Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) — Photographies, dessins et photomontages — Jeu de Paume, Concorde — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 15, 2013 → January 26, 2014

Erwin Blumenfeld — Jeu de Paume D’Erwin Blumenfeld, on connaît surtout sa période dédiée à la photographie de mode. Le Jeu de Paume choisit de cantonner cet aspect... 3 - Bravo Critique

Panorama 12/13 De la maison rouge au Palais de Tokyo en passant par le centre Pompidou, la rédaction pose un regard sans concession sur les expositions franciliennes du mois de décembre.

Erwin Blumenfeld’s life and work impressively document the socio-political context of artistic development between the two World Wars, while highlighting the individual consequences of emigration. The exhibition devoted to Erwin Blumenfeld’s multi-layered œuvre brings together over 300 works and documents from the late 1910s to the 1960s, and encompasses the various media explored by the artist throughout his career: drawings, photographs, montages and collages.

This exhibition traces his visual creativity and encompasses the early drawings, the collages and montages, which mostly stem from the early 1920s, the beginnings of his portrait art in Holland, the first black and white fashion photographs of the Paris period, the masterful colour photography created in New York and the urban photos taken toward the end of his life.

The retrospective also showcases his drawings, many of which have never been shown before, as well as his early collages and photomontages, shedding fascinating light on the evolution of his photographic oeuvre and revealing the full extent of his creative genius.

The now classic motifs of his experimental black-and-white photographs can be seen alongside his numerous self- portraits and portraits of famous and little-known people, as well as his fashion and advertising work.

In the first years of his career, he worked only in black and white, but as soon as it became technically possible he enthusiastically used color. He transferred his experiences with black-and-white photography to color; applying them to the field of fashion, he developed a particularly original repertoire of forms.

The female body became Erwin Blumenfeld’s principal subject. In his initial portrait work, then the nudes he produced while living in Paris and, later on, his fashion photography, he sought to bring out the unknown, hidden nature of his subjects; the object of his quest was not realism, but the mystery of reality.

“Just how could the women’s clothing apprentice, this wilful youth from a middle-class Jewish background in Berlin, become a sought-after and highly paid advertising and fashion photographer in the New World? And how did this owner of a leather-bag store in Amsterdam become one of the best-known figures of creative New York in the 1950s?”

Ute Eskildsen, curator