Cut & Paste
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Central Europe, in the period between World War I and World War II, was made up of countries that had lost territory (German), countries that had just come into being (Poland), and the remnants of fractured empires (the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman). Industrialization, urbanization, and the encroaching Great Depression put immense pressure on fragile political systems, and led to the rise of radical, totalitarian political parties. All of this is reflected in the work in “Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945” at the Guggenheim Museum, which presents the work of an extraordinarily gifted generation of photographers, who took advantage of new mass printing technologies and new aesthetics to communicate meaningfully with an extended audience.
One of the new ways of seeing was photomontage, a process by which photographs, drawings, and other oddments were cut up and then pasted together in startling combinations. Perhaps the way the map of Europe had been re-assembled made photomontage seem less peculiar; the technique was used not just for artistic purposes, but also for commercial advertisements and political representations. There are many examples in “Foto,” including “Twenty Years Later!” (1934) by John Heartfield, one of the masters of the genre; Wladyslaw Strzeminski’s Holocaust memorial, “The Sticky Stain of Crime” (1945), and Herbert Bayer’s quirky, but affecting, “Lonely Metropolitan” (1932). The last is also a good example of Surrealism, which began in Paris in the early 1920s and soon found an important second home in Prague.
Another major influence was the Bauhaus, which was founded in Weimar in 1919, moved to Dessau in 1925, and finally to Berlin in 1932. (It was closed by the Nazis in 1933.) László Moholy-Nagy was one of the main theorists connected with the Bauhaus, and he is represented in “Foto” by the playful “Photogram with Eiffel Tower” (1925–29) — a photogram is made by placing objects on photosensitive paper and then exposing it to light — and by “Radio Tower Berlin” (1928), an example of the radical perspectives the Bauhaus encouraged photographers to experiment with. Lucia Moholy, his wife between 1920 and 1932, has two fine portraits, “Florence Henri” (1927) and “Franz Roh” (1926). Both are close-cropped and have the clarity of intention that is one of the characteristics of Bauhaus aesthetics; the sense of specific personality is not lost in the strong sense of design.
Roh was himself an important theorist and practitioner, known for his negative prints. Two examples are on display at the Guggenheim — the stylish “Untitled (Negative ‘P’)” (late 1920s), which features a distant sedan, a woman leaning against a bollard, and a building entranceway, and “Greeting Oneself” (1927–33), a picture of a woman kissing herself in the mirror that is made even more disturbing by the reversal of tones. Sexual identity is as ambiguous in several photographs as is national identity in a time of shifting borders. Examples include August Sander’s “Wife of the Cologne Painter Peter Abelen” (1926) and Lotte Jacobi’s “Klaus and Erika Mann” (c. 1928–30).
Among the politically motivated works was Károly Escher’s “The Bank Director’s Bath” (1938), depicting a plump banker floating on his back in a pool, looking satisfied and foolish, comic but not dehumanized. It is hung right next to two pictures of workers by Kata Kálmán, “Coal Carrier” (1931) and “Emo Weisz, 23-year-old Factory Worker, Budapest” (1932), both of which gain poignancy because they too retain their humanity, and are not valorized in the manner of socialist realism. In fact, throughout the show, there are wonderful portraits, as if the new thing that most required a new way of being seen was the new people as they emerged into modernity.
There are hundreds of pictures in “Foto,” and it is interesting to see images by famous photographers such as Erich Salomon, Martin Munkácsi (his “Leni Riefenstahl,” from 1931), shows her as a hard piece of work), ringl + pit (Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach), and André Kertész surrounded by images of their lesser-known contemporaries. It helps us to understand the social and aesthetic problems they faced, and to appreciate their individual and collective accomplishments. The presence of Roman Vishniac’s overcast “Entrance to the Ghetto, Kazimierz” (1937) is a foreboding of the cataclysm to come. The last picture in the show, Jindrich Marco’s “Souvenir,” from the series “Springtime in Poland,” is dated 1947, and shows a photographer stationed behind his tripod preparing to take a snapshot of two soldiers posing with their weapons in front of a painted backdrop of trees and mountains. The idyllic backdrop is set up before the bombed-out rubble of a city; history, too, created surrealistic images.
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