Ré Soupault

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Ré Soupault (born October 29, 1901 as Meta Erna Niemeyer in Bublitz , Pomerania Province , † March 12, 1996 in Versailles ) was a German - French artist. Trained at the Bauhaus in Weimar, she belonged to the European avant-garde of the 20th century between Berlin and Paris. After the Second World War she worked as a literary translator and essayist for radio. She left behind a complex body of photographs, reports, drawings, fashion designs and texts.

Life

Erna Niemeyer grew up in a conservative family in a small town in Pomerania with seven older siblings. Her parents were Bertha Marie Auguste Niemeyer, née Hensel, and the butcher and horse breeder Friedrich Carl Richard Niemeyer. She attended the Lyceum in Kolberg . Through her drawing teacher, she learned about Walter Gropius' Bauhaus manifesto .

“There was an idea, even more an ideal: no more difference between craftsmen and artists. All together in a new community we should build the cathedral of the future. I wanted to take part. "

- Ré Soupault

Training at the Bauhaus

In 1921, against the wishes of her parents, she enrolled at the Bauhaus in Weimar and took lessons from Johannes Itten , Wassily Kandinsky , Oskar Schlemmer , Paul Klee , Walter Gropius and Georg Muche . She was most impressed by Itten: “And something happened at Itten that freed us. We didn't learn to paint, but learned to see anew, to think anew and at the same time got to know ourselves. ” She was so interested in the Persian Mazdaznan doctrine that he taught that she also studied Sanskrit for two semesters in Jena. In 1922 she came to the weaving workshop . She incorporated Sanskrit wisdom into the abstract color compositions of her carpets. Her work was exhibited and sold at the first Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar in 1923 . The Bauhaus viewed them as their “spiritual family”.

Her college friend Werner Graeff introduced her to the Swedish avant-garde filmmaker Viking Eggeling (1880-1925) in 1923 . She took a year off from the Bauhaus and helped Eggeling in Berlin with the completion of his experimental film Diagonal-Symphonie . From him she learned the basics of filming. Shortly after Eggeling's death, she made films herself, including an experimental fashion film about shoes.

Fashion

After the Bauhaus in Weimar was closed in 1925, she worked from 1926 under the pseudonym Renate Green in Berlin as a fashion journalist and illustrator for the magazine Sport im Bild , which was published by Scherl-Verlag . For this she went to Paris in 1929 as a fashion correspondent and was soon accepted into avant-garde circles. Her friends included Man Ray , Fernand Léger , Lee Miller and Kiki de Montparnasse . The photographer Florence Henri created half-nude portraits of her. Léger introduced her to the fashion designer Paul Poiret , for whom she designed a successful collection of pant skirts . But she didn't like the feminine effects and the quick fashion changes in haute couture .

In 1931 she founded her own fashion atelier Ré Sport in rue Froidevaux in Montparnasse with the financial support of the American millionaire Arthur Wheele . She called herself "Ré" since Kurt Schwitters gave her this name in 1924. She designed the interiors of her fashion studio in a puristic white. The already famous architect Mies van der Rohe furnished it with his furniture. Man Ray photographed her collections. In the supplement For the Woman in the Frankfurter Zeitung , Helen Hessel reported in 1932 and 1933 on Ré's fashion activity and her success in Paris.

She designed fashion for the contemporary type of “ new woman ”, who she embodied, who wanted to dress chic and at the same time practical and comfortable. She invented u. a. the "transformation dress". It was simply cut and could be transformed from an everyday dress to a floor-length evening dress with a cape using a variety of accessories. To make her fashion high quality but affordable, she used fabrics from the couturiers from the previous year. This idea, as well as its playful handling of the Bauhaus's theory of color and form, betrayed its character. She also successfully created a new type of neck jewelry: a metal collar and collars made from artificial flowers. With her prêt-à-porter creations, she revolutionized the Paris fashion scene and was considered a new star. Her collections were sold in department stores. After Wheele's death in 1934, she had to close her studio.

Philippe Soupault

On November 7, 1933, Ré Richter, as she was called after her short marriage to the Dadaist painter and filmmaker Hans Richter , met Philippe Soupault at the Soviet embassy in Paris at the reception to celebrate the October Revolution . He has been one of the most important journalists in France since the late 1920s. After giving up her fashion studio, she took him on reporting trips through Germany, Switzerland, England, Scandinavia, Italy, Spain and North Africa. He convinced her to illustrate his reports with photographs. They married in 1937.

photography

At the Bauhaus she had already experimented with the medium of photography. The graphic compositions of her black and white photographs are evidence of this. She worked with a Rolleiflex 6x6 , and later with a Leica . Her preferred motif were people. On her travels, she developed her eye for the “magic second” that characterizes her work. An example of this is the photo of a girl from 1936 in Madrid before the start of the civil war , who with a raised fist imitated the workers' solidarity of adults.

In 1938 the Soupaults moved to Tunisia . Léon Blum , who was elected France's first socialist prime minister in 1936, had commissioned Philippe Soupault to set up the anti-fascist radio station Radio Tunis . In Tunisia, Ré Soupault published reports for numerous magazines from August. She photographed emigrants, pilgrims, nomads and in the palace of the Tunisian monarch. There were also self-portraits. The French government bought photographs of her for little money. She dealt with the role of women in the Islamic world and learned of the existence of the “Quartier réservé” in Tunis, a closed district to which women rejected by their families and society were deported and where prostitution was their only livelihood. The good relations with the authorities enabled Ré Soupault to enter this area for two days, accompanied by a local police officer. She portrayed women in almost empty rooms and caught their eyes. It remained the only photos that were ever taken there.

During the Second World War, Tunisia was under the Vichy government from 1940 , which dismissed Philippe Soupault so that the couple no longer had a steady income. In March 1942 he was imprisoned without trial for six months for alleged treason. When German forces occupied Tunis after the Americans landed in North Africa in November 1942, the couple fled to Algeria, which had become Free France . They had to leave everything behind, including Ré's photo negatives. Her house on rue el Karchani in Tunis was completely ransacked.

They stayed in Algeria for almost a year, then in 1943 Philippe Soupault was commissioned by Général de Gaulle to set up a new French news agency in North, Central and South America. The Soupault couple traveled from Tangier to the United States in an American troop transport in 1943 and settled in New York. There they met their exiled friends from pre-war Europe again. Ré Soupault accompanied her husband on all of his travels, in 1944 to South America.

In 1945 they separated. Philippe Soupault went back to Europe; Ré Soupault stayed in New York. Max Ernst left his studio to her. She wrote and photographed travel reports for International Digest and Travel Magazine .

She made her last photo report in 1950 in West Germany about refugees and displaced persons from the eastern regions . She traveled three weeks through Bavaria, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, visited refugee shelters and described the different integration of the individual ethnic groups. One of the main topics was the threat of neglect among young people. Her photographs focused on people "whose often empty looks past the camera reveals loss and concerns about the future." But she also reported on "the high level of personal continuity of former SS people who worked as police officers in the refugee camps after the war".

Translations and radio features

In June 1946, Ré Soupault returned to Paris and began working as a literary translator from French into German for the Gutenberg Book Guild in Zurich . She has translated among others Romain Rolland , André Breton , Philippe Soupault and Tristan Tzara . In 1954 she transferred a key work of Surrealism, The Songs of Maldoror by Lautréamont .

She wrote numerous radio features for German and Swiss broadcasters, including about the Bauhaus, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry , Rabindranath Tagore , Mahatma Gandhi , Women in the Middle Ages, Paris under the Commune of 1871, the Scholl siblings , Joseph Roth , Fritz von Unruh and Viking Eggeling . Between 1955 and 1980 she wrote a total of 16 radio essays for the evening studio of Hessischer Rundfunk, including her own adaptation of Voltaire 's ' Candide '. She dedicated two features to the literary-artistic movements Dadaism and Surrealism , to which she saw Tristan Tzara as the link , Tristan Tzara, founder of Dada (1968) and "We were wrong: the real world is not what we believed." The emergence of surrealism (1974). Together with Philippe Soupault, she made a film about Wassily Kandinsky for French television in 1967 .

Late years and rediscovery of her artistic work

From 1973 the Soupaults lived together again in Paris in the same house, but in two separate apartments in the Résidence d'Auteuil in the 16th century. District . On a trip to Heidelberg in 1981 they met the publisher Manfred Metzner, who had co-founded the publishing house Das Wunderhorn in 1978 . He made Ré Soupault's long-lost photographic work of the 1930s and 1940s known in Germany. Some of her negatives from 1934 to 1942, which she had to leave behind in Tunis on her escape, were found by a Tunisian friend in a chest in the souks of Tunis after the Second World War . Much, however, was lost forever. In 1988 the first publication of the photo book A woman belongs to everyone. Photos from the 'Quartier réservé' in Tunis ; In 1994 the second photo book Paris 1934–1938 followed .

After the death of Philipp Soupault in 1990, she lived secluded in a small apartment on the Bois de Boulogne and worked on the publication of her diary, which she has kept continuously since the 1940s. She died in Versailles on March 12, 1996, exactly six years after her husband to the day. She was buried in his grave in the Montmartre Cemetery.

The first retrospective of her photographic work was dedicated to her in 2007 by the Gropius-Bau in Berlin. In 2011 the Kunsthalle Mannheim presented the complex life's work of the fashion and filmmaker, photographer, essayist and translator in the exhibition Ré Soupault. Artist at the center of the avant-garde . In addition to her own photographic work, Man Ray's photo series , in which he portrayed her and her fashion creations, were also shown.

In 2018, Metzner published the commemorative volume Nur das Geistige counts. From the Bauhaus out into the world , which he had assembled from letters, texts and diary passages by Ré Soupault into a continuous text.

"There are two ways in life: one leads outwards: career, validity, property [...] the other inwards: work, but without regard to external success, creative work that finds its reward in itself."

- Ré Soupault

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions
Participation
  • 2004-2005: Woman. Metamorphosis of modernity. Fundación Joan Miró , Barcelona
  • 2015–2016: Qui a peur des femmes photographes? 1839-1945. Musée d'Orsay , Paris
  • 2018–2019: Photography, arme de classe. La photographie sociale et documentaire en France. 1928-1936. Center Pompidou , Paris
  • 2019–2020: Unknown modernity - image of the city / city in a picture. Painting, graphics and photography between Bauhaus and New Objectivity. Brandenburg State Museum for Modern Art, Cottbus

Publications

Own works

Illustrated books, photo reports
  • Tunisia 1936-1940. German-French edition. With a text by Abdelwahab Meddeb . Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 1996, ISBN 978-3-88423-102-9 .
  • Paris 1934-1938. Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 1994, ISBN 978-3-88423-088-6 .
  • Portraits of women from the “Quartier résérvé” in Tunis. Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2001, ISBN 978-3-88423-140-1 . (The first edition of this photobook was published in 1988 with the title One woman belongs to everyone . It was reprinted for the 100th birthday of Ré Soupault.)
  • Philippe Soupault. Portraits. Photographs 1934–1944. With an essay by Philippe Soupault. Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2003, ISBN 978-3-88423-217-0 .
  • Ré Soupault - The photographer of the magic second. In the center of classical modernism between Berlin and Paris. Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2007, ISBN 978-3-88423-282-8
  • Catacombs of the soul. A report on West Germany's displaced and refugee problem in 1950. Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2016, ISBN 978-3-88423-546-1 .
Essays
Autobiographical texts
  • Only the spiritual counts. From the Bauhaus into the world. Published by Manfred Metzner, Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-88423-588-1 .
Publication of fairy tale anthologies
  • Breton fairy tales. 1959.
  • French fairy tales. 1962.
  • 52 contes merveilleux: De tous les temps et de tous les pays pour toutes les semaines. With Philippe Soupault. 1953.
  • Fairy tales from five continents. (German, French, Italian edition), with Philippe Soupault. 1968.
  • Histoires merveilleuses of the 5 continents. With Philippe Soupault and Mireille Wieland. (Collection Mille et une histoires ), Éditions Seghers, 1975.
  • L'étoile et le nénuphar, et autres contes. With Philippe Soupault, afterword by Michaël Batalla, Collection Seghers jeunesse , Éditions Seghers, 2005.
  • Histoires merveilleuses du Brésil. With Philippe Soupault, afterword by Michaël Batalla. Collection Seghers jeunesse , Éditions Seghers, 2005.
  • Dragon bleu Dragon jaune. With Philippe Soupault and Zhon yao Li. Les Pt'its albums du Père Castor , Flammarion, Paris 2006.

Translations (selection)

  • Romain Rolland : Between the Peoples - Diary of the war years and the memoirs from my life. Zurich 1948.
  • Lautréamont : The Complete Works , The Songs of Maldoror , Poems , Letters . Heidelberg 1954.
  • Philippe Soupault: The Negro , The Last Nights of Paris , A Great Man , The Last Game , Encounters with poets and painters . With André Breton: The magnetic fields.

literature

  • Ré Soupault . In: Patrick Rössler , Elizabeth Otto : Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists. Knesebeck, Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 . Pp. 52-55.
  • Inge Herold et al .: Ré Soupault. Artist in the center of the avant-garde , Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2011.
  • Anton Escher: Construction of the Public Sphere in the Middle Eastern Medina. The Photographs by Ré Soupault. In: Hans Christian Korsholm Nielsen, Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen (ed.): Middle Eastern Cities 1900–1950. Public Places and Public Spheres in Transformation. Aarhus University Press 2001, ISBN 978-87-7288-906-1 , pp. 165 f.
  • Ursula März : You live like in a hotel. Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 1999, ISBN 978-3-88423-155-5 . (Biographical essay on Ré Soupault with numerous illustrations)
  • Sigrid Wortmann Weltge: Bauhaus textiles: art and artists in the weaving workshop. Translation from the American. Ed. Atemmle, Schaffhausen 1993, p. 205.

Film portraits

  • Ré et Philippe Soupault: les années tunisiennes. By Frédéric Mitterrand , TV film ARTE, 1996.
  • Ré Soupault in Tunis. A Bauhaus student photographs the Orient. By Ulrike Becker , TV film (45 min.), SWR Baden-Baden, 1997.
  • The photographer Ré Soupault. By Luzia Braun , ZDF Aspects , April 27, 2007.

Radio plays

  • And suddenly I was a stranger. The photographer Ré Soupault. By Conny Frühauf, WDR, 2006.
  • Shooting galleries still have an appeal to me. Based on unpublished texts by Ré Soupault. By Andra Joeckle , Deutschlandradio Kultur 2007 (54'43 min.).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ré Soupault . In: Patrick Rössler, Elizabeth Otto: Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists . Knesebeck, Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 . P. 52
  2. ↑ Manfred Metzner (ed.): Ré Soupault - The photographer of the magical second. Photographs. Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2007, p. 8.
  3. ↑ Manfred Metzner (ed.): Ré Soupault - The photographer of the magical second. Photographs. Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2007.
  4. ^ Ré Soupault . In: Patrick Rössler, Elizabeth Otto: Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists . Knesebeck, Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 . P. 52
  5. ↑ Manfred Metzner (ed.): Ré Soupault - The photographer of the magical second. Photographs. Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2007, p. 9.
  6. ^ Ré Soupault . In: Patrick Rössler, Elizabeth Otto: Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists. Knesebeck, Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 . P. 52
  7. ^ Nicole Henneberg: Ré Soupault. Magic of the second. In: Der Tagesspiegel, August 24, 2018
  8. ↑ A dress for all occasions: Soupault's transformation dress, tailor-made by the costume studio of the National Theater Mannheim , photo in: FAZ, February 12, 2011
  9. ↑ Manfred Metzner (ed.): Ré Soupault - The photographer of the magical second. Photographs, Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2007, p. 10.
  10. ^ Ré Soupault . In: Patrick Rössler, Elizabeth Otto: Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists. Knesebeck, Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 . P. 54
  11. ^ Ré Soupault (1901-1996). The photographer of the magical second ( Memento from September 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), literaturhaus-muenchen.de 2009, accessed on May 2, 2013.
  12. ^ Ré Soupault: Délégation de gréviste à la fête de la victoire du Front Populaire, le 14 juin 1936 , reproduction of the photograph in the Center Pompidou
  13. ↑ Manfred Metzner (ed.): Ré Soupault - The photographer of the magical second. Photographs. Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2007, p. 12.
  14. ^ Ré Soupault . In: Patrick Rössler, Elizabeth Otto: Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists . Knesebeck, Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 . Pp. 54-55
  15. ^ Anne Frederiksen: Quartier Reserve , from: Die Zeit No. 6/1989
  16. ↑ Manfred Metzner (ed.): Ré Soupault - The photographer of the magical second. Photographs. Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2007, p. 13.
  17. ↑ Ursula März: You live like in a hotel. Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 1999, p. 80.
  18. ↑ Hans-Peter Kunisch: German Vagabonds , Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 7, 2017
  19. ↑ René Schlott, Review: Ré Soupault, Katakomben der Seele , in: Visual History December 5, 2016, DOI: https://doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok-1580
  20. ↑ Martin Ingenfeld: Between Dada and Surrealism. On the 100th anniversary of the “magnetic fields”, Ré Soupault opens a glimpse of Tristan Tzara as the link between the two art movements , literary criticism, January 1, 2019
  21. ↑ Manfred Metzner (ed.): Ré Soupault - The photographer of the magical second. Photographs. Verlag Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2007, p. 17.
  22. ↑ Natalie Soon Drum: The life work of artist Ré Soupault. At eye level with the world , Frankfurter Rundschau, February 15, 2011
  23. ↑ Helmut Böttiger: Ré Soupault: "Only the spiritual counts." An informative atmospheric testimony , Deutschlandfunk Kultur, May 30, 2018
  24. ↑ Ré Soupault - "Only the spiritual counts" . Review by Carsten Hueck. Oe1, ORF.at, June 10, 2018
  25. ↑ Film screening in the Literaturhaus Munich 2007
  26. ↑ Radio play and feature, Deutschlandfunk
  27. ↑ ARD audio game database
personal data
SURNAME Soupault, Ré
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Niemeyer, Meta Erna (maiden name); Green, Renate; Richter-Green, Renate; Judge, Ré
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French photographer
DATE OF BIRTH October 29, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Bublitz , Pomerania
DATE OF DEATH March 12, 1996
Place of death Paris