The New Objectivity and Constructivism in Czech Inter-War Photography

Vladim? Birgus

Purist pictorialism, rejecting oil printing, rubber printing and other specialized printing techniques, was introduced to Prague in 1921 by Drahom? Josef Ruži?a an American doctor and amateur photographer of Czech origin and propagator of the ideas of Stieglitz and White. In the first half of the twenties, it influenced many Czech photographers including Josef Sudek, Jarom? Funke and Adolf Schneeberger, but after a few years it was already clear that it was becoming an anachronism and its programme was to a large extent exhausted. Many ambitious professional photographers and above all amateurs constantly watered down in motif and style, the works of its pioneers, without much inventiveness, and created nice unchallenging pictures with softly depicted, simple objects or sentimental genre scenes.

Some of its original propagators appeared in the opposition against this orientation. Instead of the softly drawing lens, softening lens or fabrics placed during enlargement on sensitive paper, they gradually began to emphasize cutting sharpness of tonally rich enlargements, restraint of the subjective point of view and a transition from romantic and lyrical motifs to strictly rational depiction of many apparently entirely unaesthetic motifs from the spheres of technology, industry or architecture. This “new photography?so often emphasized un-traditional compositions with diagonals, significant underviews and overviews and large details, so that it combined typical features of the New Objectivity and Constructivism. Its representatives wanted to show the world around them in a new way, un-clich? and surprising. At the same time, they wanted to empha-size specific features of the photographic medium, and to depict and interpret motifs, which had previously stood aside from the attention of photographers. In contrast to the representatives of Impressionist and Secession pictorialism, they emphasized the preciseness and objectivity of the photographic image, but also its out of the ordinariness when depicting the ordinary, and the possibilities for artistic stylization by means of the transfer of coloured three-dimensional reality into the black and white two-dimensional image, changes of scale and perspective or the use of unusual angles of view. They were supported in this by the interest of Avant-garde artists in new arts, especially photography and film. In his article The Photograph and Cine-Film, published in the magazine Život 2 (1922), only two years after the foundation of the artistic society Dev?sil, the most important theorist of the Czech Avant-garde Karel Teige placed demands for purposefulness and truthfulness on modern photography and opposed Impressionist and Secessionist pictorialism: Yes, the morality of photography lies in reality and truthfulness, after all veracity always applies after virtue and agrees with the purpose for which photography was invented. (...) The merit of photography for curing painting of Impressionism is immense, but painting repaid its debt to photography badly: it infected photography with Impressionism, making it into artistic photography, something false, like artistic industry.1

Czech new photography, like typography, architecture or design, was significantly influenced by the famous German Bauhaus school, at which a number of Czechs and Slovaks studied. They included Jindrich Koch, who later became the successor of Hans Finsler as head of the photographic department in the School of Applied Art at Giebichenstein Castle near Halle, and before his tragic death in 1934, briefly active as photographer of the National Museum in Prague; Zden? Rossmann architect, graphic designer, scenographer, photographer and teacher at the School of Arts and Crafts in Bratislava (1932-1938) and Brno (1939-1943); his wife Marie Rossmannov?also a photographer; and the Slovak Irena Bl?ov? later organizer of the movement of social photography in Bratislava. In 1929, Karel Teige was invited by Hannes Mayer director of the Bauhaus at the time, with whom he shared many radical Functionalist views, to a cycle of lectures about the sociology of architecture, typography and aesthetics. Jarom? Funke also considered studying at the Bauhaus, but in the end he gave priority to teaching activity at the School of Arts and Crafts in Bratislava. In 1930, a German graduate of the Bauhaus Werner Feist settled in Prague for a time.

The inspirational example of the conception of teaching at the Bauhaus was strongest in the schools of arts and crafts in Bratislava2 and Brno.3 Rich contacts with the Czech Avant-garde were maintained especially by L?zl?Moholy- Nagy, who already lectured on painting, photography and film in Brno on the invitation of Dev?sil. After leaving the Bauhaus, he exhibited independently several times in Czechoslovakia (for example in June 1935 in the K?stlerhaus in Brno, later at the School of Arts and Crafts and in March 1936 together with the Fotolinia group, members of the German Amateur Photography Club from ?sk?Bud?ovice and members of the Brno Photographic Group of Five, he participated in the Exhibition of International Photography in the Institute for Promoting the Crafts in ?sk?Bud?ovice). František Kalivoda, head of the Brno branch of the Film-photo group of the Left Front, finally devoted to his work the whole introductory (and last) double number of the exclusive new magazine Telehor, which is now quoted in all monographs about Moholy-Nagy and is highly valued by collectors throughout the world. The photographs and photo-montages of Moholy-Nagy and other teachers and students of the Bauhaus, together with the works of Albert Renger-Patzsche, Aenne Biermann and other German photographers, were often reproduced in many other Czech Avant-garde magazines.

Czech Avant-garde photography, with its untraditional over-views, underviews or diagonal compositions, stood close to the representatives of Soviet Avant-garde photography. Soviet Avant-garde art reached Czechoslovakia more sporadically than French or German, but it was followed with great interest. Soviet photographers were represented at the Prague exhibitions of social photography in 1933 and 1934, and at the International Exhibition of Photography in the M?es at Prague in 1936, an extensive collection of Soviet work including works of Alexander Rodchenko, Boris Ignatovich, Max Alpert, Arkady Shaykhet, Galina Sankov? Marek Markov, Boris Kudoyarov, Georgy Petrusov, Ivan Shagin and Georgy Zelma, thanks to the leftist theoretician of photography and film Lubom? Linhart and the Soyuzfoto agency. Apart from works in the style of Constructivism, built up shots in the spirit of socialist realism and official photographs of the visit of President Edvard Bene?to Moscow and Leningrad and his meetings with Stalin and Voroshilov had a lot of space.

Since Czech artists could be inspired by works of the German, Soviet or French Avant-garde, in many cases it was not only a matter of plagiarizing and watering down foreign examples, but also of creating very original and progressive works. Jaroslav R?sler can be a good example in this area. He produced abstract compositions and Constructivist photos, which are among the oldest even in the world context. He was the only professional photographer among the members of the Czech Avant-garde group Dev?sil, into which he was accepted in 1923 on the initiative of Karel Teige, who was impressed with his work up to then. At the time, R?sler was still an assistant to the most important representative of Czech pictorialist photography František Drtikol. The Symbolism and Secession flavour of Drtikol’s works were foreign to this modernist oriented artist, but he did not resist his teacher’s influence. For example, this is shown by the use of the bromoil printing technique, which he applied in some abstract compositions and photomontages, in the imaginative cubo-futurist portrait of the dancer Ore Tarraca, and finally also in some shots in Paris. Even before the end of his training period, that is about 1919, R?sler created the so-called Opus I in Drtikol’s studio, a geometric composition with an angular bottle, which already has some elements of Constructivism.

Alongside the works of Alvin Langdon Coburn or Christian Schad, the series of photographs by R?sler of geometric surfaces, lights, shadows and reflections from the first half of the twenties have a place among the first examples of the influence of abstract art in photography. In a further part of his creative work, he caught elementary minimalist motifs, for example the light in the printing room of Drtikol’s studio. In many compositions, he combined plays of light and shade or cut out geometric shapes in the background with various traditional objects from painted or photographed still-lifes, for example glasses, candles or ash-trays, but also apparently entirely unaesthetic technical objects. These pictures were entirely in harmony with the interest of the members of Dev?sil in the beauty of technical civilization. Although as a result of R?sler’s introvert character, his contacts with the other members of Dev?sil were rather sporad-ic, they still influenced his creative work, which is perceptible especially in R?sler’s pictorial poems, in which radio towers, condensators and similar motifs appear. Constructivist influences strengthened in R?sler’s creative work from the second half of the twenties, but were already clearly perceptible in most of his collages from the Dev?sil period. For example, this is notable in his diagonally designed photographic details of the Petřín tower in Prague and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. R?sler often abstracted outcrops of motifs of the steel construction of these towers into configurations of black and white surfaces, thus coming close to abstract art. The influence of Constructionalism and Functionalism is also evident in R?sler’s individual advertising photographs, taken during his further stay in the French capital. In many of them, for example in details of files, injection sprays, tyres, medicines and bottles of wine, large detail and emphasized cutting sharpness are used in the style of the New Objectivity. However, after returning from Paris, R?sler was artistically silent for many years. He returned to experimental creative work only in the fifties. While it is now clear that R?sler’s original work is part of the greatest contribution of Czechoslovakia to the development of modern photography, they have still not been sufficiently researched and published, and his large retrospective and monographs are only being prepared.4 The creative work of Jarom? Funke, the most important personality of Czech Avant-garde photography, has an entirely exceptional position in new photography.5 In its beginnings from the beginning of the twenties, romantic pictorialist landscapes and Impression-ist genre scenes are varied by sober, direct photographs of the streets of Kol? from 1921. Later, in 1923, Funke began to create simple still-lifes, which are already among the earliest expressions of Czech new photography, coming years before similar modern works in the work of Drahom? Josef Ruži?a. In his pictures Plate (1923) and Still-life - Frames (1924), he eliminated the depicted with the help of untraditional composition and adventurous cut. In the resulting form of the picture, it is difficult to identify simple motifs on the basis of shape and line. Thus, he directly created examples of the possibilities of abstracted reality, and the suppression of spatial perspectives, while fully preserving the specific features of the photographic medium. Emphasis on these was a basic constant of all Funke’s further creative work, which always observed the principle of direct photography, except in early pictorialist specialized prints and some unpublished photograms. For example, in 1935, he said in an interview for the daily ?sk?slovo: Contemporary photography is built on a solid foundation, formed by cooperation between good technology and awareness of the possibilities, which arise from simple analysis of objects in space. Our basis is structure, its precise depiction is the priority of photography. The object, then, which is the bearer of structure, and at the same time located in space. The harmonious union of space and object is the photogenic effect of the photographic composition, a newly seen or newly discovered object is a surprise, which is demanding for the photographer, and the conceptual content is a combination of the personal conviction of the man behind the camera and a strict photographic programme.6

In the international context, many of Funke’s photographs from the twenties are also among the most radical applications of the principles of the New Objectivity and Constructivism, whether we are concerned with the diagonal composition of the photographs After the Carnival (1924) and Leg (1925), the photos Old Iron from 1925 and other photographs showing “mechanical beauty?of apparently unattractive details of various industrial objects (he could have been inspired by Paul Strand’s photographs of ball bearings, published in the first issue of Disk in 1923), or the extensive series of still-lifes with bottles, glass panels, stuffed humming bird and star-fish or kitchen vessels, in which their shadows play roles of ever increasing importance. Funke progressed smoothly from the New Objectivity to abstract photographs, which were his reaction to Man Ray’s rayograms. However, he later returned to the New Objectivity in his details of apparently unaesthetic technical objects, advertising photos, photographs of statues and architecture (for example in photographs of Prague churches or in photographs of architectural monuments in the towns of Louny and Kol?, in many portraits and