Photomontage Between the Wars, 1918-1939 (2012) [EN, ES]

This publication offers an overview of the birth of the photomontage process specifically in Germany and the Soviet Union. The extensive range of posters, collages, maquettes, postcards, magazines, and books attests to the large influence of photomontage in politics, social protest, and advertising, while also demonstrating the popularity of the technique among avant-garde members during these two decades.

The catalogue features an essay by Adrian Sudhalter, as well as a chronology of the era, a selection of period texts—several published in translation for the first time—by some of the represented artists, and facsimile reproduction and translation of the catalogue of one of the most important exhibition devoted to this artistic technique at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin in 1931 (with essays by Curt Glaser, César Domela-Nieuwenhuis, and Gustav Klutsis). The exhibition is drawn primarily from the Merrill C. Berman Collection in the United States.

Publisher Fundación Juan March, Madrid, 2012
ISBN 9788470755972
184 pages

Review: Paul Messaris (Advertising & Society Review, 2014).

Exhibition
Publisher
WorldCat

English: PDF, PDF (23 MB), View online
Spanish: PDF, PDF (24 MB), View online

Bauhaus Photography (1982/1985)

“These five hundred photographs are a record of Bauhaus activities and experiments during the 1920s and early 1930s. Most of the photographs were taken by artists-painters like Fritz Kuhr and Werner Siedhoff, designers Heinz Loew and Herbert Bayer, Bauhaus masters Hannes Meyer and Joosst Schmidt – who were not self-conscious photographers but who wanted to work with a new technology.

The book supplements visual material already published in Hans Wingler’s monumental Bauhaus and presents the school’s more human side. Some of these photographs have never been published before, while others have not been published since the period in which they were made.

Part I consists of over 100 ‘artistic’ images, a listing of Bauhaus photography exhibits, an example of a Dessau Bauhaus lesson plan, including photography, and essays on various aspects of photography by Peterhans, Moholy, Vordemberge-Gildewart, Ernst Kallai, Fritz Kuhr, Willi Baumeister, Adolf Behne, Max Burchartz, Will Grohmann, and Ludwig Kassack. There is also a section on the use of photography with typography.

Part II is a Bauhaus album – nearly 400 illustrations of applied photography documenting the Bauhaus buildings, classroom projects, or day-today activities of students and faculty.”

First published as Bauhaus Fotografie, Marzona, Düsseldorf, 1982

Edited by Egidio Marzona and Roswitha Fricke
Translated by Harvey Mendelsohn and Frederick Samson
Foreword by Eugene Prakapas
Publisher MIT Press, 1985
ISBN 0262132028, 9780262132022
xi+315 pages
via x

Review: Clark V. Poling (Design Issues, 1986).

WorldCat

PDF (32 MB)

Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Cubism and Abstract Art: Painting, Sculpture, Constructions, Photography, Architecture, Industrial Art, Theatre, Films, Posters, Typography (1936)

The catalogue of the first MoMA’s retrospective of modernism, held 2 March-19 April 1936, laid the theoretical foundation of the museum. Its jacket contains a notorious chart of modernist art history, the Diagram of Stylistic Evolution from 1890 until 1935.

“The catalogue remains an important historical document (as does that for Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism). It set abstraction within a formalist framework that—ignoring the intellectual byways of French symbolism, German idealism, and Russian Marxism of the previous thirty years—was shaped by the scientific climate that had started a century before. … The exhibition together with the widespread dissemination of its influential catalogue, established Cubism as the central issue of early modernism, abstraction as the goal.” (Sybil Gordon Kantor, 2003)

The exhibition later traveled to another 7 cities: San Francisco, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Baltimore, Providence, and Grand Rapids.

Publisher Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936
249 pages
via MoMA

Commentary: Meyer Schapiro (Marxist Quarterly, 1937), Susan Noyes Platt (Art Journal, 1988), Astrit Schmidt Burkhardt (Word & Image, 2000).

Publisher (incl. master checklist and press releases)
WorldCat

PDF (47 MB)