Curator: Maria L. Kelly, High Museum of Art assistant curator of photography
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #37 1953 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Adair and Joe B. Massey in honour of Gus Kayafas
Aaron Siskind was recognised for the ways he rendered his surroundings into often stark shapes and forms, which reflected his fascination with contemporary trends in abstract art. He was an influential teacher at Chicago’s Institute of Design, which was founded by László Moholy-Nagy as the New Bauhaus. This image of a person flying or falling comes from a series Siskind made of the contorted bodies of divers plunging into Lake Michigan. He masterfully created its disorienting effect through tight focus on the floating figure without contextual elements.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
While contemporarily AI-powered technologies are revolutionising the way we interact with and consume media, enabling us to “to process and analyse vast amounts of data quickly, making it easier to find and access the information we need” in the 1920s and 1930s there was also a revolution in the way artists (and their use of the camera) viewed and felt the world – one not based on information, image quality or duplicity in the veracity of the image but one based on the word, perspective – be that point of view, context, close ups, surreality, fragmentation, scale, concept, construction, colour, aesthetics, identity, gender, or radical experimentation.
In this departure from traditional photographic methods, “New Vision photographers foregrounded experimental techniques, including photograms, photomontages and compositions that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints, and these extended to movements such as surrealism and constructivism.” (Press release)
To me, this New Vision is about experiencing different perspectives – experiencing, sensing, feeling and seeing the world in a new light. After the disasters and machine-ations, the destruction of a conservative way of life before the First World War, here was a way to grasp hold of (and picture) the speed of a new world order, the dreams of physiological analysis, the diversity of new identities, and the fluidity of rapidly evolving technological and social cultures.
While today this (r)evolution continues at an ever expanding pace with the consumption of huge amounts of information and images, I believe it may be advantageous to rest for a while on certain experiences and images … so that we let the daggers drop from our eyes, to ‘not make images’ in our minds eye but just to be present in the viewing of a photograph, so that we appreciate and understand every aspect of the great life spirit of this wondrous earth.
Then and now, new vision.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the High 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.
The New Vision movement of the 1920s and 1930s offered a revolutionary approach to seeing the world. It represented a rebellion against traditional photographic methods and an embrace of avant-garde experimentation and innovative techniques. László Moholy-Nagy, an artist and influential teacher at the Bauhaus in Germany, named this period of expansion the “New Vision.” Today, the term encompasses photographic developments that took place between the two World Wars in Europe, America, and beyond. New Vision photographers foregrounded inventive techniques, including photograms, photomontages, and light studies, and made photographs that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints. These approaches – which also extended to more defined movements like Surrealism – spoke to a desire to find and see different perspectives in the wake of World War I.
Uniting more than one hundred works from the High’s photography collection, the exhibition traces the movement’s impact, from its origins in the 1920s to today, and demonstrates its long-standing effect on subsequent generations.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing
Named by the influential German artist and teacher László Moholy-Nagy, the “New Vision” comprised an expansive variety of photographic exploration that took place in Europe, America, and beyond in the 1920s and 1930s. The movement was characterised by its departure from traditional photographic methods. New Vision photographers foregrounded experimental techniques, including photograms, photomontages, and light studies, and made photographs that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints.
This exhibition, uniting more than one hundred works from the High’s robust photography collection, will trace the impact of the New Vision movement from its origins in the 1920s to today. Photographs from that era by Ilse Bing, Alexander Rodchenko, Imogen Cunningham, and Moholy-Nagy will be complemented by a multitude of works by modern and contemporary artists such as Barbara Kasten, Jerry Uelsmann, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Abelardo Morell to demonstrate the long-standing impact of the movement on subsequent generations.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Installation views of the exhibition Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 2025 – January 2026 Photos: Mike Jensen
The High Museum of Art presents “Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing” (June 13, 2025 – Jan. 4, 2026), an exhibition uniting more than 100 works from the High’s robust photography collection to trace the impact of the New Vision movement from its origins in the 1920s to today. Works include century-old photographs exemplifying themes from the movement and modern and contemporary images that emphasise the relevance of current artistic and social practices as a response to the technological and cultural changes that occurred in the early 20th century.
“This exhibition provides an opportunity to illuminate photographers’ creativity and innovative practices, all inspired by the progression of the medium in the 1920s and 30s,” said High Museum of Art Director Rand Suffolk. “Many of the works are rarely on view, so it will be an exciting experience for visitors to see them and learn about photographers’ abilities as they reflect reality while experimenting with technique and perspective.” Named by the influential German artist and teacher László Moholy-Nagy, the “New Vision” comprised an expansive variety of photographic exploration that took place in Europe, America and beyond in the 1920s and 1930s. The movement was characterised by its departure from traditional photographic methods. New Vision photographers foregrounded experimental techniques, including photograms, photomontages and compositions that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints, and these extended to movements such as surrealism and constructivism.
“Experiments in Seeing” features nearly 100 photographers. It also demonstrates how the New Vision movement revolutionised the medium of photography in the early 20th century in response to the great societal, economic and technological shifts spurred by the upheaval of the two World Wars. Photographs from that era by Ilse Bing, Alexander Rodchenko, Imogen Cunningham and Moholy-Nagy have been complemented by a multitude of photographs by modern and contemporary artists such as Barbara Kasten, Jerry Uelsmann, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Abelardo Morell to demonstrate the long-standing impact of the movement on subsequent generations.
The first section of the exhibition delves into experimental techniques that foreground the light-sensitive aspects of photography, followed by works created through in-camera manipulations or additions to the surfaces of the prints. Subsequent sections explore inventive methods of capturing unexpected views of the world articulated with radical angles or detailed close-ups. Other works showcase surreal approaches to subjects such as humanlike forms and bodies, the use of mirrors and doubling, and everyday scenes heightened by uncanny moments or distorted through the interplay of light, shadow and water.
“Not only does the early 20th century and its art movements continue to be influential, but that time also echoes our current moment – one that feels similarly consequential and innovative with the development of new emerging technologies and methods of communicating,” said Maria L. Kelly, the High’s assistant curator of photography. “The movements and happenings of a century ago are akin to those of today and those shown in the exhibition. There remains a desire for alternative ways to see and approach the world through art, and particularly through photography.”
“Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing” is on view in the Lucinda W. Bunnen Galleries for Photography located on the Lower Level of the High’s Wieland Pavilion.
Press release from the High Museum of Art
“Light was considered the medium that permits photography. But for me it became the main subject: the protagonist of my photography.”
Ilse Bing, c. 1920s
Light Experimentation
After the trauma of World War I, many artists felt compelled to reconsider conventional art making methods to better reflect and engage with the world. Some photographers turned their attention to the essential element of photography: light. Through innovative visual investigations, cameraless photographs were produced, viewes of the world altered, and scientific discoveries made.
Experimentations with illumination and light-sensitive paper in the darkroom gave rise to photograms, enabling artists to pursue abstraction and to wield light as a sculptural element. The process of solarisation – reversing tones in a print using a flash of light during developing – provided an unconventional view of a subject. Early attempts to capture traces of light on film led to scientific innovations such as using strove lights to freeze movement, depicting magnetic fields, and tracing electrical currents on light sensitive paper.
These processes aim to reveal the invisible, with the elements of change as a constant companion. While artists can insert some control over the elements, the process ultimately shapes the final image. Many artworks in this section exist as unique prints, challenging the assumption of the reproducibility of photography, and emphasising the singularity of the creative moment.
Wall text from the exhibition
Francis Bruguière (American, 1879-1945) The Light That Never Was on Land or Sea c. 1925 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Georgia-Pacific Corporation
Nathan Lerner (American, 1913-1977) Light Drawing #8 (Smoke) 1938-1939 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Hilary Leff and Elliot Groffman
Ilse Bing (American born Germany, 1899-1998) Untitled [Seated Woman with Necklace, Solarized] 1943 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of the Estate of Ilse Bing Wolff
Inspired by William Henry Fox Talbot, an inventor of photography who was fascinated with electromagnetic conduction, Hiroshi Sugimoto began applying charges of electricity directly to unexposed photographic film. After months of honing his technique in the darkroom, he managed to achieve remarkable results with a handheld wand charged by a generator. His Lightning Fields photographs are made without a camera or lens. Here, the abstract visual trace of an electric charge measuring over 400,000 volts sweeps across the composition, reading like the textures of a human hand, the upward tentacles of a fern, or the stark branches of a tree.
V. Elizabeth Turk is an Atlanta-based photographer whose work explores the connections between the human body and the natural world. To make this print, Turk used an analog process from the 1800s that involves coating a large sheet of paper with light-sensitive chemicals. She then arranged her model on top of the sheet and exposed it to light, creating a ghostly silhouette, before repeating the exposure with plants. The resulting photogram is a unique image in which botanical forms intersect with the body, alluding to bones, veins, and skin and suggesting a visceral bond between humans and the environment.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
“The limits of photography are incalculable; everything is so recent that even the mere act of searching may lead to creative results. […] The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as of the pen.”
László Moholy-Nagy 1928
Radical Viewpoints
From photography’s inception in 1839, camera technology involved cumbersome equipment and time-consuming development processes until the advent of lightweight cameras in the 1920s. Photographers were then able to work more nimbly, transforming photography into a medium capable of capturing fleeting moments, unusual viewpoints, and multiple perspectives. The exploration of unexpected angles became a hallmark of New Vision photography. Sharp diagonals, extreme vantage points, and shortened perspectives opened novel pathways of perceiving otherwise commonplace environments.
Alexander Rodchenko, a pioneer in this method, championed the camera’s ability to reveal, stating, “in order to teach man to see from all viewpoints, it is necessary to photograph […] from completely unexpected viewpoints and in unexpected positions […] We don’t see what we are looking at. We don’t see marvellous perspectives.” This approach aimed to provide a fuller impression of subjects, prompting viewers to seek and appreciate what might otherwise be overlooked.
Though these early photographs may not appear groundbreaking today, their makers’ carefully considered methods transferred how photography is used. This is evident in photographers’ creative interpretations of their surroundings over the past century.
Alexander Rodchenko was a key figure in the movements of New Vision and Constructivism – abstract and functional art that reflected an industrial society. Advocating “to achieve a revolution in our visual thought,” he explored various methods, such as photographing from unexpected angles, to capture dynamic views and expose new realities. With a new, lightweight 35 mm camera, he often photographed from his apartment balcony to create dramatic scenes of the street below. The perspective in this photograph flattens the building’s stories into one visual field, giving the image a theatrical quality as an onlooker peers over the railing.
A central figure among twentieth-century American photographers, Walker Evans created works in his early career that sample from the New Vision aesthetic, which he may have encountered while abroad in Paris in 1926. His photographs of New York City, made after he returned to the United States, feature dramatically angled or cropped scenes of architecture and city life. Evans made numerous photographic studies of the Brooklyn Bridge from both below and on the bridge, portraying it less as a recognisable landmark and more as a hulking expanse whose form fills each tight frame.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian 1895-1946) Stage Set for Madame Butterfly 1931 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Georgia-Pacific Corporation
Moholy-Nagy, a leader of the New Vision, had an expansive artistic practice that included painting, photography, sculpture, film, and more. As a teacher at the Bauhaus, which connected art and industry, he believed in technology’s potential to advance art and society. In 1929, he became set designer at the Kroll Opera House and created avant-garde sets with translucent and perforated materials, often making light itself a sculptural element. Lucia Moholy, a photographer, writer, teacher, and Moholy-Nagy’s first wife, was commissioned as Kroll’s stage photographer. In this image, which either artist may have made, the sharp angle shot from above complicates the set of Madame Butterfly, emphasising intersecting, moving elements and heightening areas of light and shadow.
Similar to the practice of using unusual angles to offer unexpected perspectives, some photographers began capturing highly detailed, close-up views of objects. This approach affords a study of texture, pattern, and structure that may otherwise go unnoticed by the human eye. By eliminating surroundings that could offer a narrative, the physicality of the object becomes the primary focus, allowing it to transcend beyond its everyday existence.
Practitioners of straight photography in the United States and the concurrent New Objectivity movement in Germany shared a core desire to unearth a balance of the familiar and the foreign within intricate images of forms. While Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston perfected carefully composed studies of plants and other natural matter, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Alexander Rodchenko, and Ralph Steiner explored scientific and industrial objects. Such images celebrated the technological advancements of the time and revealed how mechanical structures often mimic those found in nature, suggesting a shared framework, and a shared beauty, between humanmade and natural. The emphasis on detail and abstraction invites viewers to reconsider their perceptions of both the ordinary and the extraordinary in the world around them.
Eugenia de Olazabal (Mexican, b. 1936) Espinas c. 1985 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of the artist
“Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.”
Susan Sontag, 1973
Surreality
Surrealism emerged as an artistic movement in reaction to the horrors of World War I. The often disconcerting imagery and literature of the movement reflected a world that felt disorienting and chaotic and captured how the very foundations of reason and humanity were tested and questioned through the realities of war. In his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), French writer Andre Breton advocates for a rejection of rational ways of approaching the world in four of dreams and imagination as pathways to new creative expressions.
Photography played an important role in the Surrealist movement. Artists valued how the medium could capture spontaneous moments that reveal the unexpected, be manipulated to stage scenes, or be altered with darkroom processes. They harness photography in a multitude of ways to create dreamlike and unconscious associations with reality. In these galleries, artists explore uncanny moments and create links to the human psyche by focusing on humanlike forms and fragmented body parts, mirrored and doubled views, and the impact of light and shadows in space.
Eugène Atget was the great chronicler of Paris at the turn of the century. His vast photographic archive captures a city on the precipice of modernisation. Though his photographs of empty city streets were documentary in nature, the Surrealists admired their dreamlike quality and claimed Atget as one of their own despite his protestations. They believed any photograph could shed its original context and intent when viewed with a surrealist sensibility. Atget’s photograph of mannequins peering out of a shop window appealed to the movement by embodying the uncanny valley, where the human likeness of a nonhuman entity evokes both affinity and discomfort in viewers.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Florence Henri (Swiss born United States, 1893-1982) Composition 1932, printed 1972 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Dr. Joe B. Massey in honor of Maria L. Kelly
Florence Henri is well known for her manipulations of light and form that create complex, surrealist scenes. She used angled mirrors to frame, obscure, and replicate portions of scenes to dissolve a sense of perspective and space, as seen in this still life comprising mirrors, pears, and an image of the sea. After only one semester studying under László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus in 1927, Henri shifted her focus from painting to photography and began using various experimental techniques such as photomontage, multiple exposures, photograms, and negative printing.
Barbara Kasten’s art is as much about the process of setting up innovative still life scenes as it is about the photographs she makes of them. Her Constructs series focuses on large-scale complex assemblages that she builds in her studio using a wide variety of materials, including painted wood, plaster, mirrors, screens, and fibers. Her work is not digitally altered; instead, she complicates the scene using mirrors and light, much in the tradition of Florence Henri, whose photograph is also on view in the exhibition.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Manipulations
This final section features photographers from the New Vision period to the present day who experiment with physically manipulating photographs. Through approaches such as double exposure, photomontage, surface alteration, and multilayering, they challenge and expand our perceptions of reality. The artworks in this section prioritise the creative process through labour, intention, intervention, and theatricality.
Double exposures is the process of photographing multiple images with the same negative within the camera, resulting in layered images that often provide a frenetic, multifaceted view of a scene. In contrast to the in-camera process of double exposure, photomontage combines separate images in the darkroom to produce a final photograph that emphasises the image’s artifice and absurdity. Physically disrupting the surface of photographs with alterations such as adding unnatural colour, drawing connections, stitching into prints, or inscribing texts augments the visual experience and offers emotional and narrative depth. Finally, whether through ancient visual techniques like the camera obscure or new technologies like digital screens, these artists create enigmatic scenes by layering and physically transforming subject, composition, and image.
Wall text from the exhibition
Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) Protest 1940 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase
Noémie Goudal (French, b. 1984) Phoenix V 2021 Dye coupler print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2023
Noémie Goudal visualises “deep time” (geological history of the planet) and paleoclimatology (study of past climates) to challenge our perception of the world. Referring to the ancient continental split two billion years ago that formed South America and Africa, this image features the Phoenix atlantica, a palm tree that grows on both sides of the Atlantic. Goudal arranged strips of photographic prints of the palms made on one continent in front of the physical palms on the other and rephotographed the scene. The resulting image interweaves the two continents, creating a glitchy, kaleidoscopic view meant to unsettle our sense of stability and the constancy of the planet.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Naima Green (American, b. 1992) It Lingers Sweetly 2022 Pigmented inkjet print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the LGBTQIA+ Photography Centennial Initiative
Naima Green’s practice centres connection and collaboration to cast a tender lens on her own queer community of colour. Her lyrical portraits take shape in intimate domestic spaces and airy outdoor environments that embody havens for the people in those spaces. Through double exposure and serial photographs, she provides what she calls “multiple entry points” into a moment in time, translating movements and emotions into a single image. She explains her interest in double exposure “as a means of capturing things that can’t be held in just one way … ,” allowing her to “play with loosening the narrative and letting go of some control.”
Text from the High Museum of Art website
The High Museum of Art 1280 Peachtree St NE Atlanta, GA 30309
Exhibition dates: 7th October, 2022 – 21st May, 2023
Head Curator: Karolina Kühn Curators: Juliane Bischoff, Angela Hermann, Sebastian Huber, Anna Straetmans, Ulla-Britta Vollhardt
Wer’e here, we’re queer, we’re not going anywhere.
Despite years of persecution, death and inequality, the presence of queer identity, diversity and creativity remains undimmed.
There are some fabulous, groundbreaking human beings who are “being seen” in this posting. Equally, there are some fabulous art works that illuminate the(ir) human condition.
Let’s celebrate their existence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
About the exhibition
TO BE SEEN is an exhibition devoted to the stories of LGBTQI+ in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Through historical testimony and artistic positions from then and now, it traces queer lives and networks, the areas of freedom enjoyed by LGBTQI+, and the persecution they suffered.
The exhibition takes an intimate look at a variety of genders, bodies, and identities. It shows how queer life became ever more visible during the 1920s, giving rise to a more open treatment of role models and of desire. During this period, homosexual, trans, and non-binary people achieved their first successes in their fight for equal rights and social acceptance. They organised, fought for scientific and legal recognition of their gender identity, and carved out their own spaces.
But as recognition and visibility in art and culture, science, politics, and society increased, so did resistance. After the Nazis came to power, the LGBTQI+ subculture was largely destroyed. After 1945, their stories and fates were scarcely archived or remembered.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism website
“When a right is withheld from you, you must fight and not give in; that is a moral duty.”
Joseph Schedel opened the first meeting of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee of Munich on September 24, 1902
Exterior view of the NS Documentation Center in Munich showing a work in the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 – Maximiliane Baumgartner’s “You look at us – we look at you”: Rubbing against the architecture of the executive gaze (Based on a paper by Anita Augspurg ‘Mißgriffe der Polizei’ / ‘Abuses by the Police’, 1902) 2021 Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
TO BE SEEN | Trailer
The exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 is dedicated to the stories of LGBTIQ* in Germany in the first half of the 20th century from October 7th, 2022 to May 21st, 2023 at the Munich Documentation Center. With historical testimonies and artistic positions from then to the present, the exhibition traces queer life plans and networks, freedom and persecution.
The exhibition takes an intimate look at diverse genders, bodies and identities. It shows how queer life became more and more visible in the 1920s and how role models and desires were dealt with more openly. Homosexual, trans* and non-binary people achieved their first successes in their fight for equal rights and social acceptance: they organised themselves, fought for scientific and legal recognition of their gender identity and conquered their own spaces.
In addition to recognition and visibility in art and culture, science, politics and society, resistance also increased. After the National Socialists came to power, the LGBTIQ* subculture was largely destroyed. After 1945 their stories and fates were hardly archived or remembered.
Unknown photographer Lili, Paris 1926 From N. Hoyer (ed.). Man into Woman. An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. The true story of the miraculous transformation of the Danish painter Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre). London: Jarrolds, 1933, 1926, opp. p. 40. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Lili Elbe, a transgender woman who underwent sex reassignment surgery in Berlin in the 1930s.
Around 1900, queer people in Germany began gaining more and more visibility in public life – in art, culture, science, and politics. Existing role models for men and women were being questioned. Homosexual women and men as well as trans* and non-binary people achieved initial successes in their struggle for equal rights and acceptance: they organised and fought for scientific and legal recognition of their sexual and gender identity.
They met in public places, founded clubs and associations, and started magazines. New terms were coined to describe their identities and create a sense of belonging. Urning, lesbian, girlfriend, Bubi, homosexual: more than a hundred years ago there were already many expressions for what we call queer today. But as their visibility grew, so did the social and political backlash. The Nazi takeover in 1933 was a defining moment for queer people – their subculture was largely destroyed. In the postwar years, discrimination continued.
Even decades later, LGBTQI+ history is still hardly remembered or preserved in archives. Through historical testimonies and artistic positions from then and now, TO BE SEEN traces queer lives and networks, the spaces of freedom enjoyed by LGBTQI+ people, and the persecution they suffered.
Police photo of Liddy Bacroff, taken after an arrest, 1933. Barcoff described themself as a “homosexual transvestite”, lived from sex work, and was convicted several times. In 1943, they was murdered in the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Liddy Bacroff, a transgender woman initially from Ludwigshafen, who moved to Hamburg and lived for the majority of her life publicly presenting herself as a woman. She did not perceive herself to be a man (and, indeed, in papers she left after having been imprisoned, she determined what her name would be while also conspicuously referring to herself as “Liddy Bacroff, Transvestit”). But this was effectively her own form of self-ID. Certainly the authorities didn’t see her as such — her records remain filed under her deadname and identify her as a homosexual man – and, though she’d have been given a Transvestitenschein in Berlin, she wasn’t IN Berlin. Having not visited Hirschfeld and his Institut, it’s a marvel she uses the term “Transvestit”; elsewhere she does refer to herself as a “Mann-Weib” (a “male woman”), and frequently as a girl or a woman. The authorities, again, call her a man or, occasionally, a “Zwitter.” (NB. “Zwitter” means “hermaphrodite” and is here not meant literally but rather as an epithet recorded in the official files – an insult to her.) So the language that is used to describe trans people is inconsistent and, often, absent (depending on the sources). Reading between the lines is necessary, especially in the official records, which view trans women (regardless their lived circumstances or their appearance) only as homosexual men, and charge them as such. And while Hirschfeld was conscientious, the police were… not. This is especially true as the 1930s unfolded and the country Nazified. I wrote a very long thread a while back about “Heinrich Bode”, who was assigned male at birth but frequently presented as a woman. I used that thread to highlight difficulties of definition because Bode denounced their appearance as a woman in court filings and personal testimony, but at the same time also hinted that there was something much deeper than “just” dressing as a woman. But as they were subjected to prosecution by the Nazified judiciary and security state, they were under duress. So, do we assume that Bode was trans, and denied it because of the threat of punishment? Or was their presentation simply playing with the conventions of gender?
Dr. Bodie A. Ashton Historiker, Universität Erfurt. Text from his Twitter account
The androgynous dancer created new body images and developed the swapping of clothes into a stage genre of its own.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Queer
“Queer” originally referred to anything that did not fit into the usual categories. In English the word queer (meaning strange, other, suspicious), was used earlier as a derogative term for homosexuals. Since the 1990s, however, the term has been adopted by many non heterosexual and non-binary people as a positive self-designation. Within the exhibition, queer is used as a catch-all term for a variety of sexual and gender identities and practices that deviate from heterosexual ideas. The term primarily, but not only, refers to LGBTQI+ – in other words lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersexual persons. Furthermore, “queering” can be understood as a practice of combating various forms of discrimination and exclusion. Applied to gender, sexuality, and identity issues, it means casting a critical gaze at the worldview that regards a heterosexual relationship between two persons as the social norm. The rigid binary division of gender into man and woman and the associated role models are thrown into question. In the exhibition, historical self-designations are used where they can be traced through sources.
Self empowerment
In the German Empire, politics, the economy, and society were dominated by men. The gender order, which was maintained over centuries by state and church, was strictly divided into two parts: men and women were assigned clear roles within which they must operate. People who did not conform to these role models and lived gender and sexual identities outside the normative order were ostracised. They were considered immoral, criminal, or ill. According to Paragraph 175 of the Imperial Criminal Code of 1871, sexual acts between men were forbidden and punishable by imprisonment. In Austria, sex between women was also punishable.
But there were individuals who rebelled against the prevailing gender order and fought for a more open society. They opposed the outlawing of homosexuality and transsexuality, advocated a change in criminal law, and assertively engaged in the recognition of their identities. New alliances and self-images emerged. Many of these pioneers paid a high price for their rebellion: they lost their jobs, their families, and their friendships, and were socially isolated.
In TO BE SEEN #QueerLives we present individuals and movements who rebelled against the gender order that prevailed around 1900 and advocated a more open society. In their fight for equal rights and acceptance, they showed solidarity with each other, organised themselves in clubs, founded magazines, coined new terms and met in bars and clubs.
One of them was the chansonnière and cabaret artist Claire Waldoff (1884-1957). Born as Clara Wortmann in Gelsenkirchen, she is a central figure in the Berlin cultural scene of the 1920s. Her songs are known throughout Germany. She lives openly with her partner Olga (Olly) von Roeder and shapes the city’s lesbian scene.
Emil Orlik (21 July 1870 – 28 September 1932) was a painter, etcher and lithographer. He was born in Prague, which was at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and lived and worked in Prague, Austria and Germany.
Emil Orlik was born the son of a tailor on July 21, 1870, in Prague, then the capital of a province within the Austro-Hungarian empire. He first studied art at the private art school of Heinrich Knirr, where one of his fellow pupils was Paul Klee. Other friends at this time included Franz Kafka, Max Brod, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Starting in 1891, Orlik studied at the Munich Academy under Wilhelm Lindenschmit. He later learned engraving from Johann Leonhard Raab and proceeded to experiment with various printmaking processes, including woodcut, which he and his friend, Bernard Pankok, experimented with in 1896.
Orlik left the Academy in 1893. He performed his military service for a year before returning to Prague in 1894. He relocated to Munich in 1896, where he worked for the magazine Jugend (Youth). He spent most of 1898 travelling through Europe, visiting the Netherlands, Great Britain, Belgium, and Paris.
Emil Orlik’s prints and techniques went through extensive changes as he traveled internationally, learning new methods wherever he went. Known for his portraits of a wide variety of well-known individuals including Josephine Baker, Albert Einstein, and Marc Chagall, Orlik was an artistic chameleon, never sticking to one genre or style but studying many. His prints catalog his travels, creating a kind of pictorial diary of the years 1892 to 1900 in particular. Many of his works, often produced in color, appeared in the European periodical PAN, along with the work of Toulouse-Lautrec, Kathe Kollwitz, and Max Klinger.
Japanese art and culture fascinated Orlik. He was aware of the impact Japanese art was having on European art and decided to visit Japan. In 1900, he traveled to Japan and spent a year studying Japanese woodblock cutting and printing. His studies of the Japanese culture led him to the art of Utamaro and Hiroshige. Orlik studied the language before his departure and within four months of his arrival he was proficient enough in Japanese to converse with the artisans whose work he admired and under whom he studied.
Orlik never limited himself to popular subject matter. He studied any scene that inspired him, major events or everyday life. He produced fourteen lithographs of the trial of Arthur Schnitzler and his fellow actors; reenactment of the banned play, “Aus dem Reigin,” for which Orlik was a defence witness. After the trial, Orlik began working for the theatre as a designer of costumes, stage sets, and posters.
He kept all his early woodblocks and, in 1920, he published his celebrated portfolio Kleine Holzschnitte (Small woodcuts) in an edition of 100, which also contained the text of his descriptions of each of the prints. The portfolio contained thirty-four woodcuts, eighteen of which were printed in colours. The complete portfolio is now very rarely found. It included such delightful items as Aus London and the superb colour woodcut Schneiderwerkstatt bei Orlik in Prag (the Orlik tailoring workshop in Prague), which depicts his father and colleague’s busy sewing.
Orlik was also commissioned to design colour posters for the Best-Litovsk Peace Conference at which Russia and Germany ended their conflict. He produced seventy-two lithographs, including a number portraits of Leon Trotsky. Around this time he also began to study photography, and by the mid-1920s was photographing celebrities such as Marlene Dietrich and Albert Eintstein.
Emil Orlik died of a heart attack on September 28, 1932. His brother Hugo was willed the estate, and with it the numerous works of art Orlik had collected throughout the years. Hugo Orlik and his family perished in WWII at the hands of the Nazis, and the only survivor was an aunt who regained what little was left of Emil’s effects. To this day Orlik’s work is still exhibited throughout the world.
Anonymous. “Emil Orlik Biography” on The Annex Galleries website Nd [Online] Cited 17/04/2023
Installation views of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Bars and clubs, magazines, organisations, private or public places: queer subcultures and networks emerged in Germany beginning at the turn of the century and especially in the 1920s. Political goals were formulated together. People communicated using their own codes, ciphers, and symbols.
The public sphere continued to be reserved primarily for men – heterosexual, white, and Christian men. But the experience of conquering one’s own spaces against all social opposition, of joining forces and stepping into the public sphere together, led to a growing self-confidence in the queer scenes. In the process, they not only fought for their own interests; political bonds were forged and coalitions formed that bridged differences.
Visions for a society with equal rights for all people were drafted, and existing structures of power were questioned. But internal conflicts emerged as well, and not all queer groups pulled together.
§ 175 des Reichsstrafgesetzbuchs
Trancript: “Paragraph 175: Perverse fornication committed between persons of the male sex or by persons with animals is punishable by imprisonment; loss of civil rights may also be imposed.”
According to Paragraph 175 of the Imperial Criminal Code, sexual intercourse between men was punishable. This provision originated in the Prussian Criminal Code and was introduced throughout Germany with the founding of the German Empire in 1871. Prior to this, homosexuality was exempt from punishment in some German states, such as Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden, following the example of France. The paragraph was controversial from the beginning: ecclesiastical conservatives and extreme right-wing parties demanded it be made more severe; liberals, social democrats, and communists called for its abolition.
Organisations and the conquest of public space
At the end of the nineteenth century, gay men joined forces to fight against persecution based on Paragraph 175. They founded clubs and associations and sought supporters to achieve their vision of a more open society. Berlin became the hub of this movement and developed into a leading centre of attraction for queer people. It was in Berlin that, in 1897, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was founded, which aimed to achieve legal and social equality for homosexual and trans* people.
Some activists from the women’s movements joined this struggle, especially when the extension of Paragraph 175 to encompass women was debated in 1909. Their goal was far-reaching sexual and social reform: a woman’s right to sexual self-determination, abortion, extramarital relations, and independence from her husband. Some leading women’s rights activists lived with another woman, but only few openly identified as lesbian.
Queer subcultures flourished in the Weimar Republic. A diverse landscape of organisations emerged that represented the interests of gays, lesbians, and trans* persons. However, the struggle against Paragraph 175 was not always synonymous with advocacy for an open society. Among gay activists there were also those who paid homage to a homoerotic male cult. They excluded – in addition to women – all those who did not conform to their heroic, in some cases also racist ideas of masculinity.
Adolf Brand (publisher) Der Eigene (The Unique) 1926
Founded in 1896 by Adolf Brand, “Der Eigene” was the longest-running homosexual journal. With its literary-artistic contributions it evoked the image of heroic masculinity.
Struggle against Paragraph 175: the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee
The physician Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) came from a liberal Jewish family and began actively campaigning for the abolition of Paragraph 175 at the end of the nineteenth century. His actions were motivated by the persecution to which gay men were subjected. As a sexual reformer and founder of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, he fought against the prevailing rigid sexual morality and contributed significantly to the visibility of queer people.
Magnus Hirschfeld utilised modern means in his educational activities. The silent film drama was shot in 1919 with his active participation. It is considered the first film to deal openly with Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) the subject of homosexuality. Heavily attacked by conservative and right-wing extremists, and by some with anti-Semitic motives, the film was used as an opportunity to curtail the artistic freedom introduced after the 1918 revolution. After being screened publicly for a full year, the film was banned by censors in 1920 and almost all copies were destroyed.
“Anders als die Andern” is about a homosexual musician who is subject to blackmail. When he no longer knows what to do and files charges, not only is the blackmailer convicted, but he himself is also sentenced – for violating Paragraph 175. He is shattered by the verdict and takes his own life.
Excerpts from Different From the Others (Anders als die Andern) (Germany, 1919), which was preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive as part of the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project. Funding provided by The Andrew J. Kuehn Jr. Foundation and the members of Outfest.
Synopsis
The concert violinist Paul Koerner takes a student under his wing, much to the worry of the boy’s parents. Koerner is meanwhile being blackmailed by a former lover, since in Germany any homosexual relations at that time were punishable under the law, codified in Article 175, which was not removed from the books until the 1960s. The German film, Different From the Others is, as far as we know, the first fiction feature film to address a specifically gay audience. Fortunately, even though more than 90% of all German silent films have disappeared, this film exists today in at least half its original length. When the film was first shown in 1919, gay and lesbian audiences must have been amazed that a mainstream fiction feature film would portray their situation as a fact of nature, rather than a perversion. Today, this film celebrates the brief opening of that door, before it slammed shut for another 50 years.
The film was produced and directed by Richard Oswald, at that time one of Germany’s most prolific independents, who made films cheaply and premiered them in a Berlin cinema he owned, where his wife would often handle the office box. Oswald had earned a fortune in 1917 / 1918 with a number of “educational” feature films about sexually transmitted diseases, which were approved by the censorship authorities, simply because syphilis was rampant in the trenches. Oswald would continue to produce controversial films, like his acknowledged masterpiece, The Captain from Koepenick (1931) based on Carl Zuckmayer’s anti-authoritarian play. The Nazis never forgave Oswald for Anders als die Andern or Koepenick, forcing Oswald into exile and eventually to Hollywood, where he directed several films and televisions shows. Although long under appreciated in Germany, recent critical reappraisals have valued his in-your-face aesthetic and modern subject matter.
Only a severely truncated version of the film has survived, with Ukrainian titles, as Gosfilmofond in Russia. It was restored previously to a semblance of the original 1919 release by the Munich Film Museum. The UCLA restoration is based on that Munich reconstruction, with some changes and additions made.
Credits
Richard-Oswald-Produktion. Screenwriters: Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Oswald. Cinematographer: Max Fassbender. With: Conrad Veidt, Leo Connard, Ilse von Tasso-Lind, Alexandra Willegh, Ernst Pittschau, Fritz Schulz.
Different From Others: A Legacy Preserved (2012)
Featurette about the restoration of German silent film Different From Others (1919). Produced for the Outfest Legacy Project and the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
On October 6 the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer lives 1900-1950 opens at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism. TO BE SEEN is devoted to the stories of LGBTQI+ in Germany in the first half of the 20th century. Through historical testimony and artistic positions from then and now, it traces queer lives and networks, the areas of freedom enjoyed by LGBTQI+, and the persecution they suffered.
The exhibition takes an intimate look at a variety of genders, bodies, and identities. It shows how queer life became ever more visible during the 1920s, giving rise to a more open treatment of role models and of desire. During this period, homosexual, trans, and non-binary people achieved their first successes in their fight for equal rights and social acceptance. They organised, fought for scientific and legal recognition of their gender identity, and carved out their own spaces.
But as recognition and visibility in art and culture, science, politics, and society increased, so did resistance. After the Nazis came to power, the LGBTQI+ subculture was largely destroyed. After 1945, their stories and fates were scarcely archived or remembered.
Participating artists
Katharina Aigner, Maximiliane Baumgartner, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Claude Cahun, Zackary Drucker & Marval Rex, Nicholas Grafia, Philipp Gufler, Richard Grune, Lena Rosa Händle, Hannah Höch, Paul Hoecker, Nina Jirsíková, Germaine Krull, Elisar von Kupffer, Zoltán Lesi & Ricardo Portilho, Herbert List, Heinz Loew, Jeanne Mammen, Michaela Melián, Henrik Olesen, Emil Orlik, Max Peiffer Watenphul, Jonathan Penca, Lil Picard, Karol Radziszewski, Alexander Sacharoff, Gertrude Sandmann, Christian Schad, Renée Sintenis, Mikołaj Sobczak, Wolfgang Tillmans and others.
TO BE SEEN will be accompanied by an extensive program of events and outreach on topics such as the persecution of LGBTQI+ persons under National Socialism, the queer history of Munich, intersectionality and drag, as well as queer identity in literature and film. All information and updates can be found at nsdoku.de/tobeseen.
The accompanying publication features a collection of texts and artworks from the exhibition as well as essays by key voices that shed light on past and present queer lives from an academic and social perspective. The book in German and English will be published in December 2022 by Hirmer Verlag. It features contributions by, among others, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Michaela Dudley, Sander L. Gilman, Dagmar Herzog, Ulrike Klöppel, Ben Miller, Cara Schweitzer, Sebastien Tremblay.
TO BE SEEN: Queer lives 1900-1950 takes place under the patronage of Claudia Roth, Minister of State for Culture and Media. The exhibition was funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Director: Mirjam Zadoff Head Curator: Karolina Kühn Curators: Juliane Bischoff, Angela Hermann, Sebastian Huber, Anna Straetmans, Ulla-Britta Vollhardt Project Management: Karolina Kühn, Anna Straetmans, Sebastian Huber
Press release from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism
In April 1933, the film “The Mystery of the Gender” ran in Viennese cinemas for about two weeks before it was banned. The film is a mixture of romance and medical educational film, including close-ups of the women’s genitals. Among the protagonists are – without mentioning their names – Toni Ebel, Charlotte Charlaque and Dora Richter. You can find an excerpt of the film in our storytelling http://www.tobeseen.nsdoku.de
Toni Ebel converted to Judaism in early 1933, but reversed the conversion as the pressure of persecution increased. After 1945 she was recognised in the GDR as a victim of fascism. Ebel was able to start a new life as a painter.
Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel remained in correspondence after their forced separation in 1942. In 1946 Charlaque told her friend about her loneliness, her arrival as a refugee in New York and the difficulties in getting her female name recognised.
Dora Richter became known as one of the first trans* women to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Since it was difficult for trans* people to find work, she took a job as a housemaid at the Institute for Sexology, which was looted by National Socialist groups in 1933. Nothing is known of Richter’s fate after 1933.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing at rear, an enlargement of an image by an unknown photographer of the Eldorado in the Motzstrasse (1932, below); and at left centre in the display cabinet, an image by an unknown photographer Trans* people in the Eldorado in Berlin (1926, above) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
The Eldorado on Lutherstraße was one of the city’s infamous cabaret bars.
The Eldorado was the name of multiple nightclubs and performance venues in Berlin before the Nazi Era and World War II. The name of the cabaret Eldorado has become an integral part of the popular iconography of what has come to be seen as the culture of the period in German history often referred to as the “Weimar Republic”. …
Eldorado was a gay cabaret in that along with gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans* patrons, a heterosexual-identifying audience (artists, authors, celebrities, tourists) would have been present as well. “Cross-dressing” was tolerated on the premises, though for the most part legally prohibited and / or sharply regulated in public (and to an extent in private) at the time. This exception to everyday life attracted not only male patrons who wished to dress in the “clothing of the opposite sex”, and their admirers, but also to no small extent women who wished to do the same, and their admirers. Wealthy lookers-on were encouraged to come and drink and watch as so-called “Zechenmacher” (tab payers). The practice was particularly common in so-called “Lesbian bars” or at so-called “Lesbian balls” in the neighbourhood at the time and up the 1960s in places like the Nationalhof at nearby Bülowstraße 37. As women’s incomes were on average much lower than men’s then as now, male spectators with money to spend were explicitly welcome, and it was not uncommon that there were sex-workers present to offer their services. Eldorado also included what have come to be called drag shows as a regular part of the cabaret performances.
The Eldorado, which opened in 1926 on Lutherstrasse in Berlin-Schoeneberg, was – along with its counterpart, the “new Eldorado” on Motzstrasse – one of the internationally most well-known trendy bars of its time. Magnus Hirschfeld, Claire Waldoff, Anita Berber and Marlene Dietrich often and happily visited the Eldorado, as did the prominent National Socialist Ernst Röhm. With its shows, it attracted a wealthy audience, which soon consisted not only of homosexuals and trans* people, but above all of onlookers heterosexuals. Guests could purchase tokens that could be exchanged for a dance with the Eldorado’s “transvestite” staff.
A popular accessory for lesbian women in the 1920s was the “dance monocle”
Short hair, ties, tails, and top hats were other identifying marks within part of the lesbian scene – and soon to be common among modern heterosexual women as well. The “New Woman” of the 1920s broke away from traditional gender images and appropriated new things and spaces that had previously been occupied by men.
In the Berlin scene, but also in other cities, numerous gay and lesbian clubs that rented premises, called for social activities, but also explicitly pursued political and emancipatory goals. One of the largest “women’s clubs” was the Violetta Ladies’ Club, founded in Berlin in 1926.
The founder of the women’s club Violetta was the lesbian activist Lotte Hahm (1890-1967), who also wrote for “The Girlfriend”. Together with her Jewish partner Käthe Fleischmann (1899-1967) she ran the lesbian bar Monokel-Diele in Berlin. After 1933, both initially tried to maintain lesbian networks and meeting places under cover names. Fleischmann, persecuted as a Jew, survived the Nazi era in various hiding places.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
A lively scene for homosexuals and trans* persons emerged in Germany during the 1920s. Especially in major cities, a number of clubhouses, bars, and clubs functioned as meeting places. The undisputed centre of queer life was Berlin. Police authorities there followed a more liberal course than elsewhere after the end of the nineteenth century. Nearly two hundred subcultural venues are documented in the imperial capital between 1919 and 1933, about eighty of them for lesbian women.
In conservative Munich, as in smaller cities and rural areas, fewer venues existed. Homosexual men had to resort to informal meeting places, due to the ongoing criminal persecution. They used public parks and toilets as “pick-up spots” to socialise or have sex. In doing so, they always ran the risk of being denounced or stopped by the police.
Magazines and informal networks
Magazines were an important means of communication for queer subcultures. They listed relevant clubs and bars, bookstores, and associations, and served as contact exchanges. These references and opportunities were essential particularly for queer people in rural areas, where there were no functioning networks. However, the publishers had to reckon with the banning of their print products at any time. It was not uncommon for entire print runs or volumes to be labeled as “trash texts” and confiscated.
In order to avoid police persecution and social exclusion, the scene employed its own linguistic codes. Camouflage terms such as “friend”, “girlfriend”, “ideal friendship”, “friendly exchange of ideas”, or “ideal-minded” were used to refer to lesbian and gay connections. Lonely hearts ads in relevant magazines were often the only way to find like-minded people, especially in smaller towns and in the countryside.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing historical magazines
In TO BE SEEN you can leaf through historical magazines. They were an important means of communication for queer subcultures.
Magazines such as “Die Freundsblatt”, “DasFreundschaftsblatt” or “Frauenliebe” referred to relevant pubs, bookstores and associations and served as contact exchanges. Especially for queer people in rural areas, where there were no functioning networks, these tips and opportunities were essential. However, the publishers had to expect their printed products to be banned at any time. It is not uncommon for entire editions or volumes to be marked as “trash and dirty writing” and confiscated.
“The Girlfriend” (subtitle “The Ideal Friendship Journal”, later “Weekly Journal for Ideal Female Friendship”) was a magazine for lesbian women from 1924 to 1933 in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. It is considered the first lesbian magazine and was first published monthly, then every two weeks, and later even weekly.
The editor was Friedrich Radzuweit (1876-1932), chairman of the Federation for Human Rights. The content focuses on information on lesbian life and meeting places for lesbians, political topics, short stories, serialised novels and classifieds. Although “The Girlfriend” was primarily aimed at a lesbian readership, there are also numerous articles that deal with topics such as ‘transvestism’ or transgender. It was discontinued a few weeks after the National Socialists seized power in January 1933: the last issue appeared on March 15, 1933, a week before the Enabling Act was passed.
Covers from Die Freundin (The Girlfriend), September 1932, and Liebende Frauen (Women in Love), 1929
The “Zwischenstufenwand” (sexual transitions wall) in the Institute for Sexology illustrated Hirschfeld’s theory that all people have male and female qualities in them.
The famous picture wall, illustrating Hirschfeld’s sex and gender theories. It was first exhibited in Leipzig (1922) on occasion of the German Natural Scientists’ and Physicians’ centenary and then in Vienna (1930) at the World League for Sexual Reform’s congress. The picture wall (2×1 m by 4×5 m) always had a prominent place in the Institute and was used to explain sexual theories to visitors.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism
Knowledge, diagnosis, control
Scientific interest in sexuality and gender was expanding around the turn of the century. The amount of sexological research and number of publications increased. Most writings described homosexuality or trans* identities as “pathological” conditions. This assumption has since been scientifically refuted. At the same time, groundbreaking theories emerged, for example Magnus Hirschfeld’s model of “sexual intermediates.” In it, the sexologist anticipated the later realisation that numerous other gender identities besides man and woman exist.
Yet, then as now, knowledge also meant power and control. People were examined, described, classified, and judged as patients. Some sexologists incorporated ideas in their research that drew on biologism and eugenics. These were spread throughout society and later played a central role for the Nazis: their conception of so-called “racial hygiene” distinguished between “valuable” and “unworthy” life.
The driving forces in the German-speaking world from the 1860s on were the lawyer and physician Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and the physician Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Ulrichs in particular fought for the decriminalisation and recognition of homosexuality. His insights into the diversity of sexuality and gender are still essential today. Other scientists understood the “third sex” as a pathological phenomenon and wanted to effect the “re-education” and “healing” of their patients with methods that were sometimes questionable. The result was often physical or psychological trauma.
The Institute for Sexology and its patients
Magnus Hirschfeld was the best-known representative of sexology in the German-speaking world. He combined a pursuit for emancipation and a scientific perspective, was a champion of decriminalisation and a physician at the same time. His Institute for Sexology, founded in Berlin in 1919, became the centre of the liberal-leftist sexual reform movement of the Weimar Republic. In addition to research and medical consulting, the institute operated a library, an archive, and a museum. Unlike conservative sexologists, Hirschfeld and his staff worked towards the self-acceptance of homosexuals and trans* persons.
This “adaptation therapy” or “milieu therapy” aimed to help people adapt to the queer milieu that suited them, instead of repressing their identity. Many important people from the gay community, such as Lili Elbe, were treated here. Homosexual writers such as André Gide and Christopher Isherwood visited the institute. People who today would be considered intersex were also counselled. From the beginning, the Nazis were disturbed by liberal sexology, Hirschfeld, and his institute. Many of the institute’s employees were, like Hirschfeld himself, Jewish. In 1933, Nazi students and SA members demolished the institute; Hirschfeld was on a world tour at the time and remained in exile in France.
The institute grew to become a refuge for “transvestites”. This is how people who we understand today as trans* persons were called at the time. Some of them lived in the institute and earned their living there. They were particularly dependent on it. Despite the institute’s great merits, the relationship between doctors and “patients” was not unproblematic from today’s point of view.
By mediating between queer people and state power, Hirschfeld and his colleagues were able to protect their patients and fight for more rights and freedom for them. But in order to do so, they cooperated with the police and the courts, thus providing the state institutions with access and control. Then as now, intersex and trans* people were rarely perceived as experts on themselves, making them dependent on the recognition bestowed by medicine and the justice system. This was accompanied by a scientific and state-regulatory view of their bodies that pushed them into the role of patients, externally controlled subjects, instead of granting them autonomy over their bodies as well as their own voice.
Hirschfeld’s medical practices are controversial today
However, Magnus Hirschfeld also referred those male homosexuals who, based on his biological research, assumed that homosexuality could also be treated, to other doctors. They castrated the patients and implanted heterosexual testicles in them.
Not only Magnus Hirschfeld’s medical practices, but also his scientific approach is controversial today. His absolute belief in biology leaned towards social Darwinism and eugenics. He founded a “Medical Society for Sexology and Eugenics”. He thus promoted “sexual selection” in order to improve the “mental fitness of the offspring”. He was thus at the same time far away and entirely in line with the National Socialists.
The National Socialists saw Hirschfeld as a security risk, a threat to the population growth of the “Aryan race” and not only in him. Tens of thousands of gay men are sentenced to prison, jail, and concentration camps, the gay civil rights movement is crushed, gay hangouts are closed, magazines are banned, and then, on May 6, 1933, the Institute for Sex Research is looted and its library burned.
Session of the “International Conference for Sex Reform on a Sexological Basis”, organised by Hirschfeld 1921 in Berlin at the Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus. (Hirschfeld, leaning forward, is seated just beneath the lectern.) This was the first sexological congress held anywhere, and it laid the groundwork for the Copenhagen congress of 1928.
Titled “Transvestites in Front of the Institute of Sexology” this photograph was taken on the occasion of the First International Congress for Sexual Reform on the Basis of Sexology in Berlin, 1921.
Willy Römer (December 31 , 1887 in Berlin – October 26, 1979 in West Berlin ) was a press photographer. His picture agency was one of the ten most important of the Weimar period. The pictures mainly illustrate life in Berlin from 1905 to 1935. It is thanks to a rare stroke of luck that his extensive picture archive survived the Second World War almost unscathed.
Starting in 1900, “Transvestite Certificates” were issued by a doctor, that officially certified that a person was known to be “wearing men’s clothing” or “wearing women’s clothing”.
In TO BE SEEN #QueerLives we also show Gerd Katter’s “Transvestite License”. From 1900, “transvestite certificates” were issued in some cities. It is a medically certified official confirmation that a person is known as “wearing men’s clothing” or “wearing women’s clothing”. The authorities refrain from making an arrest if you show them during checks. However, those affected are thus registered with the police and can be monitored more easily.
Gerd Katter (1910-1995) came to the Institute for Sexology at the age of 16 – at that time still with a female birth name. Barred from having his breasts amputated because of his youth, Katter tries to operate on himself, which requires an emergency amputation. Katter is one of many people who receive concrete, albeit unconventional, help at the institute. So he is prescribed to visit bars where “transvestites” meet. According to the adaptation therapy pursued at the institute, those seeking advice should be brought into contact with like-minded people. This is how they should learn to accept themselves.
Magnus Hirschfeld repeatedly invited Gerd Katter to the institute to show his guests a medical case study – a practice of displaying people and their bodies that was common at the time, but which is problematic from today’s medical-ethical point of view. Gerd Katter later completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter and lived in the GDR.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Female homosexuality and bisexuality received little attention in the male-dominated field of sexology. An exception was the research of Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986). The physician situated precisely these topics at the centre of her work. After 1933, left-wing, Jewish, and openly lesbian women in Germany were increasingly targeted by the Nazis. Being Jewish, she emigrated to Paris in 1933, and to London in 1936. Her research on lesbian sexuality and bisexuality earned her international recognition beginning in the 1960s.
Feeling Bodies, Seeing Images
At the same time as the advancements in sexology, new notions of the body, gender, and intimacy were finding expression in art and culture. Literature, theatre, film, and the visual arts offered an opportunity to question gender stereotypes and to create new roles and body images. These served as the basis for imagining freer ways of living and to lay the foundation for what we perceive today as queer aesthetics.
While Article 142 of the Weimar Constitution promised extensive artistic freedom, censorship was simultaneously introduced for the new medium of film. Munich in particular had numerous bans on film and theatre performances deemed offensive.
The bisexual dancer Anita Berber (1899-1928) confronted audiences with homoeroticism, nudity, and drug use, addressing issues that were taboo in the public eye.
The pejorative connotations of decadence as a moral failing or degenerate or degenerative state have often played into the pathologisation and criminalisation of specific bodies and practices. This is especially the case when these bodies and practices come to be seen as a threat to the health and integrity of a nation. Some of the most interesting examples can be found in Berlin at the dawn of the Weimar Republic, when the city itself was subject to charges of miasmic contagion. ‘Even the alkaline air around the Prussian capital (Berliner Luft)’, writes performance scholar Mel Gordon in characteristically hyperbolic style, ‘was said to contain a toxic ether that attacked the central nervous system, stimulating long suppressed passions as it animated all the external tics of sexual perversity’.[1]
Dance was regarded as a vector of transmission in spreading this toxic ether. Social dancing (Tanztaumel) swept Berlin in the year following the armistice, offering writers and cultural commentators a rich repository of tropes and metaphors for describing a social, economic and political situation that appeared to be spinning out of control. …
For dance and theater scholar Karl Toepfer, Berber’s aestheticization of her addictions to a plethora of narcotics presented ‘an almost satiric critique of the pretensions to a healthy, modern identity’.[11] Sickness formed the basis of a carefully stage-managed persona in the public eye that was to manifest in equally carefully choreographed routines. For instance, in one of the better-known dances from the Tänze des Lasters series, Kokain (Cocaine, 1922), Berber stages an embattled, spasmodic body torn between a will to live and the delirious effects of a narcotic. One reviewer described the dance as ‘a product of decay’ and a ‘style of degeneracy’,[12] suggesting that her embodiment of Berlin’s ‘toxic ether’ landed with her audiences (ether was also one of Berber’s drugs of choice, particularly once mixed with chloroform and white rose petals). That this piece was set to Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre (1874) makes it tempting to position it as the epitome of Berlin’s own ‘dance of death’ in which death and sexuality perform a pas de deux across Berber’s performing body – a body that was to succumb to tuberculosis aged only twenty-nine.
Berber’s dances have been read as ‘jejune’ and derivative;[13] however, this does a disservice to what Susan Laikin Funkenstein describes as ‘a more profound understanding of her contributions’ to modern dance history that were ahead of their time.[14] Although Funkenstein is looking to put some distance between Berber’s perception as a ‘depraved vamp’ and her innovativeness as a dancer, I argue that these are mutually enriching considerations in the development of her decadent choreographies. Berber’s ‘sickness’ as an addict, her perceived corruption as a sexual libertine, and (later) her physical sickness after contracting tuberculosis were not adjacent to her work as a dancer. She danced as she lived – which is to say, decadently – just as her bohemian aestheticism makes it difficult to distinguish where her choreographies begin and end.
In the first half of the twentieth century, artists experimented with new representations of the human body. They conceived of a wide spectrum of possible identities and sexualities situated outside the dominant categories. Artists subverted binary notions of gender, whether through ambiguities, gender-neutral codes, or playing with androgynous body images.
In 1933, the Nazis put an end to this diversity. Avant-garde works by artists such as Hannah Höch or Jeanne Mammen were denounced as “degenerate” and confiscated, banned, or destroyed. The regime instead honoured artists such as Arno Breker, Leni Riefenstahl, and Josef Thorak, who immortalised traditional gender images in monumental depictions. Such images supported the Nazi regime’s racial ideals, and endured well into the postwar period.
Hannah Höch worked with clichés and role models in her art and was a significant influence on the Dada movement.
Hannah Höch (German: [hœç]; 1 November 1889 – 31 May 1978) was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage. Photomontage, or fotomontage, is a type of collage in which the pasted items are actual photographs, or photographic reproductions pulled from the press and other widely produced media.
Höch’s work was intended to dismantle the fable and dichotomy that existed in the concept of the “New Woman”: an energetic, professional, and androgynous woman, who is ready to take her place as man’s equal. Her interest in the topic was in how the dichotomy was structured, as well as in who structures social roles.
Other key themes in Höch’s works were androgyny, political discourse, and shifting gender roles. These themes all interacted to create a feminist discourse surrounding Höch’s works, which encouraged the liberation and agency of women during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) and continuing through to today.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Lovers
The works gathered here show homosexual couples and their intimate relationship with each other. At a time when gay and lesbian love could almost solely take place in secret, capturing queer intimacy within art became a political statement. The images represent an act of self-assertion within a discriminatory environment. They propose utopias and alternative realities that make togetherness possible – partly with recourse to antiquity, partly with a visionary view of future forms of loving and being.
Gertrude Sandmann (16 November 1893 – 6 January 1981) was a German artist and Holocaust survivor. Born into a wealthy German-Jewish family, Sandmann studied at the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen and had private tutelage from Käthe Kollwitz. In 1935 she was banned from practicing her profession due to the Nuremberg Laws. Given a deportation order in 1942, she ignored it, faked her own suicide, and hid with friends in Berlin until the end of the war. She lived in an apartment in Berlin-Schöneberg until the end of her life. She was a lesbian and, after the war, worked to improve the rights and visibility of LGBT people. Much of her oeuvre is held by the Potsdam Museum.
Gertrude Sandmann (1893-1981), who trained in Berlin and Munich, took private lessons from Käthe Kollwitz in the 1920s. She and the older artist remained lifelong friends. Unlike Kollwitz, however, Sandmann was less focused on social critique. A committed feminist, women were her favourite theme, as they were for her colleague Jeanne Mammen, who was about the same age.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing at centre, Dora Kallmus’ photograph The trapeze artist Barbette (Nd, below) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
The stage as site of utopias
In the Weimar Republic, vaudevilles, theatres, and nightclubs emerged in many major cities, on whose stages a freer treatment of sexuality and gender identities was allowed. Stage celebrities became role models for alternative gender roles, with drag performances developing into a genre in its own right.
The 1920s, often referred to as “golden” years, were by no means characterised by prosperity for most citizens, even though more and more people gained access to entertainment culture. War trauma and economic hardship stimulated the need to escape the worries of everyday life.
For many people, the bars and clubs of this period were places where they came into contact with alternative gender images and homosexuality, as well as where social debates were sparked.
The trapeze artist Barbette (real name Vander Clyde, 1899-1973) celebrated great success in Europe from the mid-1920s. Barbette performed, among other things, in the Berlin Varieté Wintergarten. The sensational productions of the “female impersonators” became increasingly known to a mass audience – and thus also helped the male and female impersonators of the Berlin scene to gain acceptance.
Dora Philippine Kallmus (20 March 1881 – 28 October 1963), also known as Madame D’Ora or Madame d’Ora, was an Austrian fashion and portrait photographer.
Early life
Dora Philippine Kallmus was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1881 to a Jewish family. Her father was a lawyer. Her sister, Anna, was born in 1878 and deported in 1941 during the Holocaust. Although her mother, Malvine (née Sonnenberg), died when she was young, her family remained an important source of emotional and financial support throughout her career.
She and her sister, Anna, were both “well-educated,” spoke English and French, and played the piano. They had also traveled throughout Europe.
She became interested in the photography field while assisting the son of the painter Hans Makart, and in 1905 she was the first woman to be admitted to theory courses at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (Graphic Training Institute). That same year she became a member of the Association of Austrian photographers. At that time she was also the first woman allowed to study theory at the Graphischen Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, which in 1908 granted women access to other courses in photography.
Career
In 1907, she established her own studio with Arthur Benda in Vienna called the Atelier d’Ora or Madame D’Ora-Benda. The name was based on the pseudonym “Madame d’Ora”, which she used professionally. D’ora and Benda operated a summer studio from 1921 to 1926 in Karlsbad, Germany, and opened another gallery in Paris in 1925. The Karlsbad gallery allowed D’Ora to cater to the “international elite vacationers.” These same clients later convinced her to open her Paris studio.
Between 1917 and 1927, D’Ora’s studio “produced” photographs for Ludwig Zwieback & Bruder, a Viennese department store. She was represented by Schostal Photo Agency (Agentur Schostal) and it was her intervention that saved the agency’s owner after his arrest by the Nazis, enabling him to flee to Paris from Vienna.
Her subjects included Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Tamara de Lempicka, Alban Berg, Maurice Chevalier, Colette, and other dancers, actors, painters, and writers.
Unknown photographer Dance study of Alexander Sakharoff 1912 Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration: illustr. Monatshefte für moderne Malerei, Plastik, Architektur, Wohnungskunst u. künstlerisches Frauen-Arbeiten – 30.1912
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Life under dictatorship
After the Nazis took power in 1933, every form of queer life was threatened and continued to exist only in private spaces or secret locations. Hopes for a tacit tolerance of homosexuality by the Nazis were finally dashed after the murder of Ernst Röhm, chief of- staff of the SA (Storm Troopers). The period of open persecution had begun.
During the first major Nazi raids against homosexuals on October 20, 1934, 145 men were arrested in Munich alone. Paragraph 175 of the penal code was made more severe in June 1935: any act between men bearing sexual suggestion was now punishable.
About 57,000 homosexual men were sentenced to prison, and between 6,000 and 10,000 of them were deported to concentration camps, of whom at least half were murdered.
Female homosexuality was not prosecuted in the dictatorship, but was socially ostracised. If lesbian women and persons who did not conform to their gender were denounced, they were threatened with police investigations, house searches, and interrogations. If political opposition, social deviance, or racial persecution additionally occurred, they faced repression or even internment in a concentration camp.
The graphic artist Richard Grune (1903-1983) was imprisoned almost continuously from 1934 to 1945 because of his homosexuality. After his liberation from the concentration camp, he processed what he had experienced through art.
“Solidarity,” a lithograph of one prisoner supporting another, by German artist Richard Grune, who spent eight years in Nazi concentration camps after being convicted for homosexuality.
Trained as an artist and graphic designer, 29-year-old Richard Grune moved to Berlin the same month that the police began forcing these establishments to shut down. Although prominent nightclubs like the Eldorado faced closure, members of these communities still found ways to continue gathering more privately. For example, Grune hosted two parties for friends in his studio in fall 1934. He was denounced afterward – along with dozens of others – by a private citizen who often passed information to police. Grune was then arrested for alleged violations of Paragraph 175, the statute of the German criminal code that criminalised sexual relations between men. He was imprisoned for several months before being convicted and sentenced to a year in prison.
After serving his sentence, Grune was arrested again by the Gestapo and held indefinitely in what was misleadingly referred to as “protective custody” (“Schutzhaft”) – an experience shared by many convicted of violating Paragraph 175 under the Nazi regime.5 Grune spent the next decade in concentration camps, including Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg. He escaped from Flossenbürg in April 1945 as American forces approached and camp authorities evacuated the prisoners.
Grune created the featured lithograph6 – “Solidarity: Prisoner Supports His Exhausted Comrade” – in 1945 as part of a series of images inspired by his experiences as a prisoner in the Nazi camp system. These lithographs were reproduced in two published portfolios in 1947.7 Grune’s artwork reflects many of his own experiences, but it does not reference his persecution as a gay man in any specific way. Instead, his lithographs seem to suggest the idea of shared suffering among all concentration camp prisoners. Because sexual relations between men remained criminalised for decades in Germany after the end of World War II, many people convicted under Paragraph 175 chose to conceal the details of their past persecution under the Nazi regime.8
After the war, Grune chose to portray himself as a political prisoner of Nazism, but he was not able to obtain official recognition or compensation for his suffering. Although his lithographs are among the most important artistic representations of concentration camp experiences created immediately after the war, Grune could not support himself as an artist. He did occasionally find design and illustration work, but he made his living by working as a bricklayer. Grune died in obscurity in Kiel, Germany in 1983.
“This is how the Führer cleaned up!” Front page of the extra issue of the Völkischer Beobachter, June 30, 1934, Berlin edition Public domain
Homosexuality in Nazi organisations and in the military
The proscription of homosexuality was used by various sides in the political struggle. In 1931 / 1932, the Social Democrats utilised Ernst Röhm’s homosexuality to harm the Nazi Party. The Röhm case served the notion of “gay Nazis” gathering together in male associations, a phenomenon that did exist. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the Nazi regime increasingly cracked down on homosexual activity in the army, police, and Nazi associations. Intimacy between men was now punished particularly severely in party organisations and the police. Nazi propaganda labeled homosexual men as “enemies of the state” to legitimise this persecution. Nevertheless, clandestine homosexual encounters continued to occur.
Adapting to survive
After the dismantling of gay and lesbian subcultures across the entire state and the harshening of criminal law, homosexual contact took place almost exclusively in private spaces. Fear of denunciation and persecution drove most homosexuals to hide their sexuality and conform.
This also applied to lesbian women and trans* persons, who were not prosecuted per se. They could remain unhampered as long as they did not attract attention. Marriages of convenience were one of many survival strategies. Certain prominent artists were tolerated by the Nazi regime despite their widely known homosexuality. The regime, which needed these stars for its propaganda, held off on persecution, and demanded that they conform in their way of living.
Persecution and imprisonment
The Nazi regime’s treatment of homosexuals and trans* persons was not uniform. Initially, most of the men convicted under Paragraph 175 were released after serving their prison sentences. Especially since 1940 many were transferred to concentration camps. Lesbian women and trans* persons were sometimes charged with other crimes, such as prostitution or indecent behaviour. Others were persecuted for political, social, or racist reasons.
The Nazi regime’s treatment of homosexuals and trans* persons was not uniform. Initially, most of the men convicted under Paragraph 175 were released after serving their prison sentences. Especially since 1940 many were transferred to concentration camps. Lesbian women and trans* persons were sometimes charged with other crimes, such as prostitution or indecent behaviour. Others were persecuted for political, social, or racist reasons.
Part of the diary entry by Elisabeth (Lilly) Wust on the deportation of her Jewish partner Felice Schragenheim to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, August 21, 1944
Elisabeth (Lilly) Wust (1913-2006) and Felice Schragenheim (1922-1945) met in Berlin in 1942, shortly after Schragenheim went into hiding as a Jew. They moved in together a little later and promised to marry in June 1944. On August 21, 1944, Felice Schragenheim was discovered and taken to a Berlin collection point for Jews. Lilly Wust visited her there several times before the deportation to the Theresienstadt ghetto. In the hope of being able to help her beloved, Lilly Wust travelled to Theresienstadt herself in the fall of 1944.
Felice was deported to Auschwitz a little later. She died in early 1945, probably in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Lilly Wust searched for her for years.
The love story of Lily Wust and Felice Schragenheim gained notoriety in the 1990s through the book “Aimée & Jaguar” and the feature film of the same name. However, there is another version of the story: Elenai Predski-Kramer, a former girlfriend of Felice Schragenheim, tells her perspective on the love story after the book was published and expresses the suspicion that Lilly Wust herself might have betrayed Felice Schragenheim. However, there is no evidence for this.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Only a few homosexual and trans* people succeeded in escaping Nazi persecution through emigration. This option was usually only open to the wealthy or those who had international contacts and could find work abroad thanks to their education and language skills. Leaving Nazi Germany was made more difficult by the measures against capital transfer, which were tightened in 1934. The “Reich Flight Tax” reduced assets by 25 percent upon departure, the export of foreign currency was prohibited, and the transfer of bank or securities assets was made almost impossible.
Individual homosexual or transgender people decided to actively resist the Nazi regime, also in the territories occupied by Germany. They documented the crimes of the Nazi regime, called for resistance, carried out sabotage, committed attacks, or fought as partisans or members of foreign troops against Hitler’s Germany.
Jewish-French author and photographer Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) and her partner Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972) put up resistance against the Nazi regime.
After four years of subversive activity, the pair were arrested by the Germans in 1944. Initially, the Nazi authorities couldn’t believe that the women carried it out by themselves. “They believed that there must be somebody else involved, there must be a man involved,” says Downie.
While waiting to be questioned, Cahun and Moore attempted suicide. They both took pills – barbiturates – which put them into a coma. Once they were well enough, they were sentenced to death for undermining the German forces. But the Bailiff of Jersey and the French Consul pleaded on their behalf – by that time, the Normandy landings had happened and Saint-Malo (the main connecting port) had been liberated, so they could no longer be deported to camps in Europe – and their sentence was commuted.
Although their lives had been saved, Moore and Cahun were not pleased. “They wanted to be martyrs for their cause,” says Downie. “To them, that would’ve been the realisation of their life of resistance, to be a martyr for freedom.”
At 3.40pm on May 9, 1945, the swastika was lowered from Fort Regent, a 19th-century fortification in St Helier, and the Union Jack was hoisted, signalling the official end of the occupation. Then the celebrations began. Cahun joined the crowds in Royal Square cheering, flag-waving, and holding a sailor aloft. Despite ill health from their time in prison, they kept on creating work after the war. In the same month, a photograph shows them gripping a Nazi eagle badge brazenly between their teeth, a silk scarf tied around their head, their hands dug into their coat pockets, their eyes staring defiantly at the camera.
Queer history was hardly remembered or archived after 1945. To this day, we know only some of the pioneers of the queer emancipation movement. We know even less about the life of those who were persecuted, driven into exile, murdered – or simply remained invisible.
After the end of the war, queer people continued to be marginalised. Gay men in particular continued to suffer in large numbers under Paragraph 175, many of whom did not go free but were transferred from concentration camps directly to prisons.
The ongoing discrimination by state and society changed only slowly. In 1969, Paragraph 175 was reformed and criminal law liberalised. Beginning in the 1970s, new social movements emerged, including a homosexual emancipation movement. Various groups reclaimed the “pink triangle” as a symbol to stand up for the rights of queer people.
Lesbian and feminist groups also gained popularity during the 1970s. Although lesbian sexuality was not directly persecuted by the state, many suffered from the misogynistic legal situation. The legal preferential treatment of men made it difficult to live out lesbian relationships, due to discrimination in labor and marriage laws.
The emergence of HIV in the 1980s affected many gay men and trans* people: thousands became infected, developed AIDS, and died. The state did not help, but instead relied on stigmatising measures and an aggressive rhetoric of exclusion, especially in Bavaria. For those affected, this recalled the previous period of open persecution.
Thanks to the efforts of activists, the health, political, and social situation of LGBTQI+ persons has improved since the 1990s. Today, queer people in Germany can celebrate some achievements and are also represented in politics. However, much remains to be done for LGBTQI+ equality. In many places around the world the situation is increasingly deteriorating. Trans* people in particular continue to face great discrimination.
Therefore, the commitment to queer self-determination is not over, but more relevant than ever. Because in the end, it not only ensures the preservation of LGBTIQ* human rights, but creates a more just society for all.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing in the bottom image at left on the wall, Paul Hoecker’s painting Head of a youth / Portrait of a boy (1901); and at right on the wall, Paul Hoecker’s painting Pierrot (Nd) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Paul Hoecker (German, 1854-1910) Young Man’s Head Cover of Jugend magazine, volume 44, 1901 Public domain
A chapter of TO BE SEEN #QueerLives is dedicated to the artist Paul Hoecker (1854-1910). It was created in collaboration with @forummuenchenev, which researches Hoecker’s story to honor and commemorate his life and work.
Paul Hoecker shaped the Munich art scene in the late 19th century. After his homosexuality became known, the artist was excluded and fell into oblivion. As a professor at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, Hoecker had a great deal of influence during his lifetime: almost all the painters in the artist group “Die Scholle” and many illustrators for the magazines “Simplicissimus” and “Die Jugend” were among his students. The co-founder of the Munich Secession also received great recognition for his artistic work.
Hoecker privately exchanged views with the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld about the fact that he has “contrasexual tendencies”, i.e. is gay. When a sex worker was recognised in the model of his acclaimed work “Ave Maria”, he was involuntarily outed. Paul Hoecker forestalled a scandal by resigning from his professorship. In this way he was able to avoid having to take a public position on his sexuality. He withdrew first to Italy and later to his home in Silesia, Oberlangenau.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Paul Hoecker (11 August 1854, Oberlangenau – 13 January 1910, Munich) was a German painter of the Munich School and founding member of the Munich Secession…
The Munich Academy
In 1891, at the young age of 36, he was appointed to the Munich Academy, where he replaced Friedrich August von Kaulbach, who had resigned suddenly. He was the first teacher at the academy to take his students on field trips, which often lasted two weeks. He was also one of the first “modern” teachers there, exposing his students to impressionism and the latest developments from the Barbizon School. His studio was often referred to as the “Geniekasten” (Genius Box).
Due to the pervasive influence of Franz von Lenbach, very little exhibition space was available for any art that was considered modern. In 1892, shortly after being appointed a professor, this problem motivated Hoecker to become one of the founding members of the Munich Secession, acting as its secretary. The Secession ultimately inspired similar movements in Berlin and other cities.
Scandal
In 1897, a scandal broke out when it was rumoured that Hoecker had used a male prostitute as a model for a painting of the Madonna. Eventually, the scandal became more personal in nature, and he chose to resign from the academy. He then travelled to Capri, where he stayed at the Villa Lysis, home of industrialist and poet Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, who had left Paris in the wake of his own scandal. While there, Hoecker painted several portraits of Fersen’s lover, Nino Cesarini, a professional model. Though the Jugend magazine published one of his Nino portraits in 1904 – a fully clothed version. By 1901 he returned to Oberlangenau. In 1910, he died of what was diagnosed as “Roman Malaria”.
Posthumous recognition
Despite his important role for the Munich art scene of the late 19th century, Paul Hoecker is hardly known today. This is probably due to the fact that he left the professorship in connection with his homosexuality. In October 2019 a research group was formed at the Forum Queeres Archiv München to investigate the life and work of the painter. Part of the family owned estate of Paul Hoecker has found its way into the archive of the Forum Queeres Archiv München and was digitalised.
Elisàr August Emanuel von Kupffer (20 February 1872 – 31 October 1942) was a Baltic German artist, anthologist, poet, historian, translator, and playwright. He used the pseudonym “Elisarion” for most of his writings…
Career
In 1895 he published Leben und Liebe (Life and Love), a book of poetry. In autumn of that year he moved to Berlin to study at the Berlin Art Academy and moved in with Von Mayer. The following year, he left Agnes and wrote the dramas Der Herr der Welt (Master of the World), and Irrlichter (Wisps) as well as three one-act plays. In 1897 he published the anthology Ehrlos (Infamous, or Dishonorable).
Von Mayer graduated in 1897 and they travelled throughout Italy, Sicily, Southern France and Geneva before returning to Berlin. They spent the summer in Thuringia and Heiligendamm and went back to Italy in 1899. Early next year, Adolf Brand published Von Kupffer’s influential anthology of homoerotic literature, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur (roughly, “Love of Favourites and Love Between Friends in World Literature”. Lieblingminne is a neologism created by Von Kupffer). The anthology was researched and created, in part, as a protest against the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in England. It was reprinted in 1995.
In 1908 he published a book on Il Sodoma, the Renaissance artist. In 1911, he and Von Mayer founded the publishing house Klaristische Verlag Akropolis in Munich and Von Kupffer published three major works: a play, Aino und Tio, Hymnen der heiligen Burg (Hymns of the Holy Castle) and Ein neuer Flug und eine heilige Burg (A New Flight and a Holy Castle). His work was also published and reviewed in the gay magazine Akademos, published by Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen. That same year, he and Von Meyer announced the creation of a “new religion”, Klarismus (Clarity), and established a community in Weimar. The following year he published a book on Klarismus called Der unbekannte Gott (The Unknown God). In 1913, the Brogi Gallery in Florence hosted his first art exhibition. Later that year, a Klarist community was established in Zürich.
Later life and death
In 1915, with World War I in progress and growing animosity towards Germans, they left Italy and moved to Ticino, where Von Kupffer established himself as a painter and muralist in Locarno, Switzerland. They were granted Swiss citizenship in 1922. From 1925 to 1929 they transformed their villa in Minusio, near Lake Maggiore, into an opulent collection of art, the “Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion”. He was also a photographer, making photographic studies of boys for use in the creation of his paintings, but most of his works featured a youthful version of himself. The Klarist “Elisarion Community” was founded at Minusio in 1926. During the 1930s, the number of visitors increased, then sharply decreased; stopping altogether just before the onset of World War II.
As his health declined, he became reclusive and died on 31 October 1942. Since 1981 the “Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion” has been a Museum dedicated to Von Kupffer’s work. The villa was willed to the municipality of Minusio, and his ashes are interred inside, together with Von Meyer’s. The Elisarion Community was satirically referenced as the “Polysadrion” (roughly; Place of Many Idiots), in the 1931 novel Schloss Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky.
Germaine Luise Krull (20 November 1897 – 31 July 1985) was a photographer, political activist, and hotel owner. Her nationality has been categorised as German, French, and Dutch, but she spent years in Brazil, Republic of the Congo, Thailand, and India. Described as “an especially outspoken example” of a group of early 20th-century female photographers who “could lead lives free from convention”, she is best known for photographically illustrated books such as her 1928 portfolio Métal.
Max Peiffer Watenphul (German, 1896-1976) Stillleben mit Mimosen (Still Life with Mimosas) 1932
Max Peiffer Watenphul (1896 – 13 July 1976) was a German artist. Described as a “lyric poet of painting”, he belongs to a “tradition of German painters for whom the Italian landscape represented Arcadia.” In addition to Mediterranean scenes, he regularly depicted Salzburg and painted many still lifes of flowers. As well as oil paintings, his extensive body of work encompasses watercolours, drawings, enamel, textiles, graphic art, and photographs.
Gerda Wegener (Danish, 1885-1940) Lili with a Feather Fan 1920
Gerda Wegener (Danish, 1885-1940) Lili Elbe c. 1928
Gerda Wegener (Danish, 1885-1940) At the mirror 1931-1936
On December 31, 1932 … this advertisement for Hella Knabe’s tailoring studio appeared in “Die Freund”. In the 1920s, a separate infrastructure was also created for “transvestites” – people who preferred the clothing of the opposite sex, including trans* people. Hella Knabe’s made-to-measure studio became a nationwide attraction. The hairdresser and seamstress, whose husband was a “transvestite” himself, advertised not only in scene magazines, but also in national magazines such as Jugend and Simplicissimus.
Hella Knabe made women’s underwear, artificial busts, corsets and chastity belts for her customers and ran a mail order business. In addition, she received boarders, clothed them, applied make-up and enabled them to live in the opposite sex for a short time. She continued to offer her services after 1933 and kept in touch with her clients through her own magazine with subcultural content. In 1938 she was therefore fined for distributing “lewd literature”.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976) Damenbar (Lesbian Bar) c. 1930-1932 Lithograph
Jeanne Mammen (German, 1890-1976) Siesta c. 1930-1932
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.
Jeanne Mammen was born in Berlin, the daughter of a successful German merchant. She and her family moved to Paris when she was five years old. She studied art in Paris, Brussels and Rome from 1906-1911. Her early work, influenced by Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and the Decadent movement, was exhibited in Brussels and Paris in 1912 and 1913.
In 1916 Mammen and her family fled Paris to avoid internment during World War I. While her parents moved to Amsterdam, Mammen chose instead to return to Berlin. She was now financially on her own for the first time, as the French government had confiscated all of her family’s property. For several years Mammen struggled to make ends meet, taking any work she could find, and spending time with people from different class backgrounds. These experiences and newfound sympathies are reflected in her artwork from the period.
In time Mammen was able to find work as a commercial artist, producing fashion plates, movie posters, and caricatures for satirical journals such as Simplicissimus, Ulk, and Jugend. In the mid-1920s she became known for her illustrations evoking the urban atmosphere of Berlin. Much of her artwork depicted women. These women subjects often included haughty socialites, fashionable middle-class shop girls, street singers, and prostitutes. Her drawings were often compared to those of George Grosz and Otto Dix. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s she worked mainly in pencil with watercolour washes, and in pen and ink.
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 Mammen’s 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 to 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.
In the 1940s, in a show of solidarity, Mammen began experimenting with Cubism and expressionism, a risky move given the Nazis’ condemnation of abstract art as “degenerate”. After the war she took to collecting wires, string, and other materials from the streets of bombed-out Berlin to create reliefs. In the late 1940s she began exhibiting her work again, as well as designing sets for the Die Badewanne cabaret. She created abstract collages from various materials, including candy wrappers. In the 1950s she adopted a new style, combining thick layers of oil paint with a few fine marks on the surface.
In the 1970s there was a resurgence of interest in Mammen’s early work as German art historians, as well as art historians of the women’s movement, rediscovered her paintings and illustrations from the Weimar period. In 2013 her later, more abstract work was featured in “Painting Forever!”, a large-scale exhibition held during Berlin Art Week. In 2017-2018, the Berlinische Galerie mounted a major exhibition of Mammen’s work, titled, “Jeanne Mammen: Die Beobachterin: Retrospektive 1910-1975” (Jeanne Mammen: The Observer: Retrospective 1910-1975), which included more than 170 works in various media, covering the period from the 1920s to her late work in the 1960s and beyond. The show was conceived as an update to a show mounted by the Galerie at the Martin Gropius Bau in 1997, which featured primarily works from the 1920s. In 2010 the Des Moines Art Center exhibited 13 water colour paintings done by Mammen which were inspired by Berlin in the Weimer era.
Renée Sintenis, née Renate Alice Sintenis (20 March 1888 – 22 April 1965), also known as Frau Emil R. Weiss, was a German sculptor, medallist, and graphic artist who worked in Berlin. She created mainly small-sized animal sculptures, female nudes, portraits, and sports statuettes. She is especially known for her Berlin Bear sculptures, which was used as the design for the Berlinale’s top film award, the Golden Bear…
Career
When Renée Sintenis (as she called herself from then on) met the sculptor Georg Kolbe in 1910, she became his model. She modelled for a now lost life-sized statue.
Inspired by this activity, she began creating in sculpture female nudes, expressive heads like those of André Gide and Joachim Ringelnatz, athletes like the Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, and self-portraits in drawings, sculptures (in terracotta) and etchings.
After 1915, the concise animal figures emerged, which became the subject of her artistic life. Since she rejected monumentality in sculpture, she mainly created small-format sculptures. These small works of art such as horses, deers, donkeys and dogs, enjoyed great popularity with the public because they were cheaper, suitable as gifts and could be placed in small rooms.
From attending Kolbe’s studio, a long-term friendship developed, which he accompanied artistically. In the 1913 Berlin autumn exhibition, the first major exhibition of the Free Secession, Sintenis took part (as in the following years) with small-format plaster sculptures.
From 1913 on, she had her works cast in the Hermann Noack fine art foundry, which she attended artistically for decades.
In 1917 she married the type artist, book designer, painter and illustrator Emil Rudolf Weiß, whom she had met years earlier as her teacher and was also and then as a fatherly friend. He supported her and introduced her to numerous other artists. Their collaboration was limited to a few joint projects, of which the edition of the 22 Songs of the poems by Sappho, for which she created the etchings and Weiß made the font designs, achieved particular fame.
From 1913 she exhibited her sculptures regularly and was highly valued by her colleagues from the Free Secession, the most important Berlin artists’ association, among others, by Max Liebermann, Max Beckmann, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The opening of a gallery in Berlin in 1922 made her the most important protagonist of the well-known Flechtheim art circle in those years. The art-interested public was infatuated with her athletic figures, portraits of friends and the small-format self-portraits.
In addition, due to her body size, slim figure, charisma, her self-confident, fashionable demeanor and androgynous beauty, she was often portrayed by artists like her husband, Emil Rudolf Weiß and Georg Kolbe, and by photographers, like Hugo Erfurth, Fritz Eschen and Frieda Riess. She embodied perfectly the type of the ‘new woman’ of the 1920s, even if she appeared rather reserved.
During the Weimar Republic, Renée Sintenis became an internationally recognised artist, with exhibitions in the Berlin Nationalgalerie, in Berlin, in Paris, the Tate Gallery, in London, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, Glasgow and Rotterdam. Her small-sized depictions of athletes (boxers, footballers, runners) and portrait busts of their circle of friends were found in public and private collections around the world.
In 1928 Sintenis won the bronze medal in the sculpture section of the art competition for the Summer Olympics in Amsterdam, for her “Footballeur”. She is thought to be the first LGBTQ+ Olympic medallist. Renée Sintenis took part in the 1929 exhibition of the German Association of Artists in the Cologne State House, with five small-format animal sculptures. In 1930 she met the French sculptor Aristide Maillol in Berlin. In 1931 she was appointed as the first sculptor, and second woman after Käthe Kollwitz, together with 13 other artists, to join the Berlin Academy of the Arts – Fine Arts section, although the National Socialists forced her to leave in 1934.
In 1932, she created a statue of the Berlin Bear, a bear standing on its hind legs with its arms raised, based on the Coat of arms of Berlin. The design was popular, and she sold many 15 cm (5.9 in) statues of the bear, which brought wealth and was taken up again in later life.
Third Reich
Emil Rudolf Weiß was dismissed from his university post on 1 April 1933, because of an angry statement against the Nazi regime and the law to reintroduce the civil service. Sintenis herself was excluded from the Academy of the Arts in 1934 because of her Jewish origins – her maternal grandmother was Jewish before her conversion. Nevertheless, she was able to stay in the Reich Chamber of Culture, even if her works were removed from public collections by the National Socialists.
During the Third Reich, Renée Sintenis and her husband Emil Rudolf Weiß lived with considerable restrictions. She continued to exhibit, although one of her self-portraits was shown in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1934. Since she was not banned from exhibiting, she was represented in Düsseldorf by the art dealer Alex Vömel, Flechtheim’s successor. In contrast to the 1920s, she was not doing well financially, which was reinforced by the bronze casting ban of 1941.
Until the forced dissolution of the Deutscher Künstlerbund in 1936, Sintenis remained a member of the German Association of Artists. That she was sponsored by the NSDAP propagandist Hans Hinkel, as it was later claimed, has not been proven and is highly unlikely.
Her husband died unexpectedly on 7 November 1942 in Meersburg on the Lake Constance. His death plunged Sintenis into a deep crisis. As a result, she took over his studio in the Künstlerhaus on Kurfürstenstrasse, where Max Pechstein also worked. His family took temporarily on her when her studio house was destroyed by arson and several Allied bombings in 1945. Sintenis lost almost all of her possessions; all papers and parts of her work were lost. While most of the cast models were preserved, the plaster frames of most of the portrait heads were also destroyed. In a self-portrait mask from 1944, the hardships of the war years are visible in her features.
Post-war career
After the war, Sintenis and her partner Magdalena Goldmann moved into an apartment on Innsbrucker Strasse in 1945, where they both lived until their deaths. In 1948, Sintenis received the art prize of the city of Berlin and was appointed by Karl Hofer to the Berlin University of Fine Arts. She was appointed full professor in 1955, although she gave up teaching the same year. She was also appointed to the newly founded Academy of the Arts of Berlin (West) in 1955.
In the 1950s, she became very successful once again. She stayed true to her artistic focus and motifs, which she called “making animals”.
Lena Rosa Händle (German, b. 1976) Girl Under Trees 2016 Courtesy the artist Photo: @frau_orla
In “These hands – a world without equal” (2022, below), the artist Lena Rosa Händle explores the continuation of hidden lesbian codes from the 1920s to the present day. Händle refers to the dancer Tilly Losch, the painter Mariette Lydis and the artist Claude Cahun and focuses on the motif of the hands as a gesture and code of lesbian people. In her photographs, @lenarosahaendle, together with DJane and curator @tonicahunter, reinterprets traditional gestures and is reminiscent of the first female photo studios of the 1920s.
For her work “Girls under Trees” (2016, above), Händle draws on the motif of a tapestry that schoolgirls painstakingly embroidered in 1941 in needlework classes, which were compulsory for girls at the time. Händle adds two personal ads from the newsreel published in Vienna in 1942 to the motif: “Miss is looking for correspondence with a girlfriend under modern” and “Lady wants a girlfriend for the purpose of cinema and theatre”. Advertisements like these are testimonies to the few coded signs of lesbian subculture during the Nazi era. Terms such as “Miss”, “Girlfriend” and “Lady” served as lesbian identification codes, as did the colours lilac and violet. In doing so, the artist sensitively refers to issues such as political power structures, socially enforced expectations and the resulting subtlety of lesbian aesthetics.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Lena Rosa Händle (German, b. 1976) These hands – a world without equal 2022 Courtesy the artist
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing Wolfgang Tillmans’s photograph The Cock (Kiss) (2002, below) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) The Cock (Kiss) 2002 Courtesy Galerie Buchholz
In their audiovisual piece Schreber is a Woman, the Barcelona-based artists’ collective El Palomar delves into the mind of Daniel Paul Schreber, a German lawyer (1842-1911) who became famous for his reports from a psychiatric clinic that later inspired Freud. In his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness from 1903 Schreber recounts feeling like a woman, among other experiences. The book influenced Sigmund Freud to elaborate his theories on paranoia and schizophrenia. Relevant to Schreber’s story is the fact that his father, Dr. Moritz Schreber, authored several books that proposed strict authoritarian models for the physical and moral education of children, which were very popular in Germany and other parts of Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century.
El Palomar uncover and reinterpret the writings of Schreber from a transfeminist perspective to deconstruct the Freudian link between Schreber and schizoprenic paranoia trough a queer viewpoint. Focusing on the images and sounds that Schreber describes in his memoirs, the film offers a rereading of the case as rooted in a period when gender identities were restricted to classical binary archetypes. Schreber is a Woman subverts the original circumstances of queer lineage, recontextualizing gender and pleasure in the present.
Installation view of the exhibition TO BE SEEN: Queer Lives 1900-1950 at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism showing work from Philipp Gufler’s series Quilts, in the bottom image Quilt #43 (Sophia Goudstikker) (2021) Photo: Connolly Weber Photography/NS-Dokumentationszentrum München
Philipp Gufler (German, b. 1989) Quilt #50 (Lil Picard) 2022 Screenprint on fabric Courtesy the artist and Galerie Françoise Heitsch Photo: @frau_orla
In his quilts Philipp Gufler references queer artists, scholars, and places of queer life that have found little or no place in written memories and the historical canon. The series thus becomes an alternative archive that generates a form of intergenerational memory through the technique of “quilting.” In this technique the textiles left behind by deceased people are reassembled and contextualised. The fine materiality of the fabrics stands in direct contrast to the often massive, solid stone monuments of Western historiography. By reusing a variety of historical relics, he creates diverse personal and ancestral forms of memory of different origins. The choice of materials in the works is just as important as the choice of motifs and the associated stories that are told.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Zoltán Lesi (Hungarian, b. 1982) and Ricardo Portilho (Brazilian) In Frauenkleidung (In Women’s Clothing) 2019 Courtesy the artists and Edition Mosaik Salzburg Foto: @frau_orla
The poetry collection “In Frauenkleidung” (In Women’s Clothing, above) is a joint work by the lyricist Zoltán Lesi and the designer Ricardo Portilho and is dedicated to the lives of intergender athletes in the early 1930s. In their book, both artists combine documentary language with historical photographs and newspaper clippings drawn from Lesi’s image archive, which has been in the making since 2017. The resulting surrealistic collage uses historical distance to question facts, construction, and truth in a humorous yet sensitive way.
Parallel to the publication, they have created the audio installation “Ein Sprung und der Hummer” (A Jump and the Lobster, below) which, in the form of a Dadaist assemblage inspired by Joseph Cornell, blurs the line between fiction and the documentation of the biographies of the athletes, contributing another layer to the narrative level of the book of poems.
Text from the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Instagram page
Zoltán Lesi (Hungarian, b. 1982) and Ricardo Portilho (Brazilian) Ein Sprung und der Hummer (A Jump and the Lobster) (installation view) 2018/2022 Courtesy the artists Foto: @frau_orla
Zoltán Lesi (Hungarian, b. 1982) and Ricardo Portilho (Brazilian) Ein Sprung und der Hummer (A Jump and The Lobster) (installation view) 2018/2022 Courtesy the artists Foto: @frau_orla
Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Max-Mannheimer-Platz 1 80333 Munich Phone: +49 (0)89 233-67000
Curated by Sarah Meister, former Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Quentin Bajac, Director, Jeu de Paume, with Jane Pierce, Carl Jacobs Foundation Research Assistant, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Organised by the Museum of Modern Art, New York
A huge posting today that took hours to compile and all I can think of to say is – wow, I want them all in my collection!
If I had to specify one era of photography that is my favourite it would be the experimental, avant-garde photographs from the interwar period. There was such freedom, revolution and danger in the air which encouraged artists to produce radical art that defined a generation (and which ideological others found offensive and degenerate).
The tremendous diversity of “modern” photography is on show in the different sections of the exhibition – from portraiture to perspective, from science to magic realism, from interiority and surrealist dreams to new objective visions of self and the landscape – the works investigating how photographs transcend their conventional function of documentation through their social, psychological, and metaphysical implications.
I have added relevant biographical details and salient book covers and pages from the exhibition catalogue to enhance the viewing experience. My particular favourites in the posting are Willi Ruge’s vertiginous Seconds before Landing (1931, below); Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s unforgettable portrait of Anna Oderfeld, Zakopane (1911-1912, below); Lyonel Feininger’s almost-there, atmos/sphere Bauhaus (February 26, 1929 below); and Gertrud Arndt’s masterpiece, At the Masters’ Houses (1929-1930, below).
I hope you enjoy your Sunday looking at these stunning images.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Maurice Tabard (French, 1897–1984) Untitled (Self-Portrait with Roger Parry) c. 1936 Gelatin silver print 9 1/4 × 6 5/8″ (23.5 × 16.8cm) Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Roger M. Parry (French, 1905-1977)
Born and educated in Paris, Roger Parry was originally interested in painting and worked as a draftsman after graduation. In 1928 he met Maurice Tabard, who taught him photography and for whom Parry worked as a darkroom assistant. Parry published his photographs in Art et Métiers Graphiques, a photographic annual, and Banalités, a book of poems. These publications gained the attention of André Malraux, with whom Parry became associated around 1930.
Parry worked for Malraux and the Gallimard publishers for more than forty years. In 1934 Gallimard published Parry’s photographs of Tahiti. During World War II Parry was a photography war correspondent for the news agency L’Express. He eventually became head of photography and art director for the Gallimard publication Nouvelle Revue Française.
Text from the J. Paul Getty website [Online] Cited 25/01/2022
Francis Lederer (November 6, 1899 Prague – May 25, 2000) was a Czech-born American film and stage actor with a successful career, first in Europe, then in the United States. His original name was Franz (Czech František) Lederer.
In 2001 and 2017, The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired more than 350 photographs from the collector Thomas Walther. This collection, which is now one of the pillars of MoMA’s modern collection, is presented for the first time in France in an exhibition of some 230 images.
Comprising iconic works from the first half of the twentieth century, the exhibition provides a history of the European and American photographic avant-gardes. Through the works of a hundred or so photographers, from Berenice Abbott to Karl Blossfeldt, from Claude Cahun to El Lissitzky, from Edward Weston to André Kertész, this fusion of masterpieces and lesser-known images traces the history of modernity in photography. Mixing genres and approaches – architecture and urban landscapes, portraits and nudes, reportage, photomontage, experimentation, etc. – the exhibition delves deep into the artistic networks of the inter-war period, from the Bauhaus to Surrealist Paris, via Moscow and New York.
In their visually radical inventiveness, these images capture perfectly the utopian spirit of those who wanted to change images in order to change the world; now we fully understand the words of the photographer and theoretician Lázló Moholy-Nagy who, a century ago, stated that “the illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the camera and the pen alike.”
The Exhibition
Life as an artist
While it is true that throughout the 20th century photographers took great pleasure in portraiture, the Thomas Walther Collection also illustrates the spirit of freedom that characterised the lives of these artists and the circles they moved in.
Marcel Duchamp once described the Paris of the 1920s as home to the first truly international community of artists. The body of photographs by André Kertész assembled by Thomas Walther offers a fine summary of the photographer’s affinities, empathies and networking during his Parisian years, while also reflecting his interest in abstract and post-Cubist art and the play of light on highly geometric volumes.
The period between the two World Wars saw the affirmation of a collective artistic adventure most strikingly evidenced by the Bauhaus – one of the main axes of the Thomas Walther collection. From Florence Henri to Lotte Beese and Umbo, many of the artists represented in the collection spent time there; and all of them practiced photography without necessarily being photographers. Thus the works relating to the Bauhaus here are essentially snapshots of documentary interest. Lázsló Moholy-Nagy and Lucia Moholy were both very active photographers, but while Lázsló’s work attracted considerable critical attention, this is less true of his wife, who, although not an official member of the school, took numerous photographs of architecture and portraits.
Similarly, Lyonel Feininger, a trained painter and head of the engraving workshop, and Gertrud Arndt and Lotte Beese, students in the weaving workshop, acquired skills through an intense photographic activity that went far beyond the official teaching.
Experiments with night photography, high- and low-angle shots, multiple exposures, distorting reflections: a large part of the vocabulary of the avant-gardes can be found at the Bauhaus.
The third body of work in this section documents these artistic networks and communities in a different way. The self-portrait plays a predominant role here, revealing the shaping of a new identity for the photographer via an emphasis on the camera that underscored photography’s mechanical character – an aspect often skirted by the art photographers of the previous generation.
Now, whether on a tripod or in the hand, the camera was omnipresent, to the point where it merged completely with the user as an artificial extension of the eye.
El Lissitzky redefined photography as a mental activity and the photographer as a “constructor”, a producer of images who must unify the work of eye and hand, in a context of photography become inseparable from graphics.
Here comes the new photographer!
Photography was the ideal medium for catching the feel of modern life in the aftermath of the First World War: looking both up and down – from planes, bridges and skyscrapers – photographers discovered unparalleled views and a new, dynamic visual language, free of convention.
A new thirst for photographic images took hold of the illustrated press between the wars, a period that saw the advent of reports and magazines built entirely around the photographic image. Another feature of this period was its passion for sport and speed. Advances in the sensitivity of photographic film and paper and the development of more manageable cameras allowed artists to capture movement as never before.
Totally unexpected points of view were thus created. One of the most famous is doubtless the aerial view, where the aviator embodies this new sporting modernity, as does the racing driver.
A sense of weightlessness and lightness is found in the images of Kate Steinitz and John Gutmann, both influenced by Dada and European Surrealism. Alexander Rodchenko’s images of divers emphasise the space that the body travels through as well as the athlete himself.
Their out-of-kilter framing, pushing the bodies into the corners of the image, attempts to summarise a rapid, complex movement in a single still image. While using an overtly avant-garde photographic grammar – high-angle, low angle – the themes of these photographs seem to be fully in line with the political context of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Lissitzky too was fascinated by the figure of the athlete: his photomontage Rekord (Record), a model of a project for the photographic decoration of a sports club in Moscow, offers a modernist yet dreamlike vision in which the entire illuminated metropolis mutates into a sports arena.
Finally, this exaltation of a new humanity underlies in a much more literal way Leni Riefenstahl’s images of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Armed with impressive technical and financial resources, photographer / filmmaker Riefenstahl directed Olympia, commissioned by the Hitler regime to hymn the new Aryan type. In images markedly avant-garde in style, one finds many features of the aesthetics of the Third Reich, from the references to antiquity to the celebration of the athlete-hero and the geometrisation and perfect synchronisation of figures in movement.
Discovering photography
In 1925, László Moholy-Nagy asserted that although photography had been invented a hundred years earlier, its true aesthetic potential had only just been discovered when he and other members of avant-garde circles adopted the medium. With their brief history and no connection to traditional fine arts disciplines, photography and film became true modernist instruments.
Moving away from the efforts of the art photographers of the previous generation, out to obscure the mechanical nature of the photographic print through various subterfuges – timeless subjects, use of blur, etc. – the photographic avant-gardes of the early 20th century drew on images from non-art spheres: X-rays, astronomy, medicine and science provided them with representations of the invisible; photojournalism revealed forms in motion, improbably frozen by the snapshot; amateur photography offered a repertoire of strange viewpoints and aberrations of perspective. See differently, that was the maxim.
They experimented every which way, playfully and undeterred by reversion to archaic forms and processes. The photogram is probably the best illustration of this new language. This camera-less technique, which simply prints images of objects directly onto sensitised paper that has been exposed to light, is the origin of photography. It was practiced by all of photography’s pioneers before falling into disuse except as a mere laboratory exercise. It was only after the First World War that it was rediscovered by a few enthusiasts and became a major avant-garde gambit.
Appreciated for its simplicity, playfulness, and undeniable visual impact, it also became a much appreciated tool in the field of applied photography. Moreover, in addition to the photogram as such, advertising, Industry, and publishing were becoming broadly receptive to the new avant-garde photographic language, just as photography was gradually beginning to oust graphic techniques in their respective fields.
At the same time the laboratory began to function as a venue for exploration of both the negative and the print. The stretching of exposure times, with the resultant blurring of movement, allows the representation of time to be modified by embedding duration and movement in the still image. In some cases – think Albert Renger-Patzsch and Jean Painlevé – the precision of a simple close-up framing a particular being or thing as closely as possible, sufficed to imbue the subject with fresh presence and reality.
Last but not least, the avant-gardes revelled in the construction of composite images, notably through collage and photomontage, using all the resources made available to them by the illustrated press and publishing of the time. To these image games we should add the multiple exposure, long considered as no more than a photographer’s failure. In this sense, this generation was the first to practice borrowing and reusing images and forms on such a scale, attesting to the – already – rapid circulation of images within the European avant-garde.
Magic Realisms
In the mid-1920s, members of European art movements ranging from Surrealism to New Objectivity moved away from a realist approach, seeking instead to highlight the strangeness of everyday life or to bring together dreams and unusual states of consciousness. Echoes of these preoccupations, centred on the human figure, can be found throughout the Thomas Walther collection.
The images in this section hijack two traditional photographic genres, the portrait and the nude, with the aid of various processes: close-ups, inversion of negative-positive values through solarisation, photograms, overprints. Many of the techniques employed by photographers close to Surrealism aimed to transform reality by pushing technique to the point of destroying the human form. The diffuse influence of Surrealism is of course particularly evident among Parisian photographers, as can be seen in the numerous, often virtuoso laboratory games of commercial, advertising or fashion photographers like Maurice Tabard or Aurel Bauh, and even André Kertész in the early 1930s. The “distortions” Kertész produced, using the countless optical possibilities offered by deforming mirrors, are part of a photographic tradition that goes back to the 19th century, but also remind us of the representation and deformation of the human body undertaken by Picasso and Dalí in the same years.
The press of the 1920s was fond of optical visual games, transforming the human body in line with a certain objectification: loss of scale and reference points, oddness induced by a detail or the texture of skin. Of all the parts of the body, it was undoubtedly the eye, the organ of sight, that attracted the attention of distinction between the real and the fantastic – and created interplay between the animate and the inanimate by approaching the human body through substitutes such as dolls, mannequins, or masks.
Symphony of a Great City
Like the cinema, photography in the first half of the 20th century achieved a fragmentation and recomposition of an increasingly insistent urban reality. In an era of rapidly advancing urbanisation, the big city was the stamping ground par excellence for photographers and filmmakers.
The period saw the emergence of a large number of films that treated the city as a living organism: Paul Strand’s Manhattan, Charles Sheeler on New York and Berlin, Walther Ruttmann’s Symphony of a Great City. Often consisting of short, rapidly edited shots, these films have obvious links with the photography of the time: the German photographer Umbo was involved in the making of Ruttmann’s film. The four images on display here play on some of the optical games dear to the avant-garde: the derealisation effected by the bird’s-eye view and cast shadows, the simultaneous transparency and reflection of store windows, and the repetitive geometry of certain urban spaces.
The advent of an architecture of mobility was exactly contemporary with that of the first Kodak-type cameras, which allowed the operator a hitherto unknown freedom and mobility. Photographers would take full advantage of all the new possibilities open to them by favouring symbols and places emblematic of the contemporary: factory chimneys and industry at work; the iron architecture of buildings like the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Brooklyn Bridge in New York; subjects and objects in movement, such as cyclists caught in urban traffic; newly pullulating public spaces; and, of course, the omnipresent street. The city was indeed this dynamic organism, the locus of human encounters, of incongruous objects and visual signs, captured at random in its streets. Constantly on the lookout, the pedestrian-photographer of the inter-war period appears as a modern version of the Baudelairean flâneur of the preceding century. With its unprecedented vertical extension, the modern city offers a multitude of new points of view, high-angle or low-angle, magnifying the impression of vertigo or crushing weight.
The city allowed for all kinds of new visual and optical experiments. Iron architecture, by erasing the boundaries between interior and exterior, offered countless possibilities for framing, as in the work of Germaine Krull, a photographer particularly attentive to these exercises in “framing within the frame”. Night shots, which gave pride of place to lighting effects, renewed the experience of nocturnal vision to a point of near-abstraction, simple luminous inscriptions of objects in movement.
But the fragmenting dear to Walter Benjamin is probably nowhere more perceptible than in photomontage, with its fantasised, idealised or monstrous version of the urban and industrial universe. The visual chaos of Paul Citroën’s Metropolis, composed of some two hundred images pasted together, is a perfect example. Citroën evokes a city not in ruins but in pieces, a cacophonous space, all the elements piled up in an incoherent spirit close to Dada.
High fidelity
At a time when, in Europe, experimentation was being put forward as a core concept by the photographic avant-gardes, the Americans seem to have put more emphasis on a search for a truth of the world through exact representation. “High fidelity”, a term borrowed from the world of acoustics, was used to designate this approach and its taste for a clear and faithful image.
Pure photography is a discipline in search of perfection and technical mastery at all stages of the production of the image. It is in this near-contradictory tension between the “highly detailed” and the “abstract”, between the use of a large format camera combining an almost hyper-realistic rendering with simplified shooting strategies, that lies one of the main characteristics of a certain American modernist approach. It seems logical, then, that this aesthetic of attention to object, texture and form, quickly pervaded various spheres of American commercial photography of the time.
At Film und Foto, the flagship exhibition of the international photographic avant-garde, some people remarked on the extent to which the American section, with its “refined technique that can rightly be described as cultivated”, contrasted with the more raw work of the Europeans.
However, while straight photography remained a very American movement, it also had ramifications in Europe. In Germany, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, voices began to be raised in photographic circles against the expressive experiments of the previous decade, urging respect for reality and greater objectivity. Karl Blossfeldt’s direct and unmanipulated approach to plants, produced for documentary purposes as part of his teaching at the Berlin School of Applied Arts, was praised. At the same time, it was the sweeping aerial views of Germany taken by balloonist Robert Petschow that aroused the enthusiasm of avant-garde circles, which exhibited them and celebrated both their quasi-abstract singularity and their informative content, blended in the manner of a topographical survey.
The essence of New Vision photography is pointedly expressed in this picture, commonly known as The Constructor, which puts the act of seeing at center stage. Lissitzky’s hand, holding a compass, is superimposed on a shot of his head that explicitly highlights his eye: insight, it expresses, is passed through the eye and transmitted to the hand, and through it to the tools of production. Devised from six different exposures, the picture merges Lissitzky’s personae as photographer (eye) and constructor of images (hand) into a single likeness. Contesting the idea that straight photography provides a single, unmediated truth, Lissitzky held instead that montage, with its layering of one meaning over another, impels the viewer to reconsider the world. It thus marks a conceptual shift in the understanding of what a picture can be.
Gallery label from The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, April 16, 2012 – April 29, 2013
Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) Demonstration 1932 Gelatin silver print 11 5/8 × 9″ (29.6 × 22.8cm) Thomas Walther Collection Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Germaine Krull was a pioneer in the fields of avant-garde photomontage, the photographic book, and photojournalism, and she embraced both commercial and artistic loyalties. Born in Wilda-Poznań, East Prussia, in 1897, Krull lived an extraordinary life lasting nine decades on four continents – she was the prototype of the edgy, sexually liberated Neue Frau (New Woman), considered an icon of modernity and a close cousin of the French garçonne and the American flapper. She had a peripatetic childhood before her family settled in Munich in 1912. She studied photography from 1916 to 1918 at Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Lichtbildwesen (Instructional and Research Institute for Photography), and in 1919 opened her own portrait studio. Her early engagement with left-wing political activism led to her expulsion from Munich. Then, on a visit to Russia in 1921, she was incarcerated for her counterrevolutionary support of the Free French cause against Hitler. In 1926, she settled in Paris, where she became friends with artists Sonia and Robert Delaunay and intellectuals André Malraux, Jean Cocteau, Colette, and André Gide, who were also subjects of her photographic portraits.
Krull’s artistic breakthrough began in 1928, when she was hired by the nascent VU magazine,the first major French illustrated weekly. Along with photographers André Kertész and Éli Lotar, she developed a new form of reportage rooted in a freedom of expression and closeness to her subjects that resulted in intimate close-ups, all facilitated by her small-format Icarette, a portable, folding bed camera. During this period, she published the portfolio, Metal (Métal) (1928), a collection of 64 pictures of modernist iron giants, including cranes, railways, power generators, the Rotterdam transporter bridge, and the Eiffel Tower, shot in muscular close-ups and from vertiginous angles. Krull participated in the influential Film und Foto, or Fifo, exhibition (1929-1930), which was accompanied by two books, Franz Roh’s and Jan Tschichold’s Foto-Auge (Photo-Eye) and Werner Gräff’s Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Here Comes the New Photographer!). Fifo marked the emergence of a new critical theory of photography that placed Krull at the forefront of Neues Sehen or Neue Optik (New Vision) photography, a new direction rooted in exploring fully the technical possibilities of the photographic medium through a profusion of unconventional lens-based and darkroom techniques. After the end of World War II, she traveled to Southeast Asia, and then moved to India, where, after a lifetime dedicated to recording some of the major upheavals of the twentieth century, she decided to live as a recluse among Tibetan monks.
Introduction by Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, Department of Photography, 2016, text from the MoMA website [Online] Cited 01/02/2022
The creative possibilities explored through photography were never richer or more varied than in the years between the two world wars, when photographers tested the medium with unmatched imaginative fervor. This moment of inventive approaches to documentary, abstract, and architectural subjects is dramatically captured in the more than three hundred and fifty photographs that constitute the Thomas Walther Collection at The Museum of Modern Art. The Museum acquired these photographs from Thomas Walther’s private collection, which includes exceptionally striking prints by towering figures in the field alongside lesser known treasures by more than one hundred other practitioners. This exhibition also highlights the artists whose work Walther collected in depth, including André Kertész, Germaine Krull, Franz Roh, Willi Ruge, Maurice Tabard, Umbo, and Edward Weston. Made on the street and in the studio, intended for avant-garde exhibitions and the printed page, these photographs provide unique insight into the radical objectives of their creators. The transatlantic circulation of ideas, images, objects, and people stimulated vibrant dialogues concerning the transformation of vision, and the varied uses and capacities of photography. Organised to explore thematic connections between the works, the exhibition testifies to the dynamic experience of modernity through genres such as portraiture, expressions of the urban experience, and techniques of estrangement and experimentation, including unfamiliar points of view and distortions.
Purisms
Beginning in the 1890s, in an attempt to distinguish their efforts from those of the growing ranks of professionals and the new hordes of Kodak-wielding amateurs, “artistic” photographers referred to themselves as Pictorialists. They embraced soft focus and painstakingly wrought prints to encourage an awareness of the preciousness of their photographs as objects, often emulating strategies from contemporary fine-art prints and drawings and choosing subjects that underscored the ethereal effects of their methods. Before long, however, some avant-garde photographers came to celebrate precise and distinctly photographic qualities as virtues, and by the early twentieth century, photographers on both sides of the Atlantic were transitioning from Pictorialism to Modernism – and occasionally blurring the distinction. Modernist photographers made exhibition prints using precious platinum or palladium, or, particularly after World War I, matte surfaces that mimicked those materials. These techniques are in evidence in the work of Edward Weston, whose suite of prints in the Walther Collection suggests the range of appearances achievable with unadulterated contact prints from large-format negatives.
Edward Weston (United States, 1886-1958)
In 1922, en route from his home in Los Angeles to New York City, where he planned to meet Alfred Stieglitz, Weston stopped to visit his sister in Ohio. There he made a series of pictures of the Armco Steel factory that signalled a break from the ethereal portrait practice that characterised his early professional work and an embrace of pure, industrial form. The following year Weston relocated to Mexico City, where he expanded his modernist vocabulary in the company of his apprentice, lover, and muse, the photographer Tina Modotti. In 1926, Weston returned to the United States, where he received increasingly international recognition for the formal rigour of his distilled subjects and the expressive luminosity of his prints.
The extraordinary fecundity of the photographic medium between the First and Second World Wars can be persuasively attributed to the dynamic circulation of people, ideas and images that was a hallmark of that era in Europe and the United States. Migration, a profusion of publications distributed and read on both sides of the Atlantic, and landmark exhibitions that brought artistic achievements into dialogue with one another all contributed to a period of innovation that was a creative peak both in the history of photography and in the field of arts and letters. Overall, only a small number of European photobooks made their way to the United States, but their significance was evidently appreciated by those Americans who encountered them. These publications signalled a recognition of the artistic potential of photography while also cementing its centrality in the popular imagination, as well as providing the opportunity to discover photographic works no matter the artist’s place of origin. Photographs also circulated in Europe and America through various types of publications such as avant-garde magazines and more widely circulated periodicals. The vast majority of magazines and reviews founded in the 1910s and 1920s did not survive the economic crisis of the end of the decade. This is not to say that the era of photographs in magazines was over – far from it. Life was founded in 1936, and its extraordinary success was followed, if not matched, by dozens of other magazines in the United States and Europe. These, however, did not embrace the experimental artistic and literary practices that had flourished on the pages of magazines and journals in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
Cover of László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) Painting, Photography, Film (Malerei, Fotografie, Film) Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1925
Malerei Photographie Film (Painting Photography Film) marked the beginning of an explosively creative and influential decade of photography books. The book features the work of Walther Collection artists Paul Citroen, Georg Muche, and István Kerny in addition to Moholy-Nagy, and was the eighth in the Bauhausbücher (Bauhaus Books) publications series, which was edited by Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius, the German art school’s founding director. Although photography was central to the thinking of Moholy-Nagy and his fellow Bauhaus teacher Josef Albers, and each incorporated it into the school’s preliminary course, the medium was not formally made a part of the curriculum until 1929, when the Bauhaus hired photographer Walter Peterhans. Peterhans balanced a rigorous attention to technical detail with the reputational benefits of having his work circulate in publications and exhibitions, and he was responsible for teaching a significant number of Walther Collection photographers – from the Argentine Horacio Coppola to the German Umbo.
In 1922, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy published the short article “Produktion-Reproduktion” in the Dutch journal De Stijl, identifying the potential for the relatively new mediums of photography and film to transcend their conventional function of documentation. He advocated for their creative application – through multiple exposures, typographic interventions, montage, and oblique perspectives – to produce “new, as yet unfamiliar relationships” in the visual field. In the first half of the twentieth century, publications featuring photography were one of the primary outlets for expressing these new ways of seeing. Viewing these books and journals today provides a richer understanding of modernist photography and its impact on other mediums.
Text from the MoMA website
Cover of Werner Gräff (German, 1901-1978) Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Here comes the new photographer!) Berlin: H. Reckendorf, 1929
Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Here Comes the New Photographer!) features eleven artists (and four artworks) of the Walther Collection, and was likewise designed as a primer for those interested in but unfamiliar with the experimental front lines of its medium. “The purpose of this book is to break down barriers, not create them,” wrote the author of the book Werner Gräff. He declared his bias in favour of “unconventional photographs,” including photomontage, which is featured in a dedicated section.
Foto-Auge (Photo-Eye) features on its cover El Lissitzky’s work Self-Portrait (The Constructor), a complex photomontage that collapses pictorial and graphic space, merging image with text, geometry with human form, and the act of seeing with, as the title suggests, constructing. In 1931, just two years after it appeared, Foto-Auge was recognised as a vital publication by the American photographer Walker Evans. Evans wrote, “Photo-Eye is a nervous and important book. Its editors call the world not only beautiful but exciting, cruel, and weird. In intention social and didactic, this is an anthology of the ‘new’ photography; yet its editors knew where to look for their material, and print examples of the news photo, aerial photography, microphotography, astronomical photography, photomontage and the photogram, multiple-exposure and the negative print.”
Cover from August Sander (German, 1876-1964) and Alfred Döblin (German, 1878-1957) Antlitz der Zeit. Sechzig Aufnahmen Deutscher Menschen Des 20. Jahrhunderts (Face of our time: Sixty portraits of twentieth-century Germans) Munich: Transmare Verlag, 1929
By the mid-1920s, August Sander had fixed on a wildly ambitious (if not intentionally impossible) goal of publishing a synthetic portrait – Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the Twentieth Century) – comprising hundreds of individual portraits of his fellow Germans. Although this project of capturing “an absolutely faithful historical picture of our time” would remain unrealised in his lifetime, Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time), published in Munich in 1929, distilled his vision into a suite of sixty photographs accompanied by an essay by novelist Alfred Doblin.
Cover of Albert Renger-Patzsch (German, 1897-1966) Die Welt ist schön 1928 Munich: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1928
Left: Albert Renger-Patzsch. Kauper, von unten gesehen. Hochofenwerk. Herrenwyk (Cowper, Seen from below. Blast furnace plant. Herrenwyk). Right: Albert Renger-Patzsch. Bügeleisen für Schuhfabrikation (Iron shoe for fabrication).
Albert Renger-Patzsch’s Die Welt ist schön (The World Is Beautiful) and Karl Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature) both appeared in 1928, published in Munich and Berlin, respectively. Renger-Patzsch and Blossfeldt represented two threads of the New Vision: the former was committed to unadulterated photographic depiction as the essence of a modern way of seeing, while the latter explored the intersection of mechanical processes and natural form. Neither chose the path of experimentation that Moholy-Nagy had defined earlier in the decade with Malerei Photographie Film, but in their embrace of the camera’s mechanical capacity, their work resonated with avant-garde practices.
Albert Renger-Patzsch was one of the most important promoters of modern photography in Weimar Germany. Die Welt ist Schön (The World is Beautiful) is his most well-known book, and the one that has come to define his career. It contains 100 closeup photographs of natural and man-made objects which are sequenced in progression from plants, animals, people, and the natural landscape, to turbines, girders, and other elements of industry before ending with a pair of hands clasped in prayer. The book was hugely popular at the time but received some criticism, particularly over the title which has contributed to a possible misreading of the work. In A Short History of Photography, Walter Benjamin wrote: ‘Therein is unmasked a photography which is able to relate a tin of canned food to the universe, yet cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which that tin exists.’ Renger-Patzsch himself maintains that he would have preferred to have used the title Die Dinge (Things), which is more in keeping with his straight documentary approach. He maintained that his aesthetic arose from an interest in the precise nature of scientific photography and an interest in the composition of visual structures of the outside world, rather than from a desire to create a harmonic universal design. In a 1930 letter to Franz Roh he expressed his concern that Die Welt ist Schön was being interpreted philosophically, holding it up instead as his declared belief in optimism. To the end of his life Renger-Patzsch rejected any attempts to push photography toward total abstraction. He maintained his belief that photography was not an art but a means of documenting and recording, and that any attempt to compete with the graphic arts would cause photography to lose it own inherent characteristics of nuance and detail.
Text from the Oliver Wood Books website [Online] Cited 26/01/2022
Artist’s Life
Photography is particularly well suited to capture the distinctive nuances of the human face, and photographers delighted in portraiture throughout the twentieth century. In the Thomas Walther Collection, portraits and self-portraits of artists – as varied as the individuals portrayed – are complemented by works that convey a free-spirited sense of artists’ lives and communities, generously represented here through photographs made by André Kertész in Paris, and by students and faculty at the Bauhaus. When the Hungarian-born Kertész moved to the French capital in 1925, large sheets of photographic paper were a luxury he couldn’t afford. Choosing less expensive postcard stock instead, he made intimate prints that function as miniature windows into the lives of his bohemian circle of friends. The group of photographs made at the Bauhaus in the mid-1920s, before the medium was formally integrated into the school’s curriculum, includes playful and spontaneous snapshot-like pictures, as well as more considered compositions in which students explore their relationship to the architecture of the school and other aspects of their coursework.
Between 1924 and 1930, Moholy photographed dozens of Bauhaus students, masters, and their families, creating often startlingly close views with her large-format camera. Within very narrow parameters, Moholy conveys her sensitivity to her sitters. Having printed many enlargements for her husband, László Moholy-Nagy, she was well aware of the visual impact afforded by large prints, and she had the experience and talent required to produce them.
The glass plate negative from which this image was made is the largest Moholy used, exposed in a large wooden camera on a tripod. The advantage to working with these fragile and cumbersome glass plates is their exceptionally high resolution, as well as the possibility that one could retouch directly on the negative. Indeed, this print reveals extensive retouching, both in the negative and on the print.
At the Bauhaus in Dessau, all members of the Feininger family (Lyonel, his wife, Julia, and their sons, Andreas, Laurence, and Theodore Lux) were active photographers. In 1927, Andreas built a darkroom in the Feininger basement. The year after, his father also took up photography, initially as an activity to enliven his long, solitary evening walks. Bauhaus is a view of the workshop wing of the school, carefully trimmed, retouched, and inscribed on the verso with the time and place it was taken. Feininger chose a matte paper that invites the eye to sink into the velvety blacks and allows the gradual discrimination of degrees of darkness within this nocturne.
In 1926, Lyonel Feininger, accompanied by his wife, Julia, and their adolescent sons, Andreas, Laurence, and Theodore Lux, moved into one of the double Masters’ Houses at the Dessau Bauhaus. In the other half of the house – designed by Walter Gropius, the director of the school – lived the photographer Lázsló Moholy-Nagy with his wife, Lucia Moholy, a skilled professional photographer. Moholy-Nagy enthusiastically advocated photography as the essential modern language, a message he broadcast in his influential book Malerei, Fotographie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film), which was published by the school in 1925 and reprinted in 1927. Feininger initially considered Moholy’s vigorous embrace of camera optics, new perspectives, and recombinant techniques to be outside the realm of art, but after a few years of living in the same house he changed his views: Moholy’s ideas and vitality had proved irresistible not only to the painter but to his three sons as well.
From the Feininger basement, where Andreas built a darkroom in 1927, emerged lively photographs of Bauhaus theatre productions, of the Bauhaus jazz band in which T. Lux and other students played, and of their friends involved in all manner of events. To enlarge their images, the young Feiningers fabricated a projector from a wood box, four lightbulbs, and a camera lens. They secured a glass negative to the front of the device and projected the negative’s image onto sheets of unexposed photographic paper pinned to an easel. The only signs of this procedure in the prints are the tiny white lines of shadow cast by the pins, which blocked the paper’s exposure to the light.
Prior to his arrival at the Bauhaus, in 1919, Feininger had shown his paintings with the artist group Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider), at the Galerie der Sturm and at the Galerie Dada. Because of these and other accomplishments, Gropius deferred to the somewhat older master and let him give up teaching and devote himself entirely to painting. In 1928 Feininger also took up photography, initially as an activity to enliven his long, solitary evening walks. Bauhaus is a view of the workshop wing of the school printed from a 4.5 by 6 centimeter (1 3/4 by 2 3/8 inch) glass-plate negative using the projection technique worked out by his sons. Feininger carefully trimmed, retouched, and inscribed this large print on the verso with the time and place it was taken.
In making his prints Feininger drew from his experience as a printmaker who knew the critical role of craft and materials – of inks and papers – and Lucia Moholy’s fine printing may also have made him especially attentive to print quality. Feininger chose a thin matte paper with a high rag content, which instead of reflecting light, as glossy papers do, absorbs it. This invites the viewer’s eye to sink into the velvety blacks and allows the gradual discrimination of degrees of darkness within these meditative nocturnes.
Trained first as a graphic artist and introduced to photography only upon enrolling at the Bauhaus in 1930, Rose applied his talents with both disciplines to generate this superimposition made from two different negatives: the distinctive facade of the Bauhaus in Dessau circumscribed by a self-portrait. Photography was formally integrated into the Bauhaus curriculum with the appointment of Walter Peterhans to the faculty in 1929, and this image may have been Rose’s response to a Peterhans assignment. Like the school’s curriculum, the picture weaves together photography, graphic design, and architecture into a unique, instructive whole, suggesting the collective nature of the school and the inculcation of Constructivist ideals in the individuals that made up the student body.
Lucy Schwob was a writer, actress, and outspoken member of the lesbian community of Paris between the two world wars. She and her half-sister, Suzanne Malherbe, became partners in life, love, and art, and took the ambiguously gendered pseudonyms Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore for their theatrical and photographic works. These mostly depict Cahun, and sometimes Moore, in a variety of masculine, androgynous, and feminine personas in minimally staged scenes in their home. This cropped image shows just Cahun’s head. In the full negative she appears full-length as a dandy in a man’s evening suit, her stance brazen, with hand on hip and improper cigarette in hand.
Lucy Schwob was a writer, actress, and outspoken member of the Parisian lesbian community between the two world wars. She and Suzanne Malherbe, her stepsister, became partners in life, love, and art, and took the ambiguously gendered pseudonyms Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore for their collaborative theatrical and photographic works. The images they made mostly depict Cahun, and sometimes Moore, in a variety of masculine, androgynous, and feminine personas set in minimally staged scenes in their home.
This print is an enlargement from a negative that was cropped to frame Cahun’s face and torso; the full-length image reveals a dandy in a men’s evening suit, her stance brazen, with hand on hip and cigarette in hand. Cahun erased the visible traces of her femininity by shaving her head, wearing masculine clothes, and avoiding jewellery and makeup. Through her wide variety of self-portrayals, she undercut the notion of a fixed identity and challenged the concept of a strict gender binary. Cahun and Moore’s writings – particularly their 1930 book Aveux non avenus (Disavowals), where this photograph was reproduced – also explored a shifting, malleable concept of personhood. Cahun considered their self-imaging project to be never-ending, explaining, “Under this mask another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.”
In 1920, collector-philanthropist Katherine Dreier and Marcel Duchamp cofounded the Société Anonyme, an organisation intended to promote and exhibit modern European and American art in New York. Various other artists assisted in this enterprise, including Man Ray, who photographed the art and artists for publicity and postcards, and the Italian Futurist Joseph Stella, who helped to select and hang the early exhibitions.
The presence of Stella and Duchamp together on the couch in this image reflects their close association with Dreier at this moment. Stella contrasts in joviality and girth with the monkish intensity of Duchamp; combined with the photograph of the woman smoking on the wall (an image also taken by Man Ray) this incidental pairing was just the sort of delicious, lightly barbed nonsense that delighted Man Ray. He referred to portrait photography, with which he would earn his living in Paris, as “taking heads”; that he considered the picture of the woman an essential part of this image is indicated by his title, Three Heads.
Around 1910 Sander began producing his monumental project, Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the Twentieth Century): a photographic catalogue of the German people that traces the country’s transformation from agrarian society into modern industrialised nation, organised in seven categories: farmers, workers, women, professionals, artists, urbanites, and the “last people,” or those individuals on the fringe of society. In 1929, he published Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time), a group of sixty of these photographs that outlined his ideas about the existing social order, but the project’s incompatibility with Nazi ideology eventually caught the attention of Third Reich censors, who destroyed the printing plates in 1936. This portrait appeared in Antlitz der Zeit, and was classified in Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts as a representative image of a modern high school student.
Atelier Stone. Sasha Stone (Russian, 1895-1940) and Cami Stone (born Wilhelmine Schammelhout, Belgian 1892-1975) Woman Smoking 1928 Gelatin silver print 23 1/16 × 16 5/16″ (58.6 × 41.4cm) Thomas Walther Collection. Committee on Photography Fund
Atelier Stone was a photography studio founded in Berlin by Sasha and Cami Stone, a married couple who collaborated professionally. Their pictures were disseminated in German magazines throughout the 1920s, and in 1929 their photographs were included in the exhibition Film und Foto. This large-scale print was almost certainly made for display, rather than reproduction. Oozing cool confidence, the figure portrayed here is emblematic of the Weimar-era “neue Frau,” or “new woman,” a social type whose independence, feminist outlook, and daring style challenged traditional gender expectations.
Magic Realisms
In the mid-1920s, members of European artistic movements ranging from Surrealism to New Objectivity shifted away from a realist approach, instead seeking to highlight the strangeness of everyday life or to mingle dreams and conscious states. Echoes of these concerns, centred on the human figure, can be found throughout the Walther Collection. Some photographers used anti-naturalistic methods – capturing hyperreal, close-up details, playing with scale, or rendering the body as landscape – to challenge the viewer’s perception. Others, in line with Sigmund Freud’s definition of “the uncanny” in 1919 as an effect resulting from the blurring of distinctions between the real and the fantastic, offered plays on life and the lifeless, the animate and the inanimate, engaging the human body through surrogates in the form of dolls, mannequins, and masks. Photographers influenced by Surrealism, such as Maurice Tabard, subjected the human figure to distortions and transformations by experimenting with photographic techniques while capturing the image or developing prints in the darkroom.
Maurice Tabard (France, 1897-1984)
Although he started out as a more conventional portrait photographer in the United States, Tabard made his name internationally as a magician of solarisation – a method that creates a hybrid image (part negative, part positive) by interrupting the development process to expose the image to an additional flash of light – and other darkroom manipulations. From 1928 to 1931 he was director of the photography lab at the Parisian type foundry Deberny & Peignot, which was at the forefront of the printing, advertising, and magazine trades, bringing him into contact with leading writers and artists of the day.
In the case of the Germans Herbert Bayer and John Guttman, it is the photographer’s own body that is the object of this doubling. In his Humanly Impossible – part of a series of photomontages titled Man and Dream – Bayer calls up the themes of the double and the ancient. Mingling disbelief and horror, the photographer watches himself performing his own amputation. The reflection in the mirror shows him his own body turned into a statue, his own flesh transformed into marble, and the present reverting to antiquity.
From 1925 to 1928 Bayer led the workshop in printing and advertising at the Bauhaus. In 1928, he relocated to Berlin, where he became the art director of the German edition of Vogue magazine and of Dorland Studio, an international advertising agency. It is at that time that he started creating dramatic montages, including this one, in which Bayer observes his reflected double in a mirror. A slice of his arm is severed from his torso. Although the picture is playful, reflecting both Dada humour and Surrealist dream states, the horror on Bayer’s face could reflect something darker, perhaps the physical and psychological traumas of World War I and the growing fears that such a cataclysmic nightmare might recur.
A key Berlin-based Dadaist, Hausmann exhibited assemblage sculptures, collages, and photomontages made with magazines and newspaper clippings between 1918 and 1922. By the late 1920s he had taken up photography in earnest, making straight camera-based images of landscapes and plants before turning to more experimental works on light and optics. Hausmann made this untitled image during these years of intense focus on photography. The model is his second wife, Hedwig Mankiewitz-Hausmann. The reflection in the shaving mirror magnifies the organ of vision, the eye, a strategy popular in avant-garde photography of that period. The round mirror becomes a metaphor for the camera’s mechanical lens, which enables the operator to see the world literally larger than life.
Jindřich Štyrský (Czech, 1899-1942) Untitled 1934-1935 From Na jehlách těchto dní. On the Needles of These Days Gelatin silver print 3 9/16 × 3 3/8″ (9 × 8.5cm) Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Štyrský – an avant-garde poet, photographer, editor, painter, and collagist – was among the many avant-garde artists between the two world wars who were interested in the mannequin motif. Like the Surrealists in France, he was drawn to the bizarre, erotic, and morbid, and to the symbolic forms in which they appeared in popular culture. Štyrský trawled the streets of Paris and Prague, looking for such subjects. In 1941, in occupied Czechoslovakia, he published a clandestine edition of On the Needles of These Days, a book of photographs accompanied by Jindřich Heisler’s poems. This print of a mannequin in the window of a Prague shop comes from a maquette for the book.
“Na Jehlach Techto Dni (On the Needles of These Days)” published by Fr. Borovy v Praze, Prague in 1945 was preceded by the extremely scarce clandestine self-published edition of 1941 with original tipped-in silver gelatin prints. In “The Photobook: A History”, Parr and Badger write, “This remains a haunting photobook, 50 years after the war. It is a prime example of one of the photobook’s great truths – it’s not necessarily the individual pictures that count, but what you do with them”. Commenting in the book, “The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century”, Vince Aletti states, “On the Needles of These Days” is a Surrealist meditation on war and resistance the book’s aura of alienation, repression, and anxiety not only captured the war’s home front theatre of the absurd, it anticipated the depth of postwar pessimism.” Cited in all three reference books on photobooks: “The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century” by Andrew Roth and “The Photobook: A History”, by Parr and Badger, and “The Open Book” by Andrew Roth.
At the time of his association with Surrealism in the 1930s, Ubac distinguished himself with deft darkroom manipulations, creating complex photographs through multiple experimental techniques. This image is from a series that has come to be associated with the legend of Penthesilea, the mythical queen of the Amazons. To construct this picture, Ubac carefully lit and posed his wife, Agui, and a friend in the studio. The resulting images were collaged into a new composition, which he rephotographed and solarised (exposed to an additional flash of light) to partially annihilate their forms. Recalling the transformative rituals of secret societies, the tangled mass of naked flesh and hair evokes unconscious sexual and aggressive drives, while the title suggests secret societies and subterfuge.
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) Anna Oderfeld, Zakopane 1911-1912 Gelatin silver print 6 11/16 × 4 3/4″ (17 × 12.1 cm) Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Mrs. Willard Helburn, by exchange
Writer, painter, and philosopher, Witkiewicz made extraordinary close-up portraits of himself, his parents, and his friends, including this elusive portrait of his lover, Anna Oderfeld. This photograph is an intimate record of a young man’s romantic obsession, yet the blurred image and extremely tight cropping look nothing like a traditional portrait of a sweetheart. As evidenced by the dark oval left by a negative clip in the top right corner, this is a contact print, and the light source – a paned window – is reflected in the dark of the subject’s eyes. Witkiewicz’s embrace of these technical “flaws” was not merely a signal of creative license; he was keenly attuned to their social, psychological, and metaphysical implications.
Trained in architecture at the Tokyo School of Arts but disenchanted with architectural practice in his native country, Yamawaki applied to study architecture and interior design at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Once in Germany, however, he turned to photography, creating images of architecture, people, furniture, and objects. This image is a prime example of the exquisite sculptural quality Yamawaki could achieve in his photographs. Involved in designing and producing theatre and dance at the school, Yamawaki employed theatrical lighting to emphasise the voluminous forms of a commonly available artist’s mannequin.
Experiments in Form
In 1925 László Moholy-Nagy asserted that although photography had been invented one hundred years earlier, its true aesthetic possibilities were only then being discovered, as he and others in his avant-garde circles adopted the medium. As products of technological culture, with short histories and no connection to the old fine-art disciplines, photography and cinema were truly modern instruments with the greatest potential for transforming visual habits – a key goal of the New Vision, the movement of young photographers synthesised through Moholy’s writing. These ideas were distilled in widely circulated publications by Moholy-Nagy, Franz Roh, and others who deployed innovative combinations of text and image. From the photogram to solarisation, from negative prints to double exposures, New Vision photographers explored the medium in countless ways, rediscovering older techniques and inventing new ones. Echoing the cinematic experiments of the same period, their emerging photographic vocabulary was adopted by the advertising industry, which was quick to exploit the visual efficiency of its bold graphic simplicity.
Franz Roh (Germany, 1890-1965)
Roh was an art historian and a pioneering critic of the twentieth-century avant-garde, with a special interest in photography. In 1927, encouraged by his friend László Moholy-Nagy, whom he had visited at the Bauhaus in Dessau the year before, he started making his own experimental photos. Some of Roh’s favourite techniques were photomontage, which he often used to combine shots of nudes and of architecture in nonsensical compositions; negative printing; and sequenced contact prints that suggest a film-like narrative. He coauthored the seminal photography book Foto-Auge with the Dutch graphic designer Jan Tschichold in 1929 and launched Fotothek (Photo Library), a short-lived series of small books about new photographers, in 1930.
Henri arrived at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1927 as a painter and left a few short months later as a photographer. Back in Paris in 1928 and influenced by Lucia Moholy’s ideas about photography, Henri started a series of still lifes with mirrors, playing with photography’s usual perspective. Every adjustment of mirrors and objects yielded fascinating new perceptions in this elastic environment. These images circulated in avant-garde magazines and major photography exhibitions of the day, including the 1929 exhibition Film und Foto.
“With photography, what I really want to do is compose the image, as I do in painting,” the artist Florence Henri has said about her artistic approach. “The volumes, lines, shadows and light should submit to my will and say what I would like them to say. All of this under the strict control of the composition, because I do not claim to be able to explain the world or to explain my own thoughts.” …
Henri turned to photography after spending a semester at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, in 1927. Even though photography wasn’t introduced into the curriculum until 1929, it had already been used on campus for documentary, publicity, and experimental purposes for years. Henri’s professor, László Maholy-Nagy said, “With Florence Henri’s photos, photographic practice enters a new phase, the scope of which would have been unimaginable before today… Reflections and spatial relationships, superposition and intersections are just some of the areas explored from a totally new perspective and viewpoint.”
Though photography is a medium that uses light to capture the surfaces of physical objects, she manipulated light and manipulated objects to create a dialogue between realism and abstraction. Henri frequently experimented with mirror, angling them to create surreal still lives and self-portraits marked by spatial ambiguity. She also manipulated her images via photomontage, multiple exposures, and negative printing. This experimental work exemplified the New Vision movement (a term coined by Moholy-Nagy), and it earned its place on the walls of the prominent international photography exhibitions of the time, including Fotografie der Gegenwart (1929), Film und Foto (1929), and Das Lichtbild (1930).
In 1929, Henri established her own successful studio in Paris, and she taught photography to artists such as Gisèle Freund and Lisette Model. During the Nazi occupation, photographic supplies became difficult to acquire, and Henri’s experimental style was in danger of being deemed “degenerate” by the regime. Henri returned to painting, but it was her photographs, taken mainly between 1927 and 1940, that left lasting impressions on her contemporaries and later generations alike.
Jane Pierce, Carl Jacobs Foundation Research Assistant, Department of Photography. “Florence Henri,” on the MoMA website Nd [Online’ Cited 292/01/2022
The Modern World
Even before the introduction of the handheld Leica camera in 1925, photographers were avidly exploring the unique experience of capturing the world through a camera’s lens. Photography was ideally suited to express the tenor of modern life in the wake of World War I: looking both up and down (from airplanes, bridges, and skyscrapers), photographers found unfamiliar points of view and a new dynamic visual language, freed from convention. Improvements in the light sensitivity of photographic films and papers meant that photographers could capture motion as never before. At the same time, technological advances in printing resulted in an explosion of opportunities for photographers to present their work to ever-widening audiences. From inexpensive weekly magazines to extravagantly produced journals, periodicals exploited the potential of photographs and imaginative layouts to tell a story. It wasn’t just photojournalists like Willi Ruge whose work appeared in magazines and newspapers; the illustrated press was a primary means of distribution and circulation for most photographers of this era.
Leni Riefenstahl (German, 1902-2003) Schönheit im Olympischen Kampf Berlin: Deutschen Verlag 1937
Having enjoyed success as a dancer and actress, Riefenstahl pivoted to directing films in the 1930s. Although never a formal member of the Nazi Party, she infamously made propaganda films for the Nazi Party and cultivated a close personal and professional relationship with Hitler. With the assistance of various cameramen Riefenstahl extensively documented the 1936 Olympics in Berlin in both still photography and film, using her technical virtuosity to craft an image of German triumph for an international audience. The resultant 1938 film Olympia broke ground with its innovative cinematography, and many photographs of the games taken by her and her team, including this one, were compiled in the 1936 multilingual publication Schönheit im Olympischen Kampf (Beauty in the Olympic Games) [above]. During post-war denazification proceedings, Riefenstahl was classified as a Nazi sympathiser.
In 1931, the photojournalist Willi Ruge took a series of photographs during a parachute jump over Berlin, using a camera attached to his waist. The reportage was backed up by a number of more conventional shots from another plane and from the ground. The story was published in the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, at the time Germany’s leading magazine using photography. Such was the success of the story that it was subsequently picked up by other magazines ranging from England to the United States.
Oscillating between documentation and entertainment stunt, this series depicts a parachute jump made by press photographer Ruge in 1931 from the Staaken airfield, near Berlin. In addition to the photographs Ruge made during his descent using a camera strapped to his belt, published accounts included pictures made from a second plane, and by at least one other photographer on the ground before and after the jump. The images Ruge produced while jumping echo many of the concerns and qualities put forward by New Vision photographers, including taking a more personal and almost amateur approach; unusual, dynamic vantage points; unexpected cropping; fractured, collage-like images; and the exaltation of modern sporting heroism. Distributed by the Berlin-based press agency Fotoaktuell, the pictures were published in a variety of magazines, first in Germany and then in Great Britain.
Jeu de Paume 1, Place de la Concorde 75008 Paris métro Concorde Phone: 01 47 03 12 50
Curators:The New Woman Behind the Camera is curated by Andrea Nelson, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The Met’s presentation is organised by Mia Fineman, Curator, with Virginia McBride, Research Assistant, both in the Department of Photographs.
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) [Haircutting in Front of General Store and Post Office on Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Mississippi] 1939 Gelatin silver print 9 13/16 × 12 11/16 in. (25 × 32.2cm) Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 Metropolitan Museum of Art Public domain
This is the first of two postings on this exhibition, this first one when it is taking place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The second posting will be its iteration at the National Gallery of Art, Washington starting on 31st October, with many more images. I will write more about the exhibition in the second posting.
The only thing you really need to know is… I bought the catalogue. Rarely do I buy catalogues, but that’s how important I think this exhibition is.
My favourite photographs in this posting are two atmospheric self-portraits: Gertrud Arndt’s Masked Self-Portrait (No. 16) (1930, below) and Marta Astfalck-Vietz’s Self-Portrait (nude with lace) (c. 1927, below). The most disturbing but uplifting are Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs of the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp: after all that he had gone through, how the young man can smile at the flash of the camera is miraculous.
But really, there is not a dud photograph in this posting. They are all strong, intelligent, creative images. I admire them all.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Metropolitan 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.
The New Woman of the 1920s was a powerful expression of modernity, a global phenomenon that embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art. Featuring more than 120 photographers from over 20 countries, this groundbreaking exhibition explores the work of the diverse “new” women who embraced photography as a mode of professional and artistic expression from the 1920s through the 1950s. During this tumultuous period shaped by two world wars, women stood at the forefront of experimentation with the camera and produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era.
The exhibition is the first to take an international approach to the subject, highlighting female photographers’ innovative work in studio portraiture, fashion and advertising, artistic experimentation, street photography, ethnography, and photojournalism. Among the photographers featured are Berenice Abbott, Ilse Bing, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Florestine Perrault Collins, Imogen Cunningham, Madame d’Ora, Florence Henri, Elizaveta Ignatovich, Consuelo Kanaga, Germaine Krull, Dorothea Lange, Dora Maar, Tina Modotti, Niu Weiyu, Tsuneko Sasamoto, Gerda Taro, and Homai Vyarawalla. Inspired by the global phenomenon of the New Woman, the exhibition seeks to reevaluate the history of photography and advance new and more inclusive conversations on the contributions of female photographers.
The New Woman Behind the Camera Virtual Opening
The New Woman of the 1920s through the 1950s was a powerful expression of modernity, a global phenomenon that embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art. During this tumultuous period shaped by two world wars, women stood at the forefront of experimentation with the camera and produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era.
Join Mia Fineman, Curator in the Department of Photographs, for a tour of The New Woman Behind the Camera, a groundbreaking exhibition, which features more than 120 photographers from over 20 countries and explores the work of the diverse “new” women who embraced photography as a mode of professional and artistic expression.
New Woman Behind the Camera
The New Woman of the 1920s was a powerful expression of modernity, a global phenomenon that embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art. Featuring more than 120 photographers from over 20 countries, this groundbreaking exhibition explores the work of the diverse “new” women who embraced photography as a mode of professional and artistic expression from the 1920s through the 1950s. During this tumultuous period shaped by two world wars, women stood at the forefront of experimentation with the camera and produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era.
Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978) Annie Mae Merriweather 1935 Gelatin silver print 32.9 × 24.8cm (12 15/16 × 9 3/4 in.) Purchase, Dorothy Levitt Beskind Gift, 1974 Metropolitan Museum of Art
Consuelo Kanaga photographed Annie Mae Merriweather for the October 22, 1935 issue of New Masses (vol. 17, no. 4). This portrait accompanies a Merriweather’s account of a lynch mob in Lowndes County, Alabama. In response to a strike of the Sharecropper’s Union, members of the mob terrorised demonstrators, attacking Merriweather and murdering her husband.
The artist created this portrait of Annie Mae Meriwether for New Masses magazine, an Marxist periodical published in the United States from 1926 to 1948. The picture was commissioned to accompany an account of Meriwether’s escape from the lynch mob that had murdered her husband as retribution for his involvement with an Alabama sharecroppers’ union.
Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Born in Astoria, Oregon, Consuelo Kanaga came from a family that valued ideals of social justice. After completing high school, she began writing for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1915. Within three years, she had learned darkroom technique from the paper’s photographers and become a staff photographer. She met Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and Dorothea Lange through the California Camera Club, and was interested in the fine-art photography in Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work. A series of three marriages and one canceled engagement precipitated Kanaga’s periodic relocations between New York and San Francisco, where she established a portrait studio in 1930. While not an official member of the f/64 group, her images were exhibited in its first exhibition at San Francisco’s M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in 1932. Kanaga was involved in West Coast liberal politics, and when she returned to New York in 1935, she was associated with the leftist Photo League; she lectured there in 1938 with Aaron Siskind, then occupied with his Harlem Document. Her photography was championed by Edward Steichen, who included her in ‘The Family of Man’ exhibition in 1955. Kanaga’s work was featured in the 1979 ICP exhibition “Recollections: Ten Women of Photography,” and she was the subject of a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1992.
In terms of photographic technique and depiction of subjects, romantic instincts characterise Kanaga’s work. An advocate for the rights of African-Americans and other people of colour, Kanaga distinguished her portraits from the documentary images of the Farm Security Administration by conveying her subject’s physical comfort and personal pride. The tactile sense of volume in her work is reinforced by strong contrasts in printing light and dark forms.
Meredith Fisher in Handy et al. Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection, New York: Bulfinch Press in association with the International Center of Photography, 1999, p. 219 published on the International Center of Photography website [Online] Cited 16/07/2021.
Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) Martha Graham – Lamentation 1935 Gelatin silver print 12 5/16 × 10 9/16 in. (31.2 × 26.9cm) Purchase, Dorothy Levitt Beskind Gift, 1974 Metropolitan Museum of Art
Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992)
Barbara Morgan (July 8, 1900 – August 17, 1992) was an American photographer best known for her depictions of modern dancers. She was a co-founder of the photography magazine Aperture.
Morgan is known in the visual art and dance worlds for her penetrating studies of American modern dancers Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, José Limón, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and others. Morgan’s drawings, prints, watercolours and paintings were exhibited widely in California in the 1920s, and in New York and Philadelphia in the 1930s. …
In 1935 Barbara attended a performance of the young Martha Graham Dance Company. She was immediately struck with the historical and social importance of the emerging American Modern Dance movement:
“The photographers and painters who dealt with the Depression, often, it seemed to me, only added to defeatism without giving courage or hope. Yet the galvanising protest danced by Martha Graham, Humphrey-Weidman, Tamiris and others was heartening. Often nearly starving, they never gave up, but forged life affirming dance statements of American society in stress and strain. In this role, their dance reminded me of Indian ceremonial dances which invigorate the tribe in drought and difficulty.”
Morgan conceived of her 1941 book project Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs – the year she met Graham. From 1935 through the 1945 she photographed more than 40 established dancers and choreographers, and she described her process:
“To epitomise… a dance with camera, stage performances are inadequate, because in that situation one can only fortuitously record. For my interpretation it was necessary to redirect, relight, and photographically synthesise what I felt to be the core of the total dance.”
Many of the dancers Morgan photographed are now regarded as the pioneers of modern dance, and her photographs the definitive images of their art. These included Valerie Bettis, Merce Cunningham, Jane Dudley, Erick Hawkins, Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, José Limón, Sophie Maslow, May O’Donnell, Pearl Primus, Anna Sokolow, Helen Tamiris, and Charles Weidman. Critics Clive Barnes, John Martin, Elizabeth McCausland, and Beaumont Newhall have all noted the importance of Morgan’s work.
Graham and Morgan developed a relationship that would last some 60 years. Their correspondence attests to their mutual affection, trust and respect. In 1980, Graham stated:
“It is rare that even an inspired photographer possesses the demonic eye which can capture the instant of dance and transform it into timeless gesture. In Barbara Morgan I found that person. In looking at these photographs today, I feel, as I felt when I first saw them, privileged to have been a part of this collaboration. For to me, Barbara Morgan through her art reveals the inner landscape that is a dancer’s world.”
Lucia Moholy (British born Austria-Hungary, 1894-1989)
Lucia Moholy was one of the most prolific photographers at the Bauhaus between 1923 and 1928, while her husband, László Moholy-Nagy, was an instructor there. For both, photography was not simply a transparent window onto objective reality but a specific technology to be systematically explored in the modern spirit of exuberant experimentation. Here, illustrating the effect of selective focus, Moholy imprints his hand against the invisible picture plane that separates viewer and subject-a playful, disorienting gesture that collapses illusionistic depth into the concrete reality of the photographic image.
Lucia Moholy’s 1925-26 image of her celebrated photographer husband, László Moholy-Nagy, extending his hand in front of the camera was long assumed to be his own self-portrait, but research has led scholars to conclude that his wife shot the image. A wall label calls it “a striking example of the tendency to attribute the work of women artists to their male partners”.
Text from Nancy Kenney. “Triumphant in their time, yet largely erased later: a Met exhibition explores ‘The New Woman Behind the Camera’,” on The Art Newspaper website 1st July 2021 [Online] Cited 22/07/2021
Wanda Wulz (Italian, 1903-1984) Io + gatto (Cat + I) 1932 Gelatin silver print 11 9/16 × 9 1/8 in. (29.4 × 23.2cm) Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 Metropolitan Museum of Art
Wulz, a portrait photographer loosely associated with the Italian Futurist movement, created this striking composite by printing two negatives – one of her face, the other of the family cat – on a single sheet of photographic paper, evoking by technical means the seamless conflation of identities that occurs so effortlessly in the world of dreams.
Lucy Ashjian (1907-1993) was an American photographer best known as a member of the New York Photo League. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona and the Museum of the City of New York.
Groundbreaking Exhibition to Explore How Women Photographers Worldwide Shaped the Medium from the 1920s to the 1950s
The New Woman of the 1920s was a powerful expression of modernity, a global phenomenon that embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art. Opening July 2, 2021 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New Woman Behind the Camera will feature 185 photographs, photo books, and illustrated magazines by 120 photographers from over 20 countries. This groundbreaking exhibition will highlight the work of the diverse “new” women who made significant advances in modern photography from the 1920s to the 1950s. During this tumultuous period shaped by two world wars, women stood at the forefront of experimentation with the camera and produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era.
The exhibition is made possible in part by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Daniel and Estrellita Brodsky Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. It is organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Met, commented, “The international scope of this project is unprecedented. Though the New Woman is often regarded as a Western phenomenon, this exhibition proves otherwise by bringing together rarely seen photographs from around the world and presenting a nuanced, global history of photography. The women featured are responsible for shifting the direction of modern photography, and it is exhilarating to witness the accomplishments of these extraordinary practitioners.”
The first exhibition to take an international approach to the subject, The New Woman Behind the Camera will examine women’s pioneering work in a number of genres, from avant-garde experimentation and commercial studio practice to social documentary, photojournalism, ethnography, and sports, dance, and fashion photography. It will highlight the work of photographers such as Ilse Bing, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Claude Cahun, Florestine Perrault Collins, Elizaveta Ignatovich, Dorothea Lange, Lee Miller, Niu Weiyu, Tsuneko Sasamoto, Gerda Taro, and Homai Vyarawalla, among many others.
About the exhibition
Known by different names, from nouvelle femme and neue Frau to modan gāru and xin nüxing, the New Woman of the 1920s was easy to recognise but hard to define. Her image – a woman with bobbed hair, stylish dress, and a confident stride – was everywhere, splashed across the pages of magazines and projected on the silver screen. A symbol that broke down conventional ideas of gender, the New Woman was inspiring for some and controversial for others, embraced and resisted to varying degrees from country to country.
For many of these daring women, the camera was a means to assert their self-determination and artistic expression. The exhibition begins with a selection of compelling self-portraits, often featuring the photographer with her camera. Highlights include innovative self-portraits by Florence Henri, Annemarie Heinrich, and Alma Lavenson.
For many women, commercial studios were an important entry point into the field of photography, allowing them to forge professional careers and earn their own income. From running successful businesses in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Vienna to earning recognition as one of the first female photographers in their respective country, women around the world, including Karimeh Abbud, Steffi Brandl, Trude Fleischmann, Annemarie Heinrich, Eiko Yamazawa, and Madame Yevonde, reinvigorated studio practice. Photography studios run by Black American women, such as Florestine Perrault Collins, not only preserved likenesses but also countered racist images then circulating in the mass media.
The availability of smaller, lightweight cameras spurred a number of women photographers to explore the city and the diversity of urban experience outside the studio. The exhibition features stunning street scenes and architectural views by Alice Brill, Rebecca Lepkoff, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Genevieve Naylor, and Tazue Satō Matsunaga, among others. Creative formal approaches – such as photomontage, photograms, unconventional cropping, and dizzying camera angles – came to define photography during this period. On view are experimental works by such artists as Valentina Kulagina, Dora Maar, Tina Modotti, Lucia Moholy, Toshiko Okanoue, and Grete Stern, all of whom pushed the boundaries of the medium.
During this period, many women traveled extensively for the first time and took photographs documenting their experiences abroad in Africa, China, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Others, including Marjorie Content, Eslanda Goode Robeson, and Anna Riwkin, engaged in more formal ethnographic projects. This period also gave rise to new ideas about health and sexuality and to changing attitudes about movement and dress. Women photographers such as Lotte Jacobi, Jeanne Mandello, and Germaine Krull produced images of liberated modern bodies, from pioneering photographs of the nude to exuberant pictures of sport and dance.
The unprecedented demand for fashion and advertising pictures between the world wars provided new employment opportunities for many female photographers, including Lillian Bassman, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Toni Frissell, Frances McLaughlin-Gill, Margaret Watkins, Caroline Whiting Fellows, and Yva. Fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar visually defined the tastes and aspirations of the New Woman and offered a space in which women could experiment with pictures intended for a predominantly female readership.
The rise of the picture press also established photojournalism and social documentary photography as dominant forms of visual expression. Galvanised by the effects of a global economic crisis and growing political unrest, many women photographers, including Lucy Ashjian, Margaret Bourke-White, Kati Horna, Dorothea Lange, and Hansel Mieth, created powerful images that exposed injustice and swayed public opinion. While women photojournalists often received so-called “soft assignments” on the home front, others risked their lives on the battlefield. The exhibition features combat photographs by Thérèse Bonney, Galina Sanko, and Gerda Taro, as well as unsparing views of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps by Lee Miller. Views of Hiroshima by Tsuneko Sasamoto and photographs of the newly formed People’s Republic of China by Hou Bo and Niu Weiyu underscore the global complexities of the postwar era.
Credits
The New Woman Behind the Camera is curated by Andrea Nelson, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The Met’s presentation is organised by Mia Fineman, Curator, with Virginia McBride, Research Assistant, both in the Department of Photographs.
Following its presentation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition will travel to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., where it will be on view from October 31, 2021 through January 30, 2022. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and distributed by DelMonico Books.
Press release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Elizabeth Buehrmann (American, 1886-1965) Advertisement for Robert Burns Cigar c. 1920 Gelatin silver print mounted in press book Image: 19.69 x 18.42cm (7 3/4 x 7 1/4 in.) The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library
Elizabeth Buehrmann (1886-1965)
Elizabeth “Bessie” Buehrmann (1886-1965) was born June 13, 1886, in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Elizabeth was an American photographer and artist who was one of the pioneers of taking formal portraits of people in their own homes rather than in a studio. …
At about the age of 15 she enrolled in painting and drawing classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. While she was still a teenager she began assisting Eva Watson-Schütze in her photography studio on West 57th Street, and it was there that she learned both the technical and aesthetic aspects of photography. She made such progress that by the time she was just 18 years old she was accepted as an Associate Member in Alfred Stieglitz’s important Photo-Secession.
Buehrmann specialised in taking portraits of clients in their homes, and she never used artificial scenery or props. She said “I have never had a studio at home but take my pictures in houses. A person is always much more apt to be natural, and then I can get different background effects.” She also did not pose her subjects; instead she would “spend several hours getting acquainted with her subjects before attempting to reproduce the character found in an interesting face.” Leading businessmen and diplomats commissioned her as well as prominent society women, and she was well known for both her artistry and her ability to capture “some of the soul along with the physical features of her sitters.”
In 1906-1907 she spent a year living in London and Paris in order to learn the latest techniques and styles of European photographers. As another sign of her prominence, she was invited to join the Photo-Club de Paris, where she worked for several months.
When she returned, the Art Institute of Chicago gave her a large exhibition of 61 prints, including portraits, landscapes and still lifes. Included among her portraits were photographs of Alvin Langdon Coburn, Robert Demachy, Russell Thorndike, Fannie Zeisler, Sydney Greenstreet and Helena Modjeska.
In 1909 Stieglitz included three of her prints in the prominent National Arts Club exhibition which he organised. Another photographer, Robert Demachy, insisted her prints be included in an important show he was organising in Paris the next year. She is shown as still living with her parents, in Chicago, in the 1910 census. She continued doing portraiture until the late 1910s when she began exploring the then relatively new market for advertising photography. She spent the next decade working on a variety of advertising commissions. Her last known commercial photography took place in the early 1930s.
Charlotte Rudolph (German, 1896-1983) Gret Palucca 1925 Gelatin silver print 8 13/16 × 6 9/16 in. (22.4 × 16.6cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Charlotte Rudolph (German, 1896-1983)
Charlotte Rudolph (1896-1983) was a German photographer. After training with Hugo Erfurth, Charlotte Rudolph opened a photo studio in Dresden in 1924 and concentrated on portrait and dance photography. In particular, Rudolph became known through her photographs of dancers such as Gret Palucca, with whom she was friends, Mary Wigman , Vera Skoronel and countless Wigman students such as Chinita Ullmann.
Her photos of the avant-garde German dancers of the 1920s and 1930s are among the most important documents of expressive dance today. In contrast to other photographers, Charlotte Rudolph did not take the dancers in a pose, but in action. Her pictures of Gret Palucca’s jumps made a major contribution to Palucca’s international fame in 1924 and were also Charlotte Rudolph’s breakthrough. As a result, many women went to their studio because they were hoping for such jump pictures from Rudolph.
Charlotte Rudolph continued to work in Germany during the Nazi era, and temporarily also in the USA after the Second World War. Her archives and her studio in Dresden, which she took over in 1938 after the death of Genja Jonas, were destroyed in the Second World War when Dresden was bombed on February 13, 1945.
Gret Palucca, born Margarethe Paluka (8 January 1902 – 22 March 1993), was a German dancer and dance teacher, notable for her dance school, the Palucca School of Dance, founded in Dresden in 1925.
Yvonne Chevalier (French, 1899-1982). Coming from a well-to-do background, Yvonne Chevalier went to study drawing and painting after high school. Her first photographs of seascapes and cliffs date back to 1909. She married a doctor in 1920, with whom she had a daughter the following year. She and her husband welcomed and socialised with many artists and writers, including her friends Colette (1873-1954), Adrienne Monnier (1892-1955) and Mariette Lydis (1887-1990), whom she photographed. In 1929 she devoted herself entirely to her art and in 1930 she opened a portrait studio which was a great success. She became the official photographer of painter Georges Rouault. In 1936 she joined the association of French illustrator and advertising photographers, Le Rectangle, founded by Emmanuel Sougez, René Servant and Pierre Adam, which demanded a return to classicism.
The artist exhibited her photos of nudes, architecture and landscapes during two solo exhibitions, in 1935 and 1937. She explored portraiture and photojournalism (Algeria and Southern France, 1937), worked on sculpture (Rodin, 1935), architecture (Thoronet Abbey, 1936) and objects, particularly musical instruments. She tightly framed images – hands, for example – and used high- and low-angle shots, close-ups, shadow and light effects. In 1932 her portrait of Colette submerged in almost total darkness left only the writer’s eye fully illuminated. Included in many group exhibitions, she also regularly published in various magazines, such as Arts et métiers graphiques, Cinégraph and Musica. Following the bombings of of the Second World War, the majority of her works disappeared in a fire.
In 1946 she became one of the founding members of the group XV, which wanted photography to be recognised as an art in and of itself. She exhibited with this group on several occasions. Together with the writer Marcelle Auclair, in 1949 she made a long report on the Spanish Carmelites to commemorate the foundation of the order by Teresa of Avila. She continued working extensively as a book illustrator, but stopped taking photographs in 1970. In 1980 the artist sorted and destroyed a large number of her prints.
Catherine Gonnard. “Yvonne Chevalier,” on the AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions website [Online] Cited 24/08/2021
Karimeh Abbud (Palestinian, 1893-1940) Three Women 1930s Gelatin silver print 3 1/2 × 5 1/2 in. (8.9 × 14 cm) Issam Nassar
Gertrud Arndt (German born Poland, 1903-2000) Masked Self-Portrait (No. 16) 1930 Gelatin silver print 8 15/16 × 6 15/16 in. (22.7 × 17.6cm) Museum Folkwang, Essen
Costuming played a central role at the Bauhaus. From the very beginning, masquerade balls were celebrated regularly under a wide variety of mottoes. And the Bauhaus people rushed over, sometimes preparing for weeks in the workshops and privately the Bauhaus festivals that were popular beyond the walls of the school: Decorations, demonstrations, but above all their costumes – made of simple materials – transformed the Bauhaus people into miraculous figures, incarnate objects and masked beings. Gertrud Arndt’s mask photographs (a series of 43 self-portraits) derive directly from these Bauhaus festivals. …
Arndt’s mask photos are private photographs and were never intended for the public. The mask photographs were taken, rather, independently of viewers, as an experimental excursion into the possibilities and limits of one’s own face – and into the many different characters Arndt transformed herself into in her pictures. They are the record of an intimate conversation conducted between Arndt and her camera. The special thing about Gertrud Arndt’s mask photos is that they were taken in a comprehensive series. Within the 43 photos in the series, smaller picture series can be recognized. In her mask photos, Gertrud Arndt developed a kind of external image of herself, a “visual identity.”12 Arndt only rarely photographed herself once in the same costume. She often made two, three or four pictures in the same costume (or with minor changes). Here the pose, facial expression or picture detail change. In a series of three pictures within the series, Arndt shows herself in a high-necked top with a frill collar and hat, frontally with her eyes closed, then looking directly into the camera in a half-profile, and finally posing in a larger frame with a surprised facial expression. In another mini-series consisting of two photos, Arndt once photographed herself with her eyes closed, her head raised high, and in the next picture, squinting at her nose. The true woman behind the façade is not visible to the viewer. The pictures can illustrate the conflict women faced during the Weimar Republic: faced by entrenched, conservative notions of femininity on the one hand while opposed models for how a modern emancipated woman might act were also present, if to a lesser degree. The contradictory models available within society may be one source behind Arndt’s decision to use her mask photographs as a means to observe herself from the outside, as it were, and to investigate to what degree the many women into whom she transformed herself were actually part of her own feminine persona. At the same time, perhaps unconsciously, she may have also used her portrait project in the service of the traditionally feminine image expected of her, which also did not necessarily correspond to reality. Stereotypical ideas of womanhood with broad social currency circulating during the Weimar Republic included conservative images of women – such as the wife and mother, the widow and the naïve young girl – and these clichés are present in Arndt’s photographs. Or was it that she deliberately exaggerated these role models because she herself felt like a “non-doer” at the Bauhaus, was uncomfortable in this role and felt herself degraded by being thought thusly when her own self-image was that of an emancipated a modern woman? And then again, perhaps Gertrud Arndt’s mask photos are actually merely the result of her “boredom,” which she was desperately trying to alleviate, with role plays.
Extract from Anja Guttenberger. “Festive and Theatrical: The Mask Photos of Gertrud Arndt and Josef Albers as an Expression of Festival Culture,” on the Bauhaus Imaginista Journal website Nd [Online] Cited 16/09/2021
Edith Tudor-Hart (Austrian-British, 1908–1973) Man Selling Lemons, Vienna c. 1932, printed later Gelatin silver print 9 1/16 × 9 7/16 in. (23 × 24cm) Collection of Peter Suschitzky. Julia Donat and Misha Donat
Edith Tudor-Hart (née Suschitzky; 28 August 1908 – 12 May 1973) was an Austrian-British photographer and spy for the Soviet Union. Brought up in a family of socialists, she trained in photography at Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus in Dessau, and carried her political ideals through her art. Through her connections with Arnold Deutsch, Tudor-Hart was instrumental in the recruiting of the Cambridge Spy ring which damaged British intelligence from World War II until the security services discovered all their identities by the mid-1960s. She recommended Litzi Friedmann and Kim Philby for recruitment by the KGB and acted as an intermediary for Anthony Blunt and Bob Stewart when the rezidentura at the Soviet Embassy in London suspended its operations in February 1940.
Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) Ballet “L’Errante”, Paris 1933 Gelatin silver print Image: 28.3 x 22.2 cm (11 1/8 x 8 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Andrea Nelson, an associate curator in the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC who conceived and organised the exhibition, says the idea for it arose after she was hired in 2010 and was ruminating about generating shows drawn from the NGA’s permanent collection. She was struck by a trove of 90 images by the interwar photographer Ilse Bing that were variously donated by the artist or left by her estate after Bing died in 1998. “She was actually one of the few women photographers that the National Gallery had collected in depth,” Nelson said in an interview. (The show, which was originally scheduled to open first at the NGA last September but was then deferred because of the coronavirus pandemic, travels there this autumn.)
Born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Bing became interested in photography while creating architectural illustrations for her art history dissertation there, and eventually gave up her academic studies to pursue a career with the camera. She bought a Leica 35mm model in 1929 and moved the following year to Paris, where she met leading lights in avant-garde photography including Brassaï and André Kertész. Bing began experimenting compositionally and with light effects in self-portraits, images of Parisian streets and photographs of quotidian objects, followed by a striking series of pictures of dancers at the Moulin Rouge and other performers as well as commercial and fashion work in the burgeoning German and French magazine industry.
Known to the cognoscenti as “the Queen of the Leica”, she became a firmament in the constellation of Modernist photographers, included in important exhibitions in Paris and New York. Then the Second World War intervened, and Bing and her husband were both interned with other Jews in the south of France before fleeing to New York in 1941. Her photographic career gradually diminished after that, and she gave it up altogether in 1959.
Yet what she achieved from 1930 to 1940 remains a wonder to behold. “To me, she represents the established narrative of the interwar photographer,” says Nelson. “And as I began to dive deeper, I started to think about this larger community of women photographers who were entering the field, particularly in Germany and France. Did they have the same experiences as Bing, different experiences? But then I just started asking, wait a minute, was that true elsewhere [in the world]? What I really wanted to do was hopefully move beyond the Euro-American narrative that has really structured the history of photography.”
“I just felt that there wasn’t a look at the greater diversity of practitioners during the Modern period. So I took off down that road.”
Extract from Nancy Kenney. “Triumphant in their time, yet largely erased later: a Met exhibition explores ‘The New Woman Behind the Camera’,” on The Art Newspaper website 1st July 2021 [Online] Cited 22/07/2021
Germaine Krull (German, French, and Dutch (born Poland) 1897-1985 Wetzlar, Germany) La Tour Eiffel (The Eiffel Tower) c. 1928 Gelatin silver print 8 7/8 in. × 6 in. (22.5 × 15.2cm) Museum Folkwang, Essen
Elfriede Stegemeyer (German, 1908-1988) Glühbirne, Spiralfeder, Quadrate und Kreise (Light Bulb, Spring, Squares, and Circles) 1934 Gelatin silver photogram Image: 23.5 x 17.1cm (9 1/4 x 6 3/4 in.) The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
From 1929 to 1932, Stegemeyer (German, 1908-1988) studied art in Berlin and Cologne. In Cologne she was involved in the activities of the Cologne Progressive art association together with Raoul Ubac, Heinrich Hoerle and others. From 1932 to 1938 Stegemeyer concentrated on photographic experiments such as cameraless photography, multiple exposure, photomontage and object studies. Meeting Raoul Hausmann in his Ibiza exile in 1935 nourished her photographic studies of landscape and rural architecture (also during travels in Eastern Europe in the late 1930s). Stegemeyer took part in underground political resistance activities in Nazi Germany, which led to her imprisonment in 1941. Her archive was destroyed during air raids in Berlin in 1943. After the war, Stegemeyer’s work shifted towards drawing, painting, writing and prize-winning animation. In her late work in the 1980s, the artist turned to montage work of different materials.
Text from the Kicken Berlin website [Online] Cited 16/09/2021
From 1930 to 1934 Maar turned her camera to the inhabitants of the streets of Paris and London, blending documentary and Surrealist modes. Her photographs often focus on socially marginal figures such as the poor or disabled, revealing her own political engagement. In this striking image, an adolescent with rumpled hair protectively grasps a cat to his chest, his gaze challenging Maar’s camera. The boy’s expression and posture imbue this chance encounter – and the composition – with an arresting psychological dimension.
Marjorie Content (American, 1895-1984) Adam Trujillo and His Son Pat, Taos Summer 1933 Gelatin silver print 4 1/2 × 5 9/16 in. (11.5 × 14.2 cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Purchased as the Gift of the Gallery Girls
Marjorie Content (1895-1984) was an American photographer from New York City active in modernist social and artistic circles. Her photographs were rarely published and never exhibited in her lifetime. Since the late 20th century, collectors and art historians have taken renewed interest in her work. Her photographs have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chrysler Museum of Art; her work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions.
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Fort Peck Dam, Montana 1936 Gelatin silver print 12 15/16 × 10 13/16 in. (32.9 × 27.4cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) World’s Highest Standard of Living 1937 Gelatin silver print
Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) Stairway to the Cathedral, Spain 1938 Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 × 7 1/16 in. (24.1 × 17.9cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) Sin titulo (Milicianos en una trinchera/Militiamen in a trench) 1937-1938 Gelatin silver print 7 1/2 × 7 1/2 in. (19 × 19cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, R. K. Mellon Family Foundation
Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000)
Kati Horna (May 19, 1912 – October 19, 2000), born Katalin Deutsch, was a Hungarian-born Mexican photojournalist, surrealist photographer and teacher. She was born in Budapest and lived in France, Berlin, Spain, and later was naturalised Mexican. Most of her work was lost during the Spanish Civil War. She was also one of the most influential women artists/photographers of her time. Through her photographs she was able to change the way that people viewed war. One way that Horna was able to do this was through the utilisation of a strategy called “gendered witnessing”. Gendered witnessing consisted of putting a more “feminine” view on the notion that war was a predominantly masculine thing. Horna became a legendary photographer after taking on a woman’s perspective of the war, she was able to focus on the behind the scenes, which led her to portraying the impact the war had on women and children. One of her most striking images is the Tête de poupée. Horna worked for various magazines including Mujeres and S.NOB, in which she published a series of Fétiches; but even her more commercial commissions often contained surreal touches. …
In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, she moved to Barcelona, commissioned by the Spanish Republican government and the Confédération Générale du Travail, to document the war as well as record the everyday life of communities on the front lines, such as Aragón, Valencia, Madrid, and Lérida. She photographed elderly women, young children, babies and mothers, and was considered visionary for her choice of subject matter. She was editor of the magazine Umbral (where she me José Horna). Kati Horna collaborated with other magazines, most of which were anarchic, such as Tiempos Nuevos, Libre-Studio, Mujeres Libres and Tierra y Libertad. Her images of scenes from the civil war not only revealed her Republican sympathies but also gained her almost legendary status. Some of her photos were used as posters for the Republican cause.
Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) Blind Man Walking, Paris 1933-1938 Gelatin silver print on newspaper mount 11 3/16 × 8 3/4 in. (28.4 × 22.3cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Japanese-American owned grocery store in Oakland, California March 1942 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Children of the Weill Public School shown in a flag pledge ceremony, San Francisco, California April 1942, printed c. 1965 Gelatin silver print 9 1/4 × 6 7/8 in. (23.5 × 17.4cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Hansel Mieth (German, 1909-1998) March of Dimes Dance 1943 Gelatin silver print Collection of Ron Perisho
Homai Vyarawalla (Indian, 1913-2012) The Victoria Terminus, Bombay early 1940s, printed later Inkjet print 11 9/16 × 11 13/16 in. (29.3 × 30cm) Homai Vyarawalla Archive / The Alkazi Collection of Photography
Homai Vyarawalla (Indian, 1913-2012)
Homai Vyarawalla (9 December 1913 – 15 January 2012), commonly known by her pseudonym Dalda 13, was India’s first woman photojournalist. She began work in the late 1930s and retired in the early 1970s. In 2011, she was awarded Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian award of the Republic of India. She was amongst the first women in India to join a mainstream publication when she joined The Illustrated Weekly of India. …
Vyarawalla started her career in the 1930s. At the onset of World War II, she started working on assignments for Mumbai-based The Illustrated Weekly of India magazine which published many of her most admired black-and-white images. In the early years of her career, since Vyarawalla was unknown and a woman, her photographs were published under her husband’s name. Vyarawalla stated that because women were not taken seriously as journalists she was able to take high-quality, revealing photographs of her subjects without interference:
People were rather orthodox. They didn’t want the women folk to be moving around all over the place and when they saw me in a sari with the camera, hanging around, they thought it was a very strange sight. And in the beginning they thought I was just fooling around with the camera, just showing off or something and they didn’t take me seriously. But that was to my advantage because I could go to the sensitive areas also to take pictures and nobody will stop me. So I was able to take the best of pictures and get them published. It was only when the pictures got published that people realised how seriously I was working for the place.
~ Homai Vyarawalla in Dalda 13: A Portrait of Homai Vyarawalla (1995)
Eventually her photography received notice at the national level, particularly after moving to Delhi in 1942 to join the British Information Services. As a press photographer, she recorded many political and national leaders in the period leading up to independence, including Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Indira Gandhi and the Nehru-Gandhi family.
The Dalai Lama in ceremonial dress enters India through Nathu La in Sikkim on 24 November 1956, photographed by Homai Vyarawalla. In 1956, she photographed for Life Magazine the 14th Dalai Lama when he entered Sikkim in India for the first time via the Nathu La.
Most of her photographs were published under the pseudonym “Dalda 13”. The reasons behind her choice of this name were that her birth year was 1913, she met her husband at the age of 13 and her first car’s number plate read “DLD 13”.
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Buchenwald Prison 13th April 1945 Gelatin silver print
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) The Liberation of Buchenwald April 1945 Gelatin silver print
Caption from LIFE. “Deformed by malnutrition, a Buchenwald prisoner leans against his bunk after trying to walk. Like other imprisoned slave labourers, he worked in a Nazi factory until too feeble.”
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Self-Portrait with Camera c. 1933 Gelatin-silver print, toned 13 1/4 × 9 1/8 in. (33.66 × 23.18cm)
Sometime in the 1930s, Hungarian photographer Anna Barna shot “Onlooker,” a picture of a boy standing on a chair seen from behind as he peers over a palisade.
As his shadow stretches out across the planks blocking his way, it takes the shape of a bearded profile that reads as a second “onlooker” in the shot. A bit further off stands yet a third “looker” who, though quite invisible in the image, was very much present in the mind of any prewar viewer who saw the shot’s photo credit: That looker is Anna Barna, a woman who has dared to pick up the camera that would normally have been held by a man. Like all the camera-wielding women of her era, Barna made a bold move that gave her a powerful cultural presence.
That presence is on display in “The New Woman Behind the Camera,” an inspired and inspiring exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Oct. 3. In late October, it moves on to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Curated by Andrea Nelson of the NGA, the show has been installed at the Met by Mia Fineman.
The more than 200 pictures on view, taken from the 1920s through the ’50s, let us watch as women everywhere become photo pros. I guess some of their shots could have been snapped by men, but female authorship shaped what these images meant to their contemporaries. It shapes what we need to make of them now, as we grasp the challenges their makers faced.
The Met shows women photographing everything from factories to battles to the oppressed, but also gowns and children and other traditionally “feminine” subjects. Sometimes the goal is straight documentation: Figures like Dorothea Lange in the United States and Galina Sanko in the Soviet Union recorded the worlds they moved through, often at the request of their governments. But many of their sisters prefer the aggressive viewpoints and radical lightings of what was then called the New Vision, as developed at the Bauhaus and other hot spots of modern style. It was to sight what jazz was to sound.
That made the New Vision a perfect fit for the New Woman, a term that went global early in the 20th century to describe all the many women who took on roles and responsibilities – new personas and even new powers – they’d rarely had before. When a New Woman took up photography, she often turned her New Vision on herself, as one of the modern world’s most striking creations.
A self-portrait by American photographer Alma Lavenson leaves out everything but her hands and the camera they’re holding; the only thing we need to know is that Lavenson is in control of this machine, and therefore of the vision it captures.
German photographer Ilse Bing shoots into the hinged mirrors on a vanity, giving us both profile and head-on views of her face and of the Leica that almost hides it. Since antiquity, the mirror had been a symbol of woman and her vanities; Bing claims that old symbol for herself, making it yield a new image.
The mirror deployed by the German Argentine photographer Annemarie Heinrich is a silvered sphere; capturing herself and her sister in it, she depicts the fun-house pleasures, and distortions, of being a woman made New.
Heinrich’s European peers sometimes go further in disturbing their self-presentation. In “Masked Self-Portrait (No. 16),” Gertrud Arndt double- or maybe triple-exposes her face, as though to convey the troubled identity she’s taken on as a woman who dares to photograph. (Multiple exposure is almost a hallmark of New Woman photographers; maybe that shouldn’t surprise us.) In a collage titled “I.O.U. (Self-Pride),” French photographer Claude Cahun presents herself as 11 different masked faces, surrounded by the words “Under this mask, another mask. I’ll never be done lifting off all these faces.”
It’s as though the act of getting behind a camera turns any New Woman into an ancestor and avatar of Cindy Sherman, trying on all sorts of models for gender.
If there’s one problem with this show, it’s that it mostly gives us women who succeeded in achieving the highest levels of excellence, barely hinting at the much greater number of women who were prevented from reaching their creative goals by the rampant sexism of their era: talented women whose places in a photo school were given to men instead, or who were streamed into the lowest or most “feminine” tiers of the profession – retouching, or cheap kiddie portraits – or who were never promoted above studio assistant.
It’s a problem that bedevils all attempts at recovering the lost art of the disadvantaged: By telling the same stories of success that you do with white males, you risk making it look as though others were given the same chance to rise.
A quite straight shot of Chinese photojournalist Niu Weiyu may best capture what it really meant for the New Woman to start taking pictures. As snapped by her colleague Shu Ye, Niu stands perched with her camera at the edge of a cliff. Every female photographer adopted this daredevil pose, at least in cultural terms, just by clicking a shutter.
Several of the women featured at the Met actually took over studios originally headed by husbands or fathers. In the Middle East and Asia, this gave them access to a reality that men could not document: Taken in 1930s Palestine, a photo by an entrepreneur who styled herself as “Karimeh Abbud, Lady Photographer” shows three women standing before the camera with complete self-confidence – the youngest smiles broadly into the lens – in a relaxed shot that a man would have been unlikely to capture.
Gender was almost as powerfully in play for women in the West. If taking up a camera was billed as “mannish,” many a New Woman in Europe was happy to go with that billing: Again and again, they portray themselves coiffed with the shortest of bobs, sometimes so short they read as male styles. Cahun, who at times was almost buzz-cut, once wrote “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”
Margaret Bourke-White, an American photographer who achieved true celebrity, shoots herself in a bob long enough to just about cover her ears, but this almost girlish style is more than offset by manly wool slacks. (In the 1850s, Rosa Bonheur had to get a police license to wear pants when she went to draw the horse-breakers of Paris. As late as 1972, my grandmother, born into the age of the New Woman, boasted of the courage she’d recently mustered to start wearing pants to work.)
A New Woman clicking the shutter might seem almost as much on display as any subject before her lens. Bourke-White’s photo of the Fort Peck dam graced the cover of Life magazine’s first modern issue, in 1936, and it got that play in part because it had been shot by her: The editors go on about that “surprising” fact as they introduce their new magazine, and how they were “unable to prevent Bourke-White from running away with their first nine pages.”
When a subject is in fact another woman, shooter and sitter can collapse into one. Lola Álvarez Bravo, the great Mexican photographer, once took a picture of a woman with shadows crisscrossing her face, titling it “In Her Own Prison.” As a photographic Everywoman, Álvarez Bravo comes off as in that same jail.
To capture the predicament of women in Catholic Spain, Kati Horna double-exposed a girl’s face onto the barred windows beside a cathedral; it’s hard not to see the huge eye that looks out at us from behind those bars as belonging to Horna herself, peering through the viewfinder.
For centuries before they went New, women had been objectified and observed as few men were likely to be. Picking up the camera didn’t pull eyes away from a New Woman; it could put her all the more clearly on view. But thanks to photography, she could begin to look back, with power, at the world around her.
Bernice Kolko (American born Poland, 1905-1970) Photogram c. 1944 Gelatin silver print 9 3/4 × 11 1/2 in. (24.8 × 29.2cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Bernice Kolko (American born Poland, 1905-1970)
Bernice Kolko (1905-1970) was a Polish-American photographer. During World War II, she joined the Women’s Army Corps as a photographer. In 1953 she became friends with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who she had met when they visited Chicago. They invited her to Mexico, where she travelled, taking pictures of the women of Mexico. She and Kahlo travelled frequently, with Kolko taking photos of Kahlo in the two years before Kahlo’s death. In 1955 she became the first woman to exhibit at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.
Rebecca Lepkoff (American, 1916–2014) 14th Street, New York City 1947-48 Gelatin silver print 10 5/8 × 12 9/16 in. (27 × 31.9cm) Purchase, Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation Gift, 2012 Metropolitan Museum of Art
Rebecca Lepkoff (American, 1916-2014)
Rebecca Lepkoff (born Rebecca Brody; 1916-2014) was an American photographer. She is best known for her images depicting daily life in the Lower East Side neighbourhood of New York City in the 1940s. …
Fascinated by the area where she lived, she first photographed Essex and Hester Street which, she recalls, “were full of pushcarts.” They no longer exist today but then “everyone was outside: the mothers with their baby carriages, and the men just hanging out.” Her photographs captured people in the streets, especially children, as well as the buildings and the signs on store fronts.
In 1950, she also photographed people at work and play in Vermont. The images were used to illustrate the book Almost Utopia: The Residents and Radicals of Pikes Falls, Vermont, 1950, published by the Vermont Historical Society. They present the area before its character was changed with paved roads and vacationers. In the 1970s, she photographed the next generation of inhabitants in a series she called Vermont Hippies.
Rebecca Lepkoff was an active member of the Photo League from 1947 until 1951 when it was dissolved as a “communist organisation” in the McCarthy era.
Grete Stern (Argentinian born Germany, 1904-1999) Sueño No. 1: “Articulos eléctricos para el hogar” (Dream No. 1: “Electrical Household items”) 1949 Gelatin silver print 18 1/4 × 15 11/16 in. (46.4 × 39.8cm) Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2012 Metropolitan Museum of Art
In 1948 the Argentine women’s magazine Idilio introduced a weekly column called “Psychoanalysis Will Help You,” which invited readers to submit their dreams for analysis. Each week, one dream was illustrated with a photomontage by Stern, a Bauhaus-trained photographer and graphic designer who fled Berlin for Buenos Aires when the Nazis came to power. Over three years, Stern created 140 photomontages for the magazine, translating the unconscious fears and desires of its predominantly female readership into clever, compelling images. Here, a masculine hand swoops in to “turn on” a lamp whose base is a tiny, elegantly dressed woman. Rarely has female objectification been so erotically and electrically charged.
Alice Brill (Brazilian born Cologne, 1920-2013) Street Vendor at the Chá Viaduct, São Paulo c. 1953 Gelatin silver print 32 × 32cm (12 5/8 × 12 5/8 in.) Instituto Moreira Salles
Alice Brill (Brazilian born Germany, 1920-2013)
Alice Brill (December 13, 1920 – June 29, 2013) was a German-born Brazilian photographer, painter, and art critic.
Alice Brill Czapski was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1920. She was Jewish, the daughter of the painter Erich Brill [de] and the journalist Martha Brill [de]. In 1934 she and her parents left Germany to escape the National Socialist (Nazi) regime; her mother, long divorced from Erich Brill, emigrated to Brazil, and in 1935 Alice Brill and her father also emigrated there. Influenced by a schoolteacher, she recorded in a diary the trips made during exile, with a photographic camera given to her by her father. She passed through Spain, Italy and the Netherlands before landing in Brazil. Her father returned alone to Germany in 1936. He was subsequently imprisoned and died, a Holocaust victim, in 1942 at the Jungfernhof concentration camp.
At age 16 she studied with the painter Paulo Rossi Osir, who influenced her production of photographs and batik paintings. She participated in the Santa Helena Group, an informal association of painters from São Paulo, maintaining contact with artists such as Mario Zanini and Alfredo Volpi. In 1946, she won a Hillel Foundation scholarship to study at the University of New Mexico and the Art Students League of New York where she studied photography, painting, sculpture, engraving, art history, philosophy and literature.
After returning to Brazil in 1948, she worked as a photographer for Habitat magazine, coordinated by architect Lina Bo Bardi. She documented architecture, fine arts and made portraits of artists, as well as recording works and exhibitions of the São Paulo Art Museum and Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art He also participated in an expedition in Corumbá organised by the Central Brazil Foundation, photographing the Carajás people. In 1950, she performed the essay at the Psychiatric Hospital of Juqueri at the invitation of the plastic artist Maria Leontina da Costa, registering the wing of the Free Art Workshop. In the same year, Pietro Maria Bardi commissioned an essay on São Paulo for the city’s fourth centennial. It portrayed the process of modernisation of the city between 1953 and 1954, but the publication project was not completed.
In addition to being a photographer, she worked as a painter, participating in the I and IX Bienal de São Paulo (1951 and 1967 respectively), as well as several individual and collective exhibitions. Her subjects involved urban landscapes and abstractionism, performing watercolours and batik paintings. She graduated in philosophy from PUC-SP in 1976, graduating in 1982 and a doctorate in 1994 and worked as an art critic, writing articles for the culture section of the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, which were later collected in the book “Da arte e da linguagem” (Perspectiva, 1988).
Frieda Gertrud Riess (German, 1890-1957) The Sculptor Renée Sintenis 1925, printed 1925-1935 Gelatin silver print 8 7/8 × 6 13/16 in. (22.6 × 17.3 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Bequest of Gertrude Palmer, by exchange
Frieda Gertrud Riess (German, 1890-1957)
Frieda Gertrud Riess (1890 – c. 1955) was a German portrait photographer in the 1920s with a studio in central Berlin.
In 1918, she opened a business on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin; it became one of the most popular studios in the city. Partly as a result of her marriage to the journalist Rudolf Leonhard in the early 1920s, she extended her clientele to celebrities such as playwright Walter Hasenclever, novelist Gerhart Hauptmann and actors and actresses including Tilla Durieux, Asta Nielsen and Emil Jannings. This group extended to include dancers, music-hall stars and fine artists: Anna Pavlova, Mistinguett, Lil Dagover, Renée Sintenis, Max Liebermann and Xenia Boguslawskaja. Other clients included representatives of the old aristocracy, diplomats, politicians and bankers. Boxers (and nudes thereof) were a notable group in which she specialised, including Erich Brandl, Hermann Herse, Max Schmeling, Ensor Fiermonte.
Such was her renown that she became known simply as Die Reiss. While on a trip to Italy in 1929, she was invited to photograph Benito Mussolini. In addition, she contributed to the journals and magazines of the day including Die Dame, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, Der Weltspiegel, Querschnit and Koralle. In 1932, after falling in love with Pierre de Margerie, the French ambassador in Berlin (1922-1931). She moved to Paris with him, and he died in 1942. She disappeared from the public eye during the Occupation. Even the date of her death cannot be clearly established and her place of burial remains unknown.
Renée Sintenis, née Renate Alice Sintenis (March 20, 1888, Glatz – April 22, 1965, West Berlin), was a German sculptor, medalist and graphic artist who worked in Berlin. She created mainly small-sized animal sculptures, female nudes, portraits (drawings and sculptures) and sports statuettes. …
In 1928 Sintenis won the bronze medal in the sculpture section of the art competition for the Summer Olympics in Amsterdam; she is thought to be the first LGBTQ+ Olympic medallist. Renée Sintenis took part in the 1929 exhibition of the German Association of Artists in the Cologne State House, with five small-format animal sculptures. In 1930 she met the French sculptor Aristide Maillol in Berlin. In 1931 she was appointed as the first sculptor, and second woman after Käthe Kollwitz, together with 13 other artists, to join the Berlin Academy of the Arts – Fine Arts section, although the National Socialists forced her to leave in 1934.
Due to her body size, slim figure, charisma, her self-confident, fashionable demeanor and androgynous beauty, she was often portrayed by artists like her husband, Emil Rudolf Weiß and Georg Kolbe, and by photographers, like Hugo Erfurth, Fritz Eschen and Frieda Riess. She embodied perfectly the type of the ‘new woman’ of the 1920s, even if she appeared rather reserved.
The exhibition conceptualised a utopian and melancholic gallery that follows the tracks of lesbian forms of pleasure and experience as well as lesbian identity constructions and lifestyles. In this context, the exhibition understood and recognised the term “lesbian” in its broadest sense, which is to say that desire and gender can be fluid.
Yevonde Cumbers Middleton (British, 1893–1975) Lady Bridget Poulett as ‘Arethusa’ 1935 Vivex colour print 14 3/4 × 10 3/4 in. (37.5 × 27.3cm) National Portrait Gallery, London, Given by Madame Yevonde, 1971
Yevonde Philone Middleton (English, 1893-1975)
Yevonde Philone Middleton (English, 1893-1975) was an English photographer, who pioneered the use of colour in portrait photography. She used the professional name Madame Yevonde. …
Cumbers sought, and was given, a three-year apprenticeship with the portrait photographer Lallie Charles. With the technical grounding she received from working with Charles, and a gift of £250 from her father, at the age of 21 Yevonde set up her own studio at 92 Victoria Street, London, and began to make a name for herself by inviting well-known figures to sit for free. Before long her pictures were appearing in society magazines such as the Tatler and The Sketch. Her style quickly moved away from the stiff “pouter pigeon” look of Lallie Charles, toward a still formal, but more creative, style. Her subjects were often pictured looking away from the camera, and she began using props to creative effect.
By 1921 Madame Yevonde had become a well-known and respected portrait photographer, and moved to larger premises at 100 Victoria Street. Here she began taking advertising commissions and also photographed many of the leading personalities of the day, including A.A. Milne, Barbara Cartland, Diana Mitford, Louis Mountbatten and Noël Coward.
In the early 1930s, Yevonde began experimenting with colour photography, using the new Vivex colour process from Colour Photography Limited of Willesden. The introduction of colour photography was not universally popular; indeed photographers and the public alike were so used to black-and-white pictures that early reactions to the new process tended toward the hostile. Yevonde, however, was hugely enthusiastic about it and spent countless hours in her studio experimenting with how to get the best results. Her dedication paid huge dividends. In 1932 she put on an exhibition of portrait work at the Albany Gallery, half monochrome and half colour, to enthusiastic reviews.
In 1933, Madame Yevonde moved once again, this time to 28 Berkeley Square. She began using colour in her advertising work as well as her portraits, and took on other commissions too. In 1936, she was commissioned by Fortune magazine to photograph the last stages in the fitting out of the new Cunard liner, the Queen Mary. This was very different from Yevonde’s usual work, but the shoot was a success. People printed twelve plates, and pictures were exhibited in London and New York City. One of the portraits was of artist Doris Zinkeisen who was commissioned together with her sister Anna to paint several murals for the Queen Mary. Another major coup was being invited to take portraits of leading peers to mark the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. She joined the Royal Photographic Society in 1933, and became a Fellow in 1940. The RPS Collection holds examples of her work.
Yevonde’s most famous work was inspired by a theme party held on 5 March 1935, where guests dressed as Roman and Greek gods and goddesses. Yevonde subsequently took studio portraits of many of the participants (and others), in appropriate costume and surrounded by appropriate objects. This series of prints showed Yevonde at her most creative, using colour, costume and props to build an otherworldly air around her subjects. She went on to produce further series based on the signs of the zodiac and the months of the year. Partly influenced by surrealist artists, particularly Man Ray, Yevonde used surprising juxtapositions of objects which displayed her sense of humour.
This highly creative period of Yevonde’s career would only last a few years. At the end of 1939, Colour Photographs Ltd closed, and the Vivex process was no more. It was the second major blow to Yevonde that year – her husband, the playwright Edgar Middleton, had died in April. Yevonde returned to working in black and white, and produced many notable portraits. She continued working up until her death, just two weeks short of her 83rd birthday, but is chiefly remembered for her work of the 1930s, which did much to make colour photography respectable.
Lady Bridget Elizabeth Felicia Henrietta Augusta Poulett (English, 1912-1975), was an English socialite, sometime model of Cecil Beaton.
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) La técnica [or, Mella’s Typewriter] 1928 Gelatin silver print 24 × 19.2cm (9 7/16 × 7 9/16 in.) The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Anonymous gift
Irene Bayer-Hecht (American, 1898-1991) Female Student with Beach Ball c. 1925 Gelatin silver print 4 1/8 × 3 1/16 in. (10.5 × 7.8cm) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Irene Bayer-Hecht (1898-1991) was an American born photographer involved in the Bauhaus movement. Her photographs “feature experimental approaches and candid views of life at the Bauhaus.”
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Jean Cocteau with Gun, Paris c. 1926 From Faces of the 20’s Gelatin silver print 34 x 25.5cm (13.4 x 10 in.)
Berenice Abbott in an undated photo. Photographer and source unknown 1930s Public domain
Annelise Kretschmer (1903-1987) was a German portrait photographer. Kretschmer is best known for her depictions of women in Germany in the early 20th century and is credited with helping construct the ‘Neue Frau’ or New Woman image of modern femininity.
Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) I.O.U. (Self-Pride) in Aveux non avenus 1930 Book Open: 8 3/4 × 12 1/2 in. (22.2 × 31.8cm) Closed: 8 3/4 × 6 3/4 in. (22.2 × 17.2cm) National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC,
Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) Self-portrait (reflected image in mirror with chequered jacket) 1927 Silver gelatin print
Ruth Harriet Louise (American, 1906-1944) Carmel Myers 1925-1930 Gelatin silver print 12 7/16 × 9 1/4 in. (31.6 × 23.5cm) The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of The Annenberg Foundation, acquired from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin
Ruth Harriet Louise (American, 1906-1944)
Ruth Harriet Louise (born Ruth Goldstein, January 13, 1903 – October 12, 1940) was an American photographer. She was the first woman photographer active in Hollywood, and she ran Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s portrait studio from 1925 to 1930.
Ruth Harriet Louise was born Ruth Goldstein in New York City and raised in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She was the daughter of Klara Jacobson Sandrich Goldstein, who was born in Rajec, Hungary (present-day Slovakia) and Jacob Goldstein, who was a rabbi originally from England. Her brother was director Mark Sandrich, and she was a cousin of silent film actress Carmel Myers.
Louise began working as a portrait photographer in 1922, working out of a music store down the block from the New Brunswick temple at which her father was a rabbi. Most of her photographs from this period are of family members and members of her father’s temple congregation.
In 1925 she moved to Los Angeles and set up a small photo studio on Hollywood and Vine. Louise’s first published Hollywood photo was of Vilma Banky in costume for Dark Angel, and appeared in Photoplay magazine in September 1925. When Louise was hired by MGM as chief portrait photographer, she was twenty-two years old, and the only woman working as a portrait photographer for the Hollywood studios. In a career that lasted only five years, Louise photographed all the stars, contract players, and many of the hopefuls who passed through the studio’s front gates, including Greta Garbo (Louise was one of only seven photographers permitted to make portraits of her), Lon Chaney, John Gilbert, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, Anna May Wong, Nina Mae McKinney, and Norma Shearer. It is estimated that she took more than 100,000 photos during her tenure at MGM. Today she is considered an equal with George Hurrell Sr. and other renowned glamour photographers of the era.
In addition to paying close attention to costume and setting for studio photographs, Louise also incorporated aspects of modernist movements such as Cubism, futurism, and German expressionism into her studio portraits.
Carmel Myers (American, 1899-1980) was an American actress who achieved her greatest successes in silent film.
Myers left for New York City, where she acted mainly in theatre for the next two years. She was signed by Universal, where she emerged as a popular actress in vamp roles. Her most popular film from this period – which does not feature her in a vamp role – is probably the romantic comedy All Night, opposite Rudolph Valentino, who was then a little-known actor. She also worked with him in A Society Sensation. By 1924, she was working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, making such films as Broadway After Dark, which also starred Adolphe Menjou, Norma Shearer, and Anna Q. Nilsson.
In 1925, she appeared in arguably her most famous role, that of the Egyptian vamp Iras in Ben-Hur, who tries to seduce both Messala (Francis X. Bushman) and Ben-Hur himself (Ramón Novarro). This film was a boost to her career, and she appeared in major roles throughout the 1920s, including Tell It to the Marines in 1926 with Lon Chaney, Sr., William Haines, and Eleanor Boardman. Myers appeared in Four Walls and Dream of Love, both with Joan Crawford in 1928; and in The Show of Shows (1929), a showcase of popular contemporary film actors.
Myers had a fairly successful sound career, mostly in supporting roles, perhaps due to her image as a vamp rather than as a sympathetic heroine. Subsequently, she began giving more attention to her private life following the birth of her son in May 1932. Amongst her popular sound films are Svengali (1931) and The Mad Genius (1931), both with John Barrymore and Marian Marsh, and a small role in 1944’s The Conspirators, which featured Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet.
Hildegard Rosenthal (Brazilian born Switzerland, 1913-1990) Street Scene, São Paulo c. 1940, printed later Gelatin silver print 24 × 36cm (9 7/16 × 14 3/16 in.) Instituto Moreira Salles
Hildegard Rosenthal (Brazilian born Switzerland, 1913-1990)
Hildegard Baum Rosenthal (March 25, 1913 – September 16, 1990) was a Swiss-born Brazilian photographer, the first woman photojournalist in Brazil. She was part of the generation of European photographers who emigrated during World War II and, acting in the local press, contributed to the photographic aesthetic renovation of Brazilian newspapers.
Rosenthal was born in Zurich, Switzerland. Until her adolescence, she lived in Frankfurt (Germany), where she studied pedagogy from 1929 until 1933. She lived in Paris between 1934 and 1935. Upon her return to Frankfurt, she studied photography for about 18 months in a program led by Paul Wolff [de]. Wolff emphasised small, portable cameras that used 35 mm film. These were a recent innovation at the time, and could be used unobtrusively for street photography. She also studied photographic laboratory techniques at the Gaedel Institute.
In this same period, she had entered a relationship with Walter Rosenthal. Rosenthal was Jewish, and Jews were increasingly persecuted in Germany in the 1930s under the National Socialist (Nazi) regime that took power in 1933. Walter Rosenthal emigrated to Brazil in 1936. Hildegard joined him in São Paulo in 1937. That same year she began working as a laboratory supervisor at the Kosmos photographic materials and services company. A few months later, the agency Press Information hired her as a photojournalist and she did news reports for national and international newspapers. During this period, she took photographs of the city of São Paulo and the state countryside of Rio de Janeiro and other cities in southern Brazil, as well as portraying several personalities from the São Paulo cultural scene, such as the painter Lasar Segall, the writers Guilherme de Almeida and Jorge Amado, the humorist Aparicio Torelly (Barão de Itararé) and the cartoonist Belmonte. Her images sought to capture the artist at his moment of creation, in obvious connection with his spirit of reporter. She interrupted her professional activity in 1948, after the birth of her first daughter. And in 1959, after her husband died, she took over the management of her family’s company.
Her photographs remained little known until 1974, when art historian Walter Zanini [pt] held a retrospective of her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo. The following year the Museum of Image and Sound of São Paulo (MIS) was opened with the exhibition Memória Paulistana, by Rosenthal. In 1996 the Instituto Moreira Salles acquired more than 3,000 of her negatives, in which urban scenes of São Paulo from the 1930s and 1940s stood out, during which time the city underwent a vertiginous growth, both material and cultural. Other negatives were donated by her during her life to the Lasar Segall Museum.
“Photography without people does not interest me,” she said at the Museum of Image and Sound of São Paulo in 1981.
Astfalck-Vietz‘s works offer a “range of her personal responses to the social, sexual and political transformations that shaped the German metropolis after World War One. Inspired by film and dance, they are all mediated realities in which human figures imply the figurative: a black dancer embraces a white woman, stirring Germany’s fears and fascinations about blackness and the primitive; a woman’s decapitated head conjures gutter-press reports of the grisly stigmata borne by victims of Berlin’s seedy underworld. Comprising mostly self-portraits, this show is a rich microcosm of creative registers: courage, black humour and sexual passion. In Astfalck-Vietz’s erotic images, domestic objects take on a powerful fantasy life – with a piece of lace she becomes a high society lady, a remote goddess, a masked seductress. The erotic atmosphere in these photographs encompasses dream and loneliness, joie de vivre and the mourning of lost love. Berlin, oft mythologised as a mercurial woman, is reflected in this romantic, bittersweet array of female fortunes; through it, Marta Astfalck-Vietz makes the city her own.
Almost all of her archive was lost when her Berlin home was bombed in 1943. What remains was discovered by the curator Janos Frecot in 1989 and is now housed at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin. Sadly, her original photographs are in bad condition and rarely travel. This show, however, is a precious opportunity to see reproduction prints. These works are a valuable addition to the history of Berlin’s avant-garde, but they have wider significance. They add a new facet to the practice of female self-portraiture in photography. Like Lady Hawarden before her and Cindy Sherman after, Marta Astfalck-Vietz is model, stylist and creative director in images that provocatively examine the construction of identity. As she once put it:Only when your self is no longer visible, may you be as you are.
Anonymous text from The Glasgow School of Art website 2012 [Online] Cited 22/07/2021.
Dorothy Frances Edith Wilding (10 January 1893 – 9 February 1976) was an English professional portrait photographer from Gloucester, who established successful studios in both London and New York. She is known for her portraits of the British Royal Family, some of which were used to illustrate postage stamps, and in particular for her studies of actors and celebrities which fused glamour with modernist elegance. The historian Val Williams noted Wilding’s combination of business savvy and deep understanding of aesthetic impact: ‘nobody knew better than Dorothy Wilding the power of the photograph to create or destroy the desired image’.
Diana Wynyard, CBE (born Dorothy Isobel Cox, 16 January 1906 – 13 May 1964) was an English stage and film actress.
Yva (Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon) (German, 1900-1944) Fashion Photograph c. 1930 National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection
Yva (26 January 1900 – 31 December 1944) was the professional pseudonym of Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon who was a German Jewish photographer renowned for her dreamlike, multiple exposed images. She became a leading photographer in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.
When the Nazi Party came to power, she was forced into working as a radiographer. She was deported by the Gestapo in 1942 and murdered, probably in the Majdanek concentration camp during World War II.
Marianne Breslauer (German, 1909-2001) Circus, Berlin 1931
Marianne Breslauer (German, 1909-2001)
Marianne Breslauer (married surname Feilchenfeldt, 20 November 1909 – 7 February 2001) was a German photographer, photojournalist and pioneer of street photography during the Weimar Republic.
Marianne was born in Berlin, the daughter of the architect Alfred Breslauer (1866-1954) and Dorothea Lessing (the daughter of art historian Julius Lessing). She took lessons in photography in Berlin from 1927 to 1929, and she admired the work of the then well-known portrait photographer Frieda Riess and later of the Hungarian André Kertész.
In 1929 she travelled to Paris, where she briefly became a pupil of Man Ray, whom she met through Helen Hessel, a fashion correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung and family friend. Man Ray encouraged Breslauer to “go her own way without his help.” A year later she started work for the Ullstein photo studio in Berlin, headed up by Elsbeth Heddenhausen, where she mastered the skills of developing photos in the dark-room. Until 1934 her photos were published in many leading magazines such as the Frankfurter Illustrierten, Der Querschnitt, Die Dame, Zürcher Illustrierten, Der Uhu and Das Magazin.
In the early 1930s, Breslauer travelled to Palestine and Alexandria, before traveling with her close friend, the Swiss writer, journalist, and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, whom she met through Ruth Landshoff and whom she photographed many times. She described Schwarzenbach as: “Neither a woman nor a man, but an angel, an archangel.” In 1933 they travelled together to the Pyrenees to carry out a photographic assignment for the Berlin photographic agency Academia. This led to Marianne’s confrontation with the anti-Semitic practices then coming into play in Germany. Her employers wanted her to publish her photos under a pseudonym, to hide the fact that she was Jewish. She refused to do so and left Germany. However her photo Schoolgirls won the “Photo of the Year” award at the “Salon international d’art photographique” in Paris in 1934.
She emigrated in 1936 to Amsterdam where she married the art dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt [de] – he had previously left Germany after seeing Nazis break up an auction of modern art. Her first child, Walter, was born here. Family life and work as an art dealer hindered her work in photography, which she gave up to concentrate on her other activities. In 1939 the family fled to Zurich where her second son, Konrad, was born.
After the war, in 1948, the couple set up an art business specialising in French paintings and 19th-century art. When her husband died in 1953 she took over the business, which she ran with her son Walter from 1966 to 1990. She died in Zollikon, near Zurich.
Breslauer’s work demonstrates an interest in overlooked or marginalised subjects. Her earlier work in Paris, encouraged by the surrealist photographer Man Ray, focused on the homeless along the river Seine.
Her portraits show influence from the photographic experiments of Bauhaus students and the contemporary style Neues Sehen. Nonetheless, her photography conveys a strong personal interest in and approach to capturing dynamic motion, conveyed partially through her selection of bustling urban settings.
Breslauer ended work in her photographic career in 1936 due to the rise of Nazism.
Sandra Weiner (Polish-American, 1921-2014) Boy Smoking c. 1948 Gelatin silver print 6 1/4 x 9 3/8in (16.58 x 24.7cm)
Sandra Weiner (née Smith; 1921-2014) was a Polish-American street photographer and children’s book author.
Weiner was born in Drohiczan, Poland, and emigrated to the United States in 1928. She joined the Photo League in 1942. There, she first studied under photographers Paul Strand, and Dan Weiner whom she would later marry. Following the dissolution of the Photo League in 1951, she was a commercial photographer in the 1950s and later wrote four published children’s books.
Lola Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1903-1993) The Freeloaders c. 1955 Gelatin silver print 9 5/8 × 11 3/4 in. (24.4 × 29.8cm) Collection of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 Phone: 212-535-7710
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Seven Yachts in the Bay) Nd Gelatin silver print 29 x 37cm (11.4 x 14.6 in.)
A second tranche of photographs from the Australian photographer Max Dupain. This means that Art Blart has one of the largest groups of his work online with larger images.
In this posting I have grouped the images through ships and boats; surf and beach; nudes / montage / surrealism; city and Harbour Bridge; dance and abstraction; portraits and Pictorialism – finishing with two stunning bromoil landscapes.
All images are used under fair use conditions for the purpose of educational research. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Hero Towing Pamir to Sydney Heads c. 1940s Gelatin silver print 41 x 39.5cm
Pamir was a four-masted barque built for the German shipping company F. Laeisz. One of their famous Flying P-Liners, she was the last commercial sailing ship to round Cape Horn, in 1949. By 1957, she had been outmoded by modern bulk carriers and could not operate at a profit. Her shipping consortium’s inability to finance much-needed repairs or to recruit sufficient sail-trained officers caused severe technical difficulties. On 21 September 1957, she was caught in Hurricane Carrie and sank off the Azores, with only six survivors rescued after an extensive search.
Text from the Wikipedia website
A model of Pamir, a four-masted barque that was one of the famous Flying P-Liner sailing ships of the German shipping company F. Laeisz
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Rigging Sails Nd Gelatin silver print 25.5 x 25cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Life at the Spit Nd Gelatin silver print 23.5 x 22cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Aerial of Waters Edge) 1930s Gelatin silver print 26 x 24cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Aerial View of Manly Beach) 1938 Gelatin silver print 23 x 31cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Life Guards Marching with Reel) Nd Gelatin silver print 34.5 x 30cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Sunbaking by the Wall) Nd Gelatin silver print 30.5 x 32cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Surfboard, Umbrella and Crowds) Nd Gelatin silver print 29 x 25.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Stiff Nor’Easter 1940s Gelatin silver print 38 x 40.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Beach Watchers, Bondi 1940s Gelatin silver print 28.5 x 25.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Surf Race Start 1947 Gelatin silver print 36 x 37cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Picnicker Leaving the Beach Nd Gelatin silver print 30 x 34.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Beach Play 1937 Gelatin silver print 30.5 x 36cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Nude Figures) 1930s Gelatin silver print 24 x 20cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Nude in Shadow on the Sand) 1937 Gelatin silver print 35.5 x 30cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Nude Montage) 1930s Gelatin silver print 34.5 x 33cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Standing Nude on Sand) 1930s Gelatin silver print 39 x 33.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Nude Sunbaker) 1939 Gelatin silver print 35 x 46.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Rhythmic Form) 1935 Gelatin silver print
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Debussy Quartet in G 1937 Gelatin silver print 30.5 x 23.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Solarised Nude and Rays of Light) 1935 Gelatin silver print 12.5 x 9.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Nude and Pole) 1934 Gelatin silver print 45.5 x 36cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Little Nude 1938 Gelatin silver print 41 x 31cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Spontaneous Composition 1935 Gelatin silver print 38 x 41cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Moira in the Mirror) 1931 Gelatin silver print 25.5 x 28cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Elizabeth Street, Melbourne) Nd Gelatin silver print 40.5 x 39cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Angel Statue, 392 Bus and Terraces) Nd Gelatin silver print 28 x 38cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Australian Hotel, The Rocks) Nd Gelatin silver print 31 x 38cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Hickson Road) Nd Gelatin silver print 39 x 50.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Darling Harbour from Studio Window 1940s Gelatin silver print 32 x 45cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Brooms for Sale 1950 Gelatin silver print 31.5 x 44.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) George Street Silhouette 1940 Gelatin silver print 30.5 x 29.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Central Station, Sydney 1939 Gelatin silver print 40 x 39cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Collins Street, Melbourne 1946 Gelatin silver print 42 x 39.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Morning, Kings Cross Ice Wagon Nd Gelatin silver print 45 x 40.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Parking, Macquarie Street 1930s Gelatin silver print 39 x 48.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Suburban Terraces Nd Gelatin silver print 28 x 38cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Hobart Siesta 1947 Gelatin silver print 38.5 x 38cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Diver, Northbridge Baths Nd Gelatin silver print 23 x 18.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Milson’s Point) Nd Gelatin silver print 30.5 x 32.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Harbour Bridge at Dusk) Nd Gelatin silver print 31 x 28.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Sydney from South Pylon 1938 Gelatin silver print 38 x 50.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Harbour Bridge Closed at Night) 1946 Gelatin silver print 18 x 24cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Harbour Bridge with Traffic, Buses and Policeman) 1940-1950s Gelatin silver print 17.5 x 24cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Observatory Hill, Looking North to the Sydney Harbour Bridge 1940 Gelatin silver print 40.5 x 40cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Four Graces) Nd Gelatin silver print 37 x 48cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Four Graces) Nd Gelatin silver print 24 x 30.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Design – Suburbia 1933 Gelatin silver print 29.5 x 23cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Design in Barred Light Nd Gelatin silver print 25 x 18.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Timelapse Nude Figure) Nd Gelatin silver print 23.5 x 29.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Nude Figure and Light) 1930s Gelatin silver print 30.5 x 36cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Portrait and Shadows) Nd Gelatin silver print 50 x 40cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Domestic Poem, Douglas Stewart Nd Gelatin silver print 27 x 26cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Jean 1936-1937 Gelatin silver print 37 x 31cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Tired Soldier in Queensland Train 1943 Gelatin silver print 45 x 40.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Hostel Breakfast Nd Gelatin silver print 31 x 41cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Three Men at Work) 1940s Gelatin silver print 52 x 49cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Waiting for the Queen 1954 Gelatin silver print 38.5 x 39.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) (Waiting for the Queen) Nd Gelatin silver print 24.5 x 24cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Enter The Queen 1954 Gelatin silver print 50 x 50cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Gloucester Landscape 1951 Gelatin silver print 40.5 x 50.5cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Sundown, Mona Vale Marshes 1932 18.5 x 24cm
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) The Flight of the Spectres 1932 Bromoil 27.5 x 29cm
Installation view of the exhibition László Moholy-Nagy and New Typography: A Reconstruction of a Berlin Exhibition from 1929 at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
A small, tight, focused exhibition which was stimulating for anyone interested in graphic design, photography, and typography – Neue Typografie.
Highlights included Covers for the Bauhaus books, 1925-1930, travel posters by A. M. Cassandre, plates from Moholy-Nagy’s 1929 Wohin geht die typographische Entwicklung? (Where is typography headed?) and a poster for the 1929 exhibition film und foto.
The inventiveness and creativity with colour, collage and the use of negative and positive space was peerless, elemental.
Wohin geht die typographische Entwicklung? Where is typography headed?
Installation views of the exhibition László Moholy-Nagy and New Typography: A Reconstruction of a Berlin Exhibition from 1929 at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Photos: Marcus Bunyan
die besten stuhl modelle der heutigen produktion The best models of today’s production ausstellung exhibition der Stuhl (installation view) 1929 Poster kunstgewerbemuseum Arts and Crafts Museum Kunstbibliothek der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition László Moholy-Nagy and New Typography: A Reconstruction of a Berlin Exhibition from 1929 at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Photo: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Installation view of the exhibition László Moholy-Nagy and New Typography: A Reconstruction of a Berlin Exhibition from 1929 at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin showing at left, Ausstellung Europäisches Kunstgewerbe (Exhibition of European applied arts) 1927; in the centre, Der Stuhl. Neue Typografie (New typography) 1929; and at right, Umschläge zu den Bauhausbüchern, 1925-1930 (Covers for the Bauhaus books, 1925-1930) 1925-1930 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) Ausstellung Europäisches Kunstgewerbe (Exhibition of European applied arts) (installation view) 1927 Poster Druckerei Ernst Hedrich Nachfolger, Leipzig Buchdruck Ernst Hedrich printer, Leipzig Letterpress Lithograph Kunstbibliothek der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) Ausstellung Europäisches Kunstgewerbe (Exhibition of European applied arts) 1927 Poster Druckerei Ernst Hedrich Nachfolger, Leipzig Buchdruck Ernst Hedrich printer, Leipzig Letterpress Lithograph 35 1/4 x 23 3/4″ (89.5 x 60.3cm) Kunstbibliothek der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) Der Stuhl. Neue Typografie (New typography) (installation view) 1929 Poster Entwerfer Berek-Druck (Nachweiszeit: 1928-1940), Drucker Designer Berek-Druck (record time: 1928-1940), printer Printed in Berlin Printing ink (black) & paper Linocut 61.0 x 43.5cm Kunstbibliothek der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) Umschläge zu den Bauhausbüchern, 1925-1930 (Covers for the Bauhaus books, 1925-1930) (installation view) 1925-1930 Book covers Druckerei Hesse & Becker, Leipzig Hesse & Becker printing company, Leipzig Druckerei Ohlenroth, Erfurt Klischees von Dr. von Löbbeke u. Co., Erfurt Buchdruck Ohlenroth printing company, Erfurt Letterpress Kunstbibliothek der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) Bauhausbücher 8, L. Moholy-Nagy: Malerei, Fotografie, Film 1925 Albert Langen Verlag Herstellung, Entwerfer, Mitarbeit, Verleger Albert Langen Verlag, Manufacture, designer, collaboration, publisher Offset printing on paper and letterpress Art Library / Collection of graphic design Kunstbibliothek der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition László Moholy-Nagy and New Typography: A Reconstruction of a Berlin Exhibition from 1929 at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin showing at left, Etoile du Nord 1927 (below); and at second left, Chemin de Fer du Nord. Vitesse-Luxe-Confort 1929 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
A. M. Cassandre (French, 1901-1968) Etoile du Nord (North Star) 1927 Poster Druckerei Hachard et Cie., Paris Hachard et Cie. Printing house, Paris Lithograph
A. M. Cassandre (French, 1901-1968)
Cassandre, pseudonym of Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron (24 January 1901 – 17 June 1968) was a French painter, commercial poster artist, and typeface designer.
He was born Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron in Kharkiv, Ukraine, to French parents. As a young man, Cassandre moved to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Julian. The popularity of posters as advertising afforded him an opportunity to work for a Parisian printing house. Inspired by cubism as well as surrealism, he earned a reputation with works such as Bûcheron (Woodcutter), a poster created for a cabinetmaker that won first prize at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes.
Cassandre became successful enough that with the help of partners he was able to set up his own advertising agency called Alliance Graphique, serving a wide variety of clients during the 1930s. He is perhaps best known for his posters advertising travel, for clients such as the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. He was a pioneer on airbrush arts.
His creations for the Dubonnet wine company were among the first posters designed in a manner that allowed them to be seen by occupants in moving vehicles. His posters are memorable for their innovative graphic solutions and their frequent denotations to such painters as Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso. In addition, he taught graphic design at the École des Arts Décoratifs and then at the École d’Art Graphique.
With typography an important part of poster design, the company created several new typeface styles. Cassandre developed Bifur in 1929, the sans serif Acier Noir in 1935, and in 1937 an all-purpose font called Peignot. In 1936, his works were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City which led to commissions from Harper’s Bazaar to do cover designs.
A. M. Cassandre (French, 1901-1968) Chemin de Fer du Nord. Vitesse-Luxe-Comfort (Northern Railway. Speed-Luxury-Comfort) 1929 Poster Druckerei L. Danel, Lille L. Danel printing house, Lille Lithograph
Max Burchartz (1887-1961) Schubertfeier der Städtischen Bühnen Essen (Schubert celebration of the municipal theatres of Essen) (installation view) 1927 Poster Druckerei F.W. Rohden Essen Buchdruck F.W. Rohden Essen printing house Letterpress
Max Burchartz (1887-1961) Kölner Kammerorchester. Konzert aum Besten des Essener Blindenfürsorge-Vereins (Cologne Chamber Orchestra. Concert for the benefit of the Essen Blind Welfare Association) (installation view) 1927 Poster Druckerei C.W. Haafeld, Essen Buchdruck C.W. Haafeld, Essen printing house Letterpress Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Max Burchartz (1887-1961) Schubertfeier der Städtischen Bühnen Essen (Schubert celebration of the municipal theatres of Essen) 1927 Poster Druckerei F.W. Rohden Essen Buchdruck F.W. Rohden Essen printing house Letterpress
Installation view of the exhibition László Moholy-Nagy and New Typography: A Reconstruction of a Berlin Exhibition from 1929 at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin showing American advertisement 1925 from The Saturday Evening Post Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition László Moholy-Nagy and New Typography: A Reconstruction of a Berlin Exhibition from 1929 at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin showing at left, Otto Baumberger’s Marque PKZ (1923, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Otto Baumberger (1889-1961) Marque PKZ (installation view) 1923 Steindruckerei Wolfensberg, Zürich Wolfensberg lithography, Zurich Lithograph Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Otto Baumberger (21 May 1889 Altstetten, Zurich – 26 December 1961 Weiningen), was a noted Swiss painter and poster artist. Baumberger produced some 200 posters of great quality and style. His realistic rendering of a herringbone tweed coat became a classic of Swiss poster, an example of a Sachplakat (object poster).
Installation view of the exhibition László Moholy-Nagy and New Typography: A Reconstruction of a Berlin Exhibition from 1929 at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
American advertisement Mallory Straws (installation view) 1926 Chicago Sunday Tribune Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Das Illustrierte Blatt (The Illustrated Sheet) Nr. 35, Page 895 “Boxweltmeister Tunneys Memoiren” (Boxing World Champion Tunney’s Memoir) 1927 First German publication
Jan Tschichold (1902-1974) Die Hose (The pants) (installation view) 1927 F. Bruckmann printing house, Munich Letterpress Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Jan Tschichold (1902-1974) Die Hose (The pants) 1927 F. Bruckmann printing house, Munich Letterpress
Jan Tschichold (German, 1902-1974) Die Frau ohne Namen (The woman without a name) (installation view) 1927 Lithographische Anstalt Gebr. Obpacher AG, Munich Lithographic Institute Gebr. Obpacher AG, Munich Letterpress Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Jan Tschichold (German, 1902-1974)
Jan Tschichold (born Johannes Tzschichhold, also known as Iwan Tschichold, or Ivan Tschichold; 2 April 1902 – 11 August 1974) was a calligrapher, typographer and book designer. He played a significant role in the development of graphic design in the 20th century – first, by developing and promoting principles of typographic modernism, and subsequently (and ironically) idealising conservative typographic structures. His direction of the visual identity of Penguin Books in the decade following World War II served as a model for the burgeoning design practice of planning corporate identity programs. He also designed the much-admired typeface Sabon. …
This artisan background and calligraphic training set him apart from almost all other noted typographers of the time, since they had inevitably trained in architecture or the fine arts. It also may help explain why he never worked with handmade papers and custom fonts as many typographers did, preferring instead to use stock fonts on a careful choice from commercial paper stocks.
Although, up to this moment, he had only worked with historical and traditional typography, he radically changed his approach after his first visit to the Bauhaus exhibition at Weimar. After being introduced to important artists such as László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters and others who were carrying out radical experiments to break the rigid schemes of conventional typography. He became sympathetic to this attempt to find new ways of expression and to reach a much more experimental way of working, but at the same time, felt it was important to find a simple and practical approach.
He became one of the most important representatives of the “new typography” and in a famous special issue of ‘typographic communications’ in 1925 with the title of “Elemental Typography”, he put together the new approaches in the form of a thesis.
After the election of Hitler in Germany, all designers had to register with the Ministry of Culture, and all teaching posts were threatened for anyone who was sympathetic to communism. Soon after Tschichold had taken up a teaching post in Munich at the behest of Paul Renner, they both were denounced as “cultural Bolshevists”. Ten days after the Nazis surged to power in March 1933, Tschichold and his wife were arrested. During the arrest, Soviet posters were found in his flat, casting him under suspicion of collaboration with communists. All copies of Tschichold’s books were seized by the Gestapo “for the protection of the German people”. After six weeks a policeman somehow found him tickets for Switzerland, and he and his family managed to escape Nazi Germany in August 1933.
Jan Tschichold (1902-1974) Die Frau ohne Namen (The woman without a name) 1927 Lithographische Anstalt Gebr. Obpacher AG, Munich Lithographic Institute Gebr. Obpacher AG, Munich Letterpress
As part of the bauhauswoche berlin 2019 (Bauhaus week Berlin 2019) the Kunstbibliothek is showing an historical exhibition room by the Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy.
This pioneering exhibition room, entitled Wohin geht die typographische Entwicklung? (Where is typography headed?), was first shown in May 1929 in the Martin-Gropius-Bau as part of the exhibition Neue Typographie (“New Typography”), organised by the Staatliche Kunstbibliothek. Moholy-Nagy had been invited to design a room presenting the future of typography. He came up with 78 wall charts with photos, texts and pictures, all of which have been preserved. The exhibition room can therefore be shown again, complemented by additional posters, letterheads, and other specimens of New Typography from the Kunstbibliothek collection.
Moreover, well-known posters and advertisements from the Kunstbibliothek collection in the style known as New Typography augment the Moholy-Nagy exhibition. The selection includes works by Willi Baumeister, A. M. Cassandre, Walter Dexel, Johannes Molzahn, Kurt Schwitters and Jan Tschichold. The functional graphic design of New Typography, a style of advertising designed by artists that gained wide acceptance in the 1920s, broke with a long design tradition in the printing trade. Its aim was to create a contemporary design: first by propagating a standardisation of fonts and the industrial DIN norms, and second, by promoting ideals of readability, clarity and directness in keeping with the principles of Constructivist Art.
The exhibition focuses on this large-scale presentation with which artist Moholy-Nagy summed up years of his own teaching work at the Bauhaus and the ideas and visions of New Typography, ranging from Jan Tschichold and Willi Baumeister to Herbert Bayer. The exhibition programme includes evening discussions evaluating Moholy-Nagy’s ideas from a contemporary standpoint. An important part of the programme will be the launch of a new publication on Moholy-Nagy’s historical exhibition, edited in collaboration with Gutenberg Design Lab at Mainz University of Applied Sciences.
Text from the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin website
Installation view of the exhibition László Moholy-Nagy and New Typography: A Reconstruction of a Berlin Exhibition from 1929 at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin showing at right, Paul Schuitema’s 13 Tentoonstelling van Schilderijen en Beeldhouw 1927 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Paul Schuitema (1897-1973) 13 Tentoonstelling van Schilderijen en Beeldhouw (13 Exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures) (installation view) 1927 Kühn & Zoon printing house, Rotterdam Lithograph Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Paul Schuitema (Dutch, 1897-1973) 13 Tentoonstelling van Schilderijen en Beeldhouw (13 Exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures) 1927 Kühn & Zoon printing house, Rotterdam Lithograph
Paul Schuitema (Dutch, 1897-1973)
Geert Paul Hendrikus Schuitema (February 27, 1897 in Groningen – October 25, 1973 in Wassenaar) was a Dutch graphic artist. He also designed furniture and expositions and worked as photographer, film director, painter and teacher for publicity design at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.
Industrial design
Schuitema studied at the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam. In the 1920s, he began to work on graphic design, applying the principles of De Stijl and constructivism to commercial advertising. Along with Gerard Kiljan and his famous colleague Piet Zwart, he followed ideas pioneered in the Soviet Union by El Lissitzky and Rodchenko, in Poland by Henryk Berlewi and in Germany by Kurt Schwitters.
During his employment at the NV Maatschappij Van Berkel Patent scale company in Rotterdam, Schuitema gained recognition for his original designs of stationery and publicity material, often using only the colours black, red and white and bold sans serif fonts. From 1926 on, he started working with photomontages, becoming one of the pioneers of this technique in the field of industrial design.
Even though he was a convinced socialist and often designed leftist publications directed at industrial workers, Schuitema also worked for major companies, such as Philips.
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures.
Internationalism, 1922-1937
Merz (periodical)
As the political climate in Germany became more liberal and stable, Schwitters’ work became less influenced by Cubism and Expressionism. He started to organise and participate in lecture tours with other members of the international avant-garde, such as Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann and Tristan Tzara, touring Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, and Germany with provocative evening recitals and lectures.
Schwitters published a periodical, also called Merz, between 1923 and 1932, in which each issue was devoted to a central theme. Merz 5 1923, for instance, was a portfolio of prints by Hans Arp, Merz 8/9, 1924, was edited and typeset by El Lissitsky, Merz 14/15, 1925, was a typographical children’s story entitled The Scarecrow by Schwitters, Kätte Steinitz and Theo van Doesburg. The last edition, Merz 24, 1932, was a complete transcription of the final draft of the Ursonate, with typography by Jan Tschichold.
His work in this period became increasingly Modernist in spirit, with far less overtly political context and a cleaner style, in keeping with contemporary work by Hans Arp and Piet Mondrian. His friendship around this time with El Lissitzky proved particularly influential, and Merz pictures in this period show the direct influence of Constructivism.
Thanks to Schwitters’ lifelong patron and friend Katherine Dreier, his work was exhibited regularly in the US from 1920 onwards. In the late 1920s he became a well-known typographer; his best-known work was the catalogue for the Dammerstocksiedlung in Karlsruhe. After the demise of Der Sturm Gallery in 1924 he ran an advertising agency called Merzwerbe, which held the accounts for Pelikan inks and Bahlsen biscuits, amongst others, and became the official typographer for Hanover town council between 1929 and 1934. Many of these designs, as well as test prints and proof sheets, were to crop up in contemporary Merz pictures. In a manner similar to the typographic experimentation by Herbert Bayer at the Bauhaus, and Jan Tschichold’s Die neue Typographie, Schwitters experimented with the creation of a new more phonetic alphabet in 1927. Some of his types were cast and used in his work. In the late 1920s Schwitters joined the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation).
Exile, 1937-1948
Norway
As the political situation in Germany under the Nazis continued to deteriorate throughout the 1930s, Schwitters’ work began to be included in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) touring exhibition organised by the Nazi party from 1933. He lost his contract with Hanover City Council in 1934 and examples of his work in German museums were confiscated and publicly ridiculed in 1935. By the time his close friends Christof and Luise Spengemann and their son Walter were arrested by the Gestapo in August 1936 the situation had clearly become perilous.
On 2 January 1937 Schwitters, wanted for an “interview” with the Gestapo, fled to Norway to join his son Ernst, who had already left Germany on 26 December 1936. His wife Helma decided to remain in Hanover, to manage their four properties. In the same year, his Merz pictures were included in the Entartete Kunst exhibition titled in Munich, making his return impossible.
Installation views of the exhibition László Moholy-Nagy and New Typography: A Reconstruction of a Berlin Exhibition from 1929 at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin showing at right, Photos: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) Prospekttitelblatt (Prospectus title page) (installation view) 1928 film und foto 1929
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) 14 Bauhausbücher 1928 Letterpress 5 7/8 x 8 1/4″ (14.9 x 21cm)
Johannes Molzahn (German, 1892-1965) Wohung und Werkraum, Werkbundausstellung in Breslau (Apartment and workshop, Werkbund exhibition in Breslau) (installation view) 1929 Schenkalowsky, Breslau (Wroclaw) printing house Lithograph Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Johannes Molzahn (German, 1892-1965)
Johannes Ernst Ludwig Molzahn was born 21 May 1892 in Duisburg. He learned drawing and photography, but later concentrated on painting. 1908-1914 he stayed in Switzerland. Molzahn became acquainted with Herwarth Walden, Walter Gropius, Theo van Doesburg and El Lissitzky. He was a member of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst. After World War I he worked as a graphic designer and through intervention of Bruno Taut became a graphics teacher in Magdeburg. He was forbidden to work by the Nazis in 1933 and fired.Eight of his works were shown in the exhibition of entartete Kunst in 1937.
He emigrated to the United States in 1938 and returned to Germany 1959, settling in Munich. He died there 31 December 1965.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Johannes Molzahn (German, 1892-1965) Wohung und Werkraum, Werkbundausstellung in Breslau (Apartment and workshop, Werkbund exhibition in Breslau) 1929 Schenkalowsky, Breslau (Wroclaw) printing house Lithograph
Exhibition dates: 20th November 2019 – 15th March 2020
Curators: Dora Maar is curated by Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Damarice Amao, Assistant Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Amanda Maddox, Associate Curator, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles with Emma Lewis, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The Tate Modern presentation is curated by Emma Lewis, Assistant Curator with Emma Jones, Curatorial Assistant, Tate Modern.
What a creative woman. But yet another abused by the ego of a male, that of her lover, Picasso.
Beth Gersh-Nesic observes, “Was Dora Maar’s brilliant career cut short by the typical conflicts facing professional women in the 1930s, and even today? Or was she a victim of Picasso’s psychological abuse, which chipped away at her original confidence? Was she compromised to the point that she only wanted to please the man she loved? According to art historian John Richardson, Dora Maar sacrificed her gifts on the altar of her art god, her idol, Picasso. Based on the early Surrealist photographs we see in her retrospective, one can only wish she hadn’t taken up with Picasso, for it seems she might have achieved far more in her lifetime without him.”
What we can say is that Maar left behind a strong body of photographic work – from fashion and commercial, to restrained, classical formalism with surrealist inflections; from street photography to “the stuff of delirium and nightmare, [which] taps into the unconscious, internalised sublime”, her Portrait of Ubu (1936, below) reminding me strongly of William Blake’s painting The Ghost of a Flea (c. 1819). Ubu is “a ghastly being of indeterminate origin and melancholy aspect… [an idea] something like l’informe, the concept Maar’s lover Georges Bataille coined to describe his fellow-Surrealists’ admiration for all things larval and grotesquely about-to-be.” Ubu is a her dark notion of a street “urchin”.
Her warped photomontages are technical marvels. “”She captures the mysterious,” Caws wrote, “in a combination of the unresolved and the sharply angled. This frequently creates a sense of ambiguity, even menace.” Caws notes that Dora Maar responded to Louis Aragon’s invocation “for each person there is one image to find that will disturb the whole universe.” Maar’s images managed to “disturb and reveal” with a bit of the macabre mixed in.”
But her images are more than a bit of this and a bit of that. They possess a utilitarian feeling in the enunciation of their menace, which makes them all the more effective when impinging on our waking dreams. Susan Sontag notes, “Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognise as modern” (Sontag, On Photography, p. 2). Thicken is the critical word. Maar’s photographs thicken our atmospheric (and mental) miasma, prescient of our modern world full of dark passages: pitch black sewers, fatbergs, drone strikes, bush fire skies, virus, murder and mayhem. In the back of my head. My eyes. Roll, roll, roll. Skewered. Roasted.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Tate Britain for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The most accomplished examples of Maar’s art are the photomontages of 1935 and 1936. There were already many vaults and arches in her Mont-Saint-Michel pictures; now she took the cloistral galleries of the Orangerie at Versailles, upended them so that they looked like sewers, and populated them with cryptic beings engaged in arcane rituals or dramas. In “The Simulator,” [below] a boy from one of her street photographs is bent backward at an obscene angle; Maar has retouched his eyes so that they roll back in his head toward us, like one of those thrashing hysterics photographed in the nineteenth century. In “29 Rue d’Astorg” (below) – of which Maar made several versions, black-and-white and hand-coloured – a human figure with a curtailed, avian head is seated beneath arches that have been subtly warped in the darkroom.
During the 1930s, Dora Maar’s provocative photomontages became celebrated icons of surrealism.
Her eye for the unusual also translated to her commercial photography, including fashion and advertising, as well as to her social documentary projects. In Europe’s increasingly fraught political climate, Maar signed her name to numerous left-wing manifestos – a radical gesture for a woman at that time.
Her relationship with Pablo Picasso had a profound effect on both their careers. She documented the creation of his most political work, Guernica 1937. He painted her many times, including Weeping Woman 1937. Together they made a series of portraits combining experimental photographic and printmaking techniques.
In middle and later life Maar withdrew from photography. She concentrated on painting and found stimulation and solace in poetry, religion, and philosophy, returning to her darkroom only in her seventies.
This exhibition will explore the breadth of Maar’s long career in the context of work by her contemporaries.
Installation views of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing, in the bottom image, the photographs Untitled (Nude) 1930s (left) and Untitled (Nude) c. 1938 (right)
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Assia 1934 Gelatin silver print 26.4 x 19.5cm
This autumn, Tate Modern presents the first UK retrospective of the work of Dora Maar (1907-1997) whose provocative photographs and photomontages became celebrated icons of surrealism. Featuring over 200 works from a career spanning more than six decades, this exhibition shows how Maar’s eye for the unusual also translated to her commercial commissions, social documentary photographs, and paintings – key aspects of her practice which have, until now, remained little known.
Born Henriette Théodora Markovitch, Dora Maar grew up between Argentina and Paris and studied decorative arts and painting before switching her focus to photography. In doing so, Maar became part of a generation of women who seized the new professional opportunities offered by advertising and the illustrated press. Tate Modern’s exhibition will open with the most important examples of these commissioned works. Around 1931, Maar set up a studio with film set designer Pierre Kéfer specialising in portraiture, fashion photography and advertising. Works such as Untitled (Les années vous guettent) c. 1935 – believed to be an advertising project for face cream that Maar made by overlaying two negatives – will reveal Maar’s innovative approach to constructing images through staging, photomontage and collage. Striking nude studies such as that of famed model Assia Granatouroff will also reveal how women photographers like Maar were beginning to infiltrate relatively taboo genres such as erotica and nude photography.
During the 1930s, Maar was active in left-wing revolutionary groups led by artists and intellectuals. Reflecting this, her street photography from this time shot in Barcelona, Paris and London captured the reality of life during Europe’s economic depression. Maar shared these politics with the surrealists, becoming one of the few photographers to be included in the movement’s exhibitions and publications. A major highlight of the show will be outstanding examples of this area of Maar’s practice, including Portrait d’Ubu 1936, an enigmatic image thought to be an armadillo foetus, and the renowned photomontages 29, rue d’Astorg c. 1936 and Le Simulateur 1935. Collages and publications by André Breton, Georges Hugnet, Paul and Nusch Eluard, and Jacqueline Lamba will place Maar’s work in context with that of her inner circle.
In the winter of 1935-1936 Maar met Pablo Picasso and their relationship of around eight years had a profound effect on both their careers. She documented the creation of his most political work Guernica 1937, offering unprecedented insight into his working process. He in turn immortalised her in the motif of the ‘weeping woman’. Together they made a series of portraits that combined experimental photographic and printmaking techniques, anticipating her energetic return to painting in 1936. Featuring rarely seen, privately-owned canvases such as La Conversation 1937 and La Cage 1943, and never-before exhibited negatives from the Dora Maar collection at the Musée National d’art Moderne, the exhibition will shed new light on the dynamic between these two artists during the turbulent wartime years.
After the Second World War, Maar began dividing her time between Paris and the South of France. During this period, she explored diverse subject matter and styles before focusing on gestural, abstract paintings of the landscape surrounding her home. Though these works were exhibited to acclaim in London and Paris into the 1950s, Maar gradually withdrew from artistic circles. As a result, the second half of her life became shrouded in mystery and speculation. The exhibition will reunite over 20 works from this little-known – yet remarkably prolific – period. Dora Maar concludes with a substantial group of camera-less photographs that she made in the 1980s when, four decades after all but abandoning the medium, Maar returned to her darkroom.
Dora Maar is curated by Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Damarice Amao, Assistant Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Amanda Maddox, Associate Curator, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles with Emma Lewis, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The Tate Modern presentation is curated by Emma Lewis, Assistant Curator with Emma Jones, Curatorial Assistant, Tate Modern.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue jointly published by Tate and the J. Paul Getty Museum and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.
Press release from Tate Britain [Online] Cited 16/11/2019
Installation views of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing at second left, Untitled (Study of Beauty) (c. 1931, below)
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Portrait of Lise Deharme, chez elle devant sa cage a oiseaux Portrait of Lise Deharme, at home in front of her birdcage 1936 Gelatin silver print
Associated with Pierre Kéfer from 1930 to 1934, she collaborated in 1931 on the photographic illustration of the art historian Germain Bazin’s book Le Mont Saint-Michel (1935). She then shared a studio with Brassaï, after which Emmanuel Sougez, the spokesman for the New Photography movement, became her mentor. Her work met the aesthetic criteria of the time: close-ups of flowers and objects, and photograms in the style of Man Ray. She also took portraits, original publicity shots, and fashion and erotic photographs. In 1934, while traveling alone in Spain, Paris and London, she shot a vast number of urban views (posters, shop windows, ordinary people). Both a passionate lover and committed intellectual, she became the mistress of the filmmaker Louis Chavance and of the writer Georges Bataille, whom she met in a left-wing activist group. She signed the Contre-Attaque manifesto and rubbed shoulders with the agitprop artistic group Octobre. A close friend of Jacqueline Lamba, who became Breton’s wife, she was fully involved in the surrealist group, of whose members she made many portraits. At the height of her creativity in 1935-1936, she composed strange and bold photomontages, the most famous being 29, rue d’Astorg and The Simulator (both below). Some of her compositions verge on eroticism, like the photomontage showing fingers crawling out of a shell and sensually digging into the sand (Untitled, 1933-1934, top). She also used her city photographs as backdrops for unsettling scenes: her Portrait of Ubu (1936, below) – in fact the picture of an armadillo foetus – conforms to the surrealists’ fascination for macabre and deformity.
Anne Reverseau. “Dora Maar,” from the Dictionnaire universel des créatrices on the Archives of Women Artists Research & Exhibitions website [Online] Cited 16/11/2019
When Maar began her career, the illustrated press was expanding quickly. This created a growing market for experimental photography. Maar embraced this opportunity, exploring the creative potential of staged images, darkroom experiments, collage and photomontage.
Most of Maar’s work had one thing in common: an uncanny atmosphere. Her connection to the surrealists led her to create fantastical images. This included using photomontage to bring together contrasting images and reflect the workings of the unconscious mind.
Unlike many other photomontage creators of this time, Maar did not use photographs taken from illustrated newspapers or magazines. Instead the images often came from her own work, including both street and landscape photography. This experimentation and obvious construction became a defining feature of Maar’s work.
Anonymous text from “Seven Things to Know: Dora Maar,” on the Tate website [Online] Cited 16/11/2019
Installation view of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing at second left, Arcade (1934, see below)
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Arcade 1934 Photomontage
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Danger 1936 Gelatin silver print
Maar’s early photomontages look almost as modish and styled as her fashion work. From a shell resting on sand, a dummy hand protrudes, with delicate fingers and painted nails, just like Maar’s own (see top image). In a way, the image could be by one of many photographers of the period – Cecil Beaton, say, or Angus McBean – who politely surrealised their pictures, as if the artistic movement were merely a visual style. Except: there is something ominously self-involved about this hybrid thing. The shell and hand recall Bataille’s obsessions with crustaceans, mollusks, and orphaned or butchered body parts. The hand rhymes with similar ones in the photographs of Claude Cahun, where they sometimes have masturbatory implications. And what are we to make of the storm-lit, gothic sky that looms over this auto-curious object?
The most accomplished examples of Maar’s art are the photomontages of 1935 and 1936. There were already many vaults and arches in her Mont-Saint-Michel pictures; now she took the cloistral galleries of the Orangerie at Versailles, upended them so that they looked like sewers, and populated them with cryptic beings engaged in arcane rituals or dramas. In “The Simulator,” (above) a boy from one of her street photographs is bent backward at an obscene angle; Maar has retouched his eyes so that they roll back in his head toward us, like one of those thrashing hysterics photographed in the nineteenth century. In “29 Rue d’Astorg” (above) – of which Maar made several versions, black-and-white and hand-coloured – a human figure with a curtailed, avian head is seated beneath arches that have been subtly warped in the darkroom.
Dora Maar also participated in the Surrealists’ group exhibitions, such as the one at Charles Ratton’s Gallery in 1936, wherein her Portrait of Ubu became the “icon of Surrealism,” according to her biographer Mary Ann Caws in her exceptional book Picasso’s Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar (2000). “She captures the mysterious,” Caws wrote, “in a combination of the unresolved and the sharply angled. This frequently creates a sense of ambiguity, even menace.” (p. 20) Caws notes that Dora Maar responded to Louis Aragon’s invocation “for each person there is one image to find that will disturb the whole universe.” Maar’s images managed to “disturb and reveal” with a bit of the macabre mixed in. (p. 71)
Installation view of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing Maar’s photographs Portrait of Ubu (1936, left), Untitled (Hand-Shell) (1934, top middle) and Danger (1936, bottom right) Photo: Tate (Andrew Dunkley)
In 1936, at the summit of her celebrity as a photographic artist, Dora Maar showed her picture “Portrait of Ubu” in the International Surrealist Exhibition, at the New Burlington Galleries, London. Named after a scatological, ur-Surrealist play by Alfred Jarry, from 1896, the black-and-white photograph shows a ghastly being of indeterminate origin and melancholy aspect. Maar would never say what the clawed, scaly creature was, nor where she had come across it. Her Ubu has elements of Jarry’s porcine, louse-like original, and, with its doleful eye and drooping ears, it also resembles an ass or an elephant. Scholars generally agree that the monster is in fact an armadillo foetus, preserved in a specimen jar. It is also an idea: something like l’informe, the concept Maar’s lover Georges Bataille coined to describe his fellow-Surrealists’ admiration for all things larval and grotesquely about-to-be.
To produce this complex image, Maar sandwiched together two negatives of the same model, one frontal and one profile, scavenged from a magazine assignment on springtime hats, and painted the background and hat (or decomposing halo?) onto the negative. Softening the emulsion, she scraped and lifted it off, techniques that involve destruction and suggest disintegration. The face evokes Picasso’s depictions of female faces, especially his 1938 paintings of weeping women for which Maar was the model. Although the divided face is not Maar’s, it is tempting to interpret it as a reflection of her emotional state at the time, torn between her career and independence and Picasso’s demands and potent personality. frontal and one profile, scavenged from a magazine assignment on springtime hats, and painted the background and hat (or decomposing halo?) onto the negative. Softening the emulsion, she scraped and lifted it off, techniques that involve destruction and suggest disintegration. The face evokes Picasso’s depictions of female faces, especially his 1938 paintings of weeping women for which Maar was the model. Although the divided face is not Maar’s, it is tempting to interpret it as a reflection of her emotional state at the time, torn between her career and independence and Picasso’s demands and potent personality.
Text from The Cleveland Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 16/11/2019
Maar became involved with the surrealists from 1933 and was one of the few artists – and even fewer women – to be included in the surrealists’ exhibitions. She became close to the group because of their shared left-wing politics at a time of social and civil unrest in France.
Maar’s photography and photomontages explore surrealist themes such as eroticism, sleep, the unconscious and the relationship between art and reality. Cropped frames, dramatic angles, unexpected juxtapositions and extreme close-ups are used to create surreal images. Contrasting with the idea of a photograph as a factual record, Maar’s scenes disorientate the viewer and create new worlds altogether.
Anonymous text from “Seven Things to Know: Dora Maar,” on the Tate website [Online] Cited 16/11/2019
Installation view of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing Maar’s photographs Portrait of Nusch Éluard (1935, left) and Les années vous guettent (The Years are Waiting for You) (1932, right)
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Portrait of Nusch Éluard 1935 Gelatin silver print
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Untitled c. 1940 Gelatin silver print
Eileen Agar (British-Argentinian, 1899-1991) Photograph of Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso on the beach September 1937 Gelatin silver print 68 x 60 mm Taken in Juan-les-pins, France Tate Archive Presented to Tate Archive by Eileen Agar in 1989 and transferred from the photograph collection in 2012
Eileen Agar (British-Argentinian, 1899-1991) Photograph of Dora Maar, Nusch Éluard, Pablo Picasso and Paul Éluard on the beach September 1937 Gelatin silver print 66 x 66 mm Taken in Juan-les-pins, France Tate Archive Presented to Tate Archive by Eileen Agar in 1989 and transferred from the photograph collection in 2012
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) Portrait of Dora Maar 1937 Musée National Picasso-Paris Copyright RMN-Grand Palais, Mathieu Rabeau and Succession Picasso, 2018
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Guernica May-June, 1937 Gelatin silver print Musée National Picasso-Paris Copyright RMN-Grand Palais, Mathieu Rabeau and Succession Picasso, 2018
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Picasso working on “Guernica” 1937 Gelatin silver print Courtesy VEGAP / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Picasso working on “Guernica” 1937 Gelatin silver print Courtesy VEGAP / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
Installation view of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing Maar’s painting The Conversation 1937 Photo: Tate (Andrew Dunkley)
“I must dwell apart in the desert,” the artist and surrealist photographer Dora Maar once said. “I want to create an aura of mystery about my work. People must long to see it.
“I’m still too famous as Picasso’s mistress to be accepted as a painter.”
These words form part of a conversation recorded by Maar’s friend, the art writer James Lord, in his memoir “Picasso and Dora.” During the exchange, the French artist also explains how she rationalised the work of her later years, given that she rarely exhibited and was not in demand. …
With its deliberate focus on their art, the exhibition doesn’t address certain troubling questions about the pair’s unequal personal relationship. In her memoirs, Picasso’s later lover, Françoise Gilot, recounted the brutal bullying to which the artist subjected Maar. Picasso once described the time that Maar and a previous lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, came to blows in his studio as one of his “choicest memories.”
It’s a subject Maar didn’t shy away from in her art, painting herself alongside Walter in “The Conversation,” one of the works on show at the Tate Modern. Maar is depicted facing away while Walter looks directly at the viewer.
During the aforementioned exchange with James Lord, Maar told the writer that Picasso’s portraits of her were “lies.” But the struggle for recognition she went on to describe is more insightful – that she had to survive in the “desert” to be celebrated on her own terms.
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) Dora Maar seated 1938 Ink, gouache and oil paint on paper on canvas Support: 689 x 625 mm Frame: 925 x 685 x 120 mm Tate Purchased 1960
In late 1935 or early 1936, Maar met Pablo Picasso. They became lovers soon afterwards. She was at the height of her career, while he was emerging from what he described as ‘the worst time of my life’. He had not sculpted or painted for months.
Their relationship had a huge affect on both their careers. Maar documented the creation of Picasso’s most political work, Guernica 1937, encouraged his political awareness and educated him in photography. Specifically, Maar taught Picasso the cliché verre technique – a complex method combining photography and printmaking.
Picasso painted Maar in numerous portraits, including Weeping Woman 1937. However, Maar explained that she felt this wasn’t a portrait of her. Instead it was a metaphor for the tragedy of the Spanish people. Picasso also encouraged Maar to return to painting. The flattened features and bold outlines of the cubist-style portraits Maar made at this time suggest Picasso’s influence. By 1940 her passport listed her profession as ‘photographer-painter’.
Anonymous text from “Seven Things to Know: Dora Maar,” on the Tate website [Online] Cited 16/11/2019
Installation view of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing portraits of the artist by numerous artists, some of which you can see below
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Self-portrait with Fan 1930 Gelatin silver print
Emmanuel Sougez (French, 1889-1972) Dora Maar Paris, 1934 Gelatin silver print
Dora Maar considered the French commercial photographer Emmanuel Sougez (1889-1972) her mentor. Her first commission was a book on Mont-Saint-Michel written by art critic Germain Bazin. She collaborated with the stage-set designer Pierre Kéfer in 1931. From that experience they formed a business partnership, set up at first in his parents’ garden in Neuilly and then moving to their own studio at 9 rue Campagne-Première, lent by the Polish photographer Harry Ossip Meerson (1910-1991), younger brother of the cinema art director Lazare Meerson (1900-1938), who had worked with Kéber at Film Albatros studio in the mid-1920s. Harry Meerson also lent out his darkroom to the Hungarian photographer Brassai (Gyula Halász, 1899-1984), who became Dora Maar’s close friend. Her contact with Brassai brought her into the Surrealist circle.
The Kéfer-Dora Maar studio produced glamorous, innovative images for advertising and portraits, becoming part of the booming industry of commercial photography in glossy magazines. It was a fertile context for Dora Maar’s imagination. Her perspective on the modern women of the 1930s produced models oozing with elegant sensuality. Cool, natural, sometimes athletic, sometimes aristocratic, the Kéfer-Dora Maar female gave off a whiff of eroticise insouciance that emanated from Dora’s own disposition. This conceptualisation of contemporary beauty fed the appetite for luxury and leisure time activities, despite the Great Depression. It was a fantasy for some, a reality for others. During this period of working intensely with Pierre Kéfer, Dora had affairs with the filmmaker Louis Chavance (c. 1932-1933) and the erotically transgressive writer Georges Bataille (late 1933-1934). The Kéfer-Dora Maar studio closed in 1934.
Israëlis Bidermanas (17 January 1911 in Marijampolė – 16 May 1980 in Paris), who worked under the name of Izis, was a Lithuanian-Jewish photographer who worked in France and is best known for his photographs of French circuses and of Paris.
Upon the liberation of France at the end of World War II, Izis had a series of portraits of maquisards (rural resistance fighters who operated mainly in southern France) published to considerable acclaim. He returned to Paris where he became friends with French poet Jacques Prévert and other artists. Izis became a major figure in the mid-century French movement of humanist photography – also exemplified by Brassaï, Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Sabine Weiss and Ronis – with “work that often displayed a wistfully poetic image of the city and its people.”
For his first book, Paris des rêves (Paris of Dreams), Izis asked writers and poets to contribute short texts to accompany his photographs, many of which showed Parisians and others apparently asleep or daydreaming. The book, which Izis designed, was a success. Izis joined Paris Match in 1950 and remained with it for twenty years, during which time he could choose his assignments.
Although the late works are not as significant contributions to the history of art as her Surrealist photomontages, they inform our knowledge of this Parisian artist’s accomplishments in general and beg the question: Was Dora Maar’s brilliant career cut short by the typical conflicts facing professional women in the 1930s, and even today? Or was she a victim of Picasso’s psychological abuse, which chipped away at her original confidence? Was she compromised to the point that she only wanted to please the man she loved? According to art historian John Richardson, Dora Maar sacrificed her gifts on the altar of her art god, her idol, Picasso. Based on the early Surrealist photographs we see in her retrospective, one can only wish she hadn’t taken up with Picasso, for it seems she might have achieved far more in her lifetime without him.
The 1940s brought a series of traumas. Maar’s father left Paris for Argentina, her mother and best friend Nusch Eluard both died suddenly, her relationship with Picasso ended, and friends went into exile. The difficulty of this time is reflected in some of her work from this period.
Maar was included in many group and solo exhibitions in the 1940s and 1950s. In the mid-1940s she began to spend more time in rural surroundings of Ménerbes in the south of France. Here she regained her confidence as a painter and developed her own style of abstract landscapes. Exhibited across Europe, this work received very positive reviews.
In the 1980s, Maar returned to photography. However, she was no longer interested in photographing life on the street. Instead, Maar was interested in what she could create in the darkroom and experimented with hundreds of photograms (camera-less photographs).
Dora Maar died on July 16, 1997, at 89 years old. Throughout her life she created a vast and varied range of work, much of which was only discovered after her death.
Anonymous text from “Seven Things to Know: Dora Maar,” on the Tate website [Online] Cited 16/11/2019
Exhibition dates: 28th June – 22nd September, 2019
Martin Gerlach (Austro-German, 1846-1918) Mikroskopische Aufnahmen, Aus: Formenwelt aus dem Naturreiche (Die Quelle, Bd. V) Microscopic Images, From: Form world from the natural kingdom (Die Quelle, Vol. V) 1902-1904 Vienna: Gerlach u. Wiedling Albertina Vienna, on permanent loan from the Federal Department of Education and Research Fotografien von Hugo Hinterberger
A fascinating posting on early photo books, photographic book printing, luxury volumes and advertising brochures.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Albertina for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
It is now such a given for photography to be the dominant medium of illustration in all types of publications that the beginnings of its involvement have faded into oblivion. But the process by which photography came to books was lengthy and accompanied by myriad technical difficulties. While impressive volumes with mounted originals featuring motifs such as butterfly wings magnified 1,000 times, Emperor Maximilian’s ceremonial armour, military exercises, and aristocratic theatrical performances reached enthusiastic audiences as early as 1860, few people could afford to purchase such publications.
Only when it became possible to reproduce photographs in print, which permitted book editions of practically unlimited copies, did photography grow into a mass medium that would go on to visually dominate the 20th century. But even so, the combination of convincing photography, refined book design, and artisanal perfectionism did produce a broad spectrum of those earliest photo volumes in Austria – of which this is the first-ever public exhibition.
While photography now dominates nearly every type of publishing genre, the origins of its interplay with publishing have increasingly been forgotten – but the path by which photography entered books was long and littered with numerous technical hurdles, a fact that makes the various creative solutions fielded by pioneers in this area all the more intriguing. Original photographs, test prints, and book maquettes (original book designs) from the collections of the Albertina Museum open up a new perspective on a previously overlooked aspect of Austrian cultural history, which is characterised by diverse interrelationships between scientific curiosity, industrial interests, artistic experimentation, and an educational policy beholden to the Enlightenment.
This exhibition, which includes around 300 items from between 1840 and 1940, sheds light on an extraordinary panorama of innovative achievements manifested as luxury volumes and advertising brochures, travelogues and scientific atlases, artists’ designs and industrial documentation. And a broad spectrum of early photo books from Austria – of which this is the first-ever exhibition – presents fascinating combinations of convincing photography, refined book design, and artisanal perfection. The publication produced for this exhibition traces photography’s path to books in even more depth: on over 200 pages, comprehensive texts and full-scale facsimiles reveal fascinating historical relationships between text, image, and book object.
The advent of photography in 1839 inspired even its earliest commentators to express promising visions of the future, visions that associated this medium with that of books from the very beginning. They compared the innovation of photography with that of book printing long before it became possible to duplicate photographs in large numbers. Photography’s revolutionary potential was recognised not only in its ability to depict details authentically without human intervention but also in its mechanical reproducibility – the development of which, however, was still in its nascence.
Even so, photographic depiction’s aura of authenticity and infallibility was so strong that this new medium quickly came to be considered indispensable in printed books. So at first, publishers made do with illustrations after photographs – realised as lithographs or wood engravings. 1857 saw the appearance of books with photographs glued in to illustrate the text. The demand for such productions was to be found above all in innovative areas of scientific research and in that era’s expanding industry, but there were also volumes produced privately as luxurious mementos. The print runs involved here were to remain far smaller than those that had been made possible by the revolutionary invention of the printing press, which had first facilitated the widespread dissemination of written works.
There followed decades of institutionally led attempts to render photography printable, with such a technology being viewed as something of an “Egg of Columbus” (Ludwig Schrank, 1864). This phase witnessed the development of refined printing techniques that made possible high-quality image reproduction, thus satisfying a universal desire among scientists to publish comprehensive pictorial atlases with detailed photographic depictions that could serve as authentic comparative material suitable for use in research.
The definitive “professionalisation” of photographic printing in Austria occurred at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (photographic and graphic art school) under its director Josef Maria Eder, and the present exhibition’s main focus is devoted to this institution. Photographic images were then quick to find their way into the sophisticatedly designed books of the Viennese art nouveau.
1914 witnessed the International Exhibition of the Book Industry and Graphic Arts in Leipzig, an event for which Josef Hoffmann designed an Austrian pavilion as a contemporary setting in which to celebrate the significance of the Austrian Empire’s book industry. While the outbreak of World War I – which brought this event to a premature conclusion – did produce its own genre of illustrated volumes, it simultaneously marked the end of the era of luxury editions.
The interwar period brought with it further improvements in methods of printing photographs that finally allowed the production of inexpensive illustrated volumes. And for the first time, colourful book jackets were designed with photographic motifs – thus ringing in a whole new era on the book market. In the process, photography was liberated from its functions of illustrating text and storing “authentic” factual information. It indeed took on an entirely new character in avant-garde “photo books”: such books contained photographic images printed in deliberate sequences or juxtaposed, and it is as part of a clear interplay between images and text that the photos in books such as the the Wiener Werkstätte’s jubilee volume of 1929 or Stefan Kruckenhauser’s Snow Canvas (1937) appear in a quality that had never been seen before.
Press release from the Albertina website [Online] Cited 02/08/2019
Ernst Heeger (Austrian, 1783-1866) Album microscopisch-photographischer Darstellungen aus dem Gebiete der Zoologie Album of microscopic-photographic representations from the field of zoology 1860 Wien: Carl Gerold’s Sohn, 4, 1860 Fotograf: k. k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei
Martin Gerlach (Austro-German, 1846-1918) Mikroskopische Aufnahmen, Aus: Formenwelt aus dem Naturreiche (Die Quelle, Bd. V) Microscopic Images, From: Form world from the natural kingdom (Die Quelle, Vol. V) 1902-1904 Vienna: Gerlach u. Wiedling Albertina Vienna, on permanent loan from the Federal Department of Education and Research Fotografien von Hugo Hinterberger
Österreichische Staatsdruckerei “Der Eisbär” und “Der Schimpanse”, Aus: Die neue Arche. Dreißig Tierbilder nach photographischen Naturaufnahmen Austrian State Printing House “The Polar Bear” and “The Chimpanzee”, From: The New Ark. Thirty animal pictures after photographs of nature 1923 Vienna: Austrian State Printing House Photoinstitut Bonartes
Die Wiener Werkstätte 1903-1928: Modernes Kunstgewerbe und sein Weg. Festschrift zu 25jährigen Bestehen der Wiener Werkstätte The Wiener Werkstätte 1903-1928: Modern arts and crafts and its way. Commemoration on the 25th anniversary of the Wiener Werkstätte 1929 Vienna: Krystall-Verlag Photoinstitut BONARTES
Bucheinband zu Roger Ginsburger: Frankreich. Die Entwicklung der neuen Ideen nach Konstruktion und Form Book cover to Roger Ginsburger: France. The development of new ideas according to design and form 1930 Vienna: Anton Schroll & Co Cover design el Lissitzky Private collection
Umschlag von C. Angerer & Göschl Wien Sechzig Jahre Cover by C. Angerer & Göschl Vienna Sixty years 1932 Fotograf: Angerer & Göschl
Wall texts
Photo. Book. Art 1840-1940
The production of systematic knowledge and its dissemination were the key driving forces behind nineteenth-century enlightenment, with a flourishing book industry serving as mediator. From the moment it became known in 1839, photography, a guarantor of images true to detail made without human intervention, seemed to be cut out for not only supporting but speeding up this project.
The ambition to reproduce technically generated pictures unlimited in number like texts would only be fulfilled several decades later thanks to the invention of inexpensive printing techniques. This exhibition is dedicated to the period spanning from the first “vision” of such a feat with its aspiring scientific experiments to manually produced splendid volumes, to the high print-runs of popular illustrated books of the 1930s.
The definitive professionalisation of photo printing in Austria took place at Vienna’s Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, whose historical library, preserved as a permanent loan at the Albertina, has provided the starting point for this presentation thanks to its cataloguing supported by Photoinstitut Bonartes.
“A fortunate thought …”: Photo Publications 1850-1870
Almost twenty years after the invention of the new medium, a few enthusiasts began to illustrate mainly scientific works with original photographs, which were glued in. Although their publications were hailed by the critics, it soon became apparent that high costs and long production times curbed the number of printed copies. As documented by surviving subscriber lists, books illustrated with photographs were expensive prestige objects. Nonetheless, the suggestion of the photographic image as being authentic and infallible had such a strong impact that one did not want to completely do without the new medium: prints after photographs served as substitutes ensuring credibility. “
“Gradually delivering the whole world in pictures”: The Imperial and Royal Court and Government Printing Office
When Alois Auer was appointed director of the Imperial and Royal Court and Government Printing Office in 1841, he found himself faced with a run-down enterprise whose business consisted in printing legal texts and official forms. Being able to rely on almost unlimited funds from the responsible ministry, he succeeded in turning this printing office into a media company in the modern sense committed to a variety of fields. Auer was the first man in the history of (analog) media to regard writing and images of every kind as a potential unit for the reproduction and distribution of human knowledge.
Pursuing ideas that were far ahead of his time, Auer foundered on the huge scope of his plans: he intended to use photography and nature printing to compile material collections of encyclopaedic dimensions in laboratories or on expeditions that would not only provide reliable information but were also affordable.
A State-Run Educational Institution for Photography and Reproduction Techniques
The first pivotal invention on photography’s way into books was that of the collotype method in 1868 (a planographic printing process like lithography), which made the first printed photo books possible. Heliogravure (an elaborate intaglio technique in the manner of etching, which achieved particularly brilliant results) followed in 1878, the pioneering autotype method as a relief printing process (woodblock printing being a much simpler form) in 1883. It was no coincidence that these inventions were directly followed by the founding phase of the state-run “Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie und Reproduktionsverfahren” (Educational and Experimental Institute for Photography and Reproduction Techniques) in Vienna, which from 1895 onward also included departments for book design and production. It was this institution that, under the direction of Josef Maria Eder, a photochemist, made all these new processes usable for the printing trade and industry: it not only trained the relevant specialists but also initiated or supported innovative photography and book projects.
From Luxury Volumes to Small-Format Books
World War I ushered in a radical transformation in book production. Whereas a few large volumes of plates adhering to the style of the prewar period were published, the now-common cheaper production of small-format books also brought about a change in the presentation of traditional themes. This shift manifested itself in illustrated books on foreign cultures, among others, which had already been popular in the nineteenth century. The result was a separation between scientific and popular books, of which, like in the case of Hugo Bernatzik, as many as 250,000 copies were printed.
Industry and Architecture
Since the sporadic pioneering feats of the 1860s, the brand management of big industrial companies in the form of photographic documentations and illustrated publications had increased considerably. Jubilee works and advertising brochures of all kinds offered a not to be underestimated new market for the professionalized and thus cheaper producing reproduction and printing industries. Among the most innovative users of photography were architects who – a rare case in Austria – were also open to new types of book design in the vein of the Bauhaus.
Specialised Publishers and Their Subjects
The improvement of printing techniques allowed some publishers to specialise in publications illustrated with photographs. Extensive compilations of pictures in a wide variety of fields, from ophthalmology to the holdings of museums and contemporary architecture, testify to the widespread desire to make visual information available in encyclopaedic form.
On the other hand, it was necessary to cater to new, only recently developed subject areas that emerged directly from the possibilities of technical image production. Elaborately designed and manufactured in small editions, these works ranged from volumes of wealthy amateur photographers flaunting their craftsmanship to promotionally effective illustrated books of the municipality of Vienna, which were intended to introduce the achievements of Mayor Karl Lueger to a broad public.
Bucheinband zu Alexander Niklitschek: Ratschläge für Amateurphotographen Book cover to Alexander Niklitschek: Advice for amateur photographers 1934 Leipzig, Vienna, Berlin: Steyrermühl Albertina Wien, Dauerleihgabe der Höheren Graphischen Bundes-Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt Albertina Vienna, on permanent loan from the Federal Department of Education and Research
Harald Lechenper Das Rätsel Indien [The Indian Puzzle] 1935 Verlag Ullstein Autotypie auf Karton nach Fotografie von Harald Lechenperg Autotype on cardboard with photography by Harald Lechenperg
Stefan Kruckenhauser (Austro-German, 1904-1988) In großen Linien zeichnet der Schnee, Aus: Du schöner Winter in Tirol. Ski- und Hochgebirgs-Erlebnisse mit der Leica In big lines the snow draws, From: You beautiful winter in Tyrol. Ski and high mountain experiences with the Leica 1937 Berlin: Photokino-Verlag, Otto Elsner The Albertina Museum, Vienna
Otto Croy: Es liegt auf der Hand, Aus: Fotomontage. Der Weg zu den Grenzen der Fotografie Otto Croy: It is obvious, From: photomontage. The Road to the Limits of Photography 1937 Halle (Saale): Wilhelm Knapp The Albertina, Vienna
Stefan Kruckenhauser (Austro-German, 1904-1988) Das Meisterwerk von Kefermarkt, Salzburg The masterpiece of Kefermarkt, Salzburg 1941 Leipzig: Otto Müller Fotograf: Stefan Kruckenhauser
Curators: Lori Pauli, curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Canada, and Karen Hellman, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Two Ways of Life (Hope in Repentance) 1857 Albumen silver print 21.8 x 40.8cm (8 9/16 x 16 1/16 in.) Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Oscar Rejlander, the father of photography, sets in motion many of the later developments of photographic art.
I could wax lyrical about the light, staging and humour of the images; the allegorical, religious and emotional portraits; the influence of photography on painting; the spontaneous act caught on film (Eh!); the combination printing, precursor to digital manipulation (Two Ways of Life); the costume dramas (The Comb Seller); or the presaging of the work of August Sander (The Juggler). But I won’t.
Instead, I just want you to think about the period in which these photographs were made – that Dickensian era of archetypal humanity, intricate narrative. I want you to feel that these reality pictures are alive and how they transcend the time of their creation through the lyricism of the print.
From the mind of the artist to works of art that stare down that cosmic time shift, from cradle to grave.
Marcus
Many thanks to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“It is the mind of the artist, and not the nature of his materials which makes his production a work of art.”
Oscar G. Rejlander
Oscar Gustav Rejlander is best known for his work “Two Ways of Life,” a masterpiece for which he used over 32 different negatives. It took him around six weeks to create it and over 3 days to produce a final print.
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) The Infant Photography Giving the Painter an Additional Brush c. 1856 Albumen silver print 6 × 7.1cm (2 3/8 × 2 13/16 in.) Courtesy The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
After emigrating from Sweden to England in 1839 and taking up photography in 1852, he became one of the first to recognise photography’s potential as a “handmaid of art” – exemplified by early photographs like “The Infant Photography Giving the Painter an Additional Brush.” This tiny print served to demonstrate how photography could preserve an allegorical scene for a painter’s extended study. It also functioned as a self-portrait and hinted at Rejlander’s hidden ambitions: reflected in the convex mirror, he presents himself as a modern-day Jan van Eyck.
Extract from Dana Ostrander. “The Overlooked Legacy of Oscar Rejlander, Who Elevated Photography to an Art,” on the Hyperallergic website April 2, 2019 [Online] Cited 06/06/2019
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Non Angeli sed Angli (Not Angels but Anglos), after Raphael’s Sistine Madonna c. 1854-1856 Albumen silver print 20.5 x 26.3cm (8 1/16 x 10 3/8 in.) Princeton University Art Museum Museum purchase, David H. McAlpin, Class of 1920, Fund
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Mary Constable and Her Brother 1866 Albumen silver print 16.8 x 22.1cm (6 5/8 x 8 11/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection Purchase, Harriette and Noel Levine Gift, 2005
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) The Bachelor’s Dream c. 1860 Albumen silver print 13.9 x 19.6cm (5 1/2 x 7 11/16 in.) George Eastman Museum, purchase Photo: Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Hard Times (The Out of Work Workman’s Lament) 1860 Albumen silver print 13.8 x 19.7cm (5 7/16 x 7 3/4 in.) George Eastman Museum, purchase Photo: Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Head of St. John the Baptist in a Charger c. 1860 Albumen silver print 14.1 x 17.8cm (5 9/16 x 7 in.) George Eastman Museum, purchase Photo: Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Study of Hands 1856 Albumen silver print 14.8 x 17.6cm (5 13/16 x 6 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Purchased 2014
Oscar G. Rejlander (British, born Sweden, 1813-1875) was one of the 19th century’s greatest innovators in the medium of photography, counting Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron among his devotees. Nevertheless, the extent of Rejlander’s work and career has often been overlooked. Oscar Rejlander: Artist Photographer, on view March 12 – June 9, 2019 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles, is the first exhibition to explore the prolific career of the artist who became known as “the father of art photography,” and whose bold experimentation with photographic techniques early in the medium’s development and keen understanding of human emotion were ahead of their time.
The exhibition features 150 photographs that demonstrate Rejlander’s remarkable range, from landscapes and portraits to allegories and witty commentaries on contemporary society, alongside a selection of his early paintings, drawings, and prints.
“Rejlander tells us in his writings that ‘It is the mind of the artist, and not the nature of his materials, which makes his production a work of art’,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “While technologies have dramatically changed, some of the fundamental issues that Rejlander grappled with in his photographs still resonate with photographic practice today. His photographs, though made a century and a half ago, are both meticulously of their time and timeless, foreshadowing many later achievements of the medium through to the digital age.”
Oscar G. Rejlander was born in Sweden and moved to England in 1839, working first as a painter before turning to photography in 1852. He made a living as a portrait photographer while experimenting with photographic techniques, most notably combination printing, in which parts of multiple negatives were exposed separately and then printed to form a single picture. Rejlander moved to London in 1862, where his business continued to grow and where his wife, Mary Bull, worked alongside him in his photography studios.
Portraits and Images of Everyday Life
Portraiture, particularly of members of the higher ranks of London society, was Rejlander’s main professional activity and supported his livelihood. Art critics and clients alike admired his skill with lighting as well as the natural and seemingly spontaneous expressions he was able to capture. Rejlander photographed some of the most important figures of the day, including the English scientist Charles Darwin, known for his theory of evolution, and poets Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry Taylor. He also guided the first photographic efforts of the writer and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (known as Lewis Carroll), the creator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as well as photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.
From the beginning of his career as a photographer, Rejlander was keenly interested in depicting the activities of ordinary people, particularly the middle and lower classes of society. It was through his staged domestic images that he illustrated familial relationships with tenderness and humour, often using models and props to re-create in his studio the scenes he had witnessed in the streets, from young boys who swept up dirt and debris in exchange for tips, to street vendors such as “flower girls” who offered bouquets for sale to passersby. Like a modern street photographer, Rejlander chose his compositions and subjects based on what he saw and heard, realising the final images in the studio.
In 1863 Rejlander constructed a unique iron, wood, and glass “tunnel studio,” where the sitter, positioned in the open, light-filled part of the studio, would look into the darker part of the room where the camera and operator were situated, nearly invisible. The pupils of the sitters’ eyes expanded, allowing for “more depth and expression,” as a writer observed in Photographic News. In addition to this technique, Rejlander often exploited his own unique ability to enact exaggerated emotions to assist his subjects. Charles Darwin illustrated many of Rejlander’s expressive photographs in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872.
Combination Printing and Two Ways of Life
Rejlander holds an important place in the history of photography primarily because of the groundbreaking way he applied the technique of combination printing. On view in the exhibition is the most ambitious example of the artist’s pioneering experimentation, the epic photograph, Two Ways of Life, or Hope in Repentance (1857). It attracted immediate attention upon its exhibition both for its large size and the ambition of its production, which included the combination printing of over 30 separate wet collodion on glass negatives, a process that took more than three days.
The work represents an intricate allegory of two opposing philosophies of life: Vice and Virtue. In the centre of the picture, a wise man guides a younger man to the right, toward a life of virtue – work, study, and religion. To the left, a second young man is tempted by the call of desire, gambling, idleness, and vice. Prince Albert may have worked with Rejlander on the overall conception of the picture, and he and Queen Victoria purchased three versions for their art collection.
Despite this support from the Royal Family, Two Ways of Life divided the photographic community, with professional photographers considering it a technical tour de force, and amateurs seeing it as not only artificial in production but also immoral in its subject. However, it remains one of finest examples of combination printing to come from this period.
Art and Photography
Today, the debate about photography’s status as an art may be obsolete, but the arts community in 19th-century Britain was passionately divided over Rejlander’s chosen medium. Rejlander strongly advocated the view that photography was an independent art, while he was also convinced that a photograph could help artists by providing an effective substitute for working from live models. He was possibly the first to provide artists with visual references for their work in photographs, creating figure studies in a range of poses and costumes, including close-ups of hands, feet, drapery, and even fleeting facial expressions. Although many painters were reluctant to disclose their reliance on photography, several collected Rejlander’s photographs, including George Frederic Watts (English, 1817-1904) and Henri Fantin-Latour (French, 1836-1904).
Paintings also strongly influenced Rejlander’s choice of subjects, leading him not only to imitate the styles of artists but also to re-create the figures found in their compositions. He frequently photographed actors or models posing as a “Madonna,” a “Devotee,” a “Disciple,” or specific Christian figures such as John the Baptist. He may have intended these studies, as well as others showing figures in classical robes, for artists to consult as well.
“What we hope comes through in the exhibition is Rejlander’s humanity and humour, as well as his humble nature, particularly evident in the fact that he often sent his work to exhibitions under the name ‘amateur’,” says Karen Hellman, assistant curator of photographs at the Getty Museum. “His explanation: ‘When I compare what I have done with what I think I ought to do, and some day hope I shall do, I think of myself as only an amateur, after all – that is to say, a beginner’.”
Oscar Rejlander: Artist Photographer, is on view March 12 – June 9, 2019 at J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center. The exhibition is curated by Lori Pauli, curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Canada, and Karen Hellman, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Mr. Collett’s Return 1841 Black chalk, charcoal and white wash highlights on paper (backed) 92.8 × 74.4cm The Collection: Art and Archaeology in Lincolnshire (Usher Gallery, Lincoln)
Attributed to Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) [Landscape] c. 1855 Salted paper print 22.3 × 19.7cm National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Purchased 2014
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Ariadne 1857 Albumen print from a wet collodion negative Paul Mellon Fund Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
“I believe photography will make painters better artists and more careful draughtsmen. You may test their figures by photography. In Titian’s Venus and Adonis, Venus has her head turned in a manner that no female could turn it and at the same time shows so much of her back. Her right leg also is too long. I have proved the correctness of this opinion by photography with variously shaped female models.” ~ Oscar G. Rejlander 1863
“He was perhaps the first to market photographic nude studies to artists, and he even used them to test the anatomical accuracy of the Old Masters. His photograph “Ariadne” was created, in part, to expose the unnatural pose and elongated feminine proportions in Titian’s “Venus and Adonis.” Many of Rejlander’s contemporaries came to rely on these nude studies, and the exhibition contains at least three originally owned by the painter Henri Fantin-Latour.”
Extract from Dana Ostrander. “The Overlooked Legacy of Oscar Rejlander, Who Elevated Photography to an Art,” on the Hyperallergic website April 2, 2019 [Online] Cited 06/06/2019
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist c. 1860 Albumen silver print 17.8 × 12.4cm (7 × 4 7/8 in.) Courtesy The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Young Lady in a Costume c. 1860 Albumen silver print Courtesy National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Eh! negative about 1854-1855; print about 1865 Albumen silver print 8.9 x 5.9cm (3 1/2 x 2 5/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
In “The First Negative,” Rejlander restages Pliny’s account of the origins of painting, boldly suggesting that the act of tracing a shadow is more akin to creating a photographic negative than a painting.
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) The Participles, or Grammar for Little Boys: Catching 1857 Albumen silver print 18.7 x 12.7cm (7 3/8 x 5 in.) Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) The Participles, or Grammar for Little Boys: Caught 1857 Albumen silver print 20.3 x 15.7cm (8 x 6 3/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Please Give Us a Copper c. 1866-1868 Albumen silver print 17.9 x 12.6cm (7 1/16 x 4 15/16 in.) Princeton University Art Museum. Museum purchase
A copper is a brown coin of low value made of copper or bronze.
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Enchanted by a Parrot (Mary Rejlander?) c. 1860 Albumen silver print Image (approx.): 50 x 30cm (19 11/16 x 11 13/16 in.) William Talbott Hillman Collection Photo: Hans P. Kraus, Jr., New York
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) The Cup that Cheers c. 1860 Albumen silver print 19.9 x 15cm (7 13/16 x 5 7/8 in.) Princeton University Art Museum Museum purchase, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Max Adler
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Knuckle Bones 1860 Albumen silver print 15.4 x 12.5cm (6 1/16 x 4 15/16 in.) George Eastman Museum, purchase Photo: Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum
Knucklebones
Knucklebones, also known as Tali, Fivestones, or Jacks, is a game of ancient origin, usually played with five small objects, or ten in the case of jacks. Originally the “knucklebones” (actually the astragalus, a bone in the ankle, or hock) were those of a sheep, which were thrown up and caught in various manners. Modern knucklebones consist of six points, or knobs, projecting from a common base, and are usually made of metal or plastic. The winner is the first player to successfully complete a prescribed series of throws, which, though similar, differ widely in detail. The simplest throw consists in either tossing up one stone, the jack, or bouncing a ball, and picking up one or more stones or knucklebones from the table while it is in the air. This continues until all five stones or knucklebones have been picked up. Another throw consists in tossing up first one stone, then two, then three and so on, and catching them on the back of the hand. Different throws have received distinctive names, such as “riding the elephant”, “peas in the pod”, “horses in the stable”, and “frogs in the well”.
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) “Father Times” (Where’s the Cat?) c. 1860 Albumen paper print 16.5 x 14.2cm (6 1/2 x 5 9/16 in.) Wilson Centre for Photography
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Night in Town (Poor Jo, Homeless) before 1862; print after 1879 Carbon print 20.3 x 15.7cm (8 x 6 3/16 in.) National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Purchased 1993
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Grief (Hidden Her Face, Yet Visible Her Anguish) 1864 Albumen silver print 19.6 x 14cm (7 11/16 x 5 1/2 in.) Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. Gift of John H. Rubel
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) The Comb Seller (Oscar and Mary Rejlander) c. 1860 Albumen silver print 20 x 14.9cm (7 7/8 x 5 7/8 in.) University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque. Gift of Eleanor and Van Deren Coke
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Lionel Tennyson c. 1863 Albumen print from a wet collodion negative Image (oval): 18.3 x 14.3cm (7 3/16 x 5 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Paul Mellon Fund
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) 1863 Albumen silver print 8.9 x 5.9cm (3 1/2 x 2 5/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection Purchase, Sam Salz Foundation Gift, 2005
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Allegorical Study (Sacred and Profane Love) c. 1860 Albumen paper print 12 x 17.5cm (4 3/4 x 6 7/8 in.) Wilson Centre for Photography
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Henry Taylor 1863 Albumen silver print 20.2 x 15cm (7 15/16 x 5 7/8 in.) Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas Gift of Dr. and Mrs. William D. Paden
Sir Henry TaylorKCMG (18 October 1800 – 27 March 1886) was an English dramatist and poet, Colonial Office official, and man of letters.
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Self-Portrait with Parrot c. 1865 In “Album of Photographs by Oscar G. Rejlander,” 1856-72 Albumen silver print Closed: 37.4 x 27.6 x 0.3cm (14 3/4 x 10 7/8 x 1/8 in.) Sir Nicholas Mander Collection
The J. Paul Getty Museum 1200 Getty Center Drive Los Angeles, California 90049
Co-curators: Antoine de Galbert, Barbara Safarova, Aline Vidal and Bruno Decharme
Georges Méliès (French, 1861-1938) Le voyage dans la lune. Le clair de terre – (10e tableau) A Trip to the Moon 1902 Courtesy Collection La Cinémathèque française
Another fantastic, esoteric exhibition that will resonant with a lot of human beings. The curators of L’envol (Flight) “have imagined an exhibition that examines mankind’s dream of flying – though without any reference to those who have actually made this dream come true.”
Man has long wanted to fly even though even though men are not birds. But we can, each in our own way, imagine what it is like to fly; we can dream about flying; we can meditate on flying; we can partake in shamanic rituals where our spirit becomes a bird (Carlos Castaneda); we can fly during orgasmic sex as we are taken out of our own body (la petite mort); we can loose ourselves ecstatically during a dance party when we commune with the cosmic beyond; or we can make films such as Alan Parker’s outstanding film Birdy where the protagonist “imagines himself flying like a bird around his room, throughout the house and outside in the neighbourhood.”
Many and varied are the ways human beings examine the melancholy and fantastical desire to fly.
In my own contemporary work, I investigate the moral and ethical reasons why a human being would want to fly the very latest piece of technology, a fighter plane, only to kill, bomb and maim. The reason to fly such war machines, to be as one with the latest technology, the speed, the thrill of flying – to fight for freedom, democracy, to bomb, to kill; and the moral and ethical choices that human beings make, to undertake one action over another.
Again, the melancholy and the fantastical, perhaps flight as a means of escape from the realities of the everyday, much as a child I often imagined being a bird and flying away, never to come back. So this exhibition has special resonance with me. What an incredible collection of ideas, feelings, dreams and fantastical creations these magnificent inventors have released into the universe, in order to defy a literal and promote a metaphysical gravity (love).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to La maison rouge for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Henry Darger (American, 1892-1973) Human headed Blengins of Calverine Island Catherine Isles 1920-30 Pencil and watercolour on paper
Henry Joseph Darger (American, 1892-1973)
Henry Joseph Darger Jr. (c. April 12, 1892-April 13, 1973) was a reclusive American writer and artist who worked as a hospital custodian in Chicago, Illinois. He has become famous for his posthumously discovered 15,145-page, single-spaced fantasy manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, along with several hundred drawings and watercolour paintings illustrating the story.
The visual subject matter of his work ranges from idyllic scenes in Edwardian interiors and tranquil flowered landscapes populated by children and fantastic creatures, to scenes of horrific terror and carnage depicting young children being tortured and massacred. Much of his artwork is mixed media with collage elements. Darger’s artwork has become one of the most celebrated examples of outsider art. …
In the Realms of the Unreal is a 15,145-page work bound in fifteen immense, densely typed volumes (with three of them consisting of several hundred illustrations, scroll-like watercolour paintings on paper derived from magazines and colouring books) created over six decades. Darger illustrated his stories using a technique of traced images cut from magazines and catalogues, arranged in large panoramic landscapes and painted in watercolours, some as large as 30 feet wide and painted on both sides. He wrote himself into the narrative as the children’s protector.
The largest part of the book, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, follows the adventures of the daughters of Robert Vivian, seven princesses of the Christian nation of Abbieannia who assist a daring rebellion against the child slavery imposed by John Manley and the Glandelinians. Children take up arms in their own defense and are often slain in battle or viciously tortured by the Glandelinian overlords. The elaborate mythology includes the setting of a large planet, around which Earth orbits as a moon (where most people are Christian and mostly Catholic), and a species called the “Blengigomeneans” (or Blengins for short), gigantic winged beings with curved horns who occasionally take human or part-human form, even disguising themselves as children. They are usually benevolent, but some Blengins are extremely suspicious of all humans, due to Glandelinian atrocities.
Charles August Albert Dellschau (American, 1830-1923) Untitled 1921 Book Courtesy Collection abcd / Bruno Decharme
Charles August Albert Dellschau (American born Prussia, 1830-1923)
Charles August Albert Dellschau (4 June 1830 Brandenburg, Prussia-20 April 1923 Houston, Texas) was one of America’s earliest known visionary artists, who created drawings, collages and watercolours of airplanes and airships and bound them in 12 known large scrapbooks that were discovered decades after his death. …
After his death, Dellschau’s home remained in the hands of his descendants. His notebooks of paintings and drawings, as well as his diaries were left virtually untouched for half a century until the late 1960s. Following a fire, the house was cleared and at least 12 of the notebooks were placed on the sidewalk to be discarded. Fred Washington, a local antiques and used furniture dealer, spotted the books, and for $100 bought them from the trash collector. The books sat undisturbed in Washington’s store under a pile of discarded carpet for over a year. In 1968, Mary Jane Victor, an art student at the University of St. Thomas in Houston stumbled upon the notebooks, and persuaded Washington to lend some of them to the university for a display on the story of flight. She also brought them to the attention of art patron and collector Dominique de Menil. Mrs. de Menil purchased four of the notebooks for $1,500. Of the remaining books, seven were purchased Peter (Pete) G. Navarro, a Houston commercial artist and UFO researcher. After studying them, Navarro sold four of the notebooks to the Witte Museum in San Antonio, and the San Antonio Museum of Art. One notebook ultimately ended in the private abcd (art brut connaissance & diffusion) collection in Paris belonging to Bruno Decharme, a French filmmaker and art collector. The rest of the notebooks ended up in private hands. Some were dismantled and single pages were sold. In 2016, a double sided page dated 1919, sold for $22,500 at Christie’s.
Dellschau’s earliest known work is a diary dated 1899, and the last is an 80-page book dated 1921-1922, giving his career as an artist a 21-year span. His work was in large part a record of the activities of the “Sonora Aero Club,” of which he was a purported member. Dellschau’s writings describe the club as a secret group of flight enthusiasts who met in Sonora, California in the mid-19th century. According to Dellschau, one of the club members discovered a formula for an anti-gravity fuel called “NB Gas.” The club mission was to design and build the first navigable aircraft using the NB Gas for lift and propulsion. Dellschau called these flying machines Aeros. Dellschau never claimed to be a pilot or a designer of any of the airships; he identifies himself only as a draftsman for the Sonora Aero Club. His collages incorporate newspaper clippings (called “press blooms”) of then-current news articles about aeronautical advances and disasters.
Despite exhaustive research, including searches of census records, voting rosters, and death records, nothing has been found to substantiate the existence of this group except for a few gravestones in the Columbia Cemetery where several of the surnames are found. It is speculated that, like the voluminous “Realms of the Unreal” notebooks by outsider artist Henry Darger (1882-1973), the Sonora Aero Club is a fiction by Dellschau.
L’envol is the final exhibition at La maison rouge, which will close its doors for the last time on October 28, 2018. Antoine de Galbert has invited Barbara Safarova, Aline Vidal and Bruno Decharme as co-curators. Together, these specialists in art brut and contemporary art have imagined an exhibition that examines mankind’s dream of flying – though without any reference to those who have actually made this dream come true. As always at La maison rouge, the curators have considered the subject matter independently of “categories” to bring together works of art brut, modern, contemporary, ethnographic and folk art. A walk through the various themes reveals a succession of some 200 works, including installations, films, documents, paintings, drawings and sculptures.
In the beginning there was Dedalus, that inspired inventor who dreamed of escaping into the skies, taking his son Icarus with him. Harnessed to wings made from feathers and wax, they rose into the heavens, intoxicated with their flight, borne aloft into the atmosphere. We all know what happened next. Icarus ventured too near the sun, his wings melted and he hurtled into the sea to die. From legend to reality, the sky has always been a dangerous playground for mankind. This is no small undertaking by the 130 artists in Lenvol, as they endeavour to challenge the laws of gravity, break free of Earth’s magnetic field, launch themselves into the unknown or experience the gaseous envelope of the atmosphere between two periods of turbulence. Some are hedonists, others are activists, intent on saving mankind as the world heads for destruction, whether by building flying shelters or constructing utopias. The sky offers ample territory for experiment, shared between the extravagant artists who are convinced of their ability to overcome gravity and the gods that live there, and the conceptualists designing utopias – more poet than scientist.
Defying gravity
The dream of flying may be as old as mankind – and the sky may have lost some of its mystery thanks to progress in aviation – but men are not birds, all the same. Clothing oneself in feathers is not enough. We are earthly creatures, and the body alone will always struggle to leave the ground. We can never achieve this freedom nor expand the scope of our action without the will to surpass ourselves.
Devoid of wings, dancers soar upwards, defying the laws of gravity with no fear of falling or exhaustion (Loie Fuller, Nijinsky, Cuningham, etc.) Rodchenko, a photographer for the Russian propaganda machine, uses daring, low-angle shots to make his athletes appear to take off in flight, idealising the body to further the needs of the revolution whose heroes were held aloft.
Lucien Pelen seeks anti-matter as he attempts to merge his body with the atmosphere. Arms outstretched, he launches himself into the air and, for a split second, achieves the ecstasy of flight before coming brutally back down to earth. Such is this fragile balance at the boundaries of possibility.
When Gustav Messmer attached springs to his shoes so he could bounce rather than walk, or fitted a bicycle with enormous bat-like wings, did he realise how precarious these inventions were? To hell with scepticism! Surely it takes some degree of madness to invent your own freedom?
Or engage in excesses like Rebecca Horn who, in search of new ways to experience the space around her, shrouds her ailing body in feather fans then seeks the limits of its extension, stretching these articulated wings as far as they will go before the mechanism gives way.
To infinity and beyond
The weight of the world gives artists cause to wander in the shadow of earthly paradises. Fréderic Pardo, a psychedelic star, uses tempera, an ancient technique, to produce spaced-out paintings while high on LSD. He floats alongside magic carpets (Urs Lüthi), ridden by souls from an Arabian Nights dream. We discover a limitless space filled with superheroes, Batman and witches straddling broomsticks; a world teeming with chimera and fairies.
The sky seethes with mystery. Shamans, accustomed to travelling between worlds, converse with spirits and collect information while improbable creatures, part angel, part human, bump and bowl along (Henry Darger’s Blengins side by side with Moebius’s Arzach, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern’s hybrids and Kiki Smith’s bird-women).
Engineering the impossible
Tatlin’s sculpture, more fine art than flying machine, seeks to rediscover an age-old, mythical experience. Letatlin is a melding of art, technique and utopia; an attempt at a personal dream. The year is 1929 and the Great Depression has spared no-one. Heads are hot with the desire to escape, minds filled with fantasies of infinity. “We must learn to fly through the air just as we learned to swim in the water or ride a bicycle,” Tatlin declared.
Some forty years later, Belgian artist Panamarenko appears to have taken him at his word. Obsessed with the freedom of flight, he makes sophisticated yet poetic constructions, bristling with bellows and motors. However crazy or technically unfeasible they may be, the artist never tires of convincing us they will lift him off the ground.
These are beautiful machines, created by the engineers of the impossible and of no purpose whatsoever – except for the dreams they inspire. Snuggling into Fabio Mauri’s Luna inspires a feeling of weightlessness with the senses immersed in a light, fluffy environment. Stationed on the deck of his Spacecraft, inspired as much by the Mercury project as Henry David Thoreau’s cabin in the woods, Stéphane Thidet combines musical arrangements with conversations between astronauts in an electroacoustic performance.
They shut themselves away in their own worlds, all the better to escape to another place, experience the extraordinary and relive childhood fantasies, but with adult toys. Roman Signer, for example, plays with explosives and sets off conflagrations that are both fascinating and illusory. After all, what is the point of smashing everyday objects to smithereens? Of starting up a helicopter in an inflatable pool when it will probably destroy everything around? What is the point of risking danger, other than to try and become one with the inventor of the world and reproduce the forces of nature.
Indoor aviators
Some of these dream merchants are inspired by an intercelestial mission. They are the off-the-wall artists, incomprehensible to the rational world, imbued with a different logic and convinced that flight can be achieved with contraptions made from bits and bobs. Theirs is a world free from explosions or falls, bolstered by belief and the quest for the absolute. Hans-Jörg Georgi, for one, is driven by the need to save humanity from inevitable destruction. His studio is crammed with the aeroplanes he painstakingly builds, day after day, from cardboard boxes stuck together with glue.
Karl Hans Janke is another master of the art of spaceship building, having produced an astonishing 4,500 drawings describing hundreds of technical innovations. Charles Dellschau is further testament to this obsessive dream of flying. He was a member of the Sonora Aero Club, a secret group of mid-nineteenth-century flight enthusiasts whose self-appointed mission was to build the world’s first navigable aircraft.
These are crazy escapades, guided only by the imagination and ultimately less dangerous, and just as exhilarating, as those undertaken by reality’s utopians. Adolf Wölfli chose to rise above it all, deliriously determined to embrace Creation, Space and Eternity. His associations of opposite perspectives produce apparently real and contradictory visions that are dizzying to behold.
Aviation’s spectacular progress has in no way diminished the dreams of these magnificent inventors. Two irreconcilable worlds continue to share the skies. And why shouldn’t artists seek inspiration from other suns? Despite his fall, Icarus is a hero for all eternity.
Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue, introduction by Aline Vidal.
Fabio Mauri (Italian, 1926-2009) Luna 1968 Installation
Anonymous photographer Untitled c. 1940 Black and white photograph Courtesy Collection abcd / Bruno Decharme
Alexandre Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) A leap 1934 Black and white photograph Courtesy Collection Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow / Moscow House of Photography Museum
Photographs made from above or below or at odd angles are all around us today – in magazine and television ads, for example – but for Rodchenko and his contemporaries they were a fresh discovery. To Rodchenko they represented freedom and modernity because they invited people to see and think about familiar things in new ways.
Text from the MoMA website
Photography was important to Rodchenko in the 1920s in his attempt to find new media more appropriate to his goal of serving the revolution. He first viewed it as a source of preexisting imagery, using it in montages of pictures and text, but later he began to take pictures himself and evolved an aesthetic of unconventional angles, abruptly cropped compositions, and stark contrasts of light and shadow. His work in both photomontage and photography ultimately made an important contribution to European photography in the 1920s.
Eikoh Hosoe’s groundbreaking Kamaitachi was originally released in 1969 as a limited-edition photobook of 1,000 copies. A collaboration with Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of ankoku butoh dance, it documents their visit to a farming village in northern Japan and an improvisational performance made with local villagers, inspired by the legend of kamaitachi, a weasel-like demon who haunts rice fields and slashes people with a sickle. Hosoe photographed Hijikata’s spontaneous interactions with the landscape and the people they encountered. A seductive combination of performance and photography, the two artists enact an personal and symbolic investigation of Japanese society during a time of massive upheaval.
From the late 1950s until his death in 1986, Emery Blagdon created a constantly changing installation of paintings and sculptures in a small building on his Nebraska farm. He believed in the power of “earth energies” and in his own ability to channel such forces in a space that, through constant adjusting and aesthetic power, could alleviate pain and illness.
Blagdon used found materials like hay baling wire, magnets, and remnant paints from farm sales, but he also sought out special ingredients like salts and other “earth elements” through a nearby pharmacy. He called the individual pieces his “pretties,” but collectively they comprised The Healing Machine. Blagdon worked on his Healing Machine for more than three decades, tending, tinkering with, and reorganising its components every day and, in his own words, “according to the phases of the moon.” He believed it was a functional machine in which energies were drawn upward from the building’s earthen floor into the space, where they could bounce around and remain dynamic.
As in his carefully choreographed paintings in which he used nude female models dipped in blue paint as paintbrushes, Klein’s photomontage paradoxically creates the impression of freedom and abandon through a highly contrived process. In October 1960, Klein hired the photographers Harry Shunk and Jean Kender to make a series of pictures re-creating a jump from a second-floor window that the artist claimed to have executed earlier in the year. This second leap was made from a rooftop in the Paris suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses. On the street below, a group of the artist’s friends from held a tarpaulin to catch him as he fell. Two negatives – one showing Klein leaping, the other the surrounding scene (without the tarp) – were then printed together to create a seamless “documentary” photograph. To complete the illusion that he was capable of flight, Klein distributed a fake broadsheet at Parisian newsstands commemorating the event. It was in this mass-produced form that the artist’s seminal gesture was communicated to the public and also notably to the Vienna Actionists.
Rebecca Horn (born 24 March 1944, Michelstadt, Hesse) is a German visual artist, who is best known for her installation art, film directing, and her body modifications such as Einhorn (Unicorn), a body-suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from the headpiece. She directed the films Der Eintänzer (1978), La ferdinanda: Sonate für eine Medici-Villa (1982) and Buster’s Bedroom (1990). Horn presently lives and works in Paris and Berlin.
Panamarenko (pseudonym of Henri Van Herwegen, born in Antwerp, 5 February 1940) was a prominent assemblagist in Belgian sculpture. Famous for his work with aeroplanes as theme; none of which are able nor constructed to actually leave the ground.
Panamarenko studied at the academy of Antwerp. Before 1968, his art was inspired by pop-art, but early on he became interested in aeroplanes and human powered flight. This interest is also reflected in his name, which supposedly is an acronym for “Pan American Airlines and Company”.
Starting in 1970, he developed his first models of imaginary vehicles, aeroplanes, balloons or helicopters, in original and surprising appearances. Many of his sculptures are modern variants of the myth of Icarus. The question of whether his creations can actually fly is part of their mystery and appeal.
The Kabakovs are amongst the most celebrated artists of their generation, widely known for their large-scale installations and use of fictional personas. Critiquing the conventions of art history and drawing upon the visual culture of the former Soviet Union – from dreary communal apartments to propaganda art and its highly optimistic depictions of Soviet life – their work addresses universal ideas of utopia and fantasy; hope and fear. …
The Kabakovs are best known for their ‘total’ installations, a type of immersive artwork that they pioneered. A ‘total installation’ completely immerses the viewer in a dramatic environment. They transform the gallery spaces they are displayed in, creating a new reality for the viewer to enter and experience. They often explore dark themes like power and control, oppression and destruction. Over their career, the Kabakovs have created almost two hundred total installations.
“Ilya’s world and work are based and built on fantasy and on the history of art. I, on the other hand, very early in life, somehow learned to combine both reality and fantasy and to live in both. My fantasy world is always close to and coexists with reality. Our life is very much based on this combination: I am trying to make reality seem like the realisation of fantasy, or, maybe, a continuation of fantasy, where there is no place for real, everyday situations and problems. Our life consists of our work, dreams and discussions.”
Moebius (Jean Henri Gaston Giraud) (French, 1938-2012) Arzach 1977 Heavy Metal Magazine, April 1977, Vol. I, No. 1
The first of Moebius’ Arzach comic series. Arzach made his debut in the first issue of Heavy Metal Magazine April – Vol. 1 No. 1. Arzach is seen flying atop his trusty pterodactyl in a strange world. Spotting a beautiful naked woman through a rounded window, Arzach is determined to win her heart, but what awaits him is utterly unexpected.
Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (French, 8 May 1938 – 10 March 2012) was a French artist, cartoonist, and writer who worked in the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (BD) tradition. Giraud garnered worldwide acclaim under the pseudonym Mœbius, as well as Gir outside the English-speaking world, used for the Blueberry series – his most successful creation in the non-English speaking parts of the world – and his Western-themed paintings. Esteemed by Federico Fellini, Stan Lee, and Hayao Miyazaki, among others, he has been described as the most influential bande dessinée artist after Hergé.
His most famous works include the series Blueberry, created with writer Jean-Michel Charlier, featuring one of the first antiheroes in Western comics. As Mœbius, he created a wide range of science-fiction and fantasy comics in a highly imaginative, surreal, almost abstract style. These works include Arzach and the Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius. He also collaborated with avant garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky for an unproduced adaptation of Dune and the comic book series The Incal.
Mœbius also contributed storyboards and concept designs to numerous science-fiction and fantasy films, such as Alien, Tron, The Fifth Element, and The Abyss. Blueberry was adapted for the screen in 2004 by French director Jan Kounen.
Sethembile Msezane was born in 1991 in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. She lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. Using interdisciplinary practice encompassing performance, photography, film, sculpture and drawing, Msezane creates commanding works heavy with spiritual and political symbolism. The artist explores issues around spirituality, commemoration and African knowledge systems. She processes her dreams as a medium through a lens of the plurality of existence across space and time, asking questions about the remembrance of ancestry. Part of her work has examined the processes of myth-making which are used to construct history, calling attention to the absence of the black female body in both the narratives and physical spaces of historical commemoration.
Text from the Tyburn Gallery website
“The Rhodes Must Fall protests had been going on for a month, kickstarted by an activist smearing his statue with excrement. During a lecture, students were asked whether they were for or against. Most said “for”, that it was a painful reminder of our colonial past, but one student – with a piece of paper that said “#procolonialism” on her chest – called protesters neanderthals, and said, “If you’re against the statue you’re against enlightenment and education, and you shouldn’t be at university.”
I knew it was only a matter of time before the statue fell, but at 11am on 9 April my supervisor said: “It’s coming down today.” I’d prepared my costume for the occasion and rushed to get ready. A friend helped me transport my plinth and wings. I arrived just before 2pm and was up on the plinth by quarter past. It was a little nerve-racking to be so high up because I was wearing high heels.
I looked at people’s phones and sunglasses, trying to see the reflection of the statue coming down. I saw the shadow move and thought, “This is the moment.” That’s when I lifted my wings.
I was up there for four hours. I would hold up my wings for about two minutes, take a 10-minute break and then put them up again. My legs hurt, but I didn’t realise how sore my arms were until I came down – they were shaking. My feet were blue, I was sunburnt; I had heat stroke and blurry vision from looking directly into the sun. I went home, had a shower and went straight to sleep. I felt like we were beginning to question this idealistic “rainbow nation”.”
I first saw the picture the next day on Facebook. When someone told me it was all over the global news, I was surprised.”
Largely inspired by The Defaming Portrait and by the hung man’s figure, the series Les Suspendus uses assemblage and montage to rephrase a new reality, which combines two images in a series of several diptychs. Agnès Geoffray interrogates the fictional power of imagery through her own staging and through assembled images. She accomplishes this by presenting multiple associations to the idea of suspension as a frozen moment between falling and ascension, collapsing and rising. Geoffray creates a gap and confusion between preexisting images and her own, which makes the resulting image appear as if it is part of an archive. Geoffray multiplies the references, axes of meaning of the text and genres of her work through still life, archive and stage settings to create a space, which plays with the unlimited possibilities of interpretation. The images convey the relic of the gestures and the violence connected to them, like a memory or a future memory of disorders and disasters.
Urs Lüthi (born 1947, Kriens) is a Swiss conceptual artist who attended the School of Applied Arts in Zurich. Noted for using his body and alter ego as the subject of his artworks, he has worked in photography, sculpture, performance, silk-screen, video and painting.
Several important themes can be found in Mauri’s work, all shaped into his works of art: the Screen, the Prototypes, the Projections, the Photography as Painting, the substantial Identity of Expressive Structures, the lasting relationship between Thought and World and between Thought as World. Mauri’s work, as complex as an history essay, becomes his autobiography, compact and uniform in its development and multifaceted in the attention to the contemporary world: an analysis where the fate of the individual and history co-exist.
![Ilse Bing (American born Germany, 1899-1998) 'Untitled [Seated Woman with Necklace, Solarized]' 1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/ilse-bing-seated-woman-with-necklace.jpg "Ilse Bing (American born Germany, 1899-1998) 'Untitled [Seated Woman with Necklace, Solarized]' 1943")
![Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) '[Haircutting in Front of General Store and Post Office on Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Mississippi]' 1939 from the exhibition 'The New Woman Behind the Camera' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, July - Oct, 2021](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/wolcott-haircutting.jpg "Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) '[Haircutting in Front of General Store and Post Office on Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Mississippi]' 1939 from the exhibition 'The New Woman Behind the Camera' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, July - Oct, 2021")
![Lucy Ashjian (American, 1907-1993) '[Savoy Dancers]' 1935-1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/lucy-ashjian-savoy-dancers.jpg "Lucy Ashjian (American, 1907-1993) '[Savoy Dancers]' 1935-1943")
![Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) '[Boy with a Cat]' 1934](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/dora-maar-boy-with-a-cat.jpg "Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) '[Boy with a Cat]' 1934")
![Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) 'La técnica [or, Mella's Typewriter]' 1928](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/tina-modotti-la-technica.jpg "Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) 'La técnica [or, Mella's Typewriter]' 1928")
![Harald Lechenper. 'Das Rätsel Indien' [The Indian Puzzle] 1935](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/harald_lechenperg_1935.jpg "Harald Lechenper. 'Das Rätsel Indien' [The Indian Puzzle] 1935")
![Attributed to Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) '[Landscape]' c. 1855](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/rejlander-landscape-c-1855-web.jpg "Attributed to Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) '[Landscape]' c. 1855")
![Fabio Mauri (Italian, 1926-2009) 'Macchina per fissare acquerelli [Machine for fixing watercolours]' 2007](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/fabiomauri-web.jpg "Fabio Mauri (Italian, 1926-2009) 'Macchina per fissare acquerelli [Machine for fixing watercolours]' 2007")
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