Willy Maywald

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Willy Maywald (born August 15, 1907 in Kleve ; † May 21, 1985 in Paris ) was a German photographer. He was mainly active in Paris, photographing fashion for Christian Dior and portraying many well-known artists.

Life

Hotel Maywald, 1910

Willy Maywald came from a respected family of hoteliers who ran the Grand Hotel Maywald on Nassauer-Allee in Kleve until shortly after the First World War . As a child and adolescent, he took an active part in the area and the posh spa society that frequented the hotel at that time. Here he trained his aesthetic judgment, which he developed, first in Cologne and Krefeld, then from 1928 to 1931 during his studies in art, architecture, literature and music at the Berlin "Art School of the West". In Berlin Maywald took his first "real" photo, which shows the "view of a lantern at night", "whose light draws hexagonal patterns on the street."

In the summer of 1931 Maywald returned to Kleve to take photos, inspired by his first photo. Since Kleve had long since become too small and too provincial for him and he could not live out his lifestyle and homosexuality in the “conservative-bourgeois city with its staid views [...]”, he went to Paris that same year, where he settled Self-employed in 1933 and initially offered his work to illustrated magazines. He made reports on Vincent van Gogh's house and Claude Monet's garden . Maywald was friends with many artists, of whom he took portraits. His pictures were part of the artistic avant-garde .

Edward Steichen's shots for Vanity Fair magazine inspired his career as a fashion photographer, which was interrupted by World War II. He fled to Switzerland, where he stayed with a pastor's family and spent the war years. In 1946 he returned to Paris and in 1961 opened a gallery near Montparnasse . From 1947 Maywald took up the first collection of the fashion designer Christian Dior , which later went down in fashion history as the “ New Look ”. His recordings and reports received international attention. In 1986 he had the remarkable solo exhibition “Willy Maywald et la mode” at the Musée de la Mode in Paris. In the scene he was called the "Master of the Pose".

Photo art

Fashion photography

Maywald worked for the fashion designers Christian Dior and Pierre Balmain , Jacques Fath and Jeanne Paquin , among others . His photos stood for “discreet elegance” and were taken partly in luxurious interiors or in front of expensive luxury cars, but partly also outdoors, in the streets and cafés of Paris or, for example, in front of the window of an antiquarian bookshop. His way of creating a bizarre contrast between the background and the styled models is part of the art of Nouveau Réalisme . His photos have been published in magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar .

Artist portraits

The artist portraits that Maywald produced met with great recognition; he mastered the illumination with daylight and artificial light perfectly. In his book Portrait and Atelier (1958), for example, there are portraits of Hans Arp , Georges Braque , Marc Chagall , Le Corbusier , Fernand Léger , Joan Miró , Georges Rouault and Maurice Utrillo.In his autobiography he describes how different the artists on the Photographers received: Henri Matisse only allowed a single shot, Pablo Picasso's studio was accessible to him at all times. Among the many recordings he made of artists in the following period were, for example, the portraits of the Velvet Underground singer Nico , the actor Jean-Louis Barrault and the writer and director Jean Cocteau .

Other work

His other works are less well known, for example the shot “Waschtag” (1930), a domestic, rural scene from the Lower Rhine, photographed by an “eye-catcher with a large pictorial volume”. The Kurhaus Museum in Kleve has a large collection of pictures that Maywald took of Kleve before and after the war. The collection represents an interesting documentation of the development of the cityscape for these two periods of time. In April 1959, Maywald also photographed the creation of the oak cross created by Joseph Beuys and the gate for the "Memorial to the Fallen of World War II" in the "Old Church Tower" in Meerbusch - Büderich in his former studio in the former Friedrich-Wilhelm-Bad of the Klever Kurhaus.

The person in Maywald's photo art

Apart from his Kleve photos, Maywald always focused on the human being. “He approached him discreetly, without any technical effort. He enveloped the portrayed in a mysterious light, using poses and graphic contrasts to create a limbo between reality and dream. His image compositions are clear and harmonious, but at the same time full of dynamism and poetic allusions. "

Poster for the Maywald exhibition in the Dortmund subway, May 2016

Exhibitions

Quote

“A photographic recording is primarily a realistic reproduction, a kind of document. But I still think that every photography in composition, light rhythm and sound quality of the black and white palette with its thousand nuances should form a three-dimensional picture unit. An image should always emerge that is able to interest and please, regardless of the content and regardless of the object depicted. "

- 1951

literature

Books and exhibition catalogs

  • Valentina Vlasic , Guido de Werd : Willy Maywald. Glamor and elegance. Boss, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-89413-271-2 .
  • Le Pari (s) de la creation. Photographies 1931–1955 . Carnavalet Museum - Histoire de Paris. Paris Musées, Paris 2007, ISBN 978-2-7596-0001-4 .
  • Photos from the Lower Rhine . Municipal Museum Haus Koekkoek, Kleve 1992, DNB 941313867 .
  • Willy Maywald: The splinters of the mirror. An illustrated autobiography . In collaboration with Patrick Brissard, Schirmer-Mosel, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-88814-165-6 .
  • Kleve, castle and city under the swan . Boss Verlag, Kleve 1959, DNB 453244602 .
  • Portrait and studio. Photos. Arp, Braque, Chagall, Le Corbusier, Laurens, Léger, Matisse, Miró, Picasso, Rouault, Utrillo, Villon . Die Arche, Zurich 1958, DNB 453277969 .

Secondary literature

documentary

  • Elegance of look. The photographer Willy Maywald . TV documentary, Germany, 2007, 45 min., Director: Annette von Wangenheim, production: 3sat .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Valentina Vlasic : Photography: Willy Maywald and Fritz Gelinger . In: Guido de Werd (Ed.): My shaving mirror. From Holthuys to Beuys . Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve 2012, ISBN 978-3-934935-61-7 , p. 516.
  2. ^ Ulrich Pohmann: Faire vite et bien . See: secondary literature
  3. ↑ Joachim Peter Kastner in the caption for the "Annual Ticket 1997" of the Heimatverein Vierse.
  4. ↑ Guido de Werd: The Museum Kurhaus Kleve. The place, the building, Joseph Beuys, Ewald Mataré, the collection . In: Guido de Werd: My shaving mirror. From Holthuys to Beuys . Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve 2012, p. 18.
  5. ^ Valentina Vlasic: The restoration of the Joseph Beuys studio in Friedrich-Wilhelms-Bad Kleve . In: Museums in the Rhineland 4/07. Information for the Rhenish museums. PDF file
  6. ↑ About the TV show "Elegance of the Eye - The Photographer Willy Maywald" by Annette von Wangenheim on August 18, 2007 in 3sat (online)
  7. ^ Willy Maywald, le Pari (s) de la création. Retrieved July 29, 2016 .
  8. ↑ Quoted from Ulrich Pohmann in: ( kunstlexikonsaar.de PDF )
personal data
SURNAME Maywald, Willy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Maywald, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German photographer
DATE OF BIRTH August 15, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Kleve
DATE OF DEATH May 21, 1985
Place of death Paris