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Hannes Meyer, The new world [Die neue Welt] (1926)

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The flight of the “Norge” to the North pole, the Zeiss planetarium at Jena and Flettner’s rotor ship represent the latest stages to be reported in the mechanization of our planet. Being the outcome of extreme precision of thought, they all provide striking evidence of the way in which science continues to permeate our environment. Thus in the diagram to the present age we find everywhere amidst sinuous lines of its social and economic fields of force straight lines which are mechanical and scientific in origin. They are cogent evidence of the victory of man the thinker over amorphous nature. This new knowledge undermines and transforms existing values. It gives our new world its shape.

Motor cars dash along our streets. On a traffic island in the Champs Elysées from 6 to 8 p.m. there rages round one metropolitan dynamism at its most strident. “Ford” and “Rolls Royce” have burst open the core of the town, obliterating distance and effacing the boundaries between town and country. Aircraft slip through the air: “Fokker” and “Farman” widen our range of movement and the distance between us and the earth; they disregard national frontiers and bring nation closer to nation. Illuminated signs twinkle, loud-speakers screech, posters advertise, display windows shine forth. The simultaneity of events enormously extends our concept of “space and time,” it enriches our life. We live faster and therefore longer. We have a keener sense of speed than ever before, and speed records are a direct gain for all. Gliding, parachute descents and music hall acrobatics refine our desire for balance. The precise division into hours of the time we spend working in office and factory and the split-minute timing of railway timetables make us live more consciously. With swimming pools, sanatoria, and public lavatories, hygiene appears on the local scene and its water closets, faience washbowls and baths usher in the new line of sanitary fittings in earthenware. Fordson tractors and v. Meyenburg cultivators have resulted in a shift of emphasis in land development and sped up the tilling of the earth and intensive cultivation of crops. Borrough’s calculating machine sets free our brain, the Dictaphone our hand, Ford’s motor our place-bound senses and Handley Page our earthbound spirits. Radio, marconigram, and phototelegraphy liberate us from our national seclusion and make us part of a world community. The gramophone, microphone, orchestrion, and pianola accustom our ears to the sound of impersonal-mechanized rhythms: “His Master’s Voice,” “Vox,” and “Brunswick” see to the musical needs of millions. Psychoanalysis has burst open the all too narrow dwelling of the soul and graphology has laid bare the character of the individual. “Mazdaism,” “Coué” and “Die Schönheit” are signs of the desire for reform breaking out everywhere. National costume is giving way to fashion and the external masculinization of woman shows that inwardly the two sexes have equal rights. Biology, psychoanalysis, relativity, and entomology are common intellectual property: France, Einstein, Freud, and Fabre are the saints of this latterday. Our homes are more mobile than ever. Large blocks of flats, sleeping cars, house yachts, and transatlantic liners undermine the local concept of the “homeland.” The fatherland goes into a decline. We learn Esperanto. We become cosmopolitan.

triptychon-1921

Postcard featuring Mel’nikov’s Soviet Pavilion in Paris, 1925.

The steadily increasing perfection attained in printing, photographic, and cinematographic processes enables the real world to be reproduced with an ever greater degree of accuracy. The picture the landscape presents to the eye today is more diversified than ever before; hangars and power houses are the cathedrals of the spirit of the age. This picture has the power to influence through the specific shapes, colors, and lights of its modern elements: the wireless aerials, the dams, the lattice girders: through the parabola of the airship, the triangle of the traffic signs, the circle of the railway signal, the rectangle of the billboard; through the linear element of transmission lines: telephone wires, overhead tram wires, high-tension cables; through radio towers, concrete posts, flashing lights, and filling stations. Our children do not deign to look at a snorting steam locomotive but entrust themselves with cool confidence to the miracle of electric traction. G. Palucca’s dances, von Laban’s movement choirs, and D. Mesendieck’s functional gymnastics are driving out the aesthetic eroticism of the nude painting. The stadium has carried the day against the art museum, and physical reality has taken the place of beautiful illusion. Sport merges the individual into the mass. Sport is becoming the university of collective feeling. Suzanne Lenglen’s cancellation of a match disappoints hundreds of thousands, Breitensträter’s defeat sends a shiver through hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands follow Nurmi’s race over 10,000 meters on the running track. The standardization of our requirements is shown by: the bowler hat, bobbed hair, the tango, jazz, the Co-op product, the DIN standard size, and Liebig’s meat extract. The standardization of mental fare is illustrated by the crowds going to see Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, and Jackie Coogan. Grock and the three Fratellini weld the masses — irrespective of class and racial differences — into a community with a common fate. Trade union, co-operative, Lt., Inc., cartel, trust, and the League of Nations are the forms in which today’s social conglomerations find expression, and the radio and the rotary press are their media of communication. Co-operation rules the world. The community rules the individual.

Each age demands its own form. It is our mission to give our new world a new shape with the means of today. But our knowledge of the past is a burden that weighs upon us, and inherent in our advanced education are impediments tragically barring our new paths. The unqualified affirmation of the present age presupposes the ruthless denial of the past. The ancient institutions of the old — the classical grammar schools and the academies — are growing obsolete. The municipal theaters and the museums are deserted. The jittery helplessness of the applied arts is proverbial. In their place, unburdened by classical airs and graces, by an artistic confusion of ideas or the trimmings of applied art, the witnesses of a new era are arising: industrial fairs, grain silos, music halls, airports, office chairs, standard goods. All these things are the product of a formula: function multiplied by economics. They are not works of art. Art is composition, purpose is function. The composition of a dock seems to us a nonsensical idea, but the composition of a town plan, a block of flats…?? Building is a technical not an aesthetic process, artistic composition does not rhyme with the function of a house matched to its purpose. Ideally and in its elementary design our house is a living machine. Retention of heat, insolation, natural and artificial lighting, hygiene, weather protection, car maintenance, cooking, radio, maximum possible relief for the housewife, sexual and family life, etc. are the determining lines of force. The house is their component. (Snugness and prestige are not leitmotifs of the dwelling house: the first resides in the human heart and not in the Persian carpet, the second in the attitude of the house-owner and not on the wall of a room!) Today we have new building materials at our disposal for building a house: aluminium and duralumin in plates, rods, and bars, Euboölith, Ruberoid, Forfoleum, Eternit, rolled glass, Triplex sheets, reinforced concrete, glass bricks, faience, steel frames, concrete frame slabs and pillars, Trolith, Galalith, Cellon, Goudron, Ripoliin, indanthrene paints, etc. We organize these building elements into a constructive unity in accordance with the purpose of the building and economic principles. Architecture has ceased to be an agency continuing the growth of tradition or an embodiment of emotion. Individual form, building mass, natural color of material, and surface texture come into being automatically and this functional conception of building in all its aspects leads to pure construction [Konstruktion]. Pure construction is the characteristic feature of the new world of forms. Constructive form is not peculiar to any country; it is cosmopolitan and the expression of an international philosophy of building. Internationalism is the prerogative of our time.

Today every phase of our culture of expression is predominantly constructive. Human inertia being what it is, it is not surprising that such an approach is to be found most clearly at first where the Greeks and Louis XIV have never set foot: in advertising, in typographical mechanical composition, in the cinema, in photographic processes. The modern poster presents lettering and product or trademark conspicuously arranged. It is not a poster work of art but a piece of visual sensationalism. In the display window of today psychological capital is made of the tensions between modern materials with the aid of lighting. It is display window organization rather than window dressing. It appeals to the finely distinguishing sense of materials found in modern man and covers the gamut of its expressive power: fortissimo = tennis shoes to Havana cigarettes to scouring soap to nut chocolate! Mezzo-forte = glass (as a bottle) to wood (as a packing case) to pasteboard (as packing) to tin (as a can)! Pianissimo = silk pajamas to cambric shirts to Valenciennes lace to “L’Origan de Coty”! Continue reading →

Mondrian: Order and randomness in abstract painting

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Meyer Schapiro
Modern Art
(Nov. 1978)
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Mondrian’s abstract paintings appeared to certain of his contemporaries extremely rigid, more a product of theory than of feeling. One thought of the painter as narrow, doctrinaire, in his inflexible commitment to the right angle and the unmixed primary colors. We learn that he broke with a fellow-artist and friend who had ventured to insert a diagonal in that fixed system of vertical and horizontal lines. “After your arbitrary correction of Neo-Plasticism,” he wrote to van Doesburg, “any collaboration, of no matter what kind, has become impossible for me,” and withdrew from the board of the magazine De Stijl, the organ of their advanced ideas.1

Yet in the large comprehensive shows of his art one discovers an astonishing range of qualities, a continuous growth from his twenties to his last years in fertile response to the new art of others and to a new milieu. Even while holding strictly to the horizontal and vertical in the painted lines, Mondrian brought back the abhorred diagonal in the frequent diamond shape of a square canvas. Diagonal axes are implicit too in his placing of paired colors. And in his late work he deviated from his long-held principle of the single plane by interlacing the lines to suggest a layered grid in depth. If his abstract paintings of the 1920s and 1930s seem dogmatically limited in their straight forms, these constant elements, through carefully pondered variation of length, thickness, and interval, compose a scale of forces that he deploys in always individual combinations. When studied closely, the barest works, with only a few units, reveal his canny finesse in shaping a balanced order; that variety in the sparse and straight is a ground of their continuing fascination. One need not analyze that structure, however, to sense its precision and strength. These qualities come to the eye directly like the harmony of a Greek temple. His gravely serious art unites in its forms the large regularities of architecture as a canonical constructed order with a complexity of relations inherited from the painting of nature and the city scene. The persisting white field, in heightened contrast to the black lines, is a luminous ground — it has what may be called after Keats: “the power of white Simplicity” — and, in its division by those lines, provides a measure of the rhythm of the enclosing rectangles.

Like Picasso’s art, Mondrian’s would have to be characterized very differently according to one’s choice of a particular phase as typical. Before the constructive abstract art by which he is best known, his works had been in turn impressionistic, romantic, lyrical, visionary, and symbolic; and in his last years, at seventy, after that severely intellectual style, his paintings became surprisingly sensuous and elated. In assimilating before 1914 the most advanced art of his time, he stood out unmistakably as a painter with his own qualities and powers. Moving from Holland to Paris and later to London and New York, this ascetic artist reacted to each new environment with a quiet enthusiasm, inventing new features that transformed the face of his art. When he worked in the style of Picasso and Braque in 1911 to 1913, he was not far behind them, having absorbed the most recent stage of their rapidly evolving art, and was soon able to move on to more strictly abstract forms of his own invention. Mondrian’s warm embrace of Cubism was the more surprising since he was forty then, with a long-matured practice that would have seemed to discourage the change to a style so different in principle from his own. Even more remarkable is that in adopting this challenging art from painters younger than himself, he derived from it conclusions still more radical, which were to stimulate and guide painters in Europe and America in the following decades. His later work was an outcome of reflection and a firm will to rigor, in keeping with a philosophizing habit and long meditated ideals. Few artists in our century have displayed so ardent a growth.

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Mondrian wrote in more than one article that his goal was to achieve an art of “pure relations.” These, he believed, had been “veiled” in older painting by the particulars of nature which could only distract the viewer from the universal and absolute in art, the true ground of aesthetic harmony.

I wish in this essay to explore closely several of his abstract works in order to bring into clearer sight the character of those “pure relations” and to show their continuity with structures of representation in the preceding art. For this a minute analysis is necessary. It may be tedious or seem superfluous to one who grasps with feeling the order of a work of Mondrian on immediate view. I shall risk it in the belief that it will also bring us nearer to his sensibility and thought.

In a painting of 1926 in the Museum of Modern Art labeled Composition in White and Black, what seems at first glance a square set within a diamond square — a banal motif of decorators and doodlers — becomes to the probing eye a complex design with a subtly balanced asymmetry of unequal lines. We see the square as partly covered and extending into an imaginary field beyond the diamond canvas. If modeling and perspective have been given up, another cue for depth comes into play in this flat painting on the impenetrable plane of the canvas: the overlapping of forms. The intercepting edge advances and the intercepted square recedes as if passing underneath the edge. The whole appears then as a cropped representation of an object in a three-dimensional space. The missing parts are cut off from view at the limits of the diamond field. Only at the upper left corner of the square is the angle closed; but its vertical and horizontal lines cross at that point and are prolonged just enough for us to suppose that what we first perceived as a partly masked square belongs to a larger whole, a lattice or grid formed by bars of varied thickness.2 We are induced by that single crossing to imagine a similar completion of the other bars and their continuity beyond the square. The black grid seems to exist in a space between the plane of the diamond and the white voids enclosed by the painted bars.

Even if we fix our attention on the canvas as a limited plane surface with a painted set of flat marks complete in themselves as a balanced asymmetric design, another mode of spatial intuition is soon aroused: our habitual response to recognizably incomplete forms. The black bars are envisioned unreflectively as parts of a whole continuing beyond the limits of the overlapping diamond field, although no familiar object has been depicted (unless we regard the thick lines of the “abstract” square as a concrete object like the surface of the canvas itself). Each black line is seen then as an intercepted side of a complete square, just as in a perspective view we identify a partly covered object with its whole. The diamond form of Mondrian’s canvas reinforces this effect by the strong contrast of its diagonal edges with the painted lines of the square and by providing between the angles, and especially those above and below, a much greater span than between the parallel lines of the inscribed form. The latter stands out even more decidedly from a larger field in which two lines of the square cross and four triangles are marked as opposing shapes.

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Soviet avant-garde models and sketches, 1922-1935

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B. Nadezhin. Four-storey Residential Building. Mid-1930s V. Krinsky. Podium. Experimental project. Color versions. 1921 N. Kolpakova. G. Klutsis's workshop. Colour Solution for an Architectural Volume. 2nd year. 1928:1929 M. Zhirov. A. Vesnin's workshop «Shops-Bank-Hotels». 4th year. 1927 M. Barkhin. Supervisor R Golosov. Club in the Town of Perov. Competition project. 2nd prize. 1926. Photo 1 K. Knyazev. Supervisor N. Kolli. RLKSM (Russian Young Communist League) Club. 3rd year. 1925 L Velikovsky. Co-authors G. Vegman. M. Barshch. Gostorg (State Sales Committee). 1927-1928. Photos 2 I. Gokhblit. I. Golosov's workshop. House for a Residential Community Group for 60 Flats. 4th year. 1925. Photos 1 G. Barkhin. Izvestiya Newspaper Office and Printing Factory in Moscow. Sketches. 1925 c G. Barkhin. Izvestiya Newspaper Office and Printing Factory in Moscow. Sketches. 1925 a G. Vegman. Telegraph Office in Moscow. Competition project. 1925. Photos MIGI DIPLOMA PROJECT 4 O. Ivanova. N. Ladovsky's workshop. Tourist Centre in the Mountains. 3rd year. 1928:1929 V. Kolpakova. G. Klutsis's workshop. Colour Solution for the Fagades of an Architectural Volume. 2nd year. 1928:1929 Continue reading →

Ivan Leonidov: Artist, dreamer, poet

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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.

Ivan Leonidov at the first OSA congress, 1928 Ivan Leonidov with the rest of the VKhUTEIN faculty, 1930

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.

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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)z
Hans Poelzig (1869-1936) Geschäftshaus S. Adam, Leipziger Straße_ Friedrichstraße, Berlin (1928)

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“¡Que viva Mexico!” Eisenstein in North America (1931)

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224 copy 224 copy 2 100 copy

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBTdUD0UOl8

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
Still from “Que viva Mexico!”
Funeral ceremony of the Mayan Indians
Eisenstein and Tisse preparing a shot on the pyramids of Teotihuacan, Mexico (1932)
Daily ceremony at dawn
On the Hacienda Tetlapayac, work hymn of the Mexican proletariat
Closeup of Martin Hernandez, the Mexican-Indian
Still from Eisenstein’s “Que viva Mexico!”
Death comes along dancing
Eisenstein looking into the finder to gauge an angle closeup of a Mexican woman
Mexican peasants, watching from a hilltop the passing funeral
In the country of the magueys
Martin Hernandez in the Maguey episode
Martin Hernandez, 21-year-old Mexican-Indian peasant and native of Apam, the principal character of the “Maguey” episode
The film is a poem of a sociological character. Rather an interpretive essay of Mexico’s evolution – Agustin Aragon Leiva
Angle closeup from the bull-fight sequence in the “Romance” episode
Maria is forgotten
Girl from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec
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
Eisenstein and Aleksandrov on the ruins of Chichenita in Yucatan, Mexco (1931)
Mexican women mourning over the coffin of a dead boy, during the “Maguey” episode
Youthful beauty blossoms on the screen
This still and the shorts illustrating the synopsis of the scenario for “Que Viva Mexico!” were taken by Eduard Tisse

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 →

The Stenberg brothers and the art of Soviet movie posters

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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 →

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 Johann Gottfried Herder Johann Heinrich Lips – 1773_1817 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis Jemeljan Iwanowitsch Pugatschew Hans Andreas Joachim Hillers – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Bildnis des Lessing Golbs – um 1800 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Saint-Just, Antoine Louis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 4
Bildnis des Condorcet – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des D. Diderot François Guillaume Lardy – 1764_1812 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Constant de Rebecque, Benjamin Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Bildnis des Denis Diderot Augustin de Saint-Aubin – 1776_1807 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Anton Tepplar – 1819_1849 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Bildnis des Camille Desmoulins – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des F. W. J. v. Schelling Albrecht Fürchtegott Schultheiß – 1840_1900 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig
Bildnis François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek 3
Bildnis Denis Diderot im Profil (1713-1784) Gottlob August Liebe – um 1760 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Bildnis des Leibnitz Johann Heinrich Lips – 1773_1817 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis Francis Bacon, 1618 baron Verulam, 1620 viscount St. Albans François Bonneville (1793) – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Bildnis Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Julius Ludwig Sebbers – Sachse, L., & Co. – Verlagsort- Berlin – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Bildnis des Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire Jacopo Bernardi (1808) – 1823_1847 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Desmoulins, Camille Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis Johann Gottlieb Fichte Bonini, ? – um 1810? – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Lucas, Margaret Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Bildnis des Iemelka Pugatscew – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Constant de Rebecque, Benjamin Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Guillaume Thomas François Raynal Delarue – faktischer Entstehungsort- Brüssel – um 1800 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Fr. Bacon De Vervlam Johann Joachim Bockenhoffer – Verlagsort- Straßburg – 1654 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Diderot Augustin de Saint-Aubin – um 1800 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Voltaire Joseph Friedrich Rein – faktischer Entstehungsort- Augsburg – 1778_1785 – Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Graphische Sammlung
Bildnis des René Descartes Jacques Lubin – 1674_1703 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Johann Gottfried von Herder – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung 3
Bildnis des Jean Le Rond d’Alembert unbekannter Künstler – 1801_1850 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Bildnis Maximilien (-François-Marie-Isidore-Joseph) Robespierre Adolf Friedrich Teichs – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Bildnis des Guillaume Thomas François Raynal Pierre Michel Alix – Verlagsort- Paris – 1791_1797 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Rousseau, Jean Jacques Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
Benedictus de Spinoza Desrochers, Étienne Jehandier – – – – Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg
Puschkin, Alexander Sergejewitsch Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Thomas Paine Albert Schule – Gebrüder Schumann – Verlagsort- Zwickau – 1822 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Voltaire Johann Christian Benjamin Gottschick – Gebrüder Schumann – Verlagsort- Zwickau – 1818_1832 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Saint-Just, Antoine Louis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des M. M. I. Robespierre Andreas Stöttrup – um 1790 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des David Hume David Martin (1736) – Verlagsort- London – 1767 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des Marie François Arouet Voltaire Jacob Folkema – 1738 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Lucas, Margaret Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Francis Bacon – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Ricardo, David Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Puschkin, Alexander Sergejewitsch Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Bildnis Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Julius Ludwig Sebbers – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Bildnis des Condorcet – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Bildnis des Johann Georg Hamann Monogrammist J. B. (1801) – 1801_1866 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Johann Gottfried von Herder – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung 1
Bildnis des Thomas Muntzer Romeyn de Hooghe – 1701 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des Goethe Christian Friedr. Traugott Uhlemann – 1792 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Bildnis des Denis Diderot François Jacques Dequevauviller – 1817_1848 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Voltaire Jean-Joseph Balechou – 1752 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Friedrich Wilhelm Bollinger – Verlagsort- Berlin – 1801_1825 – Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum
Bildnis des I. D ‘ Alembert Gottlob August Liebe – nach 1775 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Bildnis des Johann Gottfried von Herder – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Benedictus Spinoza Karl Traugott Riedel – 1818_1832 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Diderot Jean-Pierre-Julien Dupin – Esnauts et Rapilly – 1770_1797 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Locke, John Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Thomas Hobbes Wenzel Hollar – 1665 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Desmoulins, Camille Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Bildnis des Carl Leonhard Reinhold – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des René Descartes – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des D. Hvme Christian Gottlieb Geyser – 1766_1803 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1782 von) Ferdinand Jagemann – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Paine, Thomas Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Franciscus Quesnay Jean-Charles François – 1769 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Marie François Arouet Voltaire Friedrich Christian Carstens – um 1780 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Voltaire – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Kant, Immanuel (Prof. für Logik und Metaphysik; Rektor; zunächst Hauslehrer und Bibliothekar) Karl Robert Schindelmeyer, Stecher um 1795
Bildnis Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1782 von) George Dawe – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Diderot, Denis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Bildnis des Pierre Bayle Johann Martin Bernigeroth – faktischer Entstehungsort- Leipzig – 1741 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Pierre Bayle Martin Esslinger – Gebrüder Schumann – faktischer Entstehungsort- Zwickau – 1818_1832 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des v. Schelling – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
Bildnis des Jean Locke unbekannter Künstler – 1676_1750 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Bildnis des Leibnitz Friedrich Wilhelm Nettling – 1800 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des John Locke Anker Smith – um 1800 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Immanuel Kant Johann Friedrich Bause – Verlagsort- Leipzig – 1791 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Jean Racine François Robert Ingouf (1747) – um 1770 – München, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung
Bildnis des Franciscvs Bacon de Vervlam Wenzel Hollar – 1670 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des Stephanvs Razinvs – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Franciscus Baconus de Verulam unbekannter Künstler – 1627_1666 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Saint-Just, Antoine Louis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Bildnis des Goethe Lazarus Gottlieb Sichling – Breitkopf & Härtel – Verlagsort- Leipzig – 1840_1860 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Fichte Johann Friedrich Bolt – 1812 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Bildnis des Leibnitz Georg Christian Schule – 1796 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Joh. Locke Christian Gottlieb Geyser – 1767_1800 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Bildnis des Denis Diderot Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki – 1777 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des D. Diderot Friedrich Wilhelm Bollinger – Gebrüder Schumann – Verlagsort- Zwickau – 1818_1832 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Voltaire – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Camille Desmoulins François Joseph Etienne Beisson – Verlagsort- Paris – 1793 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Bildnis des C. L. Reinhold Johann Heinrich Lips – um 1800 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig
Bildnis des John Locke – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Camille Desmoulins – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung 1
Louverture, Toussaint Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 2
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
Bildnis des Jean Racine Carl Christian Glassbach – 1766_1789 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis Jean le Rond d’Alembert Pierre Michel Alix – um 1800 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Bildnis des Jokob Friedrich Fries Müller, H. (1830) – Königliches Lithographisches Institut – 1830 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig
Bildnis des Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz Daniel Berger (1744) – 1769 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 1
Bildnis des Joh. Georg Hamann Winckelmann & Söhne – Druckort- Berlin – 1840_1850 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Moses Mendelssohn Peter Haas – 1786_1804 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Danton, Georges Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 1
Bildnis des Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg Eduard Eichens – 1845 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Johann Wolfgang Goethe Martin Matthias Carl Darnmann – Verlagsort- Sulechów – 1803_1823 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Babeuf, Francois Noel Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Diderot, Denis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des J. G. Fichte Friedrich Bury – F. A. Brockhaus – Verlagsort- Leipzig – nach 1850 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig
Bildnis des Göthe Anton Graff (1736) – Bibliographisches Institut – faktischer Entstehungsort- Hildburghausen – 1857_1861 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Bildnis des Francis Bacon John Chapman (1792) – Verlagsort- London – 1798 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Saint-Just, Antoine Louis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 2
Bildnis des Renatus Descartes Peter Aubry (2) – 1634_1666 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Sam. Maimon Wilhelm Arndt (1750) – 1767_1813 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
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 Moses Mendelssohn Johann Conrad Krüger – 1768 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Thomas More Renold Elstrack – 1585_1622 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des Henry St. John Bolingbroke Thomas Holloway (ungesichert) – nach 1760 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Bildnis des Benedictvs de Spinoza – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis Maximilien (-François-Marie-Isidore-Joseph) Robespierre Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Bildnis des I. G. v. Herder Johann Christian Benjamin Gottschick – 1791_1844 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Guillaume Thomas François Raynal E. Henne – um 1780 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Iean Racine Monogrammist G E – 1690_1741 – Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Porträtstichsammlung
Bildnis des Thomas Hobbesivs – Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Graphische Sammlung
Hume, David Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des J. D’ Alembert André Pujos – Esnauts et Rapilly – Verlagsort- Paris – 1774_1797 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Hume, David Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Bildnis des Johann Georg Hamann August Weger – 1838_1892 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Camille Desmoulins Alexandre Lacauchie – 1833_1900 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Johann Joachim Winckelmann Anton von Maron – – – 1768_1822 – Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg
Bildnis des Renatus Cartesius Wolfgang Philipp Kilian (ungesichert) – 1721_1732 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Thomas Hobbes – Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Graphische Sammlung
Bildnis des Diderot Antoine Benoist (1721) (ungesichert) – Verlagsort- Paris – 1762_1785 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Saint-Just, Antoine Louis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 3
Johann Gottfried von Herder – – – – Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg
Bildnis des J. W. v. Göthe Antoine-Jean-Baptiste Coupé – 1799_1852 – Münster, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur
Théroigne de Méricourt, Anne Josephe Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Toussaint Louverture Unbekannt – München, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung
Condorcet, Antoine Marquis Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 2
Danton, Georges Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Pierre Bayle Etienne Desrochers – faktischer Entstehungsort- Paris – 1706_1741 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis des Renatus Descartes S. Bosch (1651) – 1651_1700 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Johann Gottfried Renger – Verlagsort- Halle (Saale) – 1718 – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Bildnis des Hobbes – Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Graphische Sammlung
Constant de Rebecque, Benjamin Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des M. F. Arouet de Voltaire – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Thomas Münzer – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis des Moses Mendelssohn – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Thomas Paine Auguste Sandoz – 1786_1802 – Coburg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Bildnis Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1782 von) Georg Friedrich Schmoll – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Petty, William Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Thomas Jefferson Carl Mayer – – – – Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg
Louverture, Toussaint Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Bildnis des Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Pascal, Jacques – 1826_1880 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Danton, Georges Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 1
Bildnis des Benedictus de Spinoza – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Bildnis des Thomas Hobbes Jean-Charles François (zugeschrieben) – 1773 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Petrvs Bayle Joh. Friedrich Schmidt (1730) – 1730_1785 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des David Hume Page (1825) (ungesichert) – Jones and Company – Verlagsort- London – 1825 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Mr. Bayle Johann Ulrich Kraus – 1715 – Halberstadt, Gleimhaus
Bildnis Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1782 von) Ernst Ludwig Riepenhausen – Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek
Marat, Jean Paul Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Johann Gottfried von Herder – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung
Rasin, Stepan Timofejewitsch Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Bildnis des Johann George Hamann – Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Graphische Sammlung
Bildnis des Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz Jean-Charles François (zugeschrieben) – 1761_1765 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Louverture, Toussaint Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Puschkin, Alexander Sergejewitsch Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung 2
Hegel, Friedrich Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Condorcet, Antoine Marquis – Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung
Danton, Georges Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
Bildnis des Immanuel Kant Johann Heinrich Lips – 1791_1817 – Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Bildnis des Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Friedrich Wilhelm Bollinger – Verlagsort- Berlin – 1801_1825 – Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Graphische Sammlung

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 →