The Museum of Art and History of Judaism, in Paris, tells the journey of the German artist who, after having endured wars and exiles, became star of fashion photo.
by Claire Guillot
“Tribulations”: this word that smells good the adventure seems very casual when it comes to evoking the course of Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969), this gifted German photographer whose life, tossed Here to the rhythm of the pangs of the 20th e century, often only stood a thread. In the exhibition “The tribulations of Erwin Blumenfeld, 1930-1950”, presented at the Museum of Art and History of Judaism (Mahj), in Paris, it is rather in the Latin sense of Tribulatio that we should go back , that of torment, test: the exhibition, mainly based on the archives of his family, is the story of resilience, of an insolent nose made to fate by an artist who, after having worked wars And exiles, ends star of fashion photo in the United States.
If the very (too) bushy exhibition is full of works of all eras, including unprecedented series of uneven interest, it is not the artistic aspect that attracts attention to the Mahj, but The incredible fate that happy family photos, letters and documents. “I can today pride myself on having lived live the end of the old world: it was ugly, stupid and fatally dangerous,” summed up Erwin Blumenfeld in his brilliant and cynical autobiography, probably romanticized, formerly and Daguerre (posthumously published in 1975). The book was recently reissued in pocket format at Babel editions, with a cover where the artist, in 1947, was in the simplest device. In the literal sense: a camera serves as a sex cover.
This self -portrait says provocative and creaky humor, full of spirit words, of which Blumenfeld has shown throughout his life – a legacy of his companionship with the Dada movement in Berlin, surely, and perhaps To also be a reaction to successive trauma. How to remain serious when absurdity mixes with the tragic?
photomontages and experiments
Born in Berlin in a family of Jewish merchants, Erwin Blumenfeld is still in high school when his father dies of syphilis: he is forced to work in a making store, and to cultivate his passion for art in self -taught. The First World War cost his beloved brother, Heinz; He himself is recruited, first as an ambulancer, then as a carrier of corpses, and finally as an accountant in a military mess. Several times he will try to escape the butcher’s shop, but will be denounced for desertion … by his own mother. La Grande Mailuse, which accompanies Blumenfeld from its beginnings, leaves its mark on this inspired and worried work where skulls, skeletons and ghosts abound.
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