Book jacket design for Upton Sinclair's book 'After the Flood'
Original title: Book jacket design for Upton Sinclair's book 'After the Flood'
Date: 1925
Art form: Decorative Arts
Heartfield's book jacket design for Upton Sinclair's book After the Great Flood: A Novel from the year 2000 (1925) visualizes a great wave swallowing a city. Heartfield effectively uses a montaged image of a tsunami-size wave and a skyscraper in the form of a single photograph across the front and back covers. It is simply framed at the top and bottom by a band of red, on which the author's name, the book's title, and Malik Verlag logo are printed. This singular image not only powerfully conveyed Sinclair's core message: the inevitable destruction of humankind by its own scientific experiments, but also Heartfield's clever use of a single image.
Upton Sinclair unwittingly shared the progressive avant-garde's sensing of an impending disaster, here expressed in prophetic terms of a biblical deluge. The critique of rationality during the Weimar Republic expressed dissatisfaction with science and concern about the psychological and social consequences of the mechanized and standardized experience of the individual. Such images of a doomed social and economic order with the specter of utter political disintegration seemed commonplace at the time. More pointedly, Heartfield's montage juxtaposes fantasy and reality, illusion and disillusionment to engage the viewer visually and sensorily.
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