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.

Reviews are an important aspect of scholarly discussion because they help filter out which works are relevant in the yearly flood of publications and are thus influential in determining how a work is received. The IBR, published again since 1971 as an interdisciplinary, international bibliography of reviews, it is a unique source of bibliographical information. The database contains entries on over 1.2 million book reviews of literature dealing primarily with the humanities and social sciences published in 6,820, mainly European scholarly journals. Reviews of more than 560,000 scholarly works are listed. The database increases every year by 60,000 entries. Every entry contains the following information: On the work reviewed: author, title On the review: reviewer, periodical (year, edition, page, ISSN), language, subject area (in German, English, Italian) Publisher, address of journal

Art criticism is spurned by universities, but widely produced and read. It is seldom theorized and its history has hardly been investigated. The State of Art Criticism presents an international conversation among art historians and critics that considers the relation between criticism and art history and poses the question of whether criticism may become a university subject. Contributors include Dave Hickey, James Panero, Stephen Melville, Lynne Cook, Michael Newman, Whitney Davis, Irit Rogoff, Guy Brett and Boris Groys.