Tom Lubbock
Hatchet Work
Photomontage: A Political Weapon
By David Evans and Sylvia Gohl
Gordon Fraser 128pp £9.95 order from our bookshop
This is a handy manual of the genre, designed to celebrate the current revival of political photomontage, by comparing it with its august origins in pre-war Germany. There is a brief art-historical monograph, but the bulk of the argument, like the book, is made up of pictures, selected on rather tendentious principles. The plates are divided into two sections: the first given wholly to the work of John Heartfield, the second to various contemporary European montage-makers, largely featuring the work of the German Klaus Staeck, and our own Peter Kennard.
Heartfield is represented as the old master of montage. Having anglicised his name as an anti-patriotic gesture in the First War, Heartfield was the first to try and rescue the technique from the indiscriminate mélange of Dada and bring it into party line. He produced most of his celebrated anti-fascist
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