Biography

Discussion

Erwin Blumenfeld was already experimenting with photography in his youth in Germany and he continued to photograph after arriving in the Netherlands. On his free days he portrayed the people around him in a light-hearted manner, initially without any professional motivation. In the sphere of his private life—where people dear to him appear to have unhesitatingly gone along with his unconventional style of photographing—Blumenfeld found the freedom to establish a basis for a personal style. He portrayed his wife and children inside the home, always varying the lighting and the camera angles. He would also produce portraits of them at his studios.

In the 1920s and ’30s, Blumenfeld often served as his own model in his photos. The self-portrait was a means for him to master this new form of portraiture in total freedom. He used lighting on himself in unorthodox ways and documented his own face in close-ups with rigorous cropping. Later on, he would include these portraits of his family and himself in exhibitions and installations.

Blumenfeld’s earliest model was Paul Citroen, who already played an important part in his playful photographic experiments as a child. Starting in the second half of the 1920s, a number of joint photo sessions were organised in and around Blumenfeld’s house in Zandvoort. On summer days, Citroen posed for the camera in various informal positions. These sessions—and later those with Blumenfeld’s friend, Carel van Lier—were much like farcical theatrical pieces, complete with unconventional props and theatrical poses. It should be observed that the experimental nature of these photos lay exclusively in the representation, not in the technique.

By presenting fifty photos of women’s heads at his exhibition Cinquante têtes de femmes (‘Fifty Heads of Women’), Blumenfeld show how women were his favourite subjects to photograph. It was in the Netherlands that he gradually developed a clear vision for his portraits of women—a vision just as recognisable in the remainder of his photographic oeuvre and a topic he would later regularly address. By comparing the contact sheets that have survived with the final enlargements, one can gain clear insight into Blumenfeld’s working method. He showed little interest in the personal traits of the people he portrayed. It was not an individual characterisation he was striving for in his portraits: an area where the documentary properties of photography can be of great help. Instead, it was his own personal vision that Blumenfeld projected on his models. On working days, he took portraits of women—acquaintances and clients—in unorthodox poses, as well relying on strong and unnatural lighting effects. With his great sense of humour, charm, and his remarkable power of persuasion, Blumenfeld was able to convince female visitors to his store to pose for him, sometimes even nude. But rarely, if ever, did this result in a paid commission. At the end of the workday, Blumenfeld went to his darkroom and manipulated his shots according to his own fantasies. With the help of enlargements, unconventional crops, and darkroom techniques used to create special effects, e.g. solarisation, brûlage, and combination print, he lifted his everyday models out of reality and transformed them into suggestive and erotic fantasy images. Blumenfeld’s portrait wall, on which he created a larger unity by combining dozens of women’s portraits on the wall of his portrait studio on the Keizersgracht, provides a good picture of what he was trying to accomplish. By representing women artists, actresses, paying clients and those close to him all in a similar way, and as well by combining their portraits in his installation, Blumenfeld appears to draw the observer’s attention to the levelling power of photography. With the discrete addition of several mannequins portrayed exactly in the same manner, he betrays his surrealist-inspired refusal to distinguish between object and subject, dream and reality. It seems as if he wishes to demonstrate that it is the eroticising eye of the artist that predominates here.

Blumenfeld’s contacts with artists representing the Modern movement in the Netherlands were closer than his connections with those in the photography world. In the period between the two world wars, he portrayed many key figures in the world of Dutch culture: dozens of artists, actresses, dancers, critics, and architects. Blumenfeld’s reputation as a photographer was not the reason why they allowed him to take their portraits, but because he moved in the same avant-garde circles. The artists formed their own social stratum as a cultural vanguard—of which Blumenfeld was a part—in the religious-based society of the Netherlands.

In the studio, the model was expected to behave passively: it was Blumenfeld who determined what the ultimate image would look like. With artists, he seemed to pay no attention to their individuality, nor was he overly impressed by their artistic persona. Just as with his models of lesser renown, they appear to have served chiefly as a physical starting point, void of any personality. It was if he used them to try out his graphic effects, achieved through light and shadow, as well as his newly acquired darkroom techniques. Blumenfeld’s portrayal of Charley Toorop, for instance, has been done in an extremely cheerful and feminine manner, as opposed to the masculine, serious image that she herself often conveyed to the outside world. John Radecker, a sculptor and friend, also willingly went along with Blumenfeld’s photographic experimentation. Radecker’s head was photographed so big that it took up the entire image. Blumenfeld also asked him to close his eyes, making him look more like a big sleeping baby than an established artist with a reputation to uphold.

In 1932, Blumenfeld became the first photographer to exhibit his work at a modern Amsterdam art gallery. It was a breakthrough that apparently sparked envy among members of the established photography world, which viewed this move as scandalous: what was an amateur doing—someone seeking a modern style through experimentation—in a temple of the visual arts that was virtually unattainable for them? The opinions voiced by professional portrait photographers in response to Blumenfeld’s two exhibitions at the art dealer Carel van Lier’s gallery, as published in the trade magazines, were uncommonly harsh. Blumenfeld’s work was criticised on every level. When perusing issues of the three Dutch magazines produced by and for anyone taking photographs in the Netherlands during the 1930s—Bedrijfsfotografie (‘Corporate Photography’) for the professional photographer; Lux/De Camera and Focus for the amateur photographer—one encounters a conservative perspective on photography. According to the critics, a good portrait was not derived from a desire for innovation, but was instead based on sound craftsmanship and a modest degree of painterly artisticity. Professional photographers viewed themselves as being responsible for the quality of craftsmanship in Dutch portrait production and saw the need to defend their reputations in this respect. In their view, Blumenfeld’s experimental portraits were a blemish on the profession. As result, Blumenfeld received not the slightest recognition with regards to his bold and daring portraits from any of his professional colleagues during his days in Amsterdam. The milieu of conservative professional photographers was no place for free spirits like Erwin Blumenfeld and his friend Paul Citroen to further develop or manifest themselves. Among circles of the Dutch avant-garde art movement, however, there was most definitely an appreciation for the two men’s photographic portraits. Art galleries therefore offered prospects for the new experimental movement in photography.

For his radical innovations? within the medium of photography, Blumenfeld was obliged to seek inspiration chiefly abroad. The relatively conservative notions of other Dutch photographers failed to provide new insights. It was thanks to artists such as Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray that an entirely new photography had arisen in Europe, which was already widely accepted even by this time. Piet Zwart and Paul Schuitema were two Dutchman who had previously taken advantage of existing international platforms such as exhibitions and magazines. For these pioneers of modern photography in the Netherlands, however, the medium was never entirely independent, but instead used by them primarily for photomontages and advertising designs.

In his autobiography, Blumenfeld wrote about his time spent in Amsterdam: ‘Three multi-faceted art magazines (Variétés, Brussels; Querschnitt, Berlin; Minotaure, Paris) kept my contact with the creative world intact.’ It is also known that he had frequent access to modern magazines such as VU and Das Deutsche Lichtbild (‘The German Photograph’). What is interesting about Blumenfeld’s remark is that he positioned the creative world so clearly outside the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, Blumenfeld was apparently isolated: the pioneers with whom he felt an affinity lived in other countries. There he was faced with making a choice between Constructivism and Surrealism. Paging through the international publications of his day, Blumenfeld was directly inspired by the surrealist photographer Man Ray. Lisette Blumenfeld recalls that Man Ray’s famous photobook Photographies 1920–1934 lay permanently on her father’s nightstand and that he was always referring to it. Blumenfeld admired the photos and the design in Man Ray’s book. It gave him the faith that one could indeed actually devote his entire life to artistic photography. Blumenfeld’s fascination with Man Ray is clearly identifiable in his portraits of women. In every issue of Variétés and Minotaure from the 1930s, one finds women’s portraits made by this American pioneer, which clearly served as a stimulus for Blumenfeld’s experimentation with poses, compositions, and darkroom techniques that were similar.

In academic literature on photography in the Netherlands in the period bridging the two world wars, the names Paul Citroen and Erwin Blumenfeld are often mentioned in the same breath. The two men’s photographic work and lives are therefore very closely related. After both having grown up in Germany, they together formed the Dutch branch of the Dada movement. It was likewise in the early 1930s that they investigated the new photographic capabilities of the modern portrait in the Netherlands. Despite their close collaboration and the many similarities to be found in the two men’s work, both ultimately chose their own path in the further development of their photography. In the early 1920s, Citroen became captivated by the Bauhaus, sharing the ideas about art and life predominating there. In his later portrait photography, Citroen worked in the spirit of the Bauhaus photographer Otto Umbehr (Umbo). By contrast, Blumenfeld loathed the Bauhaus and the constructivist philosophy promoted there. He was completely averse to dogma, no matter what the form.

Besides the fact that Citroen and Blumenfeld chose to continue in two different directions in photography, the former appears never to have gone so far in his experimentation as the latter. Citroen preferred to stick with the middle ground when it came to portrait photography, never completely forsaking the traditional approach to the portrait, in spite of his use of modern head sizes and graphic contrasts. Many of Citroen’s portraits are pictorial in character, achieved through blur and the use of soft film paper. His crops were less radical, his camera angles not as extreme, and he rarely or never worked independently in the darkroom. With Citroen, the creative process of photography seems to have been concluded at the moment he clicked the shutter. For this reason, he never saw his photos as full-fledged art, like he did his paintings and drawings. In 1933, Citroen wrote that ‘sliding a machine (camera) in between the first internal emotion (motive) and the completed artwork (…) does not allow the organic growth on which the life of an artwork depends.’ Blumenfeld’s experiments, by contrast, knew no limits. No single device was rejected in his desire to create a modern portrait that reflected his artistic vision in a clear and graphic manner.

The Portret van Tara Twain (‘Portrait of Tara Twain’), taken in Amsterdam, would clear the way for Blumenfeld’s move to Paris. In 1936, two portraits of this American woman and a surrealistic nude from the Netherlands were published in Photographie, a special edition of Arts et métiers graphiques. Some time later, photos by Blumenfeld were also published in the international avant-garde magazines Verve and Minotaure. Blumenfeld’s photos—which by this point had only been seen hanging between the handbags in the display window of his leather goods shop, on the wall of his portrait studio, or at exhibitions in the Netherlands—were now definitively considered to be works of international modern photography. In his autobiography, Blumenfeld described his ambitions at the time: ‘What I really wanted: just to be a photographer, l’art pour l’art, a new world, which the American Jew, Man Ray, had discovered with success. Whether I could support my family with this was another question.’ After all the financial hardship he suffered in the Netherlands, in the end Blumenfeld chose in favour of his family’s interest, i.e. the more commercial path of fashion photography. At the time, the profession of fashion photography was relatively new, providing ample opportunity for experimentation. Through important contacts such as Cecil Beaton and André Theriade, Blumenfeld managed to gain access to the major international fashion magazines, including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. He was able to make his mark on this profession in a way that few have ever accomplished. In addition, he has always maintained—first in Paris and later in the United States—his desire for innovation and personal style. With these qualities and his consistent vision of women, Blumenfeld has emerged as the world’s highest paid fashion photographer.

Despite Blumenfeld’s overtly negative view of his stay and photographic practice in the Netherlands, the time he spent there was most definitely significant for the further course of his career. His failure to find paying clientele and the willing support of his generally open-minded friends ensured that Blumenfeld had the freedom and space to arrive at a coherent style and vision. Had he actually been obliged to deal with ‘middle-class scum’ as his clientele, his modernist aesthetic would perhaps have never developed as freely. Over the years, Blumenfeld managed to gradually expand his initially unfettered experiments in the Netherlands into a full-fledged artistic oeuvre in Paris, and subsequently, into a commercially successful practice as a fashion photographer in New York. Ingredients encountered in his later photography—e.g. the clear compositional schemes, graphic contrasts, his persistent hunger for the latest techniques, and his vision of women as sought-after objects—can all be traced back to Blumenfeld’s early amateurish years in the Netherlands.

Despite the initial lack of interest that Blumenfeld has received in Dutch academic literature, Blumenfeld undeniably deserves a special place in the history of Dutch photography. Together with Paul Citroen, and to a lesser degree Eva Besnyö, he was one of the first photographers in the Netherlands to experiment with modern portrait photography. Furthermore, Blumenfeld can be described as one of the very few photographers in the Netherlands—together with Emiel van Moerkerken—who looked to Surrealism in France versus the Constructivism of the Bauhaus. In the first half of the 1930s, the Dutch photography world was not yet ready for Blumenfeld’s radical vision with respect to the most traditional genre in photography: the portrait. It was precisely this sector of the profession that was staunchly guarded by photographers, who, because of their highly threatened market position stemming from the economic crisis and technical innovation, were greatly reluctant to try out experiments of this kind for fear of losing their already diminishing clientele. This attitude of disapproval was probably also sparked by the professional—and therefore competitive—ambitions of this young and inexperienced portraitist. When viewed from the Dutch context, Blumenfeld is to be seen as a pioneer who focused on new possibilities for portrait photography.

Documentation

(selection Dutch oeuvre)