Irena Blühová

Irena Blühová (born March 2, 1904 in Považská Bystrica , Trenčín County , Kingdom of Hungary , Austria-Hungary ; died November 30, 1991 in Bratislava , Czech and Slovak Federal Republic ) was a Czechoslovak and Slovak photographer , publicist and university teacher . From 1931 to 1932 she studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau .

Life

youth

Irena Blühová, who also called herself Iren Blüh, came from a Jewish family struggling with financial difficulties. She had five siblings. From 1914 to 1918 she attended the secondary school for girls and the grammar school in Trenčín, Slovakia . After the First World War, the father's grocery store no longer brought in enough to raise the school fees for the daughter. Blühová left school at the age of 14 and started working as a temporary secretary in a notary 's office. From 1920 to 1929 she worked as a bank clerk, which enabled her to continue her schooling between 1922 and 1926 at the secondary school in Bratislava .

Beginnings as a photographer

At the age of 17, Blühová joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ) in 1921 . In 1924 she bought her first camera. On mountain tours with the KSČ youth club in the region around her hometown, she began to photograph, initially her own experiences, but soon also the people she met on the way. The result was impressive photos of beggars, vagabonds, farm workers and the disabled, whose poor living conditions she documented in this way. Between 1927 and 1930, Blühová created eleven photo series that focused on the lumpen proletariat . Communist MPs used Blühová's photos to draw attention to the social conditions in the region during parliamentary debates. The photos were also printed in progressive culture magazines such as Dav from 1929 . John Heartfield later used one of the photos for a photomontage for the book cover of the German edition of Peter Jilemnický's novel Brachland (1935). Other photo series of her documented craftsmen at work, for example basket makers . Another of her photos shows her childhood friend Imro Weiner-Král naked on skis. The technically brilliant, humorous photo reversed the current artist-model relationship and was the first published nude photo of a man in Slovakia that was taken by a woman.

In 1929 she ran for the Communist Party in her hometown. As a result, her bank transferred her to the distant Kysuca Valley, whose economic situation was even worse, for "disciplinary reasons" . There she further developed her photographic skills.

The time at the Bauhaus in Dessau

Imro Weiner-Král, a surrealist painter, studied in Düsseldorf, Berlin, Prague and Paris in the 1920s. Blühová visited him often, made many contacts and came into contact with progressive international literature. In May 1927, Blühová read Ilja Ehrenburg's article about his visit to the Bauhaus in Dessau in the Frankfurter Zeitung , which made her want to study there herself. The fact that the Bauhaus masters László Moholy-Nagy , Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky dedicated their work to the International Workers' Aid (IAH) contributed significantly to this.

Blühová came to Dessau in the spring of 1931 , where she began her training with the preliminary course with Josef Albers . She then moved into the workshop for printing and advertising of Joost Schmidt and also visited Walter Peterhans ' photography class, where they continued to expand their self-taught acquired technical skills. At that point her goal was to later earn a living as a photojournalist.

In the photography class, Blühová dealt intensively with image composition and examined the effect of light on different shapes in her work. During this time she captured life at the Bauhaus in a variety of ways with her camera. In one picture (“Siesta”), for example, she superimposed two negatives - one from two Bauhaus students at lunch and one from a sleeping student. The picture “Clerk at the Bauhaus”, which shows a young woman in close-up, was very well known. Through the camera perspective from below, she designed the photo as an icon of physical work. In “Fuhrmann vor dem Bauhaus” she also connects physical work with the modernist Bauhaus. Blühová's penchant for social photography was shared by only a few at the Bauhaus.

During her Bauhaus studies, she rented a room in a dormitory owned by the local Junkers factory and was in contact with the company's workers. She became a member of the communist student faction (Kostufra) founded in 1927 and took part in protest marches by Junkers workers against the rising National Socialist German Workers' Party . Together with the Kostufra members Judit Kárász and Ricarda Schwerin , she organized a trip to Berlin for the workers' children and was generally very committed to the faction, such as organizing meetings and distributing leaflets and the communist Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung ( AIZ). She also contributed to the student Bauhaus magazine bauhaus - sprachrohr der Studenten . The Bauhaus director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had banned Bauhaus students from all such political activities in 1930, which is why this commitment had to be done in secret.

1932 until the end of the Second World War

In 1932 KSČ ordered Blühová back to Czechoslovakia, which is why she had to drop out of studies after three semesters. At first she worked for the AIZ for a few months before opening her own bookstore in Bratislava under the name Blüh kníhkupectvo . The bookstore served de facto as a branch of the Communist International and belonged to Willi Munzenberg's communist media group. Blühova and Weiner-Král married in 1933.

In 1934, Blühová was a co-founder of the trilingual Agitprop theater group Dielňa-Werkstatt in Mühely and organized documentary exhibitions for the Left in Bratislava. During this time, she created photo series, for example of women workers in a tobacco farm, and depicted the hunger and poverty of industrial workers in photo montages. Her work was published as the cover of various magazines, including the AIZ, from 1932, but only anonymously. She became co-founder and organizer of the Association of Socially Active Photographers (Sociofotó), whose members only signed their photos with the association name. In 1938 Blühová studied for a short time in the film class of Karol Plicka at the School of Applied Arts in Bratislava, which is also called "Bauhaus Bratislava" because of the similar concept.

After the outbreak of World War II , Blühová joined the resistance movement. In 1942 she was exposed by a National Socialist spy. Blühová then went into hiding under the pseudonym Elena Fischerová until the end of the war. In 1944 she took part in the Slovak national uprising . Her father and many family members were murdered in the Holocaust .

post war period

In 1945, Blühová founded the Pravda publishing house in Bratislava and managed it until 1948. During this time, she began with the photographic cycle “Personalities”. After the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1948, she and others founded the Slovak Folk Arts and Crafts Cooperative in Bratislava and directed it until 1951. In 1951 she founded the Slovak Pedagogical Library, which she directed until 1966. During this time she also worked as a lecturer at the Philosophical Faculty of the Komensky University in Bratislava , as a member of the editorial board of various magazines and a member of the Central Library Council of Czechoslovakia. In addition, she published several children's books.

In 1966 Blühová retired , but continued to work as a journalist and photographer. In 1968 she took part in the international conference "Výtvarné avantgardy a dnešok" (Avant-garde and the present) in Smolenice , which was dedicated to the Bauhaus and the Bratislava School of Applied Arts. In the course of the so-called normalization process of the 1970s, i. H. the revision of the reform attempts of the Prague Spring of 1968, she was declared a "person of special (police) interest". In 1983 and 1986 Blühová took part in the third and fourth International Bauhaus Colloquium in Weimar .

Honors

In 1964, Blühová received the Order for Outstanding Work.
In 1989 she received the Josef Sudek Medal for the 150th anniversary of the invention of photography.

Publications

Irena Blühová: Bauhaus - očami býyalého študenta / The Bauhaus - as a student experienced it . In: Ars . tape 2 , no. 3 , 1969, p. 125-135 ( uni-heidelberg.de ).
Irena Blühová: My way to the Bauhaus . In: Bauhaus 6. Part I: 114th sales exhibition from November 5. until November 20, 1983. Irena Blühová and Albert Hennig, committed photography from the Bauhaus to the present day. Czechoslovak photographers 1900 to 1940 . State art trade of the GDR, Galerie am Sachsenplatz, Leipzig 1983, p. 8-9 .
Irena Blühová: Questionnaire from a former Bauhaus student or my way to the Bauhaus . In: Susanne Anna (Ed.): The Bauhaus in the East. Slovak and Czech avant-garde 1928–1939 . Gerd Hatje, Ostfildern-Ruit 1997, ISBN 3-7757-0729-8 , p. 188–197 (reprint of a questionnaire answered by Blühová in 1989, which is in the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin).

literature

Aurel Hrabušický: The group of photographers around Irena Blühová and Jaromír Funke . In: Susanne Anna (Ed.): The Bauhaus in the East. Slovak and Czech avant-garde 1928–1939 . Gerd Hatje, Ostfildern-Ruit 1997, ISBN 3-7757-0729-8 , p. 140-187 .
Julia Secklehner: Irena Blühová . In: Patrick Rössler, Elizabeth Otto (Ed.): Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists . Knesebeck, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 , pp. 172-177 .
Julia Secklehner: “A School for Becoming Human”: The Socialist Humanism of Irena Blühová's Bauhaus Photographs . In: Elizabeth Otto , Patrick Rössler (eds.): Bauhaus bodies. Gender, sexuality, and body culture in modernism's legendary art school . Bloomsbury Visual Arts, New York 2019, ISBN 978-1-5013-4477-0 , pp. 287-309 .
Julia Secklehner: Capturing the Ordinary? Irena Blühová and Photographic Modernism in Slovakia 1926–1936 . In: Euroacademia . November 13, 2015 ( euroacademia.eu [accessed October 3, 2019]).
Daniela Mrázková, Vladimír Remes: Czechoslovak photographs. 1900-1940 . Fotokinoverlag, Leipzig 1983.
Irena Blühová . In: Patrick Rössler , Elizabeth Otto : Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists. Knesebeck, Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 . Pp. 172-177.

Web links

Irena Blühová. 1931–1932 students at the Bauhaus. In: 100 years of Bauhaus. Bauhaus Cooperation Berlin Dessau Weimar GmbH, 2015, accessed on October 3, 2019 .
Photos by Irena Blühová on artnet
Photos by Irena Blühová in Slovak galleries

Individual evidence

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j ^k ^l ^m ⁿ ^o ^p Julia Secklehner: Irena Blühová . In: Patrick Rössler, Elizabeth Otto (Ed.): Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists . Knesebeck, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 , pp. 172-177 .
↑ Hubertus Gaßner (Ed.): Interactions. Hungarian avant-garde in the Weimar Republic . Jonas, Marburg 1986, ISBN 3-922561-55-1 , p. 565-566 .
↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h Irena Blühová. 1931–1932 students at the Bauhaus. In: 100 years of Bauhaus. Bauhaus Cooperation Berlin Dessau Weimar GmbH, 2015, accessed on October 3, 2019 .
↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Julia Secklehner: “A School for Becoming Human”: The Socialist Humanism of Irena Blühová's Bauhaus Photographs . In: Elizabeth Otto, Patrick Rössler (eds.): Bauhaus bodies. Gender, sexuality, and body culture in modernism's legendary art school . Bloomsbury Visual Arts, New York 2019, ISBN 978-1-5013-4477-0 , pp. 287-309 .
↑ ^a ^b ^c Herbert Molderings: From Bauhaus to photo journalism . In: Jeannine Fiedler (Ed.): Photography at the Bauhaus . Dirk Nishen, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-88940-045-0 , p. 265-269 , here p. 268 .
↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ Irena Blühová (short biography) . In: Jeannine Fiedler (Ed.): Photography at the Bauhaus . Dirk Nishen, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-88940-045-0 , p. 342 .

personal data
SURNAME	Blühová, Irena
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Bloom, Irish
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Slovak photographer, publicist and university lecturer
DATE OF BIRTH	March 2, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH	Považská Bystrica , Trenčín County , Kingdom of Hungary , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH	November 30, 1991
Place of death	Bratislava , Czech and Slovak Federal Republic

[:0-1] ↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j ^k ^l ^m ⁿ ^o ^p Julia Secklehner: Irena Blühová . In: Patrick Rössler, Elizabeth Otto (Ed.): Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists . Knesebeck, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 , pp. 172-177 .

[2] Hubertus Gaßner (Ed.): Interactions. Hungarian avant-garde in the Weimar Republic . Jonas, Marburg 1986, ISBN 3-922561-55-1 , p. 565-566 .

[:3-3] ↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h Irena Blühová. 1931–1932 students at the Bauhaus. In: 100 years of Bauhaus. Bauhaus Cooperation Berlin Dessau Weimar GmbH, 2015, accessed on October 3, 2019 .

[:1-4] Julia Secklehner: “A School for Becoming Human”: The Socialist Humanism of Irena Blühová's Bauhaus Photographs . In: Elizabeth Otto, Patrick Rössler (eds.): Bauhaus bodies. Gender, sexuality, and body culture in modernism's legendary art school . Bloomsbury Visual Arts, New York 2019, ISBN 978-1-5013-4477-0 , pp. 287-309 .

[:2-5] Herbert Molderings: From Bauhaus to photo journalism . In: Jeannine Fiedler (Ed.): Photography at the Bauhaus . Dirk Nishen, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-88940-045-0 , p. 265-269 , here p. 268 .

[:5-6] ↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ Irena Blühová (short biography) . In: Jeannine Fiedler (Ed.): Photography at the Bauhaus . Dirk Nishen, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-88940-045-0 , p. 342 .