The political collages of John Heartfield (1891-1968) have earned him a reputation as one of the most innovative graphic artists of the Weimar Republic. His photomontages and book covers based on collages which had their origins in Berlin's Dada scene were directed against Fascism and made him internationally famous. Their explosive power has lost none of its impact. Heartfield was a sharp and uncompromising observer who subverted the documentary character of the press photograph. He employed his art as political propaganda, and fought against war and Fascism with gripping pictures and trenchant humour. This catalogue will include not only the working materials which reveal Heartfield's method but also his trick films, work for the theatre and book design. The original art-works and documents all derive from his personal estate in Berlin. Statements by contemporary artists formulate positions and pose questions, which Heartfield's work raises in the age of fake news. Exhibition: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany (21.03. - 21.06.2020) / Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, The Netherlands (27.09.2020 - 03.01.2021) / Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (27.06. - 26.09.2021).

Working in Germany between the two world wars, John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld, 1891–1968) developed an innovative method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect. As a pioneer of modern photomontage, he sliced up mass media photos with his iconic scissors and then reassembled the fragments into compositions that utterly transformed the meaning of the originals. In John Heartfield and the Agitated Image, Andrés Mario Zervigón explores this crucial period in the life and work of a brilliant, radical artist whose desire to disclose the truth obscured by the mainstream press and imperial propaganda made him a de facto prosecutor of Germany’s visual culture. Zervigón charts the evolution of Heartfield’s photomontage from an act of antiwar resistance into a formalized and widely disseminated political art in the Weimar Republic. Appearing on everything from campaign posters to book covers, the photomonteur’s notorious pictures challenged well-worn assumption and correspondingly walked a dangerous tightrope over the political, social, and cultural cauldron that was interwar Germany. Zervigón explains how Heartfield’s engagement with montage arose from a broadly-shared dissatisfaction with photography’s capacity to represent the modern world. The result was likely the most important combination of avant-garde art and politics in the twentieth century. A rare look at Heartfield’s early and middle years as an artist and designer, this book provides a new understanding of photography’s role at this critical juncture in history.

Revolutionary Beauty offers the first sustained study of the German artist John Heartfield's groundbreaking political photomontages, published in the left-wing weekly Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) during the 1930s. Sabine T. Kriebel foregrounds the critical artistic practices with which Heartfield directly confronted the turbulent, ideologically charged currents of interwar Europe, exposing the cultural politics of the crucial historical moment that witnessed the consolidation of National Socialism. In this period of radicalization and mass mobilization, the medium of photomontage—the cut-and-paste assemblage of photograph and text—offered a way to deconstruct the visual world and galvanize beholders on a mass scale. Kriebel transforms our understandings of montage as a quintessentially modern practice. Central to that reconceptualization is suture, a concept integral to film theory but recruited in this book to explore the psychic operations of Heartfield’s seamlessly welded AIZ photomontages. Revolutionary Beauty proposes that the language of sutured illusionism constitutes one of the most important and overlooked critiques of modern media, wherein a radical reassessment resides in suture. Scholars of photography, modern and contemporary art history, media studies, and European history will doubtlessly embrace this book.

"Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935) achieved popular success in Germany before the First World War with a witty and sensitive novel of young love. But he is best known for his work as a satirist and critic, most of it written as a left-wing journalist in Berlin during the twenties and the years leading up to the Nazis, the fateful Weimar years. He is considered by some an exemplar of the intemperately critical spirit that doomed Weimar--a cautionary and bitter footnote to an era; by others, an indispensable moral and prophetic voice of the period, basically correct in his assessments and values." -- Book jacket.

"Born in Berlin in 1891, John Heartfield grew up in Germany during the formative years of the main modern movements: Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, each of which contributed recognisably to the photomontages for which he would become famous. Sharply critical of the Weimar Republic in which he flourished, in Germany his work was banned for the duration of Hitler's Third Reich. In London, where he lived as an anti-Fascist exile throughout the Second World War, he remained an outsider till after his return to East Germany in 1950, It is only since the 1970s that he has become a European, if not a world figure."--Cover