calendario eventi  :: 

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25/2/2010

Two exhibitions

Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur

The Subversion of Images
Surrealism, Photography, and Film

Curators Quentin Bajac, Clément Chéroux, Guillaume Le Gall, Philippe-Alain Michaud and Michel Poivert.

From February 27 to May 24, 2010, the Fotomuseum Winterthur is presenting the exhibition The Subversion of Images - Surrealism, Photography, and Film, an extraordinarily rich survey of Surrealist photography. The exhibition comprises over 400 photographs, films, and documents: from very famous photographs by Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, Claude Cahun, Raoul Ubac, Jacques-André Boiffard, and Maurice Tabard to unknown pictures, to magazine publications, artist's books, advertisements, to fascinating "raw, found documents", to photo booth photographs, and group portraits of the Surrealists. The exhibition also offers an opportunity to discover lesser-known photographic works by Paul Eluard, André Breton, Antonin Artaud, or George Hugnet, photographic games by Leo Malet or figures such as Artür Harfaux or Benjamin Fondane. More than twenty years after the last major review of the subject, "L'amour fou - Photography & Surrealism" (1985) by Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingstone, the exhibition The Subversion of Images - Surrealism, Photography, and Film extensively demonstrates and discusses the openness, diversity, and innovation with which the Surrealists employed photography.

The formal language of Surrealism has long since found its way into everyday life via fashion, advertising, and the media. Today the term Surrealism brings together everything that appears magical, dream-like, and incomprehensible. It is often forgotten that the Surrealists were artists and writers who worked very incisively toward changing the world and gaining self-knowledge and who also reflected critically on social-political questions. The surrealist avant-garde considered itself to be a revolutionary countermovement to the bourgeois system of values. Through new imagery, they investigated existence during the interwar period, a time of great social and political instability, and they deconstructed received ways of seeing and thinking through various artistic strategies. Photography seemed to best fulfill the Surrealists' needs as their medium of choice.

The title "Subversion of Images", given to a photo series by Paul Nougé by the Belgian Surrealist Marcel Mariën, is intended to inspire reflection. For the Surrealists, the challenge was certainly to overthrow images, and in this way to alter forms of representation. Yet it is equally - and perhaps even more so - about overthrowing through images, confusing the existing conditions of reality. "Over time the true revolutions," Breton wrote, "will be carried out through the power of images."

The survey exhibition is organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris and shown in collaboration with the Fundación Mapfre, Madrid, and the Fotomuseum Winterthur. The Fotomuseum Winterthur is this exhibition's only stop in the German-speaking area.

A comprehensive catalogue on the exhibition is available (French with a German booklet): La Subversion des images - Surréalisme, Photographie, Film containing essays by Quentin Bajac, Clément Chéroux, Guillaume Le Gall, Philippe-Alain Michaud and Michel Poivert and a chronology by Emmanuelle Etchecopar-Etchart. Published by Centre Pompidou, Paris (Ed. Clément Chéroux, Quentin Bajac).
In addition, the Fotomuseum Winterthur publishes all essays and the chronology in German in the form of a bound booklet. 68 pages, no illustrations. Price catalogue and booklet: CHF 79

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27 February – 30 May 2010
Marianne Breslauer
Photographs

"What interested me was reality, more precisely, the unimportant reality, the reality most people overlooked."

Marianne Breslauer left behind only a small photographic oeuvre, but one that is all the richer and that still has an undiminished freshness. It was created in the short period between 1927 and 1938 – that is, at a time when photography was moving from the status of a painterly salon art to that of a radical new photography, a new artistic medium with inherent qualities of its very own. Marianne Breslauer found herself in the middle of this upheaval and so was also torn between an artistic avant-garde’s delight in experimentation and the (supposed) stability of her upper-class parental home.

Marianne Breslauer was born on 20 November 1909 into a wealthy, art-interested family. She was the daughter of Dorothea Breslauer, née Lessing, and Alfred Breslauer and spent her childhood, adolescence and study years on Rheinbabenallee, Berlin, in a villa which was built by her father, a famous architect. Breslauer’s interest in photography was awakened in 1925 by an exhibition of works by the Berlin portrait photographer Frieda Riess at the Galerie Flechtheim. At the time, the young artistic medium of photography was, like film, very much ‘in the air’. Unlike many self-taught artists, such as Gisèle Freund or Ilse Bing, Marianne Breslauer began her career as a photographer with professional training behind her. In 1927 she enrolled with the Abteilung für Bildnisphotographie (department of portrait photography) at the Photographische Lehranstalt of the Lette-Verein, the so-called Lette-Haus, and completed a two-year apprenticeship that ended with a certificate examination with the Berlin Handwerkskammer (Chamber of Crafts) on the theme of the portrait.

Breslauer then moved to Paris, where Helen Hessel, fashion correspondent with the Frankfurter Zeitung and a friend of the family, arranged for her to meet Man Ray. Breslauer was hoping to be able to work with him, but instead, the famous Surrealist encouraged the young photographer to go her own way, without his help. She took his advice and, using her camera, explored the fascinating French capital. What mainly interested her was the life of the tramps on the banks of the river Seine, but she was also captivated by the exclusive atmosphere at the races in Longchamps and by the hustle and bustle of the fair on the Route d’Orleans. Like many young contemporary photographers, Breslauer admired the works of André Kertész and Brassaï, and in aesthetic terms her own photographs come close to those of her models. But she was also taken by the artistic trends of the New Vision movement, which was attracting a lot of attention in the circle around the Deutsche Werkbund and the Bauhaus.

Her photographs soon found their way into the print media. Even before her return from Paris, two of her Paris photographs were published in Für die Frau, a supplement of the Frankfurter Zeitung. With this, Breslauer’s photo-journalist activities really got underway in 1930. Her first position as a photographer was in the photo-studio of the publisher Ullstein, where she worked under Elsbeth Heddenhausen, who also trained at the Lette-Haus. While with Ullstein, Breslauer perfected her handling of technique, but she soon realised that the swift eye for a sensation and the audacity required of a photo-reporter were not really her style. Her personal gaze was focused more on people and details on the periphery of urban life. She never used her camera as an instrument of invasion or superiority, preferring instead to inconspicuously observe events around her. Many of her photographs were reproduced in the newly-emerging illustrated newspaper supplements and magazines published by Ullstein, like Die Dame, Funk-Stunde and Der Querschnitt, but also in other German-language and occasionally even international publications. In 1932, Breslauer left the Ullstein studio and started working as an independent photographer. Until 1937 she remained active in the fields of fashion, portraiture, advertising, travel, urban life and staged illustrations for the print media.

One of her main themes was portraiture – as it had already been in her apprenticeship work, the Portraits series of 1928/29, for which she arranged some of her artist-friends, first and foremost Paul Citroen, in the most varied of constellations. She repeatedly portrayed friends in Berlin, as well as colleagues and acquaintances from the international art world. These photographs blurred the borders between classical portrait, fashion shot for advertising, and filmic mise-en-scène. The image of the self-confident "new woman" of the 1920s, closely associated with Berlin photographers like Yva, was also shaped by Marianne Breslauer. Her photographs of Ruth von Morgen, Maud Thyssen and Jeanne Remarque present some of those "new women" – of which she herself was also one.

Beginning in the early 1930s, Marianne Breslauer travelled through many European countries and in the Near East, alone or with friends, colleagues or her later husband, the art dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt. In 1931, she felt drawn to Palestine and was enthralled by the world of the Orient. As in Paris, there too she observed the local people in the streets and alleys of Jerusalem, or portrayed her beautiful friend Djemila, for whose wedding she had gone there specially. In spring 1933, with a commission from the "Akademia" agency, she travelled to Spain with the writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Breslauer’s photographs of that trip are not socio-critical works. She concentrated instead on pictorially narrating the cultural peculiarities of the country, its architecture, its inhabitants and their characteristics. However she was unable to publish the fruits of that Spanish journey in Germany. The National Socialists had brought the German Press into line, and as a non-Arian, Marianne Breslauer was no longer able to publish under her own name. Thanks to the good offices of Annemarie Schwarzenbach, some of the photographs finally appeared, together with the writer’s own texts, in the Zürcher Illustrierte, at the time under Arnold Kübler.

This first extensive retrospective exhibition devoted to Marianne Breslauer contains many so far unknown original photographs, as well as new prints from original negatives in her estate, which latter has been in the care of the Fotostiftung Schweiz since 2003. The exhibition is supplemented by loans of the Schweizerische Literaturarchiv in Bern, the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin as well as private collections. Together with her personal albums and file copies of her publications, which are being presented to the public for the first time ever, this exhibition locates Breslauer’s artistic position in the field of tension between the radical realism of New Vision, cinematographically staged illustration, and subjective reportage.

Martin Gasser and Kathrin Beer
Translated by Pauline Cumbers

The exhibition is being supported by the Federal Office for Culture, Bern, and the F. Aeschbach AG, Zurich

Publication: Marianne Breslauer – Fotografien. Eds. Kathrin Beer / Christina Feilchenfeldt in collaboration with the Fotostiftung Schweiz. With texts in German by Marion Beckers and Elisabeth Moortgat, Florian Ebner, Janos Frecot, Dorothea Strauss, Kathrin Beer. 220 pages, 160 reproductions, Nimbus Verlag, Wädenswil 2010. CHF 88.– (during the exhibition in the shop of the Center for Photography CHF 68.–)


Image: Jacques-André Boiffard, Sans titre (Untitled), 1929. Vintage gelatin-silver print, 23 x 16,7cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris © RMN. Photo: Bertrand Prévost

For further information on Subversion der Bilder – Surrealismus, Fotografie und Film please contact Mari Serrano (Fotomuseum Winterthur, Tel. +41 (0)52 234 10 75, E-Mail: serrano@fotomuseum.ch).
For Marianne Breslauer please contact Letizia Enderli or Nicoletta Brentano (Fotostiftung Schweiz, Tel. 052 234 10 30, E-Mail: info@fotostiftung.ch).

Media preview Friday, 26 November 2010, from 10 a.m. to 12 noon
Quentin Bajac, Centre Pompidou, and Urs Stahel, Fotomuseum Winterthur, will give introductory talks at 10.30 a.m.
Martin Gasser will give an introductory talk at 11.15 a.m.
Opening: Friday 26 February 2010 6 to 9 pm

Fotomuseum Winterthur
Grüzenstrasse 44+45 , CH-8400 Winterthur (Zurich)
Hours: Tuesday to Sunday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m., Wednesday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., closed on Mondays
Admission:
Fotomuseum (Main Gallery+Gallery+Gallery of Collections) Fr. 15.- (with reduction Fr. 12.-)

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