"Drei Soldaten" by John Dos Passos
John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfeld)
German, 1891–1968
1929
A letterpress photomontage book jacket by John Heartfield that assembles photographs and typography to confront the devastation of modern warfare while promoting the German edition of John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers.
Your eye moves from a bleak, cratered battlefield on the left to a blue-tinted scene of weary soldiers under a starry sky at center, anchored by a striped vertical spine and a torn portrait with a jagged hole on the right, producing a sudden, violent sense of rupture.
The cover exemplifies Heartfield’s pioneering use of photomontage to turn commercial design into political agitprop, helping to make photomontage a key language of modernist design and anti‑war critique.
Medium
Letterpress
Dimensions
9 7/8 x 25 1/2" (25.1 x 64.8 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Jan Tschichold Collection, Gift of Philip Johnson
Accession
677.1999
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
