Revolutionary Beauty presents the first sustained, critical study
of the radical political montages by German artist John Heartfield published in
the popular, pioneering photographic weekly Arbeiter
Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ). The
book offers
a groundbreaking account of the intersections of activist art, mass replicated
photography, and embodied perception, charged by the volatile politics of 1930s
Europe. Based on the structural principle of pictorial
disruption and re-assembly, montage is characterized as a “symbolic form” or
“paradigm” of the modern-- a cipher for the shocks of accelerated social,
economic, and technological transformation of the twentieth century. Curiously,
during this period of political instability, which witnessed worldwide economic
depression, the consolidation of Nazi Germany, and the slow defeat of
democracy, Heartfield manufactured seamlessly constructed, carefully sutured
photomontages that propagate fictions of photographic wholeness rather than the
disruptive shocks that typify Dada’s critique of modernity. Heartfield’s AIZ photomontages stage our illusory,
unstable, at times hallucinatory apprehension of the world by exploiting the discourses of illusion,
of false cognition, by reproducing its very terms. Through that mimicry—which
Heartfield exceeds in the form of parody and caricature— these works critically
intervene in the illusionistically-reproduced reality perpetrated by mass
photojournalism. Given the copious attention to the tactics of Dada montage in
the last several years, the question of Heartfield’s rejection of Dadaist rupture
and embrace of sutured illusionism is particularly vital, offering new insights
into the modalities of this paradigmatic modern form, into leftist strategies
of critical mass mobilization, and as a model of subversive political critique.