Erwin Blumenfeld

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Portrait of Erwin Blumenfeld
Hermann Landshoff , 1942/1945
photography
Munich, Münchner Stadtmuseum, photography collection, signature / inventory number: FM-2012 / 200.148, Deutsche Fotothek

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

Erwin Blumenfeld (born January 26, 1897 in Berlin ; died July 4, 1969 in Rome ) was a photographer of German-Jewish origin and one of the world's most sought-after portrait and fashion photographers in the 1940s and 1950s.

Life

Erwin Blumenfeld was born in Berlin into a middle-class Jewish family. His father was Albert Blumenfeld, main partner in the umbrella and walking stick business of the company "Jordan & Blumenfeld", his mother Emma a née Cohn. His first photograph, at the age of 10, was a still life. He had received the camera from his uncle Carl. At the age of 14 he experimented with self-portraits.

From 1903 to 1913 he attended the Askanische Schule in Berlin. When he was 16 years old, Blumenfeld had to give up the idea of ​​further training, because with the death of his father, who died of syphilis , the family was practically bankrupt. Thus, Blumenfeld did a three-year apprenticeship at Moses & Schlochauer (women's clothing) at Hausvogteiplatz in Berlin. With his best friend from school, Paul Citroen , he often went to the Café des Westens , a popular meeting place for Expressionists . Here he met both expressionist artists and later Dadaists , including Else Lasker-Schüler , Mynona and George Grosz , whom he became a lifelong friend.

In 1916, Blumenfeld met Lena Citroen (1896–1990), a cousin of Paul Citroen, whom he married in 1921. During this time, Blumenfeld mainly made collages and drawings .

In 1917, Blumenfeld was drafted into the German army and sent to the Western Front , first as an ambulance driver and later as an accountant for Feld- Brothel No. 209 near the Belgian border and was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd class for bravery. On home leave in June 1918, Blumenfeld tried to desert to Holland, but was arrested and jailed before he could carry out his plans. Released, he returned to the front, where he learned of the death of his brother Heinz near Verdun.

At the end of the First World War , Blumenfeld followed Lena Citroen to Amsterdam , where he made various attempts to make a living. He worked in fashion stores, for booksellers and teamed up with Paul Citroen, who had set himself up as an art dealer. This attempt was abandoned because there was practically no market for contemporary art in Holland. Instead, he became a Sunday painter , made collages and drawings, and took part in the Dutch Dada movement. As early as 1920, Blumenfeld had published texts and poems in the Almanac Dada , edited by Richard Huelsenbeck , under the pseudonym "Jan Bloomfield" .

In 1923, Blumenfeld opened his own leather goods shop with bags in the Kalverstraat, Amsterdam's most popular shopping street, under the name "Fox Leather Company", which was not financially successful. In the meantime he had moved to Zandvoort with his family . In 1929 he was arrested on the beach in Zandvoort for sexual indecency, a person wearing his bathing suit had slipped away from him, with the result that he did not receive the Dutch citizenship, which he had applied for as a German citizen, and was later placed in French internment camps . In 1932, Blumenfeld discovered an operational darkroom on the premises behind his shop on Kalverstraat. He started taking photos of customers, mainly portraits, but also nudes . New portraits he hung in his window on the bags from crocodile skin . He also commented on current political events in sharp collages (e.g. Hitlerfresse 1933).

Blumenfeld's bag business with extravagances went bankrupt in 1935. In the same year his first photographs were published in the French magazine "Photographie" and at a group exhibition at the art school of Paul Citroen of the Nieuwe Kunstschool , together with Grosz , Man Ray , Moholy-Nagy , Léger , Mondrian , Schwitters and others.

It was not until 1936 that Blumenfeld decided to become a professional photographer and went to Paris . Geneviève Rouault, a successful dentist and daughter of Georges Rouault , whom he met while visiting his shop in Amsterdam, arranged an exhibition for him in her waiting room near the Opéra . In Paris, Rouault introduced Erwin Blumenfeld to artists such as her father and Henri Matisse , and also helped him secure clients for his portraits. The first successes came quickly.

In 1936, Blumenfeld made one of his most famous pictures “Nude under Wet Veil”. In the same year he made a picture of a half-covered, classic upper body topped by a sharp-eyed calf's head and named it "The Dictator". One of the Hitlerfresse photo collages made in 1933 , the version with a jagged hole for a nose, was exhibited in Paris in 1937, but withdrawn again because the German ambassador was snubbed. The Germans got to see it anyway. The United States Air Force threw in Operation Cornflakes from millions of letters with fake brands on German cities. Apparently the source of the design was the photo collage by Erwin Blumenfeld.

Cecil Beaton helped Blumenfeld sign a contract with French Vogue in 1938 and in the following year he made his most famous Parisian fashion photography with the model Lisa Fonssagrives of the Eiffel Tower. At that time, Blumenfeld was able to bring his family to Paris to live there. He and Lena now had three children, Lisette (born 1922), Heinz (born 1925) and Yorick (born 1933).

In 1939 he traveled to the USA for the first time , where he got a contract with the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar . When the Second World War broke out in 1940, he returned to France . His family had left Paris and emigrated to Brittany and Blumenfeld kept his prints and films in two boxes in his studio at 9 rue Delambre and left them in the care of a friend. Blumenfeld left Paris and was imprisoned in a number of camps on the way to his family, including Le Vernet (internment camp) and a year later in a camp near Catus .

Erwin Blumenfeld, Art Photo with DeSoto Fireflite, 1955

In 1941/1942 he managed to emigrate to the USA. He found an apartment in the "Hotel des Artistes" on 67th Street in New York City and shared the studio of and with Martin Munkácsi for two years, and soon afterwards he moved into his own photo studio . In the 1940s and 1950s his work appeared in “Harper's Bazaar”, “Vogue”, “Life”, “Cosmopolitan” and many other American and international publications. His nude photography was also highly valued. He was one of the best-paid fashion photographers of his time. Blumenfeld was enjoying his new life in the States, spending his time between his glamorous double-height studio in Central Park (222, Central Park South) and his beach house in the Hamptons . His studio became a meeting place for Marlene Dietrich to Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly , as well as the many models he photographed, including Carmen Dell'Orefice , with whom he was friends until his death.

In the 1960s, Blumenfeld worked on his biography. With the raw manuscript, he could not find a publisher who wanted to print the book in the mid-1960s. Publishers called it repulsive, tasteless, obscene, and devoid of sentimental memories. Blumenfeld juggled with the language, was a word artist , he created sentences like "the world is an institution that needs recognition". It was only after his death that the book imaginary novel , the book title and illustrations were selected by himself, and published in France in 1975.

He died of a heart attack in Rome on July 4, 1969, in the company of his Swiss assistant Marina Schinz, his last great love since 1961. He was buried in Rome.

Autobiographical writings

  • Jadis et Daguerre (Memoirs), Paris 1975 Foreword David Rousset
  • Through a thousand years of time (memories), Winterthur 1976 and dtv 1980
  • Through a thousand years of time (memories), Argon Verlag, Berlin 1988 - Note: improved version with photo section. Foreword by Alfred Andersch
  • Imaginary novel . Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1998 (memories), ISBN 3821841621 , series Die Other Bibliothek .
  • Eye to I: The Autobiography of a Photographer (memories), Thames and Hudson, 1999 (English), ISBN 050001907X

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Erwin Blumenfeld's biography at Answers
  2. ↑ Peter Klepper: 125 years of the Askanisches Gymnasium , in important pupils of the school. P. 32 Erwin Blumenfeld (PDF) , accessed on August 12, 2017
  3. ↑ Montage Hitlerfresse
  4. ^ In Operation Cornflakes, Erwin Blumenfeld's photo montage of Hitler
  5. ↑ Erwin Blumenfeld at artnet
personal data
SURNAME Blumenfeld, Erwin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German photographer
DATE OF BIRTH January 26, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 4th July 1969
Place of death Rome