PHOTOMONTAGE
Dawn Ades
Dawn Ades: PHOTOMONTAGE. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976. First edition. 4to. Black cloth stamped in silver. Photographically printed dust jacket. 112 pp. 174 black and white illustrations. Out-of-print -- this cloth edition has proven to be uncommon. Black cloth edges lightly sunned, otherwise a fine copy.
8.25 x 11.25 hardcover book with 112 pages and 171 illustrations. This book follows the fascinating evolution of photomontage, revealing different realities that disrupt our perceptions of the traditional world. An illustrated history including the work of John Heartfield and the Dada and Surrealist movements.
From the book: Manipulation of the photograph is as old as photography itself. Yet it was only with the impact of World War I that photomontage became an art form. The term was coined by the anti-art, anti-bourgeois Berlin Dadaists, whose members included John Heartfield, Hanna Hoch, Raoul Hausmann, and George Grosz.
By breaking up images and using odd juxtapositions of fragmented photographs and other materials - the stuff of today's and yesterday's news - they created a bold new art of agitation for posters, book jackets, magazine covers, and stage sets. The idea of photomontage was as revolutionary as its content: it emphasized the links between politics and the technological age to expose the disorder of bourgeois society. What started as an inflammatory political joke soon became a conscious artistic technique.
The use of bizarre images to render reality enigmatic was seized upon by the successors of Dadaism, the Surrealists. Artists such as Max Ernst, Moholy-Nagy, and Man Ray combined images of poetic power to form hallucinatory landscapes, pursuing a systematic derangement of the senses to express the internal chaos of the individual as well as the external chaos of the world.
Contents:
INTRODUCTION
The Supremacy of the Message - Dada - John Heartfield -Propaganda, Publicity and Constructivism
Metropolis: The Vision of the Future
The Marvelous and the Ordinary
Photomontage and Non-Objective Art
Notes
ANNOTATED LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Selected Bibliography
Index
ARTISTS INCLUDE: Eugene Atget, Johannes Baader, Johannes Baargeld, P.M. Bardi, Herbert Bayer, Mieczyslaw Berman, Erwin Blumenfeld (Bloomfield), Pierre Boucher, Andre Breton, Jacques Brunius, Paul Citroen, Joseph Cornell, Cesar Domela-Nieuwenhuis, Marcel Duchamp, Sergei Eisenstein, Max Ernst, Louise Ernst-Strauss, Theodore Fraenkel, Terry Gilliam, George Grosz, Richard Hamilton, Raoul Hausmann, Tim Head, John Heartfield, Nigel Henderson, Hannah Hoch, Lajos Kassak, Friedrich Kiesler, R.B. Kitaj, Gustav Klutsis, Bohdan Lachert, Fritz Lang, Andrew Lanyon, Roger Leigh, El Lissitzky, Conroy Maddox, Kasimir Malevich, Marcel Mariën, Georges Melies, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, John P. Morrissey, Paul Nash, Francis Picabia, Kazimierz Podsadecki, Boris Prusakov, Nikolay Prusakov, Man Ray, Oscar J. Reijlander, Henry Peach Robinson, Alexander Rodchenko, Juryi Roshkov, Walther Ruttmann, Christian Schad, A. Schitomirsky, Kurt Schwitters, Sergey Senkin, Penny Slinger, Georgy and Vladimir Steinberg, Jindrich Styrsky, Jozef Szanajca, Mieczyslaw Szczuka, Solomon Telingater, Jan Tschichold, Dziga Vertov, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Voskuil, Xanti (Alexander Schawinsky), Piet Zwart and other more contemporary artists.