July 2019

Photographs: Marcus Bunyan. ‘The Night Journey’ 2019

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
2019
From the series The Night Journey
Digital photograph on cotton rag

The Night Journey

The only reason to make art is for yourself… but I hope you enjoy the images and the sequence as much as I enjoyed making it!

The images picture interstitial spaces, un/realities that hover at a median point, a tipping point between the real and the unreal. Which is which is open to question…

Please click on the photographs to see a larger version of the image. They are best viewed on a desktop computer to see the details of the image.

Marcus

38 images in the series in two sets
© Marcus Bunyan

SEE THE FULL SERIES ON MY WEBSITE

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
2019
From the series The Night Journey
Digital photograph on cotton rag

Marcus Bunyan website

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Exhibition: ‘Under the Mexican Sky: A Revolution in Modern Photography’ at the Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University

Exhibition dates: 1st June – 28th July 2019

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Dr. Federico Marín, Jean Charlot, and Tina Modotti
1925
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches

Shown with Modotti are Federico Marín, who was Diego Rivera’s brother-in-law and physician, and Jean Charlot, who is here seen making a sketch on Tina’s back.

If there is one period and two countries that I love more than anything else in the history of medium, it is the avant-garde photography of the interwar years in France and the photography of Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s.

American, French and Italian photographers were drawn like bees to a honey pot to the blossoming artistic scene in Mexico City and the country in general. They soaked up the unique Mexican culture, its atmosphere of work, religion, beauty, death, poverty, and sensuality – its churches, religious icons, sculptures, festivals, pottery, and people – the land, the mountains and the inhabitants all photographed in this dazzling light. They photographed in an “international modernism” style (the supposed revolution in modern photography named in the title), expatriate photographers in a hospitable but impoverished land. But this was not their land, for this was not their country.

While Strand “modified his 5 × 7 Graflex camera, adding a special prism extension that enabled him to clandestinely shoot a subject at a 90° angle from the front of his camera”, surreptitiously making portraits as he had done in his New York subway portraits; while Weston documents the murals of Mexican culture at a distance, the clay pots as an abstract composition, and the traditional art and craft Tehuana dress as idealised icon; while Modotti comes closer with her political statements and constructed still life; it is only the Mexican artist Manuel Álvarez Bravo that steals my heart.

His work exudes the spirit of the country through its sensitivity and connection to the earth from which he was born. The light and form in Bravo La Siesta de los Peregrinos; the light and form in Retrato de lo Eterno. I have studied his work quite thoroughly. He is the blessed one. Through his music, he captures the light and life of Mexico, the spirit of the eternal, “the sunlight [as] a discreet veil that turns the shadows into velvet.” His work is the art of the People.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Hands in the Water of the Mind

The water of the mind    has filled with forms.
Come, come closer now,   elusive as
an anemone or a jellyfish    a criminal, a saint;

dip your hand in and pull from the tormented water
angles and profiles, an incessant music,

the murmur of the sky, the mouth of the earth,
the crown of the breeze, the rings of fire,

the bodies of the lynxes, the wings of the bat,
the glasses and the pillow, the brightness of hunger.

David Huerta

Many thankx to the Palmer Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), expatriate photographers flocked to the blossoming artistic scene in Mexico City. Los Angelino Edward Weston reinvented his approach to the medium during three years there in the 1920s. In exploring the development of international modernism into the next decades, this exhibition features rare photographs by Italian Tina Modotti, New Yorkers Helen Levitt and Paul Strand, French master Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Mexico’s own Manuel Álvarez Bravo.

“For six months I worked at still photographs of Mexico, made about sixty platinum prints, completed and mounted them. Among other things I made a series of photographs in the churches, of the Christs and Madonnas, carved out of wood by the Indians. They are among the most extraordinary sculptures I have seen anywhere, and have apparently gone relatively unnoticed. These figures so alive with the intensity of the faith of those who made them. That is what interested me, the faith, even if it is not mine; a form of faith, to be sure, that is passing, that has to go. But the world needs a faith equally intense in something else, something more realistic, as I see it. Hence my impulse to photograph these things, and I think the photographs are pretty swell.”

Paul Strand

“At first the brilliance of technique is commented on. Laymen say: What reality! How three-dimensional. Photographers say: What texture! What a scale of values! What print quality! This is a first reaction and the least significant one. All this virtuosity is at the service of what Strand has to express, the felt idea behind the photograph.”

Leo Hurwitz

“Popular Art is the art of the People. A popular painter is an artisan who, as in the Middle Ages, remains anonymous. His work needs no advertisement, as it is done for the people around him. The more pretentious artist craves to become famous, and it is characteristic of his work that it is bought for the name rather than for the work – a name that is built up by propaganda. Before the Conquest all art was of the people, and popular art has never ceased to exist in Mexico.”

Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Charles Betts Waite (American, 1861-1927)
The Iguana
1901
Vintage gelatin silver print
5 x 7 7/8 inches

In this playful study, the shadows dominate: the bowl of vittles atop the man’s shadow suggest a sombrero shielding a sleeping man’s face during an afternoon siesta.

[Waite] traveled to Mexico City and in May 1897 established a photography studio there, during the Porfirio Díaz government. He became part of Porfirian society, taking photographs of many in the ruler’s circle. He was among a group of expatriate photographers (such as Winfield Scott and fellow San Diegans Ralph Carmichael and Percy S. Cox) working in Mexico in the first decade of the 20th century. Waite traveled throughout Mexico, exploring archaeological sites and the countryside.

[Waite’s life] corresponds with that of adventurers, brave explorers with romantic spirits and materialistic outlooks, who toured the hitherto unknown world, discovering their riches and inventing paradises.” ~ Francisco Montellano, author of C. B. Waite, fotógrafo

His works were published in books, travel magazines, and on post cards, having contracted with the Sonora News Company. He also worked for several Mexican newspapers, and he documented United States scientific expeditions in Mexico. The images often included scenic Mexican images and the country’s native residents. Many of Waite’s photographs depict railroads, parks, archaeological sites, and business enterprises.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Experiment in Related Form
1924
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 3/8 x 9 3/8 inches

This is one of only two known photomontages by Modotti, in which a single image of six wine glasses is enlarged and cropped and then superimposed onto itself.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Ollas de Oaxaca
1926
Vintage palladium print
8 x 10 inches

An olla is a clay pot or jar. Weston wrote that his first thought of Oaxaca “is always of the market, – and the market means first of all loza – crockery! I bought and bought – dishes, jars, jugettes, – of the dull black or grey-black ware, and of the deep green glaze ware… Very well do these people reproduce, make use of the essential quality of the material, – splendidly do they observe and utilise to advantage the very essence of a form. A race of born sculptors!”

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Detail of stone frieze, ruins of Mitla, Oaxaca
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

“I was fascinated by the stone mosaics at Mitla, for besides a variation on the Greek fret, there was a unique pattern – oblique lines of dynamic force – flashes of stone lightning, which remain my strongest memory.” ~ Edward Weston, The Daybooks, vol. I.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Stone lions in relief, Oaxaca
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Two clay pitchers
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches

These studies of pre-Columbian and folk-art statuary and pottery, done for Anita Brenner’s Idols Behind Altars project, taught Weston the art of the table-top still life. As such, they were the direct precursor to the iconic shells, peppers, and cabbages that occupied him immediately upon his return to Los Angeles in December 1926.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Tarascan Pottery, Michoacán
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches

The Tarascan people flourished from 1100 A.D. to 1530 A.D. After the Spanish Conquest, missionaries organised the Tarascan empire into a series of craft-oriented villages. Their artistic traditions survive today in the Lake Pátzcuaro region.

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Jean Charlot
1923
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches

Anita Brenner and Tina Modotti remained friendly rivals in Mexico City’s close-knit artistic expatriate community throughout the 1920s. Their intertwined social life revolved around the French-Mexican painter Jean Charlot, who had been a principal assistant to Rivera. Charlot was Weston’s closest friend in Mexico as well as Brenner’s paramour and professional collaborator. In a diary entry in 1927, Brenner made a three-column table captioned “Actively Friends; Actively Enemies; and Actively Both.” Modotti’s name appears in the third column.

This sensitive Modotti portrait is inscribed by Charlot to Brenner, “You are bad tempered / I am worst tempered / Does that explain the sweet / Hours we passed together”

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Elisa Kneeling
1924
Vintage palladium print
8 7/8 x 6 5/8 inches

The power of Modotti’s portrait of her young chambermaid is due to the contrast between her beatific face and her coiled hands, which suggest a lifetime of hard manual labor.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Anita (“Pear-Shaped Nude”)
1925
Vintage gelatin silver print
8 5/8 x 7 3/8 inches

“I was shaving when A[nita] came, hardly expecting her on such a gloomy, drizzling day. I made excuses, having no desire, no ‘inspiration’ to work … but she took no hints, undressing while I reluctantly prepared my camera… And then appeared to me the most exquisite lines, forms, volumes – and I accepted, – working easily, rapidly, surely…

Reviewing the new prints, I am seldom so happy as I am with the pear-like nude of A[nita]. I turn to it again and again. I could hug the print in sheer joy. It is one of my most perfect photographs.” ~ Edward Weston, The Daybooks, vol. I

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Excusado
1926
Gelatin silver print, 1930s
10 x 8 inches

“‘Form follows function.’ Who said this I don’t know, but the writer spoke well! I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enamelled receptacle of extraordinary beauty. It might be suspicioned that I am in a cynical mood to approach such subject matter… My excitement was absolute aesthetic response to form… I was thrilled! – here was every sensuous curve of the ‘human form divine’ but minus imperfections.” ~ Edward Weston, The Daybooks, vol. I

Weston was particularly amused when his chambermaid placed a bouquet of flowers in the bowl, in a well-meaning effort to create a more fitting subject for her employer’s lens.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Casa de Vecindad
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 3/8 x 9 1/2 inches

A casa de vecindad or “neighborhood house” was a community home or tenement. This one had once been “a fine old convent,” wrote Weston. “The light was made perfect by the collective noise of cats and dogs, children laughing and crying, women gabbling and vendors calling.”

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Arches, Oaxaca
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Guadalajara, Barranca de los Oblatos: Rocky Trail
1925
Vintage palladium print
10 x 8 inches

Mexico City in the 1920s-30s was the scene of one of the great artistic flowerings of the twentieth century. Like Paris in the aftermath of World War I, Mexico City after the decade-long Mexican Revolution served as a magnet for international artists and photographers. Foremost among the expatriate photographers was the Los Angelino, Edward Weston, who embedded himself in the artistic milieu surrounding the muralist painters Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros. Weston reinvented his approach to picture-making during his three years in Mexico, 1923-26. The soft-focus painterliness that had characterised his studio portraiture in the ‘teens melted away under the brilliant Mexican sun, to be replaced by crystalline landscapes as well as evocative still life that prefigured his later shells and peppers. Meanwhile his paramour and protégée, the Italian silent film star Tina Modotti, created photographs that would place her in the pantheon of great photographers of the era. This exhibition features rare vintage Mexican masterworks by both Weston and Modotti from the 1920s, as well as stellar photographs from the 1930s by the New Yorker Paul Strand, the Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson, and by Mexico’s own self-taught master of the camera, Manuel Álvarez Bravo.

Already in the first two decades of the 20th century, immigrant photographers had played an outsize role in Mexican photography. German-born Hugo Brehme published picturesque views of Mexican life and landscape in local and international tourist magazines, including National Geographic. Brehme’s fellow German émigré, Carl Wilhelm (Guillermo) Kahlo, meticulously photographed Mexico’s colonial architecture; his daughter Frida would marry Diego Rivera and become a legendary painter and personality. A third talented immigrant photographer was the Californian C.B. Waite, who moved to Mexico City in 1897 and opened a photo studio. At their best, as in The Iguana from 1901, seen here, Waite’s genre studies prefigure by a quarter century the exotic Surrealism that would characterise the work of Modotti, Álvarez Bravo, and Cartier-Bresson.

In 1923, C.B. Waite left Mexico and retired to Glendale, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Coincidentally, within a few months, Glendale’s leading photographer, Edward Weston, would make that same journey in the opposite direction. Weston sought to escape from the personal and professional distractions that he felt were deterring him from an aesthetic breakthrough. His love affair with Tina Modotti made him realise that he would never be a conventional husband. In August, 1923, Weston left the port of Los Angeles and sailed to Mexico on the S.S. Colima, accompanied by Modotti, who agreed to run his studio in exchange for photography lessons.

The Weston-Modotti home in Mexico City became a gathering place for writers, painters and photographers. This was the time of the Mexican Renaissance, a cultural movement that celebrated the country’s modern artists as well as its popular and indigenous arts. Under the presidency of Álvaro Obregón, the education minister José Vasconcelos sponsored an ambitious program of progressive public art, most notably the mural movement which was led by Diego Rivera, who was in all ways a larger-than-life character.

While Weston never second-guessed his decision to give up the steady income from studio portraiture, he and Tina faced constant money problems during their three years together in Mexico. Financial salvation came in the unlikely guise of a brash 19-year-old anthropology student, Anita Brenner. Born to a mercantile family with roots in both Texas and Mexico, Brenner befriended Weston and Modotti in Mexico City and hired them to furnish 400 photographs for her book, Idols Behind Altars. This was to be the first serious art-historical treatise on pre-Columbian art, Spanish Colonial architecture, and contemporary Mexican folk art. Weston and Modotti rose to the task with gusto, criss-crossing southern Mexico from Oaxaca to Guadalajara in search of prime examples of these genres.

Weston was first introduced to pulquerías, or working-class bars, by Diego Rivera, who was writing an article on pulquería mural painting for Mexican Folkways magazine. Weston was impressed by the vitality of these anonymous murals, writing:

“The aspiring young painters of Mexico should study the unaspiring paintings – popular themes – popular art – which adorn the humble pulquería… brave matadores at the kill – white veiled ladies, pensive beside moonlit waters – an exquisitely tender group of Indians … and all the pictured thoughts, nearest and dearest to the heart of the people.”

When Modotti left Mexico in 1930, she gifted her large-format view cameras to her close friend and protégé, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. With a seven-decade career, he is considered Mexico’s greatest photographer. “I was born in the city of Mexico, behind the Cathedral, in the place where the temples of the ancient Mexican gods must have been built, February fourth, 1902,” he wrote, invoking the magical realism that infuses his most iconic photographs. As a teenager he studied painting at the Academia San Carlos, the same art school that Rivera and Orozco had attended. “Interested since always in art, I committed the common error of believing that photography would be the easiest,” he confessed. In addition to Modotti, another important early mentor was the painter Rufino Tamayo, who counselled Álvarez Bravo against the “surface nationalism” of political art, such as that of Rivera, Orozco, or indeed Modotti herself: “Art is a way of expression that has to be understood by everybody, everywhere. It grows out of the earth, the texture of our lives and our experiences.” Tamayo’s words became Álvarez Bravo’s touchstones.

In 1934, Álvarez Bravo befriended the young painter-turned-photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had come to Mexico to spend the year photographing in the brilliant natural light not often found in his native Paris. At a technical level their approach to photography diverged: Álvarez Bravo, like Weston and Modotti, favoured traditional large-format view cameras, while Cartier-Bresson, the progenitor of the “decisive moment,” was an early proponent of the hand-held 35mm Leica camera. Yet their common interest in capturing the “accidental theater of the street” outweighed these differences. “Cartier-Bresson and I did not photograph together but we walked the same streets and photographed many of the same things,” Álvarez Bravo recalled. They exhibited together in 1935 in a show entitled Documentary and Anti-Graphic Photographs, first at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and then at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. This seminal exhibit was the first time that “street photography” had been placed in a serious fine art setting. Reviewing that show, poet Langston Hughes wrote: “In a photograph by Cartier-Bresson, as in modern music, there is a clash of sunlight and shadow, while in Bravo, the sunlight is a discreet veil that turns the shadows into velvet.”

Text from the Palmer Museum of Art

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Los Changos Vaciladores (Playful Monkeys), pulquería mural
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Charrito, pulquería mural
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Two children with pulquería mural
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 3/8 x 6 3/4 inches

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Ceiling of the Church of Santiago, Tupátaro
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

“Few had seen this church of Tupátaro, far from tourist tracks. The ceiling was entirely lacquered, even the beams – a notable achievement in colour, design and craftsmanship. That was a hard day of work. Exposures were prolonged to even fifteen minutes with additional flash light, the while I must remain quite still upon a rickety balcony for fear of jarring the camera, which was real torture with more fleas biting and crawling than I ever knew could jump from a few square feet of space.” ~ Edward Weston, The Daybooks, vol. I

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Tin roofs, Mexico
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/8 x 9 1/2 inches

Edward Weston’s son Brett joined him in his final year in Mexico. Brett was himself a child prodigy photographer, as evidenced by this sensitively balanced and exquisitely printed abstract masterwork, taken when he was fourteen years old.

Theodore Brett Weston (December 16, 1911, Los Angeles – January 22, 1993, Hawaii) was an American photographer. Van Deren Coke described Brett Weston as the “child genius of American photography.” He was the second of the four sons of photographer Edward Weston and Flora Chandler.

Weston began taking photographs in 1925, while living in Mexico with Tina Modotti and his father. He began showing his photographs with Edward Weston in 1927, was featured at the international exhibition at Film und Foto in Germany at age 17, and mounted his first one-man museum retrospective at age 21 at the De Young Museum in San Francisco in January, 1932.

Weston’s earliest images from the 1920s reflect his intuitive sophisticated sense of abstraction. He often flattened the plane, engaging in layered space, an artistic style more commonly seen among the Abstract Expressionists and more modern painters like David Hockney than other photographers. He began photographing the dunes at Oceano, California, in the early 1930s. This eventually became a favourite location of his father Edward and later shared with Brett’s third wife Dody Weston Thompson. Brett preferred the high gloss papers and ensuing sharp clarity of the gelatin silver photographic materials of the f64 Group rather than the platinum matte photographic papers common in the 1920s and encouraged Edward Weston to explore the new silver papers in his own work. Brett Weston was credited by photography historian Beaumont Newhall as the first photographer to make negative space the subject of a photograph. Donald Ross, a photographer close to both Westons, said that Brett never came after anyone. He was a true photographic equal and colleague to his father and “one should not be considered without the other.”

“Brett and I are always seeing the same kinds of things to do – we have the same kind of vision. Brett didn’t like this; naturally enough, he felt that even when he had done the thing first, the public would not know and he would be blamed for imitating me.” Edward Weston – Daybooks – May 24, 1930.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Rosa Covarrubias in Tehuana dress
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 3/8 x 7 1/2 inches

Rosa and Miguel Covarrubias were early promoters of traditional Mexican art and craft; their extensive collection now resides at San Francisco’s Mexican Museum. This striking portrait of Rosa in traditional Zapotec dress was appropriated by Diego Rivera for his painting Tehuana Woman, 1929.

Born in Los Angeles, Rosa Rolanda was a dancer with the Marion Morgan dance troupe and the Ziegfeld Follies. She married the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, who was the leading caricaturist of the jazz age. While Rosa and Miguel were accompanying Edward and Tina on one of their trips for Anita Brenner, they taught Rosa the basics of photography. Later, Man Ray would teach her his technique of cameraless photograms. With such tutelage, it is no surprise that Rosa became a gifted photographer in her own right.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Rosa Covarrubias
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 x 6 3/4 inches

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Palma Bendita
1926
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 7 3/8 inches

The branches of the palma bendita, or “blessed palm,” were believed to have been strewn on the road before Christ during his entry into Jerusalem and are blessed on Palm Sunday, an important Mexican holiday.

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Campesinos (Workers’ Parade)
1926
Vintage palladium print
8 3/8 x 7 1/2 inches

Modotti’s iconic Campesinos has the same formal structure – circular forms filling the picture frame – as Weston’s Olla Pots of Oaxaca made the same year. But Modotti’s picture adds a political dimension that Weston would by nature recoil from. Modotti’s increasingly fervent politicisation contributed to the dissolution of her relationship with Weston, who was fundamentally apolitical. Weston returned to Los Angeles at the end of 1926; Modotti would remain in Mexico another four years.

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Bandolier, Corn, Sickle
1927
Vintage gelatin silver print
8 3/4 x 7 1/2 inches

This politically-charged still life, and its companion piece Bandolier, Corn and Guitar, were made the year Modotti formally joined Mexico’s Communist Party. At the time she was modelling for Diego Rivera, a fellow traveler. Modotti’s likeness appears in several of Rivera’s most famous Revolutionary murals; she would also be blamed for the break-up of his marriage to Lupe Marín.

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Bandolier, Corn and Guitar
1927
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Women of Tehuantepec
1929
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 x 7 1/4 inches

This is one of Modotti’s final masterworks. The following year she would be expelled from Mexico for sedition, due to her work on behalf of the Communist Party. She settled in Russia, giving up photography for relief work with International Red Aid. When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, she joined the fray. She returned to Mexico under a pseudonym in 1939, and died of a heart attack three years later, at age 45, her life the stuff of legend.

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
La Siesta de los Peregrinos (the siesta of the migrants)
1930s
Vintage gelatin silver print
6 7/8 x 9 3/8 inches

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (February 4, 1902 – October 19, 2002) was a Mexican artistic photographer and one of the most important figures in 20th century Latin American photography. He was born and raised in Mexico City. While he took art classes at the Academy of San Carlos, his photography is self-taught. His career spanned from the late 1920s to the 1990s with its artistic peak between the 1920s and 1950s. His hallmark as a photographer was to capture images of the ordinary but in ironic or Surrealistic ways. His early work was based on European influences, but he was soon influenced by the Mexican muralism movement and the general cultural and political push at the time to redefine Mexican identity. He rejected the picturesque, employing elements to avoid stereotyping. He had numerous exhibitions of his work, worked in the Mexican cinema and established Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana publishing house. He won numerous awards for his work, mostly after 1970. …

Álvarez Bravo’s photography career spanned from the late 1920s to the 1990s. It formed in the decades after the Mexican Revolution (1920s to 1950s) when there was significant creative output in the country, much of it sponsored by the government wanting to promote a new Mexican identity based on both modernity and the country’s indigenous past.

Although he was photographing in the late 1920s, he became a freelance photographer full-time in 1930, quitting his government job. That same year, Tina Modotti was deported from Mexico for political activities and she left Alvarez Bravo her camera and her job at Mexican Folkways magazine. For this publication, Alvarez Bravo began photographing the work of the Mexican muralists and other painters. During the rest of the 1930s, he established his career. He met photographer Paul Strand in 1933 on the set of the film “Redes”, and worked with him briefly. In 1938, he met French Surrealist artist André Breton, who promoted Alvaréz Bravo’s work in France, exhibiting it there. Later, Breton asked for a photograph for the cover of catalog for an exhibition in Mexico. Alvarez Bravo created “La buena fama durmiendo” (The good reputation sleeping), which Mexican censors rejected due to nudity. The photograph would be reproduced many times after that however.

Alvarez Bravo trained most of the next generation of photographers including Nacho López, Héctor García and Graciela Iturbide. From 1938 to 1939, he taught photography at the Escuela Central de Artes Plásticas, now the National School of Arts (UNAM). In the latter half of the 1960s he taught at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
Retrato de lo Eterno (Portrait of the Eternal)
1935
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 7 3/8 inches

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
The Spider of Love, Mexico City
1934
Gelatin silver print c. 1960
6 1/2 x 9 3/4 inches

“I was very lucky. I had only to push the door open. It was so voluptuous, so sensual. I couldn’t see their faces. It was miraculous – physical love in all its fullness. Tonio grabbed a lamp, and I took several shots. There was nothing obscene about it. I could never have got them to pose – a matter of decency.” ~ Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Calle Cuauhtemoctzin (two prostitutes), Mexico City
1934
Gelatin silver print c. 1960
9 1/8 x 13 3/4 inches

Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002)
Niña con Leña (Girl with Firewood)
1930s
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 x 9 5/8 inches

Helen Levitt’s photographs of Mexico City, taken in 1941, are a notable exception to her otherwise exclusive focus on New York City during her long career (1930s through 1970s). But the principal subject matter of Levitt’s work was the same in both metropolises: the lives of children in working-class neighbourhoods. In this evocative image, the children’s play is undeterred by their poverty, which is evidenced by their bare feet, the dirt road, and the dilapidated buildings. Levitt studied with the noted photographer Walker Evans; her work was also influenced by the other artists in the present exhibition: like Cartier-Bresson, she favoured the hand-held Leica camera; like Paul Strand, she used a secret sideways lens that enabled her to photograph surreptitiously.

Levitt printed her Mexican photographs only after returning to New York, where they added to her blossoming reputation. Her first one-woman show at the Museum of Modern Art included sixteen photographs from Mexico, including a variant of this image (below).

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
Mexico City
1941
Vintage gelatin silver print
7 1/4 x 9 5/8 inches

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Mexico
1963
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 3/4 x 6 1/2 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)

Paul Strand achieved early recognition as a protégé of Alfred Stieglitz, the New York photographer and gallerist. In 1917 Stieglitz devoted the final two issues of his Camera Work magazine to Strand’s high modernist photography, which was heavily influenced by avant garde artists such as Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso. Stieglitz praised Strand’s work as “brutally direct” and “devoid of all flim-flam.”

By 1932, when Strand drove his Model A Ford from Taos to Mexico, his style had evolved dramatically. Abstraction had given way to humanism, reflecting the influence of his high school photography teacher, the eminent social documentarian Lewis Hine. Strand was now concerned with how people lived, and especially with those aspects of life that “make a place what it is.” Mexico was a logical destination for Strand, whose political concern for the common man intersected with the proletarian goals of the Mexican Revolution.

Over the next several months Strand photographed people and places in rural small towns across southern Mexico, from Michoacán in the West to Oaxaca in the East, unconsciously retracing Edward Weston and Tina Modotti’s footsteps from the 1920s. Strand’s work in Mexico set the tone for the photographic journeys to out-of-the-way destinations in Europe and Africa that would occupy the rest of his long career.

For these Mexican portraits, Strand modified his 5 x 7 Graflex camera, adding a special prism extension that enabled him to clandestinely shoot a subject at a 90° angle from the front of his camera. The subjects of these portraits, absorbedly watching the Yankee photographer at work, were unaware that he was actually aiming his camera at them. Strand had pioneered this technique as a young photographer on the streets of New York.

Strand originally printed his Mexican photographs as platinum prints. The prints shown here are hand-pulled photogravures created for a 1940 portfolio Photographs of Mexico. In his introduction to the portfolio, Strand describes the prints as “a step forward in the art of reproduction processes,” attributing their quality to the production team’s combined two centuries of experience.

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Near Saltillo
1932
Vintage photogravure
5 x 6 3/8 inches

“When you leave the Texas border for about 70 miles – flat desert, it could still be Texas. Then suddenly appear the mountains of the North around Monterrey and Saltillo – amazing mountains. They are a continuation of the American spur – our Rockies I suppose – but how different – utterly fantastic shapes, like mountains in fairy books. And I never saw the forms within each individual mountain – defined – come right at you as those in the North.” ~ Paul Strand to painter John Marin

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Gateway – Hidalgo
1933
Vintage photogravure
10 1/8 x 8 inches

“What have come to be known as ‘Strand clouds’ – heavy, lowering shapes holding rain and threat of storm – appear in a great many of his photographs. A friend of Strand’s remembers him cursing under his breath whenever fluffy, cottony cloud formations, which he referred to as ‘Johnson & Johnson,’ took over the sky; they never appear in his prints.” ~ Calvin Tomkins

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Boy – Hidalgo
1933
Vintage photogravure
6 3/8 x 5 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Man with Hoe – Los Remedios
1933
Vintage photogravure
6 1/4 x 5 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Plaza – State of Puebla
1933
Vintage photogravure
5 x 6 3/8 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Church, Cuapiaxtla
1933
Vintage photogravure
6 3/8 x 5 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Man – Tenancingo
1933
Vintage photogravure
6 1/2 x 5 1/8 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Girl and Child – Toluca
1933
Vintage photogravure
6 1/2 x 5 1/8 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Boy – Uruapan
1933
Vintage photogravure
10 1/8 x 8 1/8 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Cristo – Oaxaca
1933
Vintage photogravure
10 x 8 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Cristo with Thorns – Huexotla
1933
Vintage photogravure
10 1/4 x 8 1/8 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Cristo – Tlacochoaya – Oaxaca
1933
Vintage photogravure
10 1/4 x 8 inches

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Virgin – San Felipe – Oaxaca
1933
Vintage photogravure
10 1/4 x 8 1/8 inches

Palmer Museum of Art
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Opening hours:
Temporarily closed until June 2024

Palmer Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Every Past Is My Past’ (photographs from the Fortepan digital photo archives) at the Hungarian National Gallery (MNG), Budapest

Exhibition dates: 16th April – 25th August 2019

Curator of the exhibition: István Virágvölgyi
Co-curator: Miklós Tamási
Curatorial assistant: Mária Madár

The catalog is a richly illustrated catalog in Hungarian and English.

Unknown photographer
Untitled
1948
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

In seeking to understand the past, present and future of a people and a country, the importance of analysing the pictures stored within a historical photographic archive cannot be underestimated. The photographs in an archive such as the Hungarian Fortepan digital photo archive are a form of cultural memory, a collective consciousness, in pictures, of the numerous lifelines of the people of that country, its history, it triumphs, its trials and tribulations. Jean-Paul Sartre observes, “Time … is everywhere a self-transcendence and a referring of the before to the after and of the after to the before…” Photographs do this very well, as the future beyond the click of the shutter, becomes past time; that very time is then transcended back into present time, the past into the present embracing the future, when someone looks at an “old” photograph. The old is young again.

The Fortepan digital photo archive usually de/pics anonymous people taken by unknown photographers in sometimes known, sometimes unknown settings. It represents “Hungary’s 20th century history, the images focusing on the lives of ordinary people and their experiences, as conveyed by private photographers.” These vernacular photographs act as a tabula rasa,1 a touchstone for hidden stories and histories. The prima materia, the base material of chaos, forms a clean slate (tabula rasa) on which is written the order of the image. Out of light emerges darkness, the inversion that is the negative, which is then made positive again during printing. The etching of light onto the negative builds up a story first seen in the mind’s eye – that knowledge then decoded (or not) through experience and perception: how do you interpret a photograph? What language does it speak? Do you understand what it is saying? The before to the after and the after to the before…

And then we see. Images of happy human beings hanging from a crossbar; a young boy with amputation looking quizzically at the camera while a doctor and nurses pose stiffly, sullenly; and the horrors of war and an uprising that failed. The bits and pieces of lives and people and places and things and events and wars and death and youth and happiness and fun. A palimpsest. The past presently emerging, the present being constantly overwritten, the future embedded in the past. We are but a speck, an infinitesimal speck in the cosmos, not even a micron of a grain of sand in the fluidity of space/time.

“Even our experience of time and space, argues Jameson, has been transformed under postmodernism. Time has collapsed into a perpetual present, in which everything from the past has been severed from its historical context in order to circulate anew in the present, devoid of its original meanings but contributing to the cluttered texture of our commodified surroundings. The result, he writes, is historical amnesia, a lack of knowledge about the past that, in its pathological form, resembles the schizophrenic’s inability to remember anything and consequent inability to sustain a coherent identity.”2

What the photographs of the Fortepan archive let us achieve is to compile an incomplete, an in/coherent but valid identity from a certain perspective (and that is very important). As with any system of classification, it all depends who is looking and from what point of view. They also let us meditate on our brief existence in order to say, we were/are/will be here. And it mattered.

I look forward to hopefully meeting my friends Tamás Németh and Miklós Tamási when I am in Budapest soon.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Tabula rasa is the theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that therefore all knowledge comes from experience or perception.

2/ Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., 1991, p. 419 quoted in Springer, Claudia. Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996, p. 40

Many thankx to the Hungarian National Gallery, Tamás Németh, Ákos Szepessy and the Fortepan digital photo archives for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Time … is everywhere a self-transcendence and a referring of the before to the after and of the after to the before … If time is considered by itself, it immediately dissolves into an absolute multiplicity of instants which considered separately lose all temporal nature and are reduced pure and simply to the total a-temporality of the this.”

Satre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. (trans. Hazel Barnes). London: Methuen, 1966, p. 215.

“Fortepan is a collective effort at “codebreaking” the assembled scanned negatives, to decipher what is there before us in the image. Fortepan has become a public resource of the Hungarian audio-visual culture.”

“In a word, Fortepan perhaps helps to make the 20th century, with all its turns and twists, a little more understandable, bearable and emotionally fathomable.”

Miklós Tamási, Founder of Fortepan

“The archive is one that is free, high resolution, and operates based on Creative Commons 3. This means that it can be used free of charge even for commercial purposes. Even in such cases, people don’t owe us anything.”

András Török, Cultural Manager of Fortepan

FORTEPAN ADOMANYOZÓK, FELHASZNÁLÓK

Unknown photographer
Untitled (amputation)
1916
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Unknown photographer
Hungary, Slovakia, Esztergom the Castle Hill and the Basilica from the Maria-Valeria Bridge
1900
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Unknown photographer
Hungary, Balaton, Siofok
1920
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Unknown photographer
Hungary, Rácalmás opposite the Catholic Church (demolished in 1969)
1920
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Unknown photographer
Hungary, Budapest III., Óbuda Óbuda Shipyard, Danube branch next to Hajógyári Island, BL floating crane and two DDSG barge
1920
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

From the material of the popular Fortepan digital photo archive, a selection of more than three hundred pieces at the Hungarian National Gallery is presented. The exhibited pictures are closely related to Hungary’s 20th century history. The age in which they were made is manifested in many different ways in these images, but the emphasis is on the view and life events of the average person through the private photographs that provide the backbone of the collection.

Representing Hungary’s 20th century history, the images focus on the lives of ordinary people and their experiences, as conveyed by private photographers.

The founders of the collection, two high school classmates Miklós Tamási and Ákos Szepessy, began to collect the photographs in the digital Fortepan archives back in the 1980s. They launched an online site with 5,000 digitised images in 2010. Today the collection numbers 110,000 photos.

Each photograph in the exhibition tells a story. In some cases these stories can be reconstructed, but in most others the people in the pictures are no longer known, and neither are the circumstances in which the photo was taken, allowing visitors to use their imagination and invent their own stories linked to the images.

Unknown photographer
Untitled (woman and boy)
1935
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Unknown photographer
Romania, Transylvania, Strait of Békés
1935
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Unknown photographer
Slovakia, Three Revuca highway between Veľký Šturec pass and village, opposite Čierny Kameň
1935
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Unknown photographer
Hungary, Szentes St. Imre street, opposite number 5
1936
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Unknown photographer
Hungary, Budapest VIII. Tavaszmező utca 1, Gartner Károly, writer of sipotei Golgotha
1942
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Gartner Károly (author) Gyula Komjáti (graphics). A Sipotei Golgotha: Romániai Rabmagyarok Története (A Sipotei Golgotha: The history of the Romanian prisoners of Hungarians). G. Z. Hartrampf I, 1932

The name of Șipotele, even for those interested in history, is mostly unknown. One of the most inhumane prisoners of war prisons in the First World War was established near this Romanian settlement, and most of the prisoners were Hungarian. Șipotele was located near the Romanian-Russian border at the time, eight kilometres from the Prut River and 40 kilometers south of lași.

Gartner Károly (Hungarian born Transylvania, 1908-1972) (author)
Gyula Komjáti (Hungarian, 1894-1958) (graphics)
G. Z. Hartrampf I (publisher)
A Sipotei Golgotha: Romániai Rabmagyarok Története
Golgotha Sipotei: The history of the Romanian prisoners of Hungarians
1932
Book cover

Gartner Károly (1908-1972) was born in Transylvania and married Irén Weigand, an officer of the Waterworks in Székesfehérvár, in 1936. Károly Gartner was mentioned in his thirties and forties as a result of his reminiscences of Golgotha, which depicts the death of fourteen thousand Hungarian prisoners of war from the experiences of the First World War. Together with his wife he also wrote a Hungarian song titled Cherry Blossom, was former director of the Phoenix Chocolate Shop, was the national director of the Bethlen István National Unity Party, and from 1938 he was the head of the Municipal Food Plant in Budapest.

Gyula Komjáti (1894-1958) was a Hungarian graphic artist, painter and teacher. He studied at Olgyai Viktors at the College of Fine Arts in Budapest. He was captured in World War I; it has become known through the graphics and etchings of the Sipotei prison camp. In 1926 he won the Ernst Prize and the Zichy Prize. Between 1927 and 1929 he spent a longer time in London with a state scholarship. He also captured World War II in drawings. From 1953 he was a teacher at the Budapest School of Fine Arts and Applied Arts.

Gyula Komjáti (Hungarian, 1894-1958)
Csendélet Sipotén
1917
Drawing for the book Golgotha Sipotei

Unknown photographer
Untitled
1942
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Unknown photographer
Hungary, Budapest XIV., City Park, Budapest International Fair showing captured Soviet I-15 Csajka fighter wreck
1942
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Polikarpov I-15

The Polikarpov I-15 (Russian: И-15) was a Soviet biplane fighter aircraft of the 1930s. Nicknamed Chaika (Russian: Чайка, “Seagull”) because of its gulled upper wings, it was operated in large numbers by the Soviet Air Force, and together with the Polikarpov I-16 monoplane, was one of the standard fighters of the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, where it was called Chato (snub-nose).

More than 1,000 I-15bis fighters were still in Soviet use during the German invasion when the biplane was employed in the ground attack role. By late 1942, all I-15s and I-15bis’ were relegated to second line duties.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Kogo
Polikarpov I-15bis ‘Bort 19’ (Aviarestoration)
2005
CC 2.0

Unknown photographer
Untitled
1943
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

More than 110,000 photographs of Fortepan’s digital collection were collected by two high school classmates, Miklós Tamási and Ákos Szepessy in the 1980s. After the regular, but possibly collecting, amateur photos and negatives appearing on the out of stock markets, they launched their Internet site in 2010 with the publication of 5,000 digitised photos. Soon, many private individuals and public institutions have joined the donating circle of 600 people, whose images are expanding monthly with the archive.

The two most important features of Fortepan’s archive (named after the most popular amateur film by amateur photographers of the former Vác Forte) are free and common. Shared because it is made up of our pictures and is about our world. Shared because it is based on volunteers. Shared because anyone can help identify individual locations and people. Free because it is freely available to anyone without any restrictions, and images can be used without royalty.

It belongs to all the photos in the exhibition, it was a story. In the fortunate case, this story can be recalled, but in most cases it is no longer known what the individuals in the photos are, the history of the individual images – so the visitor’s imagination is left to see the story behind the photo. Today’s background stories provide an insight into the misery of the world champion, who is modelled on the figure on the back of the old twenty-pound banknote, or the rescue of a burnt photo archive. In addition to this, the exhibition is strongly summoned by the ruined Budapest destroyed during World War II; visitors can walk through an imaginary capital street with pictures taken over decades and in different places, placed in the position of Fortepan editors and picking pictures of a legacy; or read into the many readers’ letters written to Fortepan.

In the exhibition, as well as in a large, common family photo album, along the paths of human life, photographs taken before the 1990s are followed by a total of about 200 pieces. For the first time in this exhibition, the main characters are children, then young people, adults and finally the elderly. In addition, we present more than 150 photos, of which sixteen well-described stories are drawn. Including the 2 World War II fronts – as a war correspondent saw; the idyll of rural life with the eyes of a photographic painter; barely photographed history of the Hungarian Holocaust; life in Transylvania during the dictatorship of the 1980s or everyday life of a First World War Prisoner in Siberia. The pictures of Budapest, destroyed by war, or youth sports with the defence content of the Cold War years form a separate story. But there is more unity in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, pictures of the Stalin statue in 1956, photographs of the rebellious youth of the 1970s and 1980s, or banned photos of commuters from 1964. The sixteen stories, with their associated photos and their complementary items, appear in a separate installation at the exhibition.

In our centuries-old common history, the exhibition updates our memory of the memories that are directly and directly linked to us, just as Zsuzsa Rakovszky puts it in his poem Fortepan: “Every past is my past”.

Text from the Hungarian National Gallery website [Online] Cited 29/06/2019

Installation views of the exhibition Every Past Is My Past at the Hungarian National Gallery (MNG), Budapest

About Fortepan

Fortepan is a copyright-free and community-based photo archive with over 100,000 photographs available for anyone to browse and download in high-resolution, free of charge. The images are free to share with the appropriate credit given as FORTEPAN / NAME OF DONOR. Please do provide the full credit at all times as it is a tribute to the selfless contribution of the donor.

This website was launched in 2010 by Ákos Szepessy and Miklós Tamási and it initially contained photographs found randomly in the streets of Budapest. The archive has expanded since then through donations from families, amateur and professional photographers, along with public collections. The images on the website are selected by editors. The descriptions attached to the images are compiled and edited by volunteers, utilising information contributed at the Fortepan Forum. We gladly offer to process your photographs and negatives as well, you can contact us at fortepan@gmail.com.

Fortepan’s collaborators are: László Gál, Luca Jávor, László Lajtai, Pál Négyesi, Tamás Németh, András Pálfi, Zsolt Pálinkás, Gábor Péter, Dávid Sándor, Gyula Simon, Miklós Tamási, András Török, János Varga, János F. Varga. Fortepan’s work is supported by Arcanum, Blinken OSA Archivum, Archive of Modern Conflict and Forum Hungaricum Nonprofit Kft. Administrative management is provided by Summa Artium Nonprofit Kft.

Text from the Fortepan website

Unknown photographer
Hungary, Uzsa (at that time part of the Lesenceistvánd settlement), Liget utca
1950
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Unknown photographer
Hungary on 8126 from Söréd and Csákberény towards Csákberény. To the right is the Bodajk-Gánt railway
1950s
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Unknown photographer
Hungary, Budapest VII. Elizabeth (Lenin) road from New York Palace to Blaha Lujza Square
1956
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Unknown photographer
Hungary, Budapest V. South of Kossuth Lajos Square, underground construction area
1956
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Unknown photographer
Hungary, Budapest VIII. II. Pope John Paul (Republic) Square, main entrance of the Erkel Theater
1956
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Unknown photographer
Untitled
1957
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Unknown photographer
Untitled
1969
Fortepan / Capital of Budapest Archives

Installation views of the exhibition Every Past Is My Past at the Hungarian National Gallery (MNG), Budapest

Hungarian National Gallery
1014 Budapest, Szent György Square 2
Central Telephone: +361 201 9082

Opening hours
Tuesday to Sunday 10.00 to 18.00
Monday closed

Fortepan website

Hungarian National Gallery website

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Vale Joyce Evans OAM photographer (1929-2019)

July 2019

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Untitled [Joyce with camera]
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)

It’s taken me more than a moment of reflection to write this text. The events are almost too close to write about my surrogate mother in Australia, my friend and fellow artist, Joycie. I can only write about the person I knew, not the time before I knew her – and so this will be a very personal reflection on one of the most incredible human beings that I have ever met.

Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light

Vale Joyce Evans.

Human, female, lover, mother, grandmother, wife, poet, publisher, writer, romantic, creative, humanist, universalist, spiritualist, bohemian, pioneer, gallery director, teacher, lecturer, collector, philanthropist, activist, artist, feminist, supporter of artists, Indigenous rights, civil rights, and the disenfranchised, exhibitor… and working photographer.

.
I met the force of nature that was Joyce Olga Evans (1929-2019) through a mutual friend, Alison Inglis, who knew of our love of photography. It was the start of an intense friendship that lasted just seven or eight years until Joycie, as I used to call her, passed away at Easter this year. Before she passed she knew that she had been awarded an OAM (Medal of the Order of Australia) for service to photography. This was a long overdue tribute to a pioneer and supporter of photography in Australia, one of the first women to be the director of an independent, commercial photography gallery in this country.

Joyce had an incredible passion for and knowledge about photography, whether it was historical Australian or world photographers and their prints from any era, or contemporary artists here and overseas. Her collection of both local and international photographs was almost unparalleled in private hands in this country. She had such a keen eye. When attending a local auction with her she purchased an original William Mortensen for next to nothing. Nobody else had recognised the power and presence of the image by this master artist.

This incisive vision translated into her work as an artist who was a working photographer. At heart, that’s what Joyce was – a working photographer and a storyteller. She believed in photography like photographers get photography… not like an academic or a theoretician, but like an avid fan, an enthusiast, a passionate collector, a teacher. Photography was an integral part of her life, her soul.

She said to me of being an artist, “If we can find out what we are… that is the artist. The core element of your being, and the core element of your enquiry as an artist remains the same. The concerns that you had when you started being an artist are with you until the end. If the core part of your life is the search for truth then that becomes a core part of your identity. It becomes embedded in your soul.”

In this sense, photography becomes something of you, more than just intention – it becomes your essence, your shape…. your physical shape, a tangible thing.

Photography and its spirit inhabited Joyce as Joyce lived in the world. To Joyce, photography was just as much about the world and creativity as it was about the image. The image was just a manifestation of spirit, something that you worked at, recognised, and captured for what it was and could be. As Minor White said, “There is always a dragon in the negative,” and a dragon, that symbol of power, strength, and good luck, lived inside Joyce (see my favourite photograph of her below) and in her work. Her photographs possessed a spiritual and psychological sensation of the place.

As she said, “Making photographs that are memorable requires more than just camera, light and a story. It requires a type of harmony, unity, and an indefinable something, which I can best explain as becoming emotionally attached to the subject so that the images almost make themselves.”

Joyce’s commitment to photography was legendary. She was in it for the long haul.

I was always amazed when we were out in public, going to the exhibitions that we loved to visit, that she would always be taking photographs. Whenever she saw something that interested her out would come her beloved iPhone or digital camera, and she would talk to strangers and their children and take their photos. She was a totally open spirit and had no fear about the path she took. People embraced her, talked to her, responded to her energy and spirit. I remember travelling up to Sydney with her to see an exhibition of her favourite photographer, “Our Julia”, Julia Margaret Cameron at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and just observing that sparkle in her eyes, that unparalleled love that transcends all our pasts and futures in the simple moment of being and looking at these photographs.

Joyce was uncompromising. If she thought you were being a fuckwit she told you so in no uncertain terms. But she was a rock on which I came to depend. As someone said of her, “Joyce wasn’t into niceties and didn’t take any shit from anyone! I hope I grow up to be as tough as her. She was a visionary.” She really did not stand fools gladly (thank god), and had little truck for fine art photographers who didn’t understand the medium, its history or their small place within the grand scheme of things. As the playwright Edward Albee commented at the American painter Lee Krasner’s memorial at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in both her life and her work, ‘… she looked you straight in the eye, and you dared not flinch’. It was the same with Joycie. She could see deep inside you to the core of your being.

Joyce loved helping people. She was so generous of her time and energy, of her wisdom and knowledge. Some of the best times of my life were spent in her kitchen talking about art, love and life. People were drawn to her. As Julie Moss has observed, she was “such a strong, creative and vibrant role model for so many female photographers” in a sea of male prejudice and ambivalence. What Joyce did not do is live on her memories… she was ever active, ever inquiring. She stood up for what she believed. A couple of weeks before she passed she said to me, “I don’t want to go yet, I still have so much that I want to do.” She was still raging against the dying of the light, not going gently into that good night.

But what she achieved in her truly remarkable life is a testament to her unquenchable spirit. In a journey full of determination, intelligence, exploration and love she achieved so much and touched so many. I miss her terribly.

I am the (sublime) space where I am, that surrounds me with countless presences.

Dr Marcus Bunyan July 2019

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Dissipation at the pub: students outside Largs Bay pub while attending N.U.A.U.S. conference, South Australia 1951 – Joyce Zerfas, Jill Warwick, Val Groves
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)

This photograph, showing students smoking and drinking outside the pub at Largs Bay, was published in an Adelaide newspaper. At the time this was considered to be immoral behaviour. Note the man in the background with his fingers up in a derogatory manner.

The names of the three women who have been identified are from left to right: Joyce Evans (nee Zerfas) photographer, Jill Warwick, deceased, (producer of TV programme “It Could Be You”) Val Groves, psychologist. I have been unable to identify the men. ~ Joyce Evans

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Guard Thine Honour, May Day March, Flinders Street, Melbourne
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Ban on Communism Means Fascism, May Day March, Flinders Street, Melbourne
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Reduce Armaments Ban Atomic Bomb, May Day March, Flinders Street, Melbourne [pictured image-right, Professor Bernard Rechter]
1951
Gelatin silver print
From We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2019)

“Making photographs that are memorable requires more than just camera, light and a story. It requires a type of harmony, unity, and an indefinable something, which I can best explain as becoming emotionally attached to the subject so that the images almost make themselves.”

Joyce Evans

“Photography for me is a type of communion with my subject. Like everybody else I take photographs which have little meaning. But sometimes I sense an underlying value in the land, a group of people, a location, and then I make photograph, which is satisfying to myself. I think I would like to call that the way in which the quintessential spirit of what I am seeing has stirred me to need to make a photograph of it.

To me, I am alive, and my life and the life of everything in the world is connected. For me it is that universality that is the basis of my idea of the spiritual. I feel uncomfortable about formal organised religion and am perhaps more than a humanist, a universalist.”

Joyce Evans

“Aesthetically, I enjoy the camera’s capacity to record relationships and detail, which my subconscious may perceive, but I may not fully see.

My appreciation of aesthetics goes back to when I studied painting with John Olsen at the Bakery Art School, Sydney in 1967-1968. Olsen made me aware of the power of the edge of the image to relate to what was not shown in the image. My formal education was further enhanced when I did a degree in fine arts at Sydney University 1969-1971. There, Dr Anton Wilhelm taught me how to read an image. My understanding of the limits and potentials of two-dimensional imagery was expounded by Professor Bernard Smith.

Informally, my knowledge of photography and my practice was refined through formative conversations with a wide range of great photographers such as Andre Kertesz, Max Dupain, Ansel Adams and Bill Henson, Julie Millowick and Linda Connor.

Each of these relationships helped me to clarify my photographic position, which is based on a search for the essence of a subject.”

Joyce Evans

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Rain Dreaming, Yuendumu, NT
2005

Joyce Evans short biography

Joyce Olga Evans is well known in Australian photography. In 1976 Joyce opened Church Street Photographic Centre, a pioneer Australian commercial gallery devoted to Photography. It showcased the best of Australian and International photographers. Joyce exhibited works by Frank Hurley, Imogen Cunningham, Bill Henson, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Julia Margret Cameron, Max Dupain and many other renowned photographers – she says that they were her teachers.

Passionately dedicated to photography, she has had many solo exhibitions of both her landscapes (she photographed in the Dandenongs and Mt Martha regions in the outer Melbourne; along the Hume Highway; in the Central Desert and outback Australia, most notably Oodnadatta, Oodlawirra, Menindee, and Lake Mungo; vineyards and rural villages in the South of France; the old Jewish cemetery in the centre of Prague; and numerous others) and her portraits (she photographed Australian intelligentsia and personalities, including Marianne Baillieu; Barbara Blackman; Baron Avid von Blumenthal; Tim Burstall; Dur-e Dara; Robert Dessaix; Germaine Greer; Elena Kats-Chernin; Joan Kerr; Ellen Koshland; David Malouf; Dame Elisabeth Murdoch; Lin Onus; Jill Reichstein; Chris Wallace-Crabbe; and innumerable others) throughout Australia and Europe.

Joyce has spent two decades documenting Australia for the National Library of Australia, who are acquiring her life’s work for their permanent collection. When this acquisition is complete the Library will hold over 30,000 analogue images and 80,000 digital files. Also included are diaries and other relevant documents and files. Much of this work is destined for display on Trove, the library’s online viewing resource. She has exhibited extensively in Australia and in France and her photographs are held in many major collections. Joyce has been published widely. Her monograph Only One Kilometre was published in 2003 by Lothian Press. It detailed her many years of studying the unique qualities of the Balcombe Estuary Reserve, at Mount Martha as well as poems and articles by distinguished writers. Her work is held in many collections both locally and internationally.

Joyce Evans also plays an important educational role in Australian photography. She taught history of photography at Melbourne’s RMIT University; appointed inaugural assistant director of Waverley City Gallery (now Monash Gallery of Art), 1990-1991, the first municipal public collection in Melbourne to specialise in photography; established and inaugurated a course on the History of Photography and appointed Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, 1997-2010.

Evans worked as an honorary photographer for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Central Australia and for over ten years documented Australian country towns and events for the National Library of Australia. Important publications on Joyce Evans include a monograph Only One Kilometre (Melbourne: Lothian Press, 2003), and exhibition catalogues with essays by Alison Inglis, Eugene Barilo von Reisberg, Tim Page, Victoria Hammond, and many others.

Anonymous text from the Joyce Evans Photographer website Nd [Online] Cited 16th June 2019. No longer available online

William Yang (Australian, b. 1943)
Marcus and Joyce
2018

Being two photographers, the only photograph of Joyce and Marcus together, taken by another photographer William Yang.

Michael Silver (Australian)
Joyce Evans
2013

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Joyce Evans standing in front of Max Dupain’s ‘Sunbaker’ 1937
2018

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Joyce and the dragon
2016

Joyce standing in front of the fireplace at Jacques Reymond’s restaurant for the birthday of her friend Marcus Bunyan. In Chinese mythology the dragon traditionally symbolises potent and auspicious powers and also is a symbol of power, strength, and good luck for people who are worthy of it.

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879)
Beatrice
1866
Albumen silver print

Joyce Evans Photographer website

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Photograph: ‘Horace Bristol (1908-1997) – PBY Blister Gunner, Rescue at Rabaul’ 1944

July 2019

Horace Bristol (American, 1908-1997)
PBY Blister Gunner, Rescue at Rabaul, 1944
1944
Gelatin silver print

On the fly

This is a stunning picture taken of a brave, courageous, and beautiful man. It is also quite an erotic photograph of a naked man. Can a picture of this man be both heroic and erotic? Of course it can.

A comment on the article “The naked gunner, Rescue at Rabaul, 1944,” on the Rare Historical Photos website November 12, 2021 [Online] Cited 23/03/2022 from which the quote below is taken observes:

“There’s nothing inherently erotic about simple nudity, as any naturist can tell you. If people refrained from sexualizing images of clothes-free living / working / recreating, then perhaps we could have more of it, with the benefit of improving both physical and mental health.”

The comment is prudish to say the least. Modern French conceptions of eroticism state that it is an act of transgression that affirms our humanity, a transgression of the taboo, in this case the desire of pleasurable looking (scopophilia). The French philosopher Georges Bataille argues that eroticism performs a function of dissolving boundaries between human subjectivity and humanity, a transgression that dissolves the rational world… for Bataille, as well as many French theorists, “Eroticism, unlike simple sexual activity, is a psychological quest… eroticism is assenting to life even in death”. (George Bataille, Eroticism, Penguin 2001, p. 11.)

Even in the face of death (the man’s heroic actions in rescuing the downed pilot, and the death freeze, the memento mori, of the photograph) we, the observer, can affirm his life through eroticism, this forbidden impulse. As Christopher Lasch comments,

“Twentieth-century peoples have erected so many psychological barriers against strong emotion, and have invested those defenses with so much energy derived from forbidden impulse, that they can no longer remember what it feels like to be inundated with desire. They tend, rather, to be consumed with rage, which derives from defenses against desire and gives rise in turn to new defenses against rage itself. Outwardly bland, submissive, and sociable, they seethe with an inner anger for which a dense, overpopulated, bureaucratic society can devise few outlets.”1

While we acknowledge the strength and commitment of this brave young man and admire his “majestic nakedness” … on another level, we can invest in those oft denied strong emotions of pleasure and desire. Pleasure in looking at his body and desire for his youth and masculinity which overturns the forbidden impulse and transgresses the supposed taboo that a hero cannot be desired. Brave, heroic, human and downright hot, hot, hot!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. Please note the chart ‘This is the enemy’ by the mans buttocks, so that he can keep an eye out for Japanese ships while patrolling. His position in the aircraft is noted in the close up photograph below.

1/ Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978, p. 11.

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

This young crewman of a US Navy “Dumbo” PBY rescue mission has just jumped into the water of Rabaul Harbor to rescue a badly burned Marine pilot who was shot down while bombing the Japanese-held fortress of Rabaul. Since Japanese coastal defense guns were firing at the plane while it was in the water during take-off, this brave young man, after rescuing the pilot, manned his position as machine gunner without taking time to put on his clothes. A hero photographed right after he’d completed his heroic act. Naked.

Photo taken by Horace Bristol (1908-1997). In 1941, Bristol was recruited to the U.S. Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, as one of six photographers under the command of Captain Edward J. Steichen, documenting World War II in places such as South Africa, and Japan. He ended up being on the plane the gunner was serving on, which was used to rescue people from Rabaul Bay (New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea), when this occurred. In an article from a December 2002 issue of B&W magazine he remembers:

“… we got a call to pick up an airman who was down in the Bay. The Japanese were shooting at him from the island, and when they saw us they started shooting at us. The man who was shot down was temporarily blinded, so one of our crew stripped off his clothes and jumped in to bring him aboard. He couldn’t have swum very well wearing his boots and clothes. As soon as we could, we took off. We weren’t waiting around for anybody to put on formal clothes. We were being shot at and wanted to get the hell out of there. The naked man got back into his position at his gun in the blister of the plane.”

Anonymous. “The naked gunner, Rescue at Rabaul, 1944,” on the Rare Historical Photos website Nd [Online] Cited 02/07/2019

“To understand the current mainstream eroticising of the male body as a purely homoerotic gesture, though, is to misrecognise the nature of the desire which flows between the media and its audience. The desire courted by men’s magazines, whether they are pitched at a nominally hetero or homosexual market, is the desire to consume. For consumer’s it’s a seduction which is increasingly mediated by the consumption of images. What is presaged by the new sexualising of men is not merely the extension and refinement of an existing market, but a new order of commodification. Originally carriers of the commodity virus, images have become desirable in themselves. Or to put it another way, our desires are increasingly modelled on the logic of images.”

Lumby, Catharine. “Nothing Personal: Sex, Gender and Identity in The Media Age,” in Matthews, Jill (ed.,). Sex in Public: Australian Sexual Cultures. St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1997, p. 9.

“The second school of thought is characterized by newer approaches, which forcibly challenge these essentialist notions of sexuality. This second school of thought includes neo-psychoanalytic approaches which see sexuality and sexual desire as constituted in language (the work of Freud reinterpreted via Jacques Lacan; a position that has been taken up by feminists such as Juliet Mitchell). It also includes discursive or poststructuralist approaches which take as a starting point the work of Michel Foucault who argues that sexuality is an historical apparatus and sex is a complex idea that was formed with the deployment of sexuality.

What links this second group of theorists is the recognition of social and historical sources of sexual definitions and a belief that bodies are only unified through ideological constructs such as sex and sexuality. That is; sex and sexuality are, and have been, shaped and determined by a multiplicity of forces (such as race, class and religion) and have undergone complex historical transformations. We therefore give the notions of sex, gender and sexuality different meanings at different times and for different people. These notions combine to create understandings of ‘sexualized bodies’ which are subsequently expressed and reinforced through a variety of mechanisms; for example through marriage laws, the regulations of deviance, the judiciary, the police, as well as, more generally, the education system, and the welfare system (Weeks, 1989, p. 9). This view of sexuality as ‘constructed’ is in agreement with the view of sex as ‘given’ on the basis that sex and sexuality define us socially and morally. However, this second view suggests that sexuality could be a potentiality for choice, change and diversity, but instead we see it as destiny – and depending on whether you are male, female, homosexual, heterosexual, young, old, black or white, for example, your destiny is set in certain ways.”

Stephen, Kylie. “Sexualized Bodies,” in Evans, M. and Lee, E. (eds.,). Real Bodies. Palgrave, London, 2002, p. 30 [Online] Cited 05/07/2019

Eroticism

Eroticism (from the Greek ἔρως, eros – “desire”) is a quality that causes sexual feelings, as well as a philosophical contemplation concerning the aesthetics of sexual desire, sensuality, and romantic love. That quality may be found in any form of artwork, including painting, sculpture, photography, drama, film, music, or literature. It may also be found in advertising. The term may also refer to a state of sexual arousal or anticipation of such – an insistent sexual impulse, desire, or pattern of thoughts.

As French novelist Honoré de Balzac stated, eroticism is dependent not just upon an individual’s sexual morality, but also the culture and time in which an individual resides. …

French philosophy

Modern French conceptions of eroticism can be traced to Age of Enlightenment, when “in the eighteenth century, dictionaries defined the erotic as that which concerned love… eroticism was the intrusion into the public sphere of something that was at base private”. This theme of intrusion or transgression was taken up in the twentieth century by the French philosopher Georges Bataille, who argued that eroticism performs a function of dissolving boundaries between human subjectivity and humanity, a transgression that dissolves the rational world but is always temporary, as well as that, “Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself”. For Bataille, as well as many French theorists, “Eroticism, unlike simple sexual activity, is a psychological quest… eroticism is assenting to life even in death”. (George Bataille, Eroticism, Penguin 2001, p. 11.)

Non-heterosexual

Queer theory and LGBT studies consider the concept from a non-heterosexual perspective, viewing psychoanalytical and modernist views of eroticism as both archaic and heterosexist, written primarily by and for a “handful of elite, heterosexual, bourgeois men” who “mistook their own repressed sexual proclivities” as the norm.

Theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayle S. Rubinand Marilyn Frye all write extensively about eroticism from a heterosexual, lesbian and separatist point of view, respectively, seeing eroticism as both a political force and cultural critique for marginalised groups, or as Mario Vargas Llosa summarised: “Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual’s sovereignty”. (Mangan, J. A. “Men, Masculinity, and Sexuality: Some Recent Literature,” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 3:2, 1992, pp. 303-313.)

Text from the Wikipedia website

Horace Bristol (American, 1908-1997)
PBY Blister Gunner, Rescue at Rabaul, 1944 (detail)
1944
Gelatin silver print

Battleships

Nagato
?
Fuso

Horace Bristol

Horace Bristol (November 16, 1908 – August 4, 1997) was a twentieth-century American photographer, best known for his work in Life. His photos appeared in Time, Fortune, Sunset, and National Geographic magazines.

Early life

Bristol was born and raised in Whittier, California, he was the son of Edith Bristol, women’s editor at the San Francisco Call. Bristol attended the Art Center of Los Angeles, originally majoring in architecture. In 1933, he moved to San Francisco to work in commercial photography, and met Ansel Adams, who lived near his studio. Through his friendship with Adams, he met Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and other artists. He was copy reader at night for the Los Angeles Times after graduating from Belmont High School.

Photography career

In 1936, Bristol became a part of Life‘s founding photographers, and in 1938, began to document migrant farmers in California’s central valley with John Steinbeck, recording the Great Depression, photographs that would later be called the Grapes of Wrath collection.

In 1941, Bristol was recruited to the U.S. Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, as one of six photographers under the command of Captain Edward J. Steichen, documenting World War II in places such as South Africa, and Japan. Bristol helped to document the invasions of North Africa, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

Later life

Following his documentation of World War II, Bristol settled in Tokyo, Japan, selling his photographs to magazines in Europe and the United States, and becoming the Asian correspondent to Fortune. He published several books, and established the East-West Photo Agency.

Following the death of his wife in 1956, Bristol burned all his negatives, packed his photographs into storage, and retired from photography. He went on to remarry, and have two children. He returned to the United States, and after 30 years, recovered the photographs from storage, to share with his family. Subsequently he approached his alma mater, Art Center College of Design, where the World War II and migrant worker photographs became the subject of a 1989 solo exhibition. The migrant worker photos would go on to be part of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Grapes of Wrath series.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Silhouette recognition chart of Japanese surface vessels of World War 2 September 1944

Great Planes – Catalina Pby

A great documentary about this plane.

U.S. Navy
A U.S. Navy Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina patrol bomber in flight, 1942-43
c. 1942
U.S. National Archives 80-G-K-14896

This plane carries radar antennas under its wing

U.S. Navy
A U.S. Navy Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina patrol bomber in flight, 1942-43 (detail)
c. 1942
U.S. National Archives 80-G-K-14896

Consolidated PBY Catalina

Around 3,300 aircraft were built, and these operated in nearly all operational theatres of World War II. The Catalina served with distinction and played a prominent and invaluable role against the Japanese. This was especially true during the first year of the war in the Pacific, because the PBY and the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress were the only American aircraft with the range to be effective in the Pacific.

First flight: 28 March 1935
Introduction: October 1936, United States Navy
Retired: January 1957 (United States Navy Reserve)
1979 (Brazilian Air Force)
Primary users: United States Navy
United States Army Air Forces
Royal Air Force
Royal Canadian Air Force
Produced: 1936-1945
Number built: 3,305 (2,661 U.S.-built, 620 Canadian-built, 24 Soviet-built

General characteristics

Crew: 10 – pilot, co-pilot, bow turret gunner, flight engineer, radio operator, navigator, radar operator, two waist gunners, ventral gunner
Length: 63 ft 10 7/16 in (19.46 m)
Wingspan: 104 ft 0 in (31.70 m)
Height: 21 ft 1 in (6.15 m)
Wing area: 1,400 ft² (130 m²)
Empty weight: 20,910 lb (9,485 kg)
Max. takeoff weight: 35,420 lb (16,066 kg)
Zero-lift drag coefficient: 0.0309
Drag area: 43.26 ft² (4.02 m²)
Aspect ratio: 7.73
Powerplant: 2 × Pratt & Whitney R-1830-92 Twin Wasp radial engines, 1,200 hp (895 kW) each

Performance

Maximum speed: 196 mph (314 km/h)
Cruise speed: 125 mph (201 km/h)
Range: 2,520 mi (4,030 km)
Service ceiling: 15,800 ft (4,815 m)
Rate of climb: 1,000 ft/min (5.1 m/s)
Wing loading: 25.3 lb/ft² (123.6 kg/m²)
Power/mass: 0.067 hp/lb (0.111 kW/kg)
Lift-to-drag ratio: 11.9

Armament

3x .30 cal (7.62 mm) machine guns (two in nose turret, one in ventral hatch at tail)
2x .50 cal (12.7 mm) machine guns (one in each waist blister)
4,000 lb (1,814 kg) of bombs or depth charges; torpedo racks were also available

October 1941 – January 1945

Hydraulically actuated, retractable tricycle landing gear, with main gear design based on one from the 1920s designed by Leroy Grumman, for amphibious operation. Introduced tail gun position, replaced bow single gun position with bow “eyeball” turret equipped with twin .30 machine guns (some later units), improved armour, self-sealing fuel tanks.

Search and rescue

Catalinas were employed by every branch of the U.S. military as rescue aircraft. A PBY piloted by LCDR Adrian Marks (USN) rescued 56 sailors in high seas from the heavy cruiser Indianapolis after the ship was sunk during World War II. When there was no more room inside, the crew tied sailors to the wings. The aircraft could not fly in this state; instead it acted as a lifeboat, protecting the sailors from exposure and the risk of shark attack, until rescue ships arrived. Catalinas continued to function in the search-and-rescue role for decades after the end of the war.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Howard R. Hollem (American, d. 1949) for the United States Office of War Information
Jesse Rhodes Waller, a World War II Aviation Ordnanceman stationed at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas, installing a M1919 Browning machine gun in a United States Navy PBY plane
August 1942
Kodachrome film
United States Library of Congress Prints and Photographs division digital ID fsac.1a34894
The image is in the public domain

It’s an intricate operation – installing a 30-calibre machine gun in a Navy PBY plane, but not too tricky for Jesse Rhodes Waller, Corpus Christi, Texas. He’s a Georgia man who’s been in the Navy 5-1/2 years. At the Naval Air Base he sees that the flying ships are kept in tip-top shape. Waller is an aviation ordnance mate (AOM)

Howard R. Hollem was a photographer with the US Farm Security Administration and the US Office of War Information during the 1930s and 1940s.

Jesse Rhodes Waller was enlisted in the US Navy 13 Oct 1936 in Macon, Georgia. He served aboard USS Tarbell (DD-142) and USS Curtiss (AV-4).

Howard R. Hollem (American, d. 1949) for the United States Office of War Information
Jesse Rhodes Waller, a World War II Aviation Ordnanceman stationed at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas, installing a M1919 Browning machine gun in a United States Navy PBY plane (detail)
August 1942
Kodachrome film
United States Library of Congress Prints and Photographs division digital ID fsac.1a34894
The image is in the public domain

Howard R. Hollem (American, d. 1949) for the United States Office of War Information
US Navy ordnanceman Jesse Rhodes Waller posing with a M1919 Browning machine gun in a PBY Catalina aircraft, Naval Air Station, Corpus Christi, Texas, United States
August 1942
Kodachrome film
United States Library of Congress Prints and Photographs division
The image is in the public domain

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Exhibition: ‘Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919-33’ at the Tate Modern, London

Exhibition dates: 30th July 2018 – 14th July 2019

Conrad Felixmüller (German, 1897-1977)
The Beggar of Prachatice
1924
Watercolour, gouache and graphite on paper
500 x 645 mm
The George Economou Collection
© DACS, 2018

Butchers, lion tamers, and Lustmord (sexualised murder) makers. War, rape, prostitution, violence, old age and death. Creativity, defeat, disfigurement, and revelry. Suicide and misery, poverty and widowhood, beauty and song. Magic in realism, realism and magic.

The interwar years are one of the most creative artistic periods in human history. But there is a magical dark undertone which emanates from the mind of this Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity:

“The art historian Dennis Crockett says there is no direct English translation, and breaks down the meaning in the original German:

Sachlichkeit should be understood by its root, Sache, meaning “thing”, “fact”, “subject”, or “object.” Sachlich could be best understood as “factual”, “matter-of-fact”, “impartial”, “practical”, or “precise”; Sachlichkeit is the noun form of the adjective/adverb and usually implies “matter-of-factness” …

The New Objectivity was composed of two tendencies which Hartlaub characterised in terms of a left and right wing: on the left were the verists, who “tear the objective form of the world of contemporary facts and represent current experience in its tempo and fevered temperature;” and on the right the classicists, who “search more for the object of timeless ability to embody the external laws of existence in the artistic sphere.”

The verists’ vehement form of realism emphasised the ugly and sordid. Their art was raw, provocative, and harshly satirical. George Grosz and Otto Dix are considered the most important of the verists. The verists developed Dada’s abandonment of any pictorial rules or artistic language into a “satirical hyperrealism”, as termed by Raoul Hausmann, and of which the best known examples are the graphical works and photo-montages of John Heartfield. Use of collage in these works became a compositional principle to blend reality and art, as if to suggest that to record the facts of reality was to go beyond the most simple appearances of things. This later developed into portraits and scenes by artists such as Grosz, Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter. Portraits would give emphasis to particular features or objects that were seen as distinctive aspects of the person depicted. Satirical scenes often depicted a madness behind what was happening, depicting the participants as cartoon-like.

Other verists, like Christian Schad, depicted reality with a clinical precision, which suggested both an empirical detachment and intimate knowledge of the subject. Schad’s paintings are characterised by “an artistic perception so sharp that it seems to cut beneath the skin”, according to the art critic Wieland Schmied. Often, psychological elements were introduced in his work, which suggested an underlying unconscious reality.

Compared to the verists, the classicists more clearly exemplify the “return to order” that arose in the arts throughout Europe. The classicists included Georg Schrimpf, Alexander Kanoldt, Carlo Mense, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, and Wilhelm Heise. The sources of their inspiration included 19th-century art, the Italian metaphysical painters, the artists of Novecento Italiano, and Henri Rousseau.

The classicists are best understood by Franz Roh’s term Magic Realism, though Roh originally intended “magical realism” to be synonymous with the Neue Sachlichkeit as a whole. For Roh, as a reaction to expressionism, the idea was to declare “[that] the autonomy of the objective world around us was once more to be enjoyed; the wonder of matter that could crystallise into objects was to be seen anew.” With the term, he was emphasising the “magic” of the normal world as it presents itself to us – how, when we really look at everyday objects, they can appear strange and fantastic.” (Text from the Wikipedia website)

It strikes me, with a slap of the hand across the face, that the one, realism, cannot live cannot breathe with/out the other, the Other, magic. One cannot coexist without the other, as in the body not living without oxygen to breathe: one occupies the other whilst itself being inhabited. The precondition to reality is in essence the unknown. As order relies on mutation to define itself, so reality calls forth that form of hyperrealism, a state of magic, that we can have knowledge of (the image of ourselves before birth, that last image, can we remember, before death) but cannot mediate.

Magic/realism is no duality but a fluid, observational, hybridity which exists on multiple planes of reality – from the downright mad and evil to the ecstatic and revelatory. The fiction of a stable reality is twisted; magic or the supernatural is supposedly presented in an otherwise real-world or mundane setting. Or is it the other way round? Or no way round at all?

It is the role of the artist to set up opposites, throwing one against the other, to throw… into the void.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Tate Modern for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Tate Modern will explore German art from between the wars in a year-long, free exhibition, drawing upon the rich holdings of The George Economou Collection.

These loans offer a rare opportunity to view a range of artworks not ordinarily on public display, and to see a small selection of key Tate works returned to the context in which they were originally created and exhibited nearly one hundred years ago.

This presentation explores the diverse practices of a number of different artists, including Otto Dix, George Grosz, Albert Birkle and Jeanne Mammen. Although the term ‘magic realism’ is today commonly associated with the literature of Latin America, it was inherited from the artist and critic Franz Roh who invented it in 1925 to describe a shift from the art of the expressionist era, towards cold veracity and unsettling imagery. In the context of growing political extremism, the new realism reflected a fluid social experience as well as inner worlds of emotion and magic.

“Art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.”

Otto Dix

Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969)
Assault Troops Advance under Gas (Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor)
1924
© DACS 2017
Image: Otto Dix Stiftung

Otto Dix World War I service

When the First World War erupted, Dix enthusiastically volunteered for the German Army. He was assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden. In the autumn of 1915 he was assigned as a non-commissioned officer of a machine-gun unit on the Western front and took part in the Battle of the Somme. In November 1917, his unit was transferred to the Eastern front until the end of hostilities with Russia, and in February 1918 he was stationed in Flanders. Back on the western front, he fought in the German Spring Offensive. He earned the Iron Cross (second class) and reached the rank of vizefeldwebel. In August of that year he was wounded in the neck, and shortly after he took pilot training lessons.

He took part in a Fliegerabwehr-Kurs (“Defense Pilot Course”) in Tongern, was promoted to Vizefeldwebel and after passing the medical tests transferred to Aviation Replacement Unit Schneidemühl in Posen. He was discharged from service in 22 December 1918 and was home for Christmas.

Dix was profoundly affected by the sights of the war, and later described a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through destroyed houses. He represented his traumatic experiences in many subsequent works, including a portfolio of fifty etchings called Der Krieg, published in 1924. Subsequently, he referred again to the war in The War Triptych, painted from 1929-1932.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969)
International Riding Act (Internationaler Reitakt)
1922
Etching, drypoint on paper
496 x 431 mm
The George Economou Collection
On short term loan

Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969)
International Riding Scene (Internationale Reiterszene)
1922
Watercolour, pen and ink on paper
510 × 410 mm
The George Economou Collection
On short term loan

Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969)
Butcher Shop (Fleischerladen)
1920
Etching, drypoint on paper
495 x 338 mm
The George Economou Collection
On short term loan

Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969)
Lion-Tamer (Dompteuse)
1922
Etching, drypoint on paper
496 x 429 mm
The George Economou Collection
On short term loan

Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969)
Lust Murder (Lustmord)
1922
Watercolour, ink and graphite on paper
485 x 365 mm
The George Economou Collection
On short term loan

Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969)
Lili, the Queen of the Air (from Circus portfolio)
1922
Etching, drypoint on paper
The George Economou Collection
© The Estate of Otto Dix 2018

Otto Dix Post-war artwork

At the end of 1918 Dix returned to Gera, but the next year he moved to Dresden, where he studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste. He became a founder of the Dresden Secession group in 1919, during a period when his work was passing through an expressionist phase. In 1920, he met George Grosz and, influenced by Dada, began incorporating collage elements into his works, some of which he exhibited in the first Dada Fair in Berlin. He also participated in the German Expressionists exhibition in Darmstadt that year.

In 1924, he joined the Berlin Secession; by this time he was developing an increasingly realistic style of painting that used thin glazes of oil paint over a tempera underpainting, in the manner of the old masters. His 1923 painting The Trench, which depicted dismembered and decomposed bodies of soldiers after a battle, caused such a furore that the Wallraf-Richartz Museum hid the painting behind a curtain. In 1925 the then-mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, cancelled the purchase of the painting and forced the director of the museum to resign.

Dix was a contributor to the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition in Mannheim in 1925, which featured works by George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Karl Hubbuch, Rudolf Schlichter, Georg Scholz and many others. Dix’s work, like that of Grosz – his friend and fellow veteran – was extremely critical of contemporary German society and often dwelled on the act of Lustmord, or sexualised murder. He drew attention to the bleaker side of life, unsparingly depicting prostitution, violence, old age and death.

In one of his few statements, published in 1927, Dix declared, “The object is primary and the form is shaped by the object.”

Among his most famous paintings are Sailor and Girl (1925), used as the cover of Philip Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater, the triptych Metropolis (1928), a scornful portrayal of depraved actions of Germany’s Weimar Republic, where nonstop revelry was a way to deal with the wartime defeat and financial catastrophe, and the startling Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926). His depictions of legless and disfigured veterans – a common sight on Berlin’s streets in the 1920s – unveil the ugly side of war and illustrate their forgotten status within contemporary German society, a concept also developed in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969)
Technical Personnel (Technisches Personal)
1922
Etching, drypoint on paper
497 x 426 mm
The George Economou Collection
On short term loan

Magic Realism

The term magic realism was invented by German photographer, art historian and art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe modern realist paintings with fantasy or dream-like subjects.

The term was used by Franz Roh in his book Nach Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus (After Expressionism: Magic Realism).

In Central Europe magic realism was part of the reaction against modern or avant-garde art, known as the return to order, that took place generally after the First World War. Magic realist artists included Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio and others in Italy, and Alexander Kanoldt and Adolf Ziegler in Germany. Magic realism is closely related to the dreamlike depictions of surrealism and neo-romanticism in France. The term is also used of certain American painters in the 1940s and 1950s including Paul Cadmus, Philip Evergood and Ivan Albright.

In 1955 the critic Angel Flores used the term magic realism to describe the writing of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, and it has since become a significant if disputed literary term.

Text from the Tate website [Online] Cited 23/06/2019

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
Suicide (Selbstmörder)
1916
Oil paint on canvas
1000 x 775 mm
Tate
Purchased with assistance from the Art Fund 1976

The horrific picture of Suicide by Groz astonishes by its savage imagery, harsh colours and restless composition. Highlighting the misery of the middle class who has no means to live on today and no future tomorrow, the artist gets one man strung up on a lamp post and the other shot on a stage just near a prompter guy in his cabin. Is his death a real thing or is it a part of some performance? It seems to be quite real because everybody promptly abandons the scene except for the hungry dogs roaming the desolate streets of Berlin. And these murders are no worse than dubious pleasures given by an ugly, man-like prostitute to an aged bald client visiting her in a cheap apartment block – the only source of solace from the cold and desolation for the bourgeois at the time. The pervasive moral corruption in Berlin during the war years is underlined by the forsaken Kirche at the back.

Text from the Arthive website [Online] Cited 23/06/2019

Grosz was drafted into the German army in 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War. His experiences in the trenches deepened his intense loathing for German society. Discharged from the army for medical reasons, he produced savagely satirical paintings and drawings that ‘expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment’. This work shows dogs roaming past the abandoned bodies of suicides in red nocturnal streets. The inclusion of an aged client visiting a prostitute reflects the pervasive moral corruption in Berlin during the war years.

Gallery label, September 2004

Rudolf Schlichter (German, 1890-1955)
The Artist with Two Hanged Women (Der Künstler mit zwei erhängten Frauen)
1924
Watercolour and graphite on paper
453 x 340 mm
The George Economou Collection
On short term loan

Sexualised murder was a recurrent theme within this period: the exhibition holding a number of other works similar to the piece by Dix. An example is Rudolf Schlichter’s The Artist with Two Hanged Women watercolour. Schlichter was known to have sexual fantasies revolved around hanging, as well as an obsession with women’s buttoned boots. Acting as a self-portrait, the image represents Schlichter’s private fantasies, whilst also drawing upon the public issues of suicide, which saw an unsettling rise during this period.

Text by Georgia Massie-Taylor from the G’s Spots blog

Albert Birkle (German, 1900-1986)
Crucifixion (Kreuzigung)
1921
Oil paint on board
920 x 607 mm
The George Economou Collection
On short term loan

Herbert Gurschner (Austrian, 1901-1975)
Lazarus (The Workers) (Lazarus (Die Arbeiter))
1928
Oil paint on canvas
920 x 690 mm
The George Economou Collection
On short term loan

Herbert Gurschner (Austrian, 1901-1975)

Herbert Gurschner was born on August 27, 1901 in Innsbruck. In 1917 he attended the art school in Innsbruck and had his first exhibition. Between 1918 and 1920 he studied at the Munich Art Academy. After that he had other exhibitions in Innsbruck.

In 1924 he married an English nobleman, through which he came to London artist and collector circles. In 1929 he had his first exhibition in the London Fine Art Society. Two years later, he showed another exhibition in the Fine Art Society and made the artistic breakthrough in England. Subsequently, he was able to open several exhibitions throughout the UK. Herbert Gurschner found access to aristocratic, diplomatic and business circles and was able to exhibit his works in New York City, among others .

At the time of World War II Gurschner obtained British citizenship and served in the British army. During this time, he met his future second wife, the actress Brenda Davidoff, with whom he lived in London. In the postwar years Gurschner exhibited only sporadically and instead focuses on the stage design (including for the Royal Opera House, Globe Theater and Hammersmith Apollo). On January 10, 1975 Gurschner died in London.

Text from the German Wikipedia website translated by Google Translate

Herbert Gurschner (Austrian, 1901-1975)
The Annunciation
1929-30
Oil on canvas
1617 x 1911 mm
Tate
Presented by Lord Duveen 1931

This summer, Tate Modern will explore the art of the Weimar Republic (1919-33) in a year-long, free display, drawing upon the rich holdings of The George Economou Collection. This presentation of around seventy paintings and works on paper will address the complex paradoxes of the Weimar era, in which liberalisation and anti-militarism flourished in tandem with political and economic uncertainty. These loans offer a rare opportunity to view a range of artworks not ordinarily on public display – some of which have never been seen in the United Kingdom before – and to see a selection of key Tate works returned to the context in which they were originally created and exhibited nearly one hundred years ago.

Although the term ‘magic realism’ is today commonly associated with the literature of Latin America, it was inherited from the artist and critic Franz Roh who invented it in 1925 to describe a shift from the anxious and emotional art of the expressionist era, towards the cold veracity and unsettling imagery of this inter-war period. In the context of growing political extremism, this new realism reflected a more liberal society as well as inner worlds of emotion and magic.

The profound social and political disarray after the First World War and the collapse of the Empire largely brought about this stylistic shift. Berlin in particular attracted a reputation for moral depravity and decadence in the context of the economic collapse. The reconfiguration of urban life was an important aspect of the Weimar moment. Alongside exploring how artists responded to social spaces and the studio, entertainment sites like the cabaret and the circus will be highlighted, including a display of Otto Dix’s enigmatic Zirkus (‘Circus’) print portfolio. Artists recognised the power in representing these realms of public fantasy and places where outsiders were welcomed.

Works by Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann perhaps best known today for their unsettling depictions of Weimar life, will be presented alongside the works of under recognised artists such as Albert Birkle, Jeanne Mammen and Rudolf Schlichter, and many others whose careers were curtailed by the end of the Weimar period due to the rise of Nationalist Socialism and its agenda to promote art that celebrated its political ideologies.

The display comes at a pertinent time, in a year of commemoration of the anniversary of the end of the First World War, alongside Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One at Tate Britain and William Kentridge’s new performance for 14-18 Now at Tate Modern entitled The Head and the Load, running from 11-15 July 2018.

Magic Realism is curated by Matthew Gale, Head of Displays and Katy Wan, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The display is realised with thanks to loans from The George Economou Collection, with additional support from the Huo Family Foundation (UK) Limited.

Press release from the Tate website [Online] Cited 23/06/2019

Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976)
Boring Dolls (Langweilige Puppen)
1929
Watercolour and graphite on paper mounted on cardboard
384 x 286 mm
The George Economou Collection
On short term loan

Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976)
Free room (Brüderstrasse (Zimmer frei))
1930
Watercolour, ink and graphite on vellum
The George Economou Collection
On short term loan

Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976)
At the Shooting Gallery
1929
Watercolour and graphite on vellum
445 x 360 mm
The George Economou Collection
© DACS, 2018

Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976)

Jeanne Mammen (21 November 1890 – 22 April 1976) was a German painter and illustrator of the Weimar period. Her work is associated with the New Objectivity and Symbolism movements. She is best known for her depictions of strong, sensual women and Berlin city life.

… In 1921, Mammen moved into an apartment with her sister in Berlin. This apartment was a former photographer’s studio which she lived in until her death. Aside from Art throughout her life Mammen also was interested in science. She was close friends with Max Delbrück who left Europe and took some of her artwork with him and exhibited them in California. In addition to bringing these art works to be exhibited he also sent Mammen care packages from the United States with art supplies.

In 1930 she had a major exhibition in the Fritz Gurlitt gallery. Over the next two years, at Gurlitt’s suggestion, she created one of her most important works: a series of eight lithographs illustrating Les Chansons de Bilitis, a collection of lesbian love poems by Pierre Louÿs.

In 1933, following her inclusion in an exhibition of female artists in Berlin, the Nazi authorities denounced her motifs and subjects as “Jewish”, and banned her lithographs for Les Chansons de Bilitis. The Nazis were also opposed to her blatant disregard for apparent ‘appropriate’ female submissiveness in her expressions of her subjects. Much of her work also includes imagery of lesbians. The Nazis shut down most of the journals she had worked for, and she refused to work for those that complied with their cultural policies. Until the end of the war she practiced a kind of “inner emigration”. She stopped exhibiting her work and focused on advertising. For a time she also peddled second-hand books from a handcart.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Otto Rudolf Schatz (Austrian, 1900-1961)
Moon Women (Mondfrauen)
1930
Oil paint on canvas
1915 x 1110 mm
The George Economou Collection
On short term loan

Otto Rudolf Schatz (Austrian, 1900-1961)

Otto Rudolf Schatz was born on January 18, 1900, the son of a post office family in Vienna. From 1915 to 1918 Schatz studied at the Viennese Art Academy under Oskar Strnad and Anton von Kenner. In 1918 his studies were interrupted by military service in the Second World War although he graduated in 1919. During this time the artist’s chosen medium was wood. From 1920 he worked with the painter Max Hevesi who exhibited Schatz’s paintings and woodcuts. Otto Rudolf Schatz also published books with the art critic Arthur Roessler including The Gothic Mood.

In 1923 Schatz became friends with the Viennese gallery owner Otto Kallir who became one of his most important patrons. Kallir continuously presented Schatz’s works in the Neue Galerie. In the same year the Austrian collector Fritz Karpfen published Austrian Art featuring Schatz’s art. The artist’s book of twelve woodcuts was published with a foreword by the art historian Erica Tietze-Conrat. The painter also traveled to Venice in 1923.

In 1924 he had his first collective exhibition in the Neue Galerie. In 1925 Schatz exhibited in the Neue Galerie together with Anton Faistauer, Franz Probst, and Marianne Seeland. In the same year he became a member of the Austrian artists’ association Kunstschau and he provided eight original woodcuts for the publication of a fairytale book Im Satansbruch by Ernst Preczang.

In 1927 Schatz contributed woodcuts to the volume The New Town by the Berlin Büchergilde Gutenberg. From 1928 to 1938 he was a valued member in the Hagenbund in Vienna. In 1929 he produced several illustrations for The Stromverlag among others and for Stefan Zweig’s Fantastic Night and H. G. Wells The Invisible. In 1936 he participated in a collective exhibition with Georg Ehrlich in the Neue Galerie. In 1936 to 1937 Schatz traveled through the United States as well as visited the World Exhibition in Paris. His paintings were seen in exhibition of his New York, in the Neue Galerie, and in the Hagenbund. The artists provided illustrations for the Büchergilde Gutenberg edition of Upton Sinclair’s Co-op.

When the National Socialists gained power in 1938 Schatz was forbidden to work. In 1938 he lived with his Jewish wife Valerie Wittal in Brno and in 1944 in Prague where he painted landscape miniatures. In 1944 Schatz was imprisoned in the Klettendorf labour camp and then transferred to the Graditz and Bistritz concentration camps. In 1946 Schatz returned to Vienna where he was promoted by the cultural politician, city counsellor, and writer Viktor Matejka. In 1946 he became a member of the Vienna Secession. In 1947 Schatz received the prize of the city of Vienna for graphics. In the same year eighteen woodcuts were created for Peter Rosegger’s Jakob der Letzte. In 1949 Scatz’s watercolour series Das war der Prater was published in book form. In 1951 Schatz won the competition for the design of the Vienna Westbahnhof. On April 26, 1961 Otto Rudolf Schatz died of lung cancer in Vienna.

As a graphic artist and painter Otto Rudolf Schatz occupies a leading position in the Austrian inter-war period. His multi-faceted work which moves between Expressionism and New Objectivity, was characterised by a social-critical attitude that gives his work historical significance. The artist’s works are now found in numerous collections including the Belvedere in Vienna, the Vienna Museum, and the Hans Schmid Private Foundation.

Anonymous text. “Biography,” on the Otto Rudolf Schatz website Nd [Online] Cited 23/06/2019

Rudolf Schlichter (German, 1890-1955)
Lady with Red Scarf (Speedy with the Moon) (Frauenportrait (Speedy))
1933
The George Economou Collection
On short term loan

Rudolf Schlichter (German, 1890-1955)

Rudolf Schlichter (or Rudolph Schlichter) (December 6, 1890 – May 3, 1955) was a German artist and one of the most important representatives of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement.

Schlichter was born in Calw, Württemberg. After an apprenticeship as an enamel painter at a Pforzheim factory he attended the School of Arts and Crafts in Stuttgart. He subsequently studied under Hans Thoma and Wilhelm Trübner at the Academy in Karlsruhe. Called for military service in World War I, he carried out a hunger strike to secure early release, and in 1919 he moved to Berlin where he joined the Communist Party of Germany and the “November” group. He took part in a Dada fair in 1920 and also worked as an illustrator for several periodicals.

A major work from this period is his Dada Roof Studio, a watercolour showing an assortment of figures on an urban rooftop. Around a table sit a woman and two men in top hats. One of the men has a prosthetic hand and the other, also missing a hand, appears on closer scrutiny to be mannequin. Two other figures in gas masks may also be mannequins. A child holds a pail and a woman wearing high button shoes (for which Schlichter displayed a marked fetish) stands on a pedestal, gesturing inexplicably.

In 1925 Schlichter participated in the “Neue Sachlichkeit” exhibit at the Mannheim Kunsthalle. His work from this period is realistic, a good example being the Portrait of Margot (1924) now in the Berlin Märkisches Museum. It depicts a prostitute who often modelled for Schlichter, standing on a deserted street and holding a cigarette.

When Adolf Hitler took power, bringing to an end the Weimar period, his activities were greatly curtailed. In 1935 he returned to Stuttgart, and four years later to Munich. In 1937 his works were seized as degenerate art, and in 1939 the Nazi authorities banned him from exhibiting. His studio was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1942.

At the war’s end, Schlichter resumed exhibiting works. His works from this period were surrealistic in character. He died in Munich in 1955.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Sergius Pauser (Austrian, 1896-1970)
Self-Portrait with Mask
1926
Oil paint on canvas
600 x 730 mm
The George Economou Collection
© Angela Pauser and Wolfgang Pauser

Sergius Pauser (Austrian, 1896-1970)

Sergius Pauser, who was born in Vienna on 28 December 1896, represents the prototype of this generation of artists. As a painter, he enjoyed the recognition of his contemporaries and as a much sought-after artist who was able to earn his living with his paintings. He was never a revolutionary but rather a “gentleman of the Viennese order”, who sought to capture moods and atmosphere in his paintings. The writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) wrote of Pauser: “Sergius Pauser uttered thoughts about people – Adalbert Stifter, for example – that I have never heard before or since; he succeeded in revealing the most concealed corners of poetic sensitivity; he was a tender and vigilant diviner on the landscape of world literature, a philosopher and an artist through and through.” And yet a painter like Sergius Pauser is barely known today; only a few of his works hang in Austrian galleries and many of his paintings cannot be traced due to the emigration of their owners.

Dr. Isabella Ackerl. “Sergius Pauser (1896-1979),” on the Sergius Pauser website Nd [Online] Cited 23/06/2019

Hans Grundig (German, 1901-1958)
Girl with Pink Hat
1925
Oil paint on cardboard
704 x 500 mm
The George Economou Collection
© DACS, 2018

Hans Grundig (German, 1901-1958)

Hans Grundig (February 19, 1901 – September 11, 1958) was a German painter and graphic artist associated with the New Objectivity movement.

He was born in Dresden and, after an apprenticeship as an interior decorator, studied in 1920–1921 at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts. He then studied at the Dresden Academy from 1922 to 1923. During the 1920s his paintings, primarily portraits of working-class subjects, were influenced by the work of Otto Dix. Like his friend Gert Heinrich Wollheim, he often depicted himself in a theatrical manner, as in his Self-Portrait during the Carnival Season (1930).

He had his first solo exhibition in 1930 at the Dresden gallery of Józef Sandel. He made his first etchings in 1933.

Politically anti-fascist, he joined the German Communist Party in 1926, and was a founding member of the arts organisation Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler in Dresden in 1929.

Following the fall of the Weimar Republic, Grundig was declared a degenerate artist by the Nazis, who included his works in the defamatory Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937. He expressed his antagonism toward the regime in paintings such as The Thousand Year Reich (1936). Forbidden to practice his profession, he was arrested twice – briefly in 1936, and again in 1938, after which he was interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp from 1940 to 1944.

In 1945 he went to Moscow, where he attended an anti-fascist school. Returning to Berlin in 1946, he became a professor of painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1957 he published his autobiography, Zwischen Karneval und Aschermittwoch (“Between Shrovetide carnival and Ash Wednesday”). He was awarded the Heinrich Mann Prize in Berlin in 1958, the year of his death.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Josef Eberz (German, 1880-1942)
Dancer (Beatrice Mariagraete)
1923
Oil paint on canvas
1580 x 785 mm
The George Economou Collection

Josef Eberz died in utter loneliness on 27 August 1942, his apartment with his studio burned out in a bombing raid.

Conrad Felixmüller (German, 1897-1977)
Portrait of Ernst Buchholz
1921
Oil paint on canvas
900 x 750 mm
The George Economou Collection
© DACS, 2018

Conrad Felixmüller (German, 1897-1977)

Conrad Felixmüller (21 May 1897 – 24 March 1977) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker. Born in Dresden as Conrad Felix Müller, he chose Felixmüller as his nom d’artiste.

He attended drawing classes at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts in 1911-1912 before studying under Carl Bantzer at the Dresden Academy of Art. In 1917 he performed military service as a medical orderly, and became a founding member of the Dresden Expressionist group Expressionistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dresden. He achieved his earliest success as a printmaker. Felixmüller was a member of the Communist Party of Germany from 1918 to 1922. He published many woodcuts and drawings in left-wing magazines, and remained a prolific printmaker throughout his career. He was a close friend of the composer Clemens Braun of whom he produced a number of portraits and a woodcut depicting him on his deathbed.

He was one of the youngest members of the New Objectivity movement. His paintings often deal with the social realities of Germany’s Weimar Republic. He was mentor to the German Expressionist Otto Dix.

Felixmüller’s work became more objective and restrained after the mid-1920s. He wrote in 1929:

“It has become increasingly clear to me that the only necessary goal is to depict the direct, simple life which one has lived oneself, also involving the design of colour as painting – in the manner in which it was cultivated by the Old Masters for centuries, until Impressionism and Expressionism, infected by the technical and industrial delusions of grandeur, rejected every affinity for tradition, ability and results, committing harakiri.”

In the 1930s, many of his works were seized as degenerate art by the Nazis, and destroyed. In 1944, his studio in Berlin was bombed, resulting in more losses of his works. From 1949 to 1962 Felixmüller taught at the University of Halle. He died in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf.

Text from the Wikipedia website

August Heitmüller (German, 1873-1935)
Self-Portrait
1926
Oil paint on canvas
900 x 705 mm
The George Economou Collection

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
A Married Couple
1930
Watercolour, gouache, pen and ink on paper
505 x 440 mm
The George Economou Collection
© Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, N.J. 2018

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
Self-Portrait with Model in the Studio
1930-1937
Watercolour on paper
660 x 473 mm
Tate
© Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, N.J. 2018

Heinrich Maria Davringhausen (German, 1894-1970)
The Poet Däubler (Der Dichter Däubler)
1917
Oil paint on canvas
1810 x 1603 mm
The George Economou Collection
On short term loan

Heinrich Maria Davringhausen (German, 1894-1970)

Heinrich Maria Davringhausen (21 October 1894 – 13 December 1970) was a German painter associated with the New Objectivity.

Davringhausen was born in Aachen. Mostly self-taught as a painter, he began as a sculptor, studying briefly at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts before participating in a group exhibition at Alfred Flechtheim’s gallery in 1914. He also traveled to Ascona with his friend the painter Carlo Mense that year. At this early stage his paintings were influenced by the expressionists, especially August Macke.

Exempted from military service in World War I, he lived in Berlin from 1915 to 1918, forming friendships with George Grosz and John Heartfield. In 1919 he had a solo exhibition at Hans Goltz’ Galerie Neue Kunst in Munich, and exhibited in the first “Young Rhineland” exhibition in Düsseldorf. Davringhausen became a member of the “Novembergruppe” and gained some prominence among the artists representing a new tendency in German art of the postwar period. He was asked to take part in the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) exhibition in Mannheim which brought together many leading “post-expressionist” artists, including Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Alexander Kanoldt and Georg Schrimpf.

Davringhausen went into exile with the fall of the Weimar republic in 1933, first going to Majorca, then to France. In Germany approximately 200 of his works were removed from public museums by the Nazis on the grounds that they were degenerate art. Prohibited from exhibiting, Davringhausen was interned in Cagnes-sur-Mer but fled to Côte D’Azur. In 1945 however he returned to Cagnes-sur-Mer, a suburb of Nice, where he remained for the rest of his life. He worked as an abstract painter under the name Henri Davring until his death in Nice in 1970.

Perhaps the best-known work from Davringhausen’s New Objectivity period is Der Schieber (The Black-Marketeer), a Magic realist painting of 1920-1921, which is in the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf im Ehrenhof. Painted in acidulous colours, it depicts a glowering businessman seated at a desk in a modern office suite that foreshortens dramatically behind him. Although Davringhausen rarely presented social criticism in his work, in Der Schieber “the artist created the classic pictorial symbol of the period of inflation that was commencing”.

Much of Davringhausen’s work was deposited in 1989 in the Leopold Hoesch museum in Düren, which has subsequently organised several exhibitions of his pictures, above all those from the later period.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Albert Birkle (German, 1900-1986)
The Acrobat Schulz V
1921
Oil paint on canvas
920 x 607 mm
The George Economou Collection
© DACS, London 2018

Albert Birkle (German, 1900-1986)

Albert Birkle was born in Charlottenburg, then an independent city and since 1920 part of Berlin. His grandfather on his mother’s side, Gustav Bregenzer, and his father, Carl Birkle, both were painters, originally from Swabia. Albert Birkle was trained as a decorative painter in his father’s firm. From 1918 to 1924, he studied at the Hochschule für die bildenden Künste / College of Fine Arts, a predecessor of today’s Universität der Künste Berlin. Birkle developed a unique style informed by expressionism and New Objectivity / Neue Sachlichkeit. His subjects were lonely, mystic landscapes, typical scenes of Berlin of the 20’s and 30’s, such as scenes from Tiergarten Park, bar scenes etc., character portraits, and religious scenes. In his style of portrait painting he was often compared to Otto Dix and George Grosz.

In 1927, Birkle had his first one man show in Berlin, which turned out to be very successful. He decided to turn down a professorship at the Koenigsberg Acadamy of Arts in order to continue to work independently as an artist and to dedicate himself to assignments in the field of church decoration, where he had become a specialist. As National Socialism was on its way to power, Birkle moved to Salzburg, Austria in 1932. Nevertheless, he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale as late as 1936. In 1937, his artwork was declared to be “entarted”, his works were removed from public collections, and a painting ban was imposed on him.

In 1946, Birkle received Austrian citizenship. In the post-war year, he made a living painting religious frescos for various churches and doing oil paintings. In his final year, he more and more returned back to his Berlin themes of the 20’s and 30’s.

Text from the Albert Birkle website [Online] Cited 23/06/2019

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
United Kingdom

Opening hours:
Daily 10.00 – 18.00

Tate Modern website

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July 2019

The Night Journey

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.

Exhibition dates: 1st June – 28th July 2019

Hands in the Water of the Mind

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)

Exhibition dates: 16th April – 25th August 2019

FORTEPAN ADOMANYOZÓK, FELHASZNÁLÓK

Polikarpov I-15

About Fortepan

July 2019

Do not go gentle into that good night Rage, rage, against the dying of the light

Joyce Evans short biography

July 2019

On the fly

Eroticism

French philosophy

Non-heterosexual

Horace Bristol

Early life

Photography career

Later life

Great Planes – Catalina Pby

Consolidated PBY Catalina

General characteristics

Performance

Armament

October 1941 – January 1945

Search and rescue

Exhibition dates: 30th July 2018 – 14th July 2019

Otto Dix World War I service

Otto Dix Post-war artwork

Magic Realism

Herbert Gurschner (Austrian, 1901-1975)

Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976)

Otto Rudolf Schatz (Austrian, 1900-1961)

Rudolf Schlichter (German, 1890-1955)

Sergius Pauser (Austrian, 1896-1970)

Hans Grundig (German, 1901-1958)

Conrad Felixmüller (German, 1897-1977)

Heinrich Maria Davringhausen (German, 1894-1970)

Albert Birkle (German, 1900-1986)

Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light