Month: August 2015
Ivan Leonidov: Artist, dreamer, poet
Andrei Gozak
Complete Works
January 1988
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The greatest poet is not the one who wrote best but the one who suggested most.
— Walt Whitman
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Since he first emerged on the architectural scene in the twenties, the name of Ivan Leonidov has acquired legendary status. The reason for this is simply the uniqueness of his work. Its power and originality have been attested by the deep and fruitful influence which it exerted, and continues to exert, on worldwide architectural thinking — despite the fact that the vast majority of his projects remained on paper and unbuilt.
For all the complexities of his life, Leonidov produced a great deal of work. Till the very end of his life he preserved his sharpness of eye and steadiness of hand. But more important he also preserved a total faithfulness to the central ideas of his architecture and to his own aesthetic principles. Thus those commentators are profoundly mistaken, and indeed inaccurate, who say that he was only fully able to display his talent in those brief avant-garde years of the late twenties and early thirties during which he first became known. Notable here has been the writing of P. Aleksandrov and S.O. Khan-Magomedov.1 The triumphant success of Leonidov’s projects in those years is obvious, but what he did later is neither architecturally nor artistically inferior to it. His capabilities in no way diminished with time, but only now, when we can see the fullest possible range of his sketches and designs, such as is assembled here, can we really appreciate the inexhaustible quality of his talent. Naturally his work underwent a process of evolution, as on one hand it reflected the beating of his own internal artistic pulse, and on the other it reacted to external influences and circumstances. But through all the modifications it was characterized by an enviable stability, both in aesthetic and ethical dimensions of his worldview, and in its style of graphic representation.
Ivan Il’ich Leonidov was born into a peasant family on the 9th of February 1902 in the village of Vlasikh, in what was then the Stantskii district of the Tverskoi gubemia, or province. His childhood was spent in the village of Babino, and when he had completed four years at the local parish school he went at the age of twelve to earn his living in Petrograd.2 It is known that Leonidov first received training in painting and drawing in Tver, at the Free Art Studios which were organized in 1920.3 In 1921 he was sent to continue his study in Moscow at the Painting Faculty of the VKhUTEMAS, from which he later transferred to the architecture faculty and the studio of Aleksandr Vesnin.
The atmosphere of the VKhUTEMAS and his personal contacts with Aleksandr Vesnin played an important role in the shaping of Leonidov’s creative personality. Aleksandr Vesnin contributed a great deal to drawing out every side of his gifted pupil’s talents. While still a student, Leonidov took part in numerous open architectural competitions, and often achieved success. There were for example third prizes for an improved peasant hut and for a housing development in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, as well as a “recommendation for acquisition and adoption” for his Byelorussian State University project for Minsk. None of the original drawings done during his training have survived, but several publications from those years give a relatively full idea of his highly individual manner of composition and his graphic skills, as a young architect who had already mastered the language of early constructivism. There are manifestly close links between these Leonidov works and the projects of the Vesnin brothers and other founders of the constructivist architectural association, OSA.4
Leonidov’s final diploma project, for the Lenin Institute of Librarianship, must be regarded not only as his first truly independent work, but also as the distinctive credo of an architect setting out on his professional life. Displayed publicly at the First Exhibition of Modern Architecture in Moscow in 1927, it was received as the opening up of a whole new architectural direction.5 Alongside Tatlin’s tower of 1919 and Melnikov’s Paris Pavilion of 1925, the Lenin Institute has remained to this day one of the great symbols of the revolutionary, innovative spirit of the first decade of Soviet architecture.
The beginning of Leonidov’s professional activity is marked by his active participation in competitions. From 1927 to 1930 he was himself teaching at the somewhat reorganized version of VKhUTEMAS known as VKhUTEIN. Competitions were very numerous in Soviet architecture in those years, and they gave the young architect an opportunity to express himself in the various typological genres of current practice. Leonidov’s works of those years are universally characterized by the coherence of the synthesis he achieved between the constructivist functional method and his own compositional approach, but they are equally characterized by the consistency of his representational technique in exploiting the restrained language of black-and-white graphics.
In 1928 Leonidov took part for the first time in international architectural competitions, for the headquarters of the Tsentrosoiuz in Moscow, and for the monument to Christopher Columbus in Santo Domingo. Many well-known Soviet architects participated in both competitions, as well as Westerners. Corbusier of course was eventually to build the Tsentrosoiuz, which was completed in 1935; it is well known that he met Leonidov on related visits to Moscow during 1929-1930, as he did other leading constructivists, and that he had a very high opinion of Leonidov’s scheme for that building.
The finale to this series of competition designs was the project for the new socialist town around the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine in the Urals executed at the end of 1929. Leonidov headed an OSA design team composed of students from his own class in the VKhUTEIN.
The next year, 1930, was to be a fateful one in Leonidov’s biography. He took part in a competition for the design of a Palace of Culture in the Proletarskii district of southern Moscow, around the old Simonov Monastery. The plan which he submitted for the first round diverged significantly from the brief, and proposed not a building, but a model for the “cultural organization” of a whole area of the city. Even in the first round of the competition Leonidov’s project therefore provoked sharp criticism. Discussion of the results of the second round took place in even more complex circumstances, revealing acute disagreements between the various groupings and philosophies now becoming consolidated in and around Soviet architecture. Although this time his proposal was in complete accordance with the terms of the brief, Leonidov’s scheme once again became the focal point of heated debate and discussions of larger architectural issues. Continue reading
László Moholy-Nagy and his vision
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You can download the 1969 translation of László Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film (1927) by clicking on the embedded link. A while ago I posted some of Moholy’s work, but this is much more comprehensive. Otto Stelzer’s postscript to the 1967 reissue of the classic Bauhausbuch release appears below along with some examples of his films, photographs, and paintings.
Nearly out of space on my WordPress account. So I might have to set up a Paypal account and start soliciting donations. For now, though, enjoy.
Painting
Pressebild der Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau zur Ausstellung “Mensch Raum Maschine. Bühnenexperimente am Bauhaus”
Bei Veröffentlichung geben Sie bitte den Bildnachweis wie oben aufgeführt an und beachten Sie bitte, dass die Verwendung der Fotos nur zur einmaligen Verwendung im Zusammenhang mit der Berichterstattung gestattet ist.
Um ein Belegexemplar wird gebeten.
Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau
Gropiusallee 38
06846 Dessau-Roßlau
Tel. +49-(0)340-6508-250
Fax +49-(0)340-6508-226
www.bauhaus-dessau.de
E-Mail: service@bauhaus-dessau.de
Otto Stelzer
Janet Seligman
(March 1969)
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László Moholy-Nagy saw photography not only as a means of reproducing reality and relieving the painter of this function. He recognized its power of discovering reality. “The nature which speaks to the camera is a different nature from the one which speaks to the eye,” wrote Walter Benjamin years after Moholy had developed the experimental conditions for Benjamin’s theory. The other nature discovered by the camera influenced what Moholy, after he had emigrated, was to call The New Vision. It alters our insight into the real world. Much has happened in the meantime in this field and on a broader basis than Moholy could have foreseen. Painting, Photography, Film today exists as a new entity even in areas to which Moholy’s own creative desire could scarcely have led: for example, in the Neo-Realism of Bacon, Rivers, Warhol, Vostell and many others whose reality is no more than a second actuality produced by photography.
Moholy is one of those artists whose reputation continues to grow steadily after their death because their works have a prophetic action. Moholy always saw himself as a Constructivist but he passed quickly through the static Constructivism of his own time. In a few moves he opened a game which is being won today. His light-modulators, his “composition in moving colored light,” his leaf-paintings of the forties, represent the beginnings of a “kinetic art” — even the term is his — which is flourishing today. Op Art? Moholy did the essential spade-work of this school (the old expression is in order here) in 1942, even including the objective, important for Op artists, of a “use”: with his pupils in Chicago he had evolved studies for military camouflage. The display of these things, later mounted in the school of design by his collaborator and fellow Hungarian György Kepes, was at once the first Op exhibition, “Trompe l’oeil,” and its theoretical constituent. New materials? Moholy had been using celluloid, aluminium, plexiglass, and gallalith as early as the Bauhaus days. Modern typography? Moholy has influenced two generations of typographers. Even in the field of aesthetic theory Moholy found a new approach; its aim was a theory of information in art. Moholy enlisted pioneers of this now much discussed theory as long as twenty-five years ago, nominating Charles Morris, the authority on semantics, to a professorship at the New Bauhaus, Chicago and inviting Hayakawa, another semanticist to speak at his institute. In 1925, when the Bauhaus book now being re-issued first appeared, Moholy was regarded as a Utopian. That Moholy, this youthful radical, with his fanaticism and his boundless energy, radiated terror too, even among his colleagues at the Bauhaus, is understandable. “Only optics, mechanics, and the desire to put the old static painting out of action,” wrote Feininger to his wife at the time: “There is incessant talk of cinema, optics, mechanics, projection and continuous motion and even of mechanically produced optical transparencies, multicolored, in the finest colors of the spectrum, which can be stored in the same way as gramophone records” (Moholy’s “Domestic Pinacotheca,” p. 25). Is this the atmosphere in which painters like Klee and some others of us can go on developing? Klee was quite depressed yesterday when talking about Moholy.” Yet Feininger’s own transparent picture-space seems not wholly disconnected from Moholy’s light “displays.”
Pascal discovered in human behavior two attitudes of mind: “One is the geometric, the other that of finesse.” Gottfried Benn took this up and made the word “finesse,” difficult enough to translate already, even more obscure. “The separation, therefore, of the scientific from the sublime world…the world which can be verified to the point of confirmatory neurosis and the world of isolation which nothing can make certain.” The attitudes which Pascal conceived of as being complementary and connected are now separated. The harmonization of the two attitudes of mind to which the art of classical periods aspired is abandoned. The conflict between the Poussinistes and the followers of Rubens, conducted flexibly from the 17th to the 19th century, became a war of positions with frozen fronts.
Photography 1
The Bauhaus carried on the conflict until the parties retired: on the one side the sublime: Klee, Feininger, Itten, and Kandinsky too, whose “nearly” Constructivist paintings still reminded Moholy of “underwater landscapes’; on the other “geometricians” with Moholy at their head (“forms of the simplest geometry as a step towards objectivity’), his pupils and the combatants, Malevich, El Lissitzky, Mondrian, Van Doesburg, all closely connected with the Bauhaus. On the one side the “lyrical I” (in Benn’s sense), on the other the collectivists, “one in the spirit” with science, social system and architecture, as Moholy formulated it in a Bauhaus lecture in 1923.
Return to the Horrorhaus: Hans Poelzig’s nightmare expressionism, 1908-1935
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Two years ago, I introduced my readers to the work of the German expressionist architect Hans Poelzig. Many were doubtless familiar with his buildings already. What I sought to highlight, though, was the sheer scariness of his architecture. Hence “scary architecture.” SOCKS Studio, always excellent and often operating on the same wavelength, also put up a post on Poelzig around the same time.
In the time that has passed, I have amassed hundreds more high-quality images of plans, sketches, and period photographs of Poelzig’s built work. Needless to say, they aren’t any less scary than before. One could easily imagine Max Schreck’s Nosferatu lurking in the corridors of these structures, with Caligari’s hypnotized somnambulist dashing madly over their rooftops. Alfred Kubin’s monsters threaten to burst forth at any minute.
Flights of fancy aside, these really are stunning images. Dark, peculiar, and unexpected. I’m not sure what lends them this eerie quality, especially as a range of different building types are depicted, delineated, or photographed. Yet all of Poelzig’s structures share this tenebrous aspect, whether one takes his elegant cinema palaces, ominous monuments, or frightening industrial complexes (see the acid factory and gas works). Great stuff.
Click any of the following thumbnails to see the images in higher resolution, and scroll through to see more. Enjoy!
Hans Poelzig _ Albert Vennemann Deli-Lichtspiele, Breslau (1926-1927)
Hans Poelzig (1869-1936) Geschäftshaus S. Adam, Leipziger Straße_ Friedrichstraße, Berlin (1928)
Hans Poelzig (1869-1936) Geschäftshaus S. Adam, Leipziger Straße_ Friedrichstraße, Berlin (1928)z
“¡Que viva Mexico!” Eisenstein in North America (1931)
For anyone who’s interested in this sort of thing, Experimental Cinema was basically an organ of Soviet avant-garde movie-making published in English. It includes articles written by Sergei Eisenstein, Béla Balázs, Dziga Vertov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and numerous others from that milieu. El Lissitzky and Aleksandr Rodchenko were employed as photographers for the journal. You can download a few issues published between 1930 and 1934 courtesy of the Internet Archive. Movie posters for some of the films discussed in its pages can be found in my post from a few days ago on the Stenberg brothers.
The following review of Eisenstein’s unfinished masterpiece, Que viva México!, was written by the American filmmaker and studio producer Morris Helprin. At the time, both he and his wife were committed communists. Later, Helprin became president of London Films in Hollywood (one article in Experimental Cinema called Hollywood “the sales agent of American imperialism”). Still, quite a neat summary and some behind-the-scenes details. If you’re interested in reading more about it, you can download the following texts or watch the full-length movie below.
- Andrea Noble, “Seeing through ¡Que viva México!: Eisenstein’s Travels in Mexico”
- Masha Salazkina, In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBTdUD0UOl8
Martin Hernandez, 21-year-old Mexican-Indian peasant and native of Apam, the principal character of the “Maguey” episode
Youthful beauty blossoms on the screen
Still from “Que viva Mexico!”
Death comes along dancing
Still from Eisenstein’s “Que viva Mexico!”
In the country of the magueys
Mexican women mourning over the coffin of a dead boy, during the “Maguey” episode
On the Hacienda Tetlapayac, work hymn of the Mexican proletariat
Mexican peasants, watching from a hilltop the passing funeral
Funeral ceremony of the Mayan Indians
Closeup of Martin Hernandez, the Mexican-Indian
This still and the shorts illustrating the synopsis of the scenario for “Que Viva Mexico!” were taken by Eduard Tisse
Eisenstein looking into the finder to gauge an angle closeup of a Mexican woman
Daily ceremony at dawn
Angle closeup from the bull-fight sequence in the “Romance” episode
Eisenstein and Aleksandrov on the ruins of Chichenita in Yucatan, Mexco (1931)
Eisenstein and Tisse preparing a shot on the pyramids of Teotihuacan, Mexico (1932)
Maria is forgotten
Martin Hernandez in the Maguey episode
Production still showing Eisenstein, Aleksandrov, and Tisse at work on “Que viva Mexico!” Here Eisenstein’s collective production company is at work, Eisentein on the right
The film is a poem of a sociological character. Rather an interpretive essay of Mexico’s evolution – Agustin Aragon Leiva
The dwellers of Yucatan, land of ruins and huge pyramids, have still conserved in feature and forms the character of their ancestors, the great race of ancient Mayas
Girl from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec
Eisenstein in Mexico
Morris Helprin
Experimental Cinema
September 1932
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“Que Viva Mexico!”
It is the first film made in the Western hemisphere to assume the mantle of maturity. The furthest step yet from the idiocies of corn-fed Hollywood. It turns its tail up at the banal; thumbs its nose at the benign. It is pictorial rhetoric of such vital force that it thunders and roars. Yet it contains every aspect of the popular cinema.
“QUE VIVA MEXICO!”
That day at Los Remedios, when we walked over the hills in search of a suitable location, served as an indication of Eisenstein’s preciseness, his exciting demands that his subject be even in quality. All Mexico around us was “beautiful enough to swoon in.” Here was no prettiness of the postcard cinema, none of your oak-paneled pictures that need but sprinklings of chemical brilliants to turn them into revolting chromes. The top of a mountain and an ancient aqueduct jutting at a seven-thousand foot height into a stilled canopy of swan-white clouds. You could set your camera down at almost any spot and grind. And have a beautiful scenic.
But the Russian, followed hastily by Tisse, his cameraman, Aragon, a young Mexican intellectual who serves as a guide, interpreter, and go-between, a camera boy, and myself, trailed by five peons who were the day’s actors at a peso each, led a frantic chase to find the spot. Following which were at least a dozen of the spots. Continue reading
A black man in Turkmenistan: Langston Hughes’ 1932 account of Soviet Central Asia
Below are scans of the communist and Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes’ copy of his own short tract on Soviet Central Asia, from 1932. It was published under the title A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, and includes copious editorial notation and marginalia around the text. Hughes was known as something of a perfectionist, so it’s not surprising at all that he would submit something he wrote to such rigorous scrutiny.
The introductory remark provided by the publisher is slightly misleading, reflecting a political policy adopted by the Stalinist Comintern toward the black population in the Southern United States. Describing Hughes as “the son of an oppressed nationality,” the brief note suggests that he will testify to “the achievements of formerly oppressed nationalities under the banner of the Soviets.” At the time, Moscow’s line on “the Negro question” in the US was that blacks in the South — especially along the so-called “Black Belt,” areas where they held a sizable majority — constituted a separate nation which ought to be granted autonomy, i.e. the right of national self-determination.
Readers can learn more about this disastrous official stance here in Benjamin Blumberg’s excellent essay “Race and the Left in America: An Unmet Challenge.” For now, we turn to the text. What were Hughes’ impressions of life in Soviet Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan?
Many of his attitudes and opinions, it must be said, would likely shock and offend today’s self-proclaimed “Marxists.” Hughes unabashedly celebrated the secularization process then underway in these territories, inaugurated by the Soviet authorities working in tandem with local communists and fellow-travelers. The struggle against religious tradition was not restricted to gender integration and secular education in school reform, but extended to the public sphere and culture in general. “Illiteracy, not only of children but of adults, has been greatly reduced,” wrote Hughes, enthusiastically. “The cells of the madrases are empty, and the schools of the state are overcrowded. Already to the youth today, Allah is only a legend and the Koran is forgotten. Marx, Lenin, chemistry, economics, mathematics, scientific agriculture, electricity, and hygiene are new realities to millions who once knew only the sleepy teachings of priestcraft” (33).
Such talk would likely get one branded an Orientalist or Islamophobe by Marxists writing in recent years. According to Houria Bouteldja and the indigènes of France, religion is not the opiate of the masses but rather an authentic expression of non-Western ways of life. Worldviews rooted in atheistic materialism are imports of the decadent, liberal, bourgeois West. Downtrodden peoples living along the periphery cannot be expected to live without the comforting illusions of religious ritual. Perhaps Hughes was simply unaware of radical cultural difference, irreducible Otherness, and similar French theoretical nonsense. Now, thank G-d, we know better than those naïve revolutionaries of the past.
But Hughes had a more immediate reason for associating faith and religiosity with oppression. Citing Mencken — i.e., “America’s lovable literary buffoon” — he notes that “Across the water, on the mainland, the god worshipers are legion. Mencken…calls the South ‘The Bible Belt’ because there are so many churches, preachers, and prayers there. Yet it is in this same Bible Belt that hundreds of Negroes are lynched, race riots are organized, peonage and chain gangs and forced labor of all forms are found, women are exploited in the cotton mills, and farces of justice like the Scottsboro trial are staged” (27).
Little wonder, then, that Marx’s 1875 program “to liberate conscience from the witchery of religion” would appeal to someone like Hughes. He poetically recalls,
In industrial cities in the Northern Unites States, hundreds of thousands of black and white workers walk the streets hungry and unemployed in the shadows of skyscrapers… And in the churches, the bosses pray, and the ministers are one in denouncing communism — and calling on God — like the mullahs of Bukhara when the Emir ruled. I walk through the streets past crumbling walls of sun-dried brick, beneath empty towers and minarets beside palaces and mosques. I remember how, as a boy in far-away Kansas, I dreamed of seeing this fabulous city… And now here I am, traveling with a Soviet newspaper, seeing for myself all the dusty and wonderful horrors that monarchy and religion created in the dark past, which have now been vanquished by socialism. (28)
What impressed Hughes the most, however, was the liberation of women brought about by the Bolsheviks. And not just Russian ones, either, but partisans hailing from every Soviet republic. Following the Emir’s overthrow, he explains, came “an opening of doors to women and the death of Allah…Now the brass bed of the Emir still stands in the summer palace, but his wives are free from the harem, and the whole estate is shortly to become a rest-home for the workers of the sovkhozes. Peasants will sleep where they could not enter before, and women will stroll unveiled beneath the grape arbors where once they walked only in paranjas guarded by eunuchs” (25). Continue reading
Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer’s adventures in the Soviet Union, 1930-1936
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I’ve posted about Hannes Meyer several times already. For those who don’t know, Meyer was the second Bauhaus director. He stepped in after Walter Gropius returned to his own private practice in 1928, and presided over the art and architecture school until he was forced out due to his Marxist convictions in 1930. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe replaced him. After his tenure came to an abrupt end, Meyer and a number of his students traveled to Moscow at the invitation of the Soviet government. Despite his enthusiastic support for the five-year plans then underway, and his unwavering loyalty throughout, Meyer eventually wore out his welcome in the USSR. Several of his colleagues were rounded up and arrested before he finally decided to return to Switzerland. Meyer didn’t stay long there, however, moving permanently to Mexico in 1938.
Hannes Meyer’s communist party membership card
Meyer, Hannes View of the magazine Bauhaus-Zeitschrift, No. 2_3, 2nd year, 1928 being placed on a flat surface, Dessau, Germany, between 1928 and 1930
Hannes Meyer, 1928 (photo by Lotte Beese)
Bauhaus party in Weimar, 1924 Hannes Meyer on the lower right
Bauhaus students protesting the dismissal of Hannes Meyer, 1930
Portrait of Hannes Meyer, 1928
Photograph of Hannes Meyer Date 1928 Description Bauhaus
Unknown Portrait of Hannes Meyer, Aryeh Sharon and unidentified students at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, holding a competition drawing by Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer for the League of Nations Building in Geneva, Switzerland, between 1927-1929
Hannes Meyer was the school’s director from 1928-30. His personable manner and egalitarian outlook made him popular with students, despite the controversies surrounding his political outlook and his dismissal 1930. (Otto Umbehr)
Hannes Meyer, ca. 1929
Portrait of H. Meyer Artist_Maker(s)- Lotte Beese (German, 1903 – 1988) Culture- German Date- about 1928 Medium- Gelatin silver print Dimensions- 22.7 x 16.8 cm
Today he is largely forgotten, though some have expressed interest in his legacy of late. Claude Schnaidt has provided probably the best comprehensive account of his work. It is not surprising that Meyer would be overshadowed by his predecessor Gropius on the one hand, and his successor Mies on the other. Both were more significant in the history of modern architecture, more groundbreaking or talented. Nevertheless, Meyer was quite innovative himself, as can be seen from his designs for co-ops and proposal for the League of Nations building in Geneva (1926). His skill in other media, such as photography and city planning, was also considerable.
Yesterday I discovered a rare article Meyer wrote in 1942, originally in Spanish, on the architectural profession in the Soviet Union. It was translated into English and published by Harvard’s student design magazine TASK in 1943. The article is interesting in several respects. First, because it displays no bitterness whatsoever at the Stalinist regime that forced Meyer into exile and many of his friends. Second, because the pioneering modernist implicitly repudiates many of his earlier positions on the role of architecture in modern society, criticizing the avant-garde architects at VKhUTEMAS and providing a “dialectical” justification for protopostmodernist eclecticism. Third, because it includes a number of facts and figures, which are interesting even though they are without a doubt inaccurate or misleading.
Alongside the article, which appears below, I’ve included a bunch of photos Meyer took documenting his journeys across the USSR. Enjoy.
Meyer, Hannes Exterior view of the Moscow-Volga Canal Pumping-station with a modern building surmounted by a replica of a sailing ship in the foreground, Moscow, 1937-1954
Meyer, Hannes
Exterior view of the Krassnye Vorota subway station entrance, Moscow
1935-1954
Meyer, Hannes Exterior view of the Palace of the Azerbaijan Press from across Nizami Square, Baku, Soviet Union (now in Azerbaijan), 1932-1954
Meyer, Hannes Interior view of Dzerzhinskaya Square subway station escalators, Moscow, 1935-1954
Meyer, Hannes Exterior view of the Ukrainian Pavilion, 1939 Soviet Union Agricultural Exhibition, Moscow, 1941
Meyer, Hannes Exterior view of New Riviera Sanatorium for employees of the People’s Commissariat of Military Affairs, Sochi, Soviet Union (now in Russia), 1935
Meyer, Hannes Exterior view of funicular railway tracks flanked by flights of stairs leading to Voroshilov Sanatorium, Sochi, Soviet Union (now in Russia), 1930
Meyer, Hannes Interior view of Dzerzhinskaya Square subway station showing the escalators, Moscow, 1935-1954
Meyer, Hannes Interior view of a Moscow theatre showing the play “Aristocrats”, Moscow, 1930-1936
Meyer, Hannes Exterior view of the V.I. Lenin National Library, Moscow, ca. 1933
Meyer, Hannes Bâtiment de la Pravda, Moscou, 1935 – 1936 PH1981-0199-009
Meyer, Hannes Exterior view of the N. 11 Mikoyan Bread-Baking Plant, Moscow, June 1941
Meyer, Hannes Interior view of Dvorets Sovietov (Palace of Unions) subway station platform, Moscow, 1935-1954
Meyer, Hannes Exterior view of Voroshilov Sanatorium, Sochi, Soviet Union (now in Russia) 1933 or later
Meyer, Hannes View of Arbat Square with street car, cars, and people, Moscow, 1935
Meyer, Hannes View of an interior courtyard of the Dukstroi Apartment Building, 34 Leningradskoe Schosse, Moscow, 1930-1954
Meyer, Hannes Interior view of Mayakovskaya subway station platform, Moscow, 1938-1954
Meyer, Hannes People waiting for street cars beside an information post in Revolution Square, Moscow, 1935
Meyer, Hannes View of the entrance to Dvorets Sovetov (Palace of Soviets, now Kropotkinskaya) metro station, Moscow, Soviet Union, 1935-1954
The Soviet architect
Hannes Meyer
TASK magazine
February 1943
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I dedicate this unpretentious work to the composer Dmitri Shostakovitch, who, in the trenches of Leningrad, December 1941, put the final notes on his Seventh Symphony, rising in this classic form — score and weapon forged in hand — to the present duty of all democratic intellectuals in the entire world: the defense of our culture and of humanity.
Hannes Meyer
Mexico 11/15/1942
Villalongin 46-8
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The architect has always been intimately linked with his social environment. He is one of the human tools that serve the ruling power to fortify its position. Architecture besides its direct utility, has always served to maintain power. We find an architect serving the Pope, in Bramante, or the King, in Le Nôtre, or as a colonial functionary, in Tolsa, or as a privileged member of the bourgeoisie, in Tony Garnier. To this we must add that building’ is an activity profoundly connected with social-economic needs and the superimposed spiritual structure. And the architect is always of necessity a collaborator. He does his work together with economists and industrialists, with workers, artisans, and housewives. In Hindu tradition the future architect must first perfect himself as a carpenter, a mason, a painter, a sculptor, and an iron worker. Mature men of forty years are then known as “masters of architecture.”
In capitalist society architecture is numbered among the “liberal professions,” and this is why bankers, speculators, and other knights of the stock market can use the decorative cloak of architecture to cover the sores of the social body. — Architecture is not an autonomous art, as certain prima donnas of the drawing board would like to have us believe. The architect is born and finds his form in the womb of his society and is brought forth by a specific age and by a definite epoch. Hence we find the most capable and creative architects in the heart of the classical forms of society.
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The socialist society in the USSR, created by the October Revolution of 1917, is an experiment without precedent. For the first time in human history the people themselves own the factories and all the means of production. The land also has been nationalized. Private economy, until then in a state of anarchy, has been transformed into a planned and directed economy. Together with the great change in the position of intellectuals in the USSR, the position and the role of the architect has been completely altered. The architectural structure of the new state has itself been transformed.
Outside of the USSR it is very hard to form any clear idea of the present conception of architecture in that country. It is confusing to find in its publications buildings of the most diverse character, examples of classicism, and of conflicting trends. These efforts in search of a national ideal are described as backward by American architects, who are justly proud of their highly industrialized achievements. They describe the Soviet attempt to connect by way of dialectics the magnificent past of Russian architecture with the dynamic present as a new academicism. Because of their ignorance of social and economical matters, they can employ no other pattern than those found in their everyday surroundings. For this reason “glass construction,” which is the last word on this continent, over there, in a different environment appears completely out of place. Chippendale furniture, here an expression of conservatism, is there a step forward in the development of the highest quality in cabinet work.
The Stenberg brothers and the art of Soviet movie posters
MacDougal 8th Sept. 060
Alma Law: Let’s begin, if you’re agreeable, simply with some biographical information.
Vladimir Stenberg: My father was born in Sweden in the town of Norrkoping and he finished the Academy in Stockholm with a gold medal. Then he was invited to come here to Moscow to do some kind of work. At that time [1896] there was an exhibition in Yuzovka — now it’s called Donetsk — so there in Yuzovka my father worked on an exhibition. Later at the Nizhninovgorod fair he did some kind of work. In Moscow he met my mother. They married and had three children.1
My father lived and worked in Moscow and I wanted to enter a technical school. I was very fond of technology, mechanics, and so forth.2 But conditions were such that I had to enter Stroganov, the art school. My father worked as a painter, and from the time I was six years of age, we had pencils, brushes, and the like in our hands. We began to draw very early. Well, like children, they see their father drawing, and so we drew too. And here’s what’s interesting about our father. When we were going to school, we would bring home our drawings at the end of the year. My brother, Georgii, and I would play a trick and switch some of the drawings. But my father always knew. We would sit together and draw figures. Everything. And it seemed to us that we had everything the same. But nevertheless our father would still distinguish the hand of one son’s work from the other’s.
When we had to do perspective, to study all that, we told the teacher that our father was an artist and he had taught us a little. The teacher gave us a test assignment and we did it. He said, “That isn’t the way it’s done. The plan should be at the bottom, and at the top, the representation of that perspective.” But our father had another method: the plan on top and underneath the representation. Because when you’re working, it’s more convenient to have at the bottom what is most important. Therefore we had it the other way around. When the teacher asked, “Why do you do it that way?” we answered, “Our father taught us that way.” “Well, of course,” he said, “with foreigners, they have things the other way around.” Continue reading
Open source Marxism: Free PDFs from Historical Materialism, Verso, and Jacobin
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UPDATE: Though the links below are no longer working, some hero bundled the entire contents of this post into a torrent that can be downloaded from The Pirate Bay.
Stumbled across an amazing database of free Marxist PDFs, the posts of which seems to be password protected but whose files are nevertheless accessible. (You can click any of the hundreds of links below to download them directly, since the post itself is locked). Even if these get taken down, as seemed to happen with the Fuck V£R$0 blog a few years ago, the cat is already out of the bag. As Novara Media pointed out following the Lawrence & Wishart copyright controversy in 2014, once published these things tend to obey the logic of the so-called “Streisand effect.” They explained that “[the] attempt to ban or censor something will tend to increase its prominence and breadth of dissemination. The instantly and near-infinitely replicable quality of digital information makes this easy.”
In their view, this is just one of “Seven Reasons ‘Radical’ Publishers are Getting OWNED by the Internet.” You should really read the whole article; it’s quite good. With Lawrence & Wishart, the outcry over their exclusive claims to ownership over material that should be made available to all was nearly universal. However, publishing tycoons such as Sebastian Budgen — until recently a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party in Britain (prior to its 2013 rape scandal), commissioning editor of Historical Materialism, Verso Books, New Left Review, and now also Jacobin — take exception when similar demands are placed on books released by their own companies. Budgen of course claims that the printing presses he works for are not ordinary companies, but rather integral parts of a “counterhegemonic apparatus” that will someday challenge hegemonic capitalism.
The Association of Musical Marxists captured this hilarious sense of exceptionalism on their “Sebastian Budgen Memorial Download Page,” featuring one of his trademark™ outbursts against those who illegally download books:
Before the internet people had to actually go to the photocopying shop. Now they don’t even have to do that and they are outraged when they can’t download the stuff for free. Fuckers – I hate them so much…
I make a distinction between the honest downloaders who do it discreetly and will spend money when they have it and the loud-mouthed freeloading scum who have no interest in or understanding of how to build a counterhegemonic apparatus.
I’m not just interested in people being customers but in recognising, to the extent that they are leftists, that they should be involved in building a counterhegemonic apparatus. The anarchoids and lazy leftists of today don’t get that so they act like the lowest petty bourgeois individualist swine.
Usually rhetoric denouncing “lazy fuckers” and “freeloading scum” comes from neoliberal demagogues, who want to gut social welfare programs and impose austerity. Not this time, though. This time it’s straight from the mouths of counterhegemonic apparatchiks, tilting at windmills in order to protect intellectual property. Pretty pathetic, if you ask me. Whoever uploaded these PDFs has it more right, to my mind: “Knowledge must be held in common.”
Erik Olin Wright, in his book Envisioning Real Utopias (ironically published by Verso), went so far as to claim online file-sharing as an “interstitial strategy” that can “subvert capitalist intellectual property.” I personally doubt whether acts of petty piracy can undermine capitalist social relations, but maybe it’s significant as a utopian impulse. Better to just recognize file-sharing as an unavoidable fact, and that embarrassing hissy fits like the one above only encourage practitioners to download harder.
Maybe I’d feel a bit worse about linking to all these texts if Budgen weren’t such a whiny crybaby. Hard to sympathize with him, however, after he put out this ridiculous burn notice against me a couple months back, urging other leftists to erect a cordon sanitaire around me. Leftists should “shun” and “no platform” me, defriending anyone who posts or shares links to this blog. Kind of reminds me of a recent Clickhole article, “Uncompromising: This Tyrant Unfriends All Dissidents as an Example to the Rest,” which describes “[a] despotic maniac rules with an iron fist of callous indifference, unfriending anyone who dares go against something he posts.”
Childishness and grandiosity aside, though, this is a great list of books. Grab them while you can, but don’t despair if they’re removed before you get the chance. Someone will repost them eventually, probably sooner than later. Enjoy. Continue reading
The golden age of bourgeois portraiture, before the rise of photography
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What follows is an assortment of extremely high-resolution portraits of famous figures gleaned from various sources around the web, along with a short text by the French photographer and media critic Gisèle Freund. Almost 175 portraits are included, featuring well-known philosophers, political economists, and revolutionaries such as Thomas Münzer, Stepan Razin, René Descartes, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, David Ricardo, G.W.F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Toussaint Louverture, Maximilien Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, Baruch Spinoza, Georges Danton, and numerous others who I’m forgetting. Included also, as mentioned, is an extract from Freund’s Photography and Society (1970), a book more than thirty years in the making.
Freund’s close friend and theoretical influence Walter Benjamin commented on an earlier draft of this chapter:
Study of the history of photography began about eight or ten years ago. We have a number of publications, mostly illustrated, on its infancy and its early masters. But only this most recent study has treated the subject in conjunction with the history of painting. Gisèle Freund’s study describes the rise of photography as conditioned by that of the bourgeoisie, successfully illustrating the causal connection by examining the history of the portrait. Starting from the expensive ivory miniature (the portrait technique most widely used under the ancien régime), the author describes the various procedures which contributed to making portrait production quicker and cheaper, and therefore more widespread, around 1780, sixty years before the invention of photography. Her description of the “physiognotrace” as an intermediate form between the portrait miniature and the photograph shows in exemplary fashion how technical factors can be made socially transparent. The author then explains how, with photography, technical development in art converged with the general technical standard of society, bringing the portrait within the means of wider bourgeois strata. She shows that the miniaturists were the first painters to fall victim to photography.
Besides Freund’s masterful study, I would also recommend Aby Warburg’s longish essay on “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie” (1902). Less obviously Marxist than the remarks by Freund and Benjamin in this post — Warburg was a self-professed follower of Burckhardt — but quite complementary to them. Feel free to browse and enlarge any of the images below.
Portraits
Bildnis des Condorcet – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Bildnis des Jean Racine François Robert Ingouf (1747) – um 1770 – München, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung
Théroigne de Méricourt, Anne Josephe Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Thomas Hobbes Jean-Charles François (zugeschrieben) – 1773 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Marie François Arouet Voltaire Jacob Folkema – 1738 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Benedictus de Spinoza Desrochers, Étienne Jehandier – – – – Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg
Bildnis des Thomas Hobbesivs – Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Graphische Sammlung
Bildnis des Guillaume Thomas François Raynal E. Henne – um 1780 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Leibnitz Georg Christian Schule – 1796 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Jokob Friedrich Fries Müller, H. (1830) – Königliches Lithographisches Institut – 1830 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (Universitätsrektor 1811-1812; Vater von Immanuel Hermann von F.; Jena, Berlin, Zürich, Königsberg (Wirkungsorte); Dt. Philosoph, 1762-1814) Friedrich Wilhelm Bollinger, Stecher Verlagsort- Zwickau vor 1825
Bildnis des Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Friedrich Wilhelm Bollinger – Verlagsort- Berlin – 1801_1825 – Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum
Bildnis des Johann George Hamann – Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Graphische Sammlung
Bildnis des Denis Diderot Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki – 1777 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Kant, Immanuel (Prof. für Logik und Metaphysik; Rektor; zunächst Hauslehrer und Bibliothekar) Karl Robert Schindelmeyer, Stecher um 1795
Bildnis des Lessing Golbs – um 1800 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des René Descartes – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des M. F. Arouet de Voltaire – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Voltaire Jean-Joseph Balechou – 1752 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des D. Diderot François Guillaume Lardy – 1764_1812 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis Francis Bacon, 1618 baron Verulam, 1620 viscount St. Albans François Bonneville (1793) – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Bildnis des Pierre Bayle Martin Esslinger – Gebrüder Schumann – faktischer Entstehungsort- Zwickau – 1818_1832 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Goethe Christian Friedr. Traugott Uhlemann – 1792 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Bildnis des Moses Mendelssohn Peter Haas – 1786_1804 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Diderot Augustin de Saint-Aubin – um 1800 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1782 von) George Dawe – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Danton, Georges Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Bildnis des Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz Daniel Berger (1744) – 1769 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis Jemeljan Iwanowitsch Pugatschew Hans Andreas Joachim Hillers – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Johann Joachim Winckelmann Anton von Maron – – – 1768_1822 – Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg
Bildnis des Renatus Descartes S. Bosch (1651) – 1651_1700 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Constant de Rebecque, Benjamin Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Bildnis Jean le Rond d’Alembert Pierre Michel Alix – um 1800 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Bildnis des M. M. I. Robespierre Andreas Stöttrup – um 1790 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire Jacopo Bernardi (1808) – 1823_1847 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Denis Diderot Augustin de Saint-Aubin – 1776_1807 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Ricardo, David Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Johann Gottfried von Herder – – – – Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg
Bildnis des Thomas Hobbes Wenzel Hollar – 1665 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Johann Gottfried Renger – Verlagsort- Halle (Saale) – 1718 – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Bildnis des Renatus Descartes Peter Aubry (2) – 1634_1666 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Diderot Jean-Pierre-Julien Dupin – Esnauts et Rapilly – 1770_1797 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Iean Racine Monogrammist G E – 1690_1741 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Puschkin, Alexander Sergejewitsch Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Diderot, Denis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Bildnis des Leibnitz Friedrich Wilhelm Nettling – 1800 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Puschkin, Alexander Sergejewitsch Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 2
Bildnis des Toussaint Louverture Unbekannt – München, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung
Bildnis des Johann Gottfried von Herder – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung 3
Bildnis des D. Hvme Christian Gottlieb Geyser – 1766_1803 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des Voltaire Joseph Friedrich Rein – faktischer Entstehungsort- Augsburg – 1778_1785 – Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Graphische Sammlung
Bildnis des Moses Mendelssohn Johann Conrad Krüger – 1768 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Danton, Georges Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 1
Hume, David Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Bildnis Johann Gottlieb Fichte Bonini, ? – um 1810? – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Bildnis Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Julius Ludwig Sebbers – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Bildnis des Johann Georg Hamann Monogrammist J. B. (1801) – 1801_1866 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
Bildnis des Benedictus Spinoza Karl Traugott Riedel – 1818_1832 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Renatus Cartesius Wolfgang Philipp Kilian (ungesichert) – 1721_1732 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Petty, William Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Benedictvs de Spinoza – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Lucas, Margaret Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des John Locke Anker Smith – um 1800 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Diderot, Denis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Jean Locke unbekannter Künstler – 1676_1750 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Condorcet, Antoine Marquis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 2
Bildnis des Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Louverture, Toussaint Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Bildnis des J. D’ Alembert André Pujos – Esnauts et Rapilly – Verlagsort- Paris – 1774_1797 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Moses Mendelssohn – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Benedictus de Spinoza – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Thomas Paine Albert Schule – Gebrüder Schumann – Verlagsort- Zwickau – 1822 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Danton, Georges Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
Bildnis Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1782 von) Georg Friedrich Schmoll – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Louverture, Toussaint Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 2
Bildnis des Goethe Lazarus Gottlieb Sichling – Breitkopf & Härtel – Verlagsort- Leipzig – 1840_1860 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Stephanvs Razinvs – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Saint-Just, Antoine Louis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Johann Gottfried Herder Johann Heinrich Lips – 1773_1817 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis Maximilien (-François-Marie-Isidore-Joseph) Robespierre Adolf Friedrich Teichs – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Hume, David Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des I. D ‘ Alembert Gottlob August Liebe – nach 1775 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Thomas Jefferson Carl Mayer – – – – Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg
Bildnis des Leibnitz Johann Heinrich Lips – 1773_1817 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Thomas Münzer – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des Immanuel Kant Johann Heinrich Lips – 1791_1817 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Anton Tepplar – 1819_1849 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Bildnis des Diderot Antoine Benoist (1721) (ungesichert) – Verlagsort- Paris – 1762_1785 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Thomas Paine Auguste Sandoz – 1786_1802 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des Francis Bacon John Chapman (1792) – Verlagsort- London – 1798 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Puschkin, Alexander Sergejewitsch Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Thomas More Renold Elstrack – 1585_1622 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des Franciscus Quesnay Jean-Charles François – 1769 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des I. G. v. Herder Johann Christian Benjamin Gottschick – 1791_1844 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Johann Gottfried von Herder – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des D. Diderot Friedrich Wilhelm Bollinger – Gebrüder Schumann – Verlagsort- Zwickau – 1818_1832 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des J. W. v. Göthe Antoine-Jean-Baptiste Coupé – 1799_1852 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Bildnis des Fr. Bacon De Vervlam Johann Joachim Bockenhoffer – Verlagsort- Straßburg – 1654 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Condorcet, Antoine Marquis – Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des J. G. Fichte Friedrich Bury – F. A. Brockhaus – Verlagsort- Leipzig – nach 1850 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig
Saint-Just, Antoine Louis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 4
Marat, Jean Paul Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Franciscvs Bacon de Vervlam Wenzel Hollar – 1670 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des John Locke – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Hobbes – Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Graphische Sammlung
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 1
Desmoulins, Camille Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Sam. Maimon Wilhelm Arndt (1750) – 1767_1813 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Constant de Rebecque, Benjamin Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Joh. Georg Hamann Winckelmann & Söhne – Druckort- Berlin – 1840_1850 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Johann Wolfgang Goethe Martin Matthias Carl Darnmann – Verlagsort- Sulechów – 1803_1823 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des Voltaire – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Camille Desmoulins – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung 1
Bildnis des Iemelka Pugatscew – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1782 von) Ferdinand Jagemann – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Bildnis des Immanuel Kant Johann Friedrich Bause – Verlagsort- Leipzig – 1791 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz Jean-Charles François (zugeschrieben) – 1761_1765 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Condorcet – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Saint-Just, Antoine Louis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des David Hume Page (1825) (ungesichert) – Jones and Company – Verlagsort- London – 1825 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Göthe Anton Graff (1736) – Bibliographisches Institut – faktischer Entstehungsort- Hildburghausen – 1857_1861 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Bildnis des David Hume David Martin (1736) – Verlagsort- London – 1767 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des Voltaire Johann Christian Benjamin Gottschick – Gebrüder Schumann – Verlagsort- Zwickau – 1818_1832 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des C. L. Reinhold Johann Heinrich Lips – um 1800 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig
Bildnis des F. W. J. v. Schelling Albrecht Fürchtegott Schultheiß – 1840_1900 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig
Bildnis des Marie François Arouet Voltaire Friedrich Christian Carstens – um 1780 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Carl Leonhard Reinhold – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Friedrich Wilhelm Bollinger – Verlagsort- Berlin – 1801_1825 – Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Graphische Sammlung
Babeuf, Francois Noel Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Denis Diderot François Jacques Dequevauviller – 1817_1848 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Rasin, Stepan Timofejewitsch Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des v. Schelling – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Bildnis Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Julius Ludwig Sebbers – Sachse, L., & Co. – Verlagsort- Berlin – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Bildnis des Camille Desmoulins Alexandre Lacauchie – 1833_1900 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Pierre Bayle Johann Martin Bernigeroth – faktischer Entstehungsort- Leipzig – 1741 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis Maximilien (-François-Marie-Isidore-Joseph) Robespierre Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Bildnis des Guillaume Thomas François Raynal Pierre Michel Alix – Verlagsort- Paris – 1791_1797 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Henry St. John Bolingbroke Thomas Holloway (ungesichert) – nach 1760 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Bildnis des Guillaume Thomas François Raynal Delarue – faktischer Entstehungsort- Brüssel – um 1800 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Rousseau, Jean Jacques Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
Bildnis des Johann Georg Hamann August Weger – 1838_1892 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Locke, John Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Jean Racine Carl Christian Glassbach – 1766_1789 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Francis Bacon – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Desmoulins, Camille Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Bildnis François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek 3
Constant de Rebecque, Benjamin Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Johann Gottfried von Herder – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Danton, Georges Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Mr. Bayle Johann Ulrich Kraus – 1715 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg Eduard Eichens – 1845 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Thomas Muntzer Romeyn de Hooghe – 1701 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Pascal, Jacques – 1826_1880 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Saint-Just, Antoine Louis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 3
Bildnis des Pierre Bayle Etienne Desrochers – faktischer Entstehungsort- Paris – 1706_1741 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis Denis Diderot im Profil (1713-1784) Gottlob August Liebe – um 1760 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Bildnis des Petrvs Bayle Joh. Friedrich Schmidt (1730) – 1730_1785 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Johann Gottfried von Herder – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung 1
Bildnis Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1782 von) Ernst Ludwig Riepenhausen – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Lucas, Margaret Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Louverture, Toussaint Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Joh. Locke Christian Gottlieb Geyser – 1767_1800 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Bildnis des Camille Desmoulins – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Fichte Johann Friedrich Bolt – 1812 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Bildnis des Thomas Hobbes – Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Graphische Sammlung
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
Saint-Just, Antoine Louis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 2
Bildnis des Voltaire – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des René Descartes Jacques Lubin – 1674_1703 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Jean Le Rond d’Alembert unbekannter Künstler – 1801_1850 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Paine, Thomas Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Franciscus Baconus de Verulam unbekannter Künstler – 1627_1666 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des Camille Desmoulins François Joseph Etienne Beisson – Verlagsort- Paris – 1793 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Hegel, Friedrich Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Precursors of the photographic portrait
Gisèle Freund
Photography &
Society (1970)
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The development of the photographic portrait corresponds to an important phase in the social development of Western Europe: the rise of the middle classes when for the first time, fairly large segments of the population attained political and economic power. To meet their resulting demand for goods, nearly everything had to be produced in greater quantities. The portrait was no exception: By having one’s portrait done an individual of the ascending classes could visually affirm his new social status both to himself and to the world at large. To meet the increased demand for portraits, the art became more and more mechanized. The photographic portrait was the final stage in this trend toward mechanization.
Around 1750 the nascent middle classes began pushing into areas that were formerly the sole domain of the aristocracy. For centuries the privilege of aristocratic circles, the portrait began to yield to democratization. Even before the French Revolution the bourgeoisie had already manifested its profound need for self-glorification, a need which provoked the development of new forms and techniques of portraiture. Photography, which entered the public domain in 1839, owes much of its popularity and rapid social development to the continuing vogue of the portrait. Continue reading