Marianne Breslauer

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Marianne Breslauer (married Marianne Feilchenfeldt , born November 20, 1909 in Berlin , † February 7, 2001 in Zurich ) was a German photographer and art dealer during the Weimar Republic .

Live and act

Marianne Breslauer was born in Berlin as the daughter of the architect Alfred Breslauer and Dorothea Lessing, daughter of the art historian Julius Lessing . Because of her admiration for the well-known Berlin portrait and society photographer Frieda Riess , she attended the photography class at the Lettehaus Photography School in Berlin from 1927 to 1929 . As a 20-year-old she passed her exam there.

In 1929 she took part in the Stuttgart exhibition “Film und Foto” of the Deutscher Werkbund and fulfilled her dream of a stay in Paris . There she briefly became a student of Man Ray , who encouraged her to become self-employed. "Paris was the destination of my dreams - I wanted to live there for a while, if at all possible," she later wrote in her memoir. There she noticed that in view of the dynamism of this city she could not get very far with the means of studio photography she had learned and went completely new ways in her visual language. She was particularly interested in works such as those by the Hungarian photographer André Kertész . As a goal of her own work, however, she primarily saw reportage photography under the standards of the New Vision . She wanted to take pictures of people and their environment and to make use of the "invisible camera" technique mastered by Erich Salomon .

Marianne Breslauer shows an eye for dramatic picture compositions: she moves two lonely anglers on the Seine into the upper third of the photo and lets the paving stones dominate the rest of the surface and the composition of the picture. She had learned to tackle the central perspective hierarchization of pictorial space from the impressionists she met in Paris. At the same time it is the formal vocabulary of the New Vision. It was about “rule violations” against the aesthetic norms of the then still prevailing, academically taught photography.

A year later she got a job at the Berlin photo studio Ullstein, which was headed by Elsbeth Heddenhausen. In their darkroom she got to know all the steps involved in film development and negative enlargement. Until 1934, Marianne Breslauer published in numerous magazines such as Frankfurter Illustrierte , Cross Section , Dame , UHU , Weltspiegel and Magazin .

In 1931 she traveled to Palestine , where some of her most famous recordings were made. Through Ruth Landshoff , Marianne Breslauer got to know the “girls' circle” around the Swiss Annemarie Schwarzenbach , with whom she became friends and who later accompanied her on numerous trips. In 1933 the Berlin agency “Academia” sent the two women to the Spanish Pyrenees for a report ; for Schwarzenbach it was the beginning of her literary and photographic work. For Marianne Breslauer the first serious problems arose with her Jewish origin. She was asked not to publish her pictures under her maiden name, but to choose a pseudonym , which she refused. The picture she took there, Schoolgirls , was awarded “Picture of the Year” in 1934 at the “Salon international d'art photographique” in Paris .

In 1933 Marianne Breslauer left Germany. She lived without a permanent residence until she moved to Amsterdam in 1936 and married the art dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt , who had also emigrated from Germany . She gave up photography in 1937 and devoted herself to the art trade together with her husband. In January 1939 their first son Walter was born; When the war broke out in September 1939, she was in Switzerland with her husband. In 1944 the second son Konrad was born.

After the Second World War , in 1948 they opened an art trading company under their own name with a focus on French painting and drawings of the 19th century. When Marianne Breslauer's husband died in 1953, she took over the business and worked with her son Walter from 1966 to 1990. Under the name of Marianne Feilchenfeldt, she was one of the first women in a male domain to build a well-respected reputation in this industry.

Her photographic work was rediscovered in the 1980s, and numerous publications and exhibitions were devoted to her, including the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Breslauer's estate is in the Swiss Photo Foundation . Some of her works are also owned by the Berlinische Galerie. In particular, it concerns her final portfolio work at the Lettehaus Photography School . Together with a wealth of other material from the estate, they formed the basis for the exhibition in early summer 2010 with the title “Marianne Breslauer. Overlooked moments. Photographs 1927–1936 ”.

Marianne Breslauer was the younger sister of Agathe Breslauer, who was first married to the Amsterdam classical philologist Hendrik Jan de Marez Oyens. After the divorce, Agathe married the Swabian textile manufacturer Ernst Saulmann. The Jewish couple had to flee Germany in 1935 and left behind an important art collection which, due to persecution, was auctioned off in 1936 at the Weinmüller auction house in Munich.

Awards

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

  • 2013: Artists in Dialogue , The Hidden Museum, Berlin
  • 2014: Artists in Dialog , The Hidden Museum, Berlin

literature

  • Kathrin Beer and Christina Feilchenfeldt (eds.): Marianne Breslauer - photographs. Catalog for the exhibition in the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur. Nimbus Verlag, Wädenswil 2010.
  • Marianne Feilchenfeldt Breslauer: Pictures of my life: memories. Nimbus, Wädenswil 2001/2009, ISBN 978-3-907142-03-5 .
  • A feast for the eyes - The Paris Myth - Re Soupault, Ilse Bing and Marianne Breslauer . In: Unda Hörner: Madame Man Ray: Avant-garde photographers in Paris. Ed. Ebersbach, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-934703-36-4 .
  • Dominik Bartmann : Marianne Breslauer. Photographs: 1927–1937. Exhibition catalog. City Museum Foundation, Berlin 1999.
  • Jutta Dick and Marina Sassenberg: Jewish women in the 19th and 20th centuries. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993, ISBN 3-499-16344-6 .
  • Manuela Reichart : The secret of the captured moment. The photographer Marianne Breslauer. In: Marianne Breslauer Photographien 1927–1937. Exhibition catalog Neue Nationalgalerie. Berlin 1989.
  • Marianne Breslauer. In: Retrospective Photography - Marianne Breslauer. Edition Marzona, Bielefeld 1979.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Ute Eskildsen: Taking photos meant taking part. Photographers of the Weimar Republic. Exhibition catalog Museum Folkwang, Essen 1995, p. 262.
  2. a b Michaela Gericke: Flaneurin with the camera photographs by Marianne Breslauer in Berlin. Deutschlandradio Kultur from June 10, 2010.
  3. a b c Dominik Bartmann: Marianne Breslauer. Photographs: 1927–1937. Exhibition catalog. Stadtmuseum Foundation, Berlin 1999, p. 6 ff.
  4. ^ The Hidden Museum, Berlin
  5. ^ Swiss Photo Foundation: "Marianne Breslauer - Photographs", exhibition 2010
  6. ^ Berlinische Galerie: "Marianne Breslauer. Overlooked moments. Photographs 1927–1936 ”, exhibition 2010
  7. "Moments of Onbewaakte. Photos van Marianne Breslauer ”, exhibition 2011 (Dutch)
  8. Exhibition from August 22, 2013 to October 6, 2013: Artists in Dialogue - Paintings, Photographs and Sculptures. ( Memento from September 1, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) On the Museum Portal Berlin (archive version)
  9. 25 female painters and photographers on the subject of »Landscape and Face«