Les tribulations d'Erwin Blumenfeld 1930-1950.

Les tribulations d'Erwin Blumenfeld 1930-1950. : Le Minotaure ou Le Dictateur Paris, 1937 © The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld 2022    Les tribulations d'Erwin Blumenfeld 1930-1950. : Sans titre (Margarethe von Sievers) Paris, vers 1937 © The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld 2022    Les tribulations d'Erwin Blumenfeld 1930-1950. : Sans titre (Marianne Tischler, dite Manina) Paris, vers 1937 © The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld 2022    Les tribulations d'Erwin Blumenfeld 1930-1950. : Sans titre (Marianne Tischler, dite Manina) Paris, vers 1937 © The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld 2022   


The exhibition


Celebrating femininity through the play of light and shadow, these photographs reveal bodies partially covered by fabrics that reveal more than they hide, or enveloping a face with closed eyes in mystery. We find this attraction to the body in his pictorial quotations, as when a woman poses in front of him in Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl. Always intimately linked to the body, his first images with Dadaist accents are marked by their time. This is the case of his photograph The Minotaur or The Dictator, where an antique bust with a calf's head is wearing a toga. Everything is hieratic and dangerous. Power and threat. In the same spirit, but contenting himself - circumstances obliging - with rough shots, Blumenfeld captures the camps in which he is interned, the guards and the crowd of passengers on the cargo ships ensuring the transport from one confinement to another. The course of the MAHJ covers twenty years of creation. It shows him in turn as a committed photographer or lover of female curves. But above all, he was an experimenter with images, multiplying optical games and being one of the first to use color in photography, in the 1940s.

Extract from the article by Emma Noyant published in the N°104 de la revue Art Absolument. Published February 3, 2023

When


13/10/2022 - 05/03/2023
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