Le Corbusier saw the house as a machine, and the Villa Savoye realizes that belief beautifully.

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) with Pierre Jeanneret, Villa Savoye, c. 1928–31, 82 Rue de Villiers, Poissy. Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

The house is a box in the air …
Le Corbusier, Précisions (1929)

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) with Pierre Jeanneret, Villa Savoye, c. 1928–31, 82 Rue de Villiers, Poissy (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The Villa Savoye at Poissy, designed by Le Corbusier in 1929, represents the culmination of a decade during which the architect worked to articulate what he considered the essence of modern architecture. Throughout the 1920s, via his writings and designs, Le Corbusier (formerly Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) considered the nature of modern life and architecture’s role in the new machine age. His famous dictum, that “The house is a machine for living in,” is perfectly realized within the forms, layout, materials, and siting of the Villa Savoye. [1]

Located just outside Paris, the Villa Savoye offered an escape from the crowded city for its wealthy patrons. Its location on a large unrestricted site allowed Le Corbusier total creative freedom. The delicate floating box that he designed is both functional house and modernist sculpture, elegantly melding form and function.

Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture) (New York: Dover Publications, 1923), pp. 134–35

Le Corbusier had been developing his theories on modern architecture throughout the previous decade. In 1920, he founded the journal L’Esprit Nouveau (The New Spirit), and many of the essays he published there would eventually be incorporated into his landmark collection of essays, Vers une architecture (Toward an Architecture) in 1923. This book celebrated science, technology, and reason, arguing that modern machines could create highly precise objects not unlike the ideal platonic forms valued by the ancient Greeks. Le Corbusier lavished praise on the icons of modernity—race cars, airplanes, and factories—marveling at the beauty of their efficiency. However, he also argued that beauty lay not only in the newest technology but in ancient works such as the Parthenon, whose refined forms represented, in his view, the perfection of earlier Archaic systems. Le Corbusier sought to isolate what he called “type forms,” which he referred to as universal elements of design that can work together in a system. He found these across time and across the globe, in the fields of architecture and engineering. The many images embedded throughout the text drew striking visual parallels and eloquently expressed his search for modern perfection through universal forms.

Le Corbusier House, Weissenhofsiedlung, 1927, Stuttgart, Germany (photo: Andreas Praefcke, CC BY 3.0)

During the 1920s, Le Corbusier designed a series of houses which allowed him to develop his ideas further. By 1926, he had devised his Five Points of Architecture, which he viewed as a universal system that could be applied to any architectural site. The system demanded pilotis to raise the building off the ground and allow air to circulate beneath; roof terraces, to bring nature into an urban setting; a free plan that allowed interior space to be distributed at will; a free façade whose smooth plane could be used for formal experimentation; and ribbon windows, which let in light but also reinforced the planarity of the wall.

Ground plan (left), first story (center), atrium and roof garden (right), Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, 1929, Poissy, France

The Villa Savoye incorporated these principles, and also realized many of the concepts expressed in Vers une Architecture. Made of reinforced concrete, the ground floor walls are recessed and painted green so that the house looks like a box floating on delicate pilotis. Visitors arrive by car, in true machine-age fashion. The stark white exterior wall, with its strips of ribbon windows, has a remarkably smooth, planar quality. This stands in contrast to the fluidity of the interior, which is organized by a multistory ramp that leads the viewer on a gently curving path through a building that is nearly square. The contrast between the sharp angles of the plan and the dynamism of the spaces inside charge the house with a subtle energy.

Ramp and spiral staircase, Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) with Pierre Jeanneret, Villa Savoye, c. 1928–31, 82 Rue de Villiers, Poissy (photo: Scarletgreen, CC BY 2.0)

The ramp winds from the entrance up to the salon, a formal interior space that flows seamlessly into the roof terrace outside. Corbu, as he is also known, treated the terrace as a room without walls, reflecting his desire to fully integrate landscape and architecture. The ramp finally culminates in the curved solarium crowning the house, whose rounded enclosure appears to be an abstract sculpture when viewed from below. Seen from the roof terrace, the ramp and cylinder of the solarium echo the forms of the ocean liners lauded in Vers une Architecture. Le Corbusier and Madame Savoye believed in the health benefits of fresh air and sunshine, and considered leisure time spent outdoors one mark of a modern lifestyle. The Villa Savoye’s integration of indoor and outdoor spaces allowed the family to spend time outdoors in the most efficient way possible—the house was, in a sense, a machine designed to maximize leisure in the machine age.

Solarium viewed from the roof terrace, Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) with Pierre Jeanneret, Villa Savoye, c. 1928–31, 82 Rue de Villiers, Poissy (photo: a-m-a-n-d-a, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The Villa Savoye can be understood as Le Corbusier’s refinement of his architectural system, his own personal Parthenon. Its essential geometric volumes embody his concept of the type form, and its careful consideration of procession and proportion connect the building to Classical ideals. At the same time, its clean simplicity and its use of concrete evoke the precisely-calibrated works of engineering so admired by the architect. The Villa Savoye represents Le Corbusier’s re-conception of the very nature of architecture, his attempt to express a timeless classicism through the language of architectural modernism.

Mahmoud Moukhtar, The Bride of the Nile, 1929, limestone, 50 x 60 x 148 cm (Mahmoud Moukhtar Museum, Cairo; photo: © Nadia Radwan)

The Bride of the Nile that wasn’t

Examining Mahmoud Moukhtar’s iconic sculpture The Bride of the Nile may align with what viewers expect of a modern artist from Egypt. At first sight, the work appears to be a direct quotation of ancient Egyptian art framed by the Art Deco aesthetic of 1929. However, a closer reading of this significant sculpture, representing a kneeling female nude on a pedestal, raises several questions that reveal the complexities and contradictions of the modern artistic cultures of the Arab world. Who exactly is this Bride of the Nile? What does her nudity, her graceful and somewhat subdued kneeling posture, with her head leaning toward her hand, convey about the context in which she was created? Is she trapped in the timeless ideal of an Orientalist gaze and an ancient past when Egypt was ruled by pharaohs, or does she evoke the agency of the modern Egyptian woman?

A trans-Mediterranean modernism

Mahmoud Moukhtar, recognized as one of Egypt’s leading modern artists, was born in the Nile Delta, the son of the mayor of Tanbara, a village where he spent his childhood. In 1908, he was among the first students to enroll in the newly established School of Fine Arts in Cairo. The young student moved to Cairo at a time of significant modernization. Admission to the school was then free of charge, supported by its founder Prince Yusuf Kamal, and the institution was headed by the French sculptor Guillaume Laplagne. Students were trained in the academic tradition of the French Beaux-Arts and engaged with traditional Western genres, including the nude, landscape, and portraiture, by copying models, photographic reproductions, and plaster casts imported from European museums.

Mahmoud Moukhtar in his workshop in Paris, c. 1913–14 (Archives Eimad Abou Ghazi, © Dr. Eimad Abou Ghazi)

Engraving by Louis Lecoeur, Fontaine des Incurables, c. 1810, 16.1 x 11.3 cm (Musée Carnavalet, Paris)

Like many artists of his generation, Mahmoud Moukhtar received a grant to study art in Europe, and was sent to Paris to advance his skills in sculpture. Moukhtar would spend most of the interwar years in Paris where he studied works he had previously only encountered in copies, particularly the sculptures of Auguste Rodin and Antoine Bourdelle.

Despite being in Paris, Egypt remained ever-present in Moukhtar’s surroundings; he could see reflections of his own heritage in the Art Deco style visible in Paris, a phenomenon stemming from French Egyptomania. For example, the Fontaine des Incurables, located in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, was built in 1806 during the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte, in the neo-Egyptian style inspired by Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign.

Upper body (detail), Mahmoud Moukhtar, The Bride of the Nile, 1929, limestone, 50 x 60 x 148 cm (Mahmoud Moukhtar Museum, Cairo; photo: Abel Paris, Archives Eimad Abou Ghazi, © Dr. Eimad Abou Ghazi)

Aristide Maillol, La Méditerranée, c. 1906, marble, 21.6 x 17.2 x 12.7 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

This translation of European Art Deco elements is evident in the Bride of the Nile’s stylized headdress delicately adorned with feathers and topped with a bird’s head, as well as in her jewelry and the clean, elongated, symmetrical lines of her body.

Her posture, kneeling with a reclining head, also recalls Aristide Maillol’s nudes, and in particular, one of the sculptors’ most famous works, Méditerrannée. Similarly, Moukhtar’s Bride, carved out of limestone, a material local to the Nile valley, is an allegory of Egypt, and her nudity may be understood as the reclaiming of artistic modernity and its awakening in Egypt. The Bride of the Nile would later be exhibited in 1937 at the Paris International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques in front of the Egyptian Pavilion, in a context celebrating international Art Deco modern architecture.

While the young sculptor was enjoying his bohemian life in Paris, despite facing significant financial difficulties, he was constantly reminded by the Egyptian authorities of the important role he would have to play upon his return to Cairo. During his years in France, Egypt experienced anti-colonial movements demanding the end to British occupation that culminated with the 1919 Revolution led by the nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul, who became a symbol of Egypt’s struggle for independence that led to the restoration of the monarchy in 1922.

Mahmoud Moukhtar supervising the achievement of Egypt’s Awakening (Nahdat Misr), c. 1927 (Archives Eimad Abou Ghazi, © Dr. Eimad Abou Ghazi)

The pharaoh-peasant and Egyptian feminists

The origins of The Bride of the Nile can be traced back to a series of sculptures the artist produced while in Paris. After the First World War, Moukhtar began to work on the small-scale model for a monument, Egypt’s Awakening (Nahdat Misr). The model, accepted by the Salon des Artistes Français in 1920, received excellent reviews in the Parisian press. This recognition led a delegation from the Wafd Party (the national Party founded by Saad Zaghloul) to visit Moukhtar’s studio in Paris, and then appeal to the Egyptian people for support in financing the larger monument through national subscription.

Egypt’s Awakening became the visual symbol of the Nahda, and was intended to be erected in a public square in Cairo. Carved from pink granite brought through the Nile from Aswan, the monument features a Sphinx standing proudly on its front legs, alongside an Egyptian peasant (fellaha) unveiling, symbolizing a new era of the country’s emancipation and modernization. It was officially inaugurated on May 20, 1928, in Bab al-Hadid Square, opposite the Cairo Central Railway Station. Egypt’s Awakening was displaced in 1954, and replaced by an ancient monumental statue of Ramses II, which stands today in front of Cairo University.

Mahmoud Moukhtar, Egypt’s Awakening in front of Cairo Railway Station (photo: Lehnert & Landrock, collection of the author)

That same year Moukhtar showcased his sculptures in a solo exhibition in Paris held at the renowned gallery Bernheim-Jeune, organized by Georges Grappe, then the curator of the Musée Rodin. He presented a series of elegant feminine figures inspired by Egyptian rural life and ancient goddesses. Enthroned in the midst of the exhibition hall was The Bride of the Nile.

View of Mahmoud Moukhtar’s exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris, March 1930 (photo: Archives Eimad Abou Ghazi, © Dr. Eimad Abou Ghazi)

In this series, Moukhtar created an ideal image of the contemporary Egyptian fellaha, who became emblematic of the Nahda and symbolized authenticity, endurance, and connection to land. During that same period, he befriended Huda Shaarawi, an intellectual, patron of the arts, and founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union who provided him with financial support. Moukhtar’s representation of the fellaha also resonated with the idealized image of the peasant embraced by Egyptian feminists. The women of the urban elite viewed the fellaha as an emancipated working woman, who managed household finances, who was not compelled by tradition to cover her entire face with a veil that would hinder her work in the fields.

Mahmoud Moukhtar, To the River, 1929, limestone, 14 x 36 x 38 cm (Mahmoud Moukhtar Museum, Cairo; photo: © Nadia Radwan)

From this perspective, the gesture of the fellaha unveiling in Mahmoud Moukhtar’s Egypt’s Awakening may allude to a historical event when Huda Shaarawi and her colleague and friend Sayza Nabaraoui publicly unveiled their faces on the platform of Cairo’s Central Railway Station in 1923 upon returning from the Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, which they attended in Rome, Italy. At the time, such gestures of political emancipation were in fact far more revolutionary than the depiction of nude female bodies, which were widely accepted as a genre of the fine arts, especially when presented as allegorical representations of Egypt.

Face and headdress (detail), Mahmoud Moukhtar, The Bride of the Nile, 1929, limestone, 50 x 60 x 148 cm (Mahmoud Moukhtar Museum, Cairo; photo: © Nadia Radwan)

Marcelle Dubreil (photo: Archives Eimad Abou Ghazi, © Dr. Eimad Abou Ghazi)

A Parisian bride?

During his years in Paris, Moukhtar met a French woman named Marcelle Dubreil, who became his companion, as well as the model for several of his sculptures. The similarities between the pose, facial features, and the elaborate headdress of The Bride of the Nile and a photographic portrait of Marcelle Dubreil found in Mahmoud Moukhtar’s family archives, suggest that it was after her that he fashioned The Bride of the Nile.

Looking back at this sculpture, which embodies references to ancient Egyptian statuary, the Nile as a metaphor of agriculture and economic wealth, Art Deco stylization, the emancipation of Egyptian women, and Rodin and Bourdelle’s lessons, we can better understand the many layers embedded in Egyptian artistic modernism during the Nahda.

Following Moukhtar’s premature death at the age of forty-three, Egyptian feminists were the first to call for the restitution of his works that had remained in Paris. Huda Shaarawi argued in L’Egyptienne, the publication of the Egyptian Feminist Union, for the necessity of preserving the sculptor’s works as national heritage in a museum worthy of him, and for perpetuating his memory through an institution that would make his works and life known to the public. She also established the Mahmoud Moukhtar Prize to encourage and support the work of young Egyptian sculptors.

With the assistance of Georges Grappe and members of the Society of Art Lovers based in Cairo, some of Moukhtar’s sculptures were finally returned to Egypt in March 1939, along with The Bride of the Nile. However, it was not until 1962 that the Mahmoud Moukhtar Museum, designed by the renowned architect Ramses Wissa Wassef, opened its doors in Cairo, initiated by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Minister of Culture, Tharwat Okasha, almost thirty years after Huda Shaarawi’s call for the creation of a museum.

Mahmoud Moukhtar’s oeuvre had a long-lasting impact on Egypt’s modern art and culture. He paved the way for future generations of artists to explore and express personal and national narratives through their artistic practice. The Bride of the Nile equally embodies the transnational character of his work, unfolding between Cairo and Paris, and his search for an approach that reflected the Nahda aspirations, as the Arab world was beginning to form new identities.

Paintings of this size had historically exalted war, but this one suggests that war is anything but heroic.

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, May 1–June 4, 1937 (Paris), oil on canvas, 349.3 x 776.6 cm (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid) © Estate of Pablo Picasso. Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

What would be the best way today to protest against a war? How could you influence the largest number of people? In 1937, Pablo Picasso expressed his outrage against war with Guernica, his enormous mural-sized painting displayed to millions of visitors at the Paris World’s Fair. It has since become the twentieth century’s most powerful indictment against war, a painting that still feels intensely relevant today.

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, May 1–June 4, 1937 (Paris), oil on canvas, 349.3 x 776.6 cm (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) © Estate of Pablo Picasso

Antiwar icon

Much of the painting’s emotional power comes from its overwhelming size, approximately eleven feet tall and twenty five feet wide. Guernica is not a painting you observe with spatial detachment; it feels like it wraps around you, immerses you in its larger-than-life figures and action. And although the size and multiple figures reference the long tradition of European history paintings, this painting is different because it challenges rather than accepts the notion of war as heroic. So why did Picasso paint it?

Postcard of the International Exposition, Paris, 1937 (from a series of 20 detachable cards, edited by H. Chipault)

Commission

In 1936, Picasso (who was Spanish) was asked by the newly elected Spanish Republican government to paint an artwork for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. The official theme of the Exposition was a celebration of modern technology. Yet Picasso painted an overtly political painting, a subject in which he had shown little interest up to that time. What had happened to inspire it?

Unknown author, Guernica in ruins, 1937, photograph, Bild 183-H25224 (German Federal Archives, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Crimes against humanity: an act of war

In 1936, a civil war began in Spain between the democratic Republican government and fascist forces, led by General Francisco Franco, attempting to overthrow them. Picasso’s painting is based on the events of April 27, 1937, when Hitler’s powerful German air force, acting in support of Franco, bombed the village of Guernica in northern Spain, a city of no strategic military value. It was history’s first aerial saturation bombing of a civilian population. It was a cold-blooded training mission designed to test a new bombing tactic to intimidate and terrorize the resistance. For over three hours, twenty five bombers dropped 100,000 pounds of explosive and incendiary bombs on the village, reducing it to rubble. Twenty more fighter planes strafed and killed defenseless civilians trying to flee. The devastation was appalling: fires burned for three days, and seventy percent of the city was destroyed. A third of the population, 1600 civilians, were wounded or killed.

Picasso hears the news

On May 1, 1937, news of the atrocity reached Paris. Eyewitness reports filled the front pages of local and international newspapers. Picasso, sympathetic to the Republican government of his homeland, was horrified by the reports of devastation and death. Guernica is his visual response, his memorial to the brutal massacre. After hundreds of sketches, the painting was done in less than a month and then delivered to the Fair’s Spanish Pavilion, where it became the central attraction. Accompanying it were documentary films, newsreels and graphic photographs of fascist brutalities in the civil war. Rather than the typical celebration of technology people expected to see at a world’s fair, the entire Spanish Pavilion shocked the world into confronting the suffering of the Spanish people.

Later, in the 1940s, when Paris was occupied by the Germans, a Nazi officer visited Picasso’s studio. “Did you do that?” he is said to have asked Picasso while standing in front of a photograph of the painting. “No,” Picasso replied, “you did.”

World traveler

When the fair ended, the Spanish Republican forces sent Guernica on an international tour to create awareness of the war and raise funds for Spanish refugees. It traveled the world for 19 years and then was loaned for safekeeping to The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Picasso refused to allow it to return to Spain until the country “enjoyed public liberties and democratic institutions,” which finally occurred in 1981. Today the painting permanently resides in the Reina Sofía, Spain’s national museum of modern art in Madrid.

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, May 1–June 4, 1937 (Paris), oil on canvas, 349.3 x 776.6 cm (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) © Estate of Pablo Picasso

What can we see?

This painting is not easy to decipher. Everywhere there seems to be death and dying. As our eyes adjust to the frenetic action, figures begin to emerge. On the far left is a woman, head back, screaming in pain and grief, holding the lifeless body of her dead child. This is one of the most devastating and unforgettable images in the painting. To her right is the head and partial body of a large white bull, the only unharmed and calm figure amidst the chaos. Beneath her, a dead or wounded man with a severed arm and mutilated hand clutches a broken sword. Only his head and arms are visible; the rest of his body is obscured by the overlapping and scattered parts of other figures. In the center stands a terrified horse, mouth open screaming in pain, its side pierced by a spear. On the right are three more women. One rushes in, looking up at the stark light bulb at the top of the scene. Another leans out of the window of a burning house, her long extended arm holding a lamp, while the third woman appears trapped in the burning building, screaming in fear and horror. All their faces are distorted in agony. Eyes are dislocated, mouths are open, tongues are shaped like daggers.

Textured pattern on the horse’s body (detail), Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, oil on canvas, 349 x 776 cm (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) © Estate of Pablo Picasso

Color

Picasso chose to paint Guernica in a stark monochromatic palette of gray, black and white. This may reflect his initial encounter with the original newspaper reports and photographs in black and white; or perhaps it suggested to Picasso the objective factuality of an eye witness report. A documentary quality is further emphasized by the textured pattern in the center of the painting that creates the illusion of newsprint. The sharp alternation of black and white contrasts across the painting surface also creates dramatic intensity, a visual kinetic energy of jagged movement.

Visual complexity

On first glance, Guernica’s composition appears confusing and chaotic; the viewer is thrown into the midst of intensely violent action. Everything seems to be in flux. The space is compressed and ambiguous with the shifting perspectives and multiple viewpoints characteristic of Picasso’s earlier Cubist style. Images overlap and intersect, obscuring forms and making it hard to distinguish their boundaries. Bodies are distorted and semi-abstracted, the forms discontinuous and fragmentary. Everything seems jumbled together, while sharp angular lines seem to pierce and splinter the dismembered bodies. However, there is in fact an overriding visual order. Picasso balances the composition by organizing the figures into three vertical groupings moving left to right, while the center figures are stabilized within a large triangle of light.

Bull and horse (detail), Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, oil on canvas, 349 x 776 cm (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) © Estate of Pablo Picasso

Symbolism

There has been almost endless debate about the meaning of the images in Guernica. Questioned about its possible symbolism, Picasso said it was simply an appeal to people about massacred people and animals.

In the panel on which I am working, which I call Guernica, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain into an ocean of pain and death.

The horse and bull are images Picasso used his entire career, part of the life and death ritual of the Spanish bullfights he first saw as a child. Some scholars interpret the horse and bull as representing the deadly battle between the Republican fighters (horse) and Franco’s fascist army (bull). Picasso said only that the bull represented brutality and darkness, adding “It isn’t up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words. The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.”

In the end, the painting does not appear to have one exclusive meaning. Perhaps it is that very ambiguity, the lack of historical specificity, or the fact that brutal wars continue to be fought, that keeps Guernica as timeless and universally relatable today as it was in 1937.

Science, art, and technology come together in Bruguière’s abstract photograph.

Cut-paper Abstraction (Film Still from Light Rhythms), c. 1929, Francis Bruguière. Gelatin silver print, 22.4 x 27.8 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum. Speakers: Dr. Jim Ganz, senior curator, Department of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum and Dr. Steven Zucker, Executive Director, Smarthistory

Have you ever been curious about what it would be like to create art using light? In this film still, Francis Bruguière draws in pure light on cut and folded paper to create a complex image that conveys both space and depth. Originating from Bruguière abstract film produced in England, Light Rhythms demonstrates 1920s avant-garde photographers’ great interest in abstract imagery created through experimental light exposures.

Getty has joined forces with Smarthistory to bring you an in-depth look at select works within our collection, whether you want to learn more at home or make art more accessible in your classroom. This video series illuminates art history concepts through fun, unscripted conversations between art historians, curators, archaeologists, scientists, and artists, committed to a fresh take on the history of visual arts.

“Light Rhythms” is featured in the exhibition “Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography,” part of the larger initiative “PST ART: Art & Science Collide.”

Hans Bellmer, The Doll, 1935–37, gelatin silver print, 24.1 x 23.7 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

The first time I encountered Hans Bellmer’s life-sized double-doll sculpture—at an exhibition I helped organize at the International Center of Photography in 2001—my feelings were a mix of shock, revulsion, and fascination. In The Doll photo-series based on the sculpture, Hans Bellmer assembled and reassembled doll parts that he had constructed with his brother Fritz—also a trained engineer. Bellmer accentuated and duplicated their female sex organs, splaying them out on the floor as a still life before the viewer. Due to the nature of the work from this series, he is often pegged by scholars as a misogynist-leaning, female-objectifying artist—even to the extent of having alleged “pedophiliac” visual fantasies. [1] But Bellmer also provides a compelling example of the complexities of reading artwork retroactively. As scholars since the year 2000 have suggested with The Doll and other photographs from the series, Bellmer also expressed his own gender-identity issues, engaged the alternative realities of Surrealism, and commented on Nazi Germany’s notions of the “perfect” versus the degenerate body.

Bellmer was born in German-speaking Silesia but had been exposed to French Surrealism on trips to mid-1920s Paris, where he met the Italian artist much beloved by the Surrealists, Giorgio De Chirico, who often used mannequins as subjects for his paintings. Surrealist preoccupations with the uncanny melded with numerous highly personal events once the Bellmer family moved to Berlin in 1931. Together, these inspired the artist to construct his first life-sized doll in 1933—the same year Hitler took over as German Chancellor—which he could use as a subject for experimental photography. [2] That was followed by a more complex second doll in 1935 which was composed of a central ball joint that allowed for more flexibility and various appendages to be attached. While that opened up the object for Bellmer and kindled his desire to create various associations of gender and identity, it concurrently led to accusations of purposeful violence done to the doll’s “body” through implied amputations and sexualization.

As Therese Lichtenstein explored in depth in her 2001 monograph Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer, the convergence of three events between 1930–32 inspired him to construct the first doll. They included his mother sending him a box of his childhood toys—including broken dolls. He also had a Lolita-like fixation on his teenage cousin Ursula Naguschewski, newly arrived in Berlin where the Bellmer family had moved. And finally, he attended a local production of The Tales of Hoffman, a Jules Offenbach opera, where the first act centered on a “beautiful, lifelike doll Olympia.” [3]

Hans Bellmer, “Poupée: Variations sur le montage d’une mineure articulée (Doll: Variations on the Montage of an Articulated Minor),” Minotaure, number 6 (December 1934)

The circulation of Bellmer’s Dolls

The artist took approximately 30 black-and-white photographs of the first doll, some of which were included in the 1934 book Die Puppe (“Dolls”) and which also appeared in the Surrealist publication Minotaure in December of 1934. His cousin Ursula, then a Sorbonne student in Paris, had shown them to the Surrealist founder and poet André Breton at Bellmer’s request, and they caused “such a stir” that they were quickly published as the double-page spread above.

Hans Bellmer, La Poupée, 1935, hand colored gelatin silver print, 29.2 x 27.3 cm (private collection)

Parts of that doll were then incorporated into the more monumental second doll in 1935, which was the subject of more than 100 photographs, including the images that have become “textbook” Bellmer such as The Doll (La Poupée, 1935). This image was hand-tinted in candy-colored pastels, lovingly applied by Bellmer—an unusual practice when black-and-white photography was accepted as the default—with the parts adhered to a chair-caning surface. [4]  

In a way, it’s unfortunate that this image from the series has become one of the most widely disseminated examples of Bellmer’s work. As striking as it is, other images of the second doll speak more directly to the complexity of gender and political issues that the artist sorted out through these performative sculptural acts before photographing them, with the photographs then becoming his definitive works of art. A different photograph also entitled The Doll (the repeated titles can become confounding) from 1936 shows how the ball joint of the more flexible second doll can be used to attach multiple legs.

Hans Bellmer, The Doll, 1936, hand-colored gelatin silver print, printed 1949, 13.7 x 13.7 cm (private collection)

Bellmer therefore had more choices of garb here and chose to put one set of legs into men’s trousers and another set laid bare to show off girly patent-leather shoes. The artist was very forthcoming about his own lingering gender confusion, speculating that it may have been precipitated by his tyrannical, fascistic father who was obsessed with masculinity, underwhelmed by his sons’ lack of demonstration of it, and who eventually joined the Nazi Party. Bellmer described himself and his brother as children: “In fact, we were probably rather adorable, more like little girls than the formidable boys we would have preferred to be. Yet, it seemed to be more fitting than anything else to lure the brute out of his place in order to confuse him.” [5] And so it seems safe to presume that he often identified himself directly with the doll.

Rejecting Nazi “perfection”

One of the most astonishing experiments with the doll parts is witnessed through a 1936 Doll photograph, a hand-colored photographic print depicting a torso where a second set of legs replace the arms and head and which is dressed in red and clad in two sets of the black leather shoes: the type typically worn by young girls. Concurrently in the forest setting, an ominous and voyeuristic figure dressed in all black hovers behind a nearby tree, ready to pounce, with all the implied features of a strongly-built male. 

Hans Bellmer, The Doll (La Poupée), 1936, hand-colored vintage gelatin silver print, 6 x 5.5 cm (private collection)

Is this scene based on voyeuristic sexual fantasies? Or perhaps it refers to the suffocating environment of surveillance instituted by the Third Reich, a regime Bellmer protested, and as a result, refused to work or exhibit with publicly. He claimed The Doll was a political artwork, but many viewers focused on the sexual content. Other hand-tinted images of the doll created a sense of diseased skin, which the art historian Therese Lichtenstein emphasizes was a protest against the desire for perfection in Nazi “body culture.” The persuasive combination of possibilities is precisely what complicates Bellmer’s arresting and disturbing works.

Bellmer and Surrealism

The interwar Nazi politics of Germany became so constricting for Bellmer that when his sickly wife died in 1938, he moved to Paris where he lived for the rest of his life. He was immediately embraced by the Surrealists there who included him in the International Exhibition of Surrealism in 1938, with its famed “Street of Mannequins.” Surrealist poet Paul Eluard wrote poems to accompany Bellmer’s second doll’s photographs in the book Games of the Doll, although it was not published until 1949. In the late 1940s Bellmer also collaborated with the author Georges Bataille, providing illustrations for his 1947 reprint of the novella Story of the Eye.

Later in his career, he began additional “body-art” collaborations with his lover, the German writer and artist Unica Zürn. However, Zürn suffered deeply from her mental health issues, and died in 1970. The following year he was able to enjoy a definitive retrospective at the Centre national d’art contemporain, Paris, including an overview of his dolls. He died a few years later and was laid to rest in the illustrious Père Lachaise Cemetery in his beloved adopted city, where the artistic movement of Surrealism had always welcomed him with open arms.

Adolf Ziegler, The Four Elements (Fire, Water and Earth, Air), before 1937 (Modern Art Collection, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich)

It comes as somewhat of a shock to many people that the first career choice of Adolf Hitler was not dictator and mass murderer, but something far more agreeable: visual artist. As a teenager, Hitler dreamed of entering the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. While he failed the entrance exam in 1907, he returned to the city and spent many years there painting small watercolors of streetscapes and landscapes, while living in shelters and boarding rooms. For the rest of his life Hitler fancied himself an artist and took pride in his aesthetic taste. To Hitler, art really mattered.

Adolf Ziegler, The Four Elements (Fire, Water and Earth, Air) hanging in the Kaminzimmer on the first floor of the Führerbau, Munich

Once in power, the Nazis systematically stole millions of works of art from both private individuals and public collections, in many of the countries which they conquered. Through this systematic expropriation, Hitler acquired a huge art collection and could have chosen from amongst the most celebrated masterpieces ever created to hang over a fireplace in his Munich apartment. So what did he choose? Adolf Ziegler’s The Four Elements: Fire, Water and Earth, Air. Who was Ziegler and what was it about this work that appealed to Hitler? Was there such a thing as “Nazi Art”? And how do we approach it?

Adolf Ziegler, celebrated artist in Nazi Germany

Although you almost certainly have never heard of him, Ziegler was about as celebrated a contemporary artist as there was in Nazi Germany. Ziegler joined the Nazi party in the 1920s and began advising Hitler on artistic matters many years before he was elected Chancellor of Germany. This set him up very well; in 1933 when Hitler and the Nazi Party took power, Ziegler was not only made a Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, but in 1936 he was made President of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts (Reichskammer der bildenden Künste), which controlled the production of every visual artist in the Third Reich (as the regime was called by those in the Nazi party).

Paul Troost, House of (German) Art, 1933–37, Munich

Hitler had the opportunity to view a lot of Ziegler’s paintings at the annual exhibitions held at the House of German Art (Haus der Deutschen Kunst) in Munich. The large and imposing building was specially constructed for these exhibits, whose purpose was to show off the works of the “best” contemporary German painters and sculptors, that is those whom the upper ranks of the Nazis believed to be most worthy and reflective of the Reich’s values. Surprisingly, very few of the works were explicitly “political”; landscapes and genre scenes of peasants were especially favored. But in the Nazi totalitarian state all art was controlled, and all art was understood to have political valence—even if it seemed entirely divorced from politics.

While there was no singular “Nazi art” style, Ziegler’s Four Elements exhibits many traits common to works shown in the House of German Art. We might first notice its format, a triptych (a work clearly divided into three sections). Many medieval and Renaissance altarpieces (such as this one) took the form of triptychs, and they were used almost exclusively for religious images. This format therefore immediately announces the work’s spiritual or metaphysical significance. Likewise, the title of the work, The Four Elements (Fire, Water and Earth, Air) removes it from the mundane and real world, linking it to the Ancient Greek theory on the elements that made up the universe.

From Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), clearly based on the ancient Greek sculpture of the Discobolos

The title also signals that the painting does not depict four real women, but rather is an allegory. In this case, Ziegler’s allegory is derived from the classical world. While some high-ranking cultural figures in the Nazi movement favored German medieval and folk art, Hitler himself saw classical art (the art of ancient Greece and Rome) as the highest achievement. His favored movie director, Leni Riefenstahl, created a film, “Olympia” (1938), about the 1936 Olympics which simultaneously served as an ode to classical beauty and classically proportioned bodies.

As noted, the format of The Four Elements alluded to celebrated altarpieces of the Renaissance. These references reflect the Nazi belief that they were the heirs of classical civilization, passed down through the Renaissance. (It certainly took a lot of pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-scientific mental gymnastics to argue how the Germans came to be the direct heirs of both the Greeks and the Italians).

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Berlin, 1913, oil on canvas, 120.6 x 91.1 cm (The Museum of Modern Art)

The Degenerate Art Exhibit, Munich, 1937

In addition to approved subjects, the style of Nazi-approved works was nearly always highly realistic. In 1937—the same year as Four Elements—Ziegler was instrumental in organizing the Degenerate Art Show, a gigantic exhibition held across from the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, with the aim of ridiculing modern and abstract art. The exhibition put forward the idea that use of unnaturalistic color and the distortions of the human body that appeared in the art of the period were the result of of mental or physical illness and/or racial degeneracy that were corrupting German culture.

Bearing the stamp of Nazi ideology

In contrast to modern art, in Four Elements, Ziegler gives no indication this is in fact a painting, but works hard to make the figures look almost photographic, seamless, and smooth. The precision gives the image an airless and cold feeling. There is something nearly eerie about the nudes, a result of their being highly idealized and perfected along the lines of classical art and yet highly individualized.

One man who saw the work in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst as a student remembered that they looked “almost pornographic” in their lifelessness and lack of animation. This may also have been the result of the fact that in contrast to almost the entire academic art tradition, the women in Ziegler’s paintings have body hair, resulting in his nickname, “The Reich Master of Pubic Hair.” [1] The presence of body hair contrasts sharply with the perfect symmetry and nearly marble-like smoothness of the women’s high breasts, unblemished skin and idealized form. The representation of such body types were meant to stir the desire of the male viewer, thus leading indirectly to the production of more children for the Reich. [2] Women’s highest role in Nazi society was to be the bearers of as many children as possible and thus to continue the “Aryan master race” (a disproven and racist belief that Northern Europeans were a racially “pure” and “superior” race). It is hardly an accident that all of the women are blonde and Nordic types, reflecting Nazi belief in racial superiority of the Germans. In this way even subjects seemingly far removed from political content nevertheless bear the stamp of Nazi ideology.

Adolf Ziegler, The Four Elements (Fire, Water and Earth, Air), before 1937 (Modern Art Collection, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich)

As the title makes clear, these are not “ordinary” women but rather personifications, or allegories, of the four elements. The woman on the far left carries a torch (“Fire”). Fire played a large role in the Nazi iconography as a symbol of both destruction and purity. (We might think both of Nazi torchlit rallies and of book burnings). Water is represented in a thoroughly unimaginative way, held in a small bowl. Earth is signaled by the sheaf of wheat, another beloved symbol in the Nazi repertoire for evoking their Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) ideology, which held the farmer and the peasant to be the “truest” of Germans for being rooted to the land. To represent air, the artist shows a slight breeze waving the hair of the figure on the right.

While Ziegler clearly possessed great technical skills, the work traffics in obvious symbols and leaves no work for the viewer to do. It hardly engages, in any way, with the modern world or any form of modern conflict or concern. Ziegler is attempting to work in the vein of “high art,” while reflecting Nazi ideas of beauty, aesthetics, Greek philosophy, naturalism, and racial superiority. In that way it is similar to many works exhibited in the House of German Art and promoted by Nazi officials.

Christine Lehnen, “Calls for Nazi art in Munich to be taken down,” DW (October 7, 2022)

The exhibition of such works has raised serious issues, which continue to be debated. Should artists such as Ziegler, deeply tainted by his Nazi party membership, as well as his associations and artistic collaborations, be exhibited at all in the 21st century? Are we somehow celebrating or championing the artist by displaying his work? And what if we actually like it? While the works were seldom shown in the latter half of the 20th century, in the last decade or so many scholars and art historians have turned their attention to Ziegler and other official Nazi artists, believing that we must study them, not to honor them, but to understand their appeal and their aims. Whether we like it or not, these debates show that art can never be separated from the context in which it is created, especially when that context is one of the darkest chapters in human history.

Surrealism: Imagining A New World from HENI Talks on YouTube.

Why did Surrealism appeal to artists across the world?

Curator Carine Harmand traces how the Surrealist movement was taken up by artists in Egypt, Mexico, and by African American artists in the US, as a way to challenge authority and imagine a new world.

Traditional stories of Surrealism have focused on Paris in the 1920s, but here Harmand demonstrates how artists across the globe have been inspired and united by Surrealism as part of an international network.

The Revolution of the Black Square from HENI Talks on YouTube.

Black Square, 1915. Kazimir Malevich’s small masterpiece is one of the most shocking and influential paintings in the history of art. What does it mean and what impact has it had around the world?

Iwona Blazwick begins the story in the dramatic turbulence of early 1900s Tsarist Russia, where a group of young artists began to rethink the possibilities of art and overturned traditional ideas of representation. The art movements they founded—Constructivism and Suprematism—focused on pure colour, shape and line, and reflected a world undergoing social and political revolution.

Blazwick follows the trail from western Europe to 1950s Latin America and beyond, looking at how Kazimir Malevich’s deceptively simple Black Square reverberated amongst artists in various countries throughout the following decades, creating a universal language that continues to shape art to this day.

André Masson, Battle of Fishes, 1926, sand, gesso, oil, pencil, and charcoal on canvas (Museum of Modern Art)

It takes the eyes a moment to adjust to seeing André Masson’s Battle of Fishes and to rest on any of its particular forms. The experimental mixed-media piece of 1926, made of sand, gesso, oil, pencil, and charcoal on canvas, suggests dreamlike doodles and an interplay of objects, textures, and scenes. Once the large, crudely penciled fishes come into focus amidst the otherwise chaotic rendering, however, they maintain an emphatic presence.

The colossal fish at the bottom left of the picture plane is a sharp-tooth predator evocative of primordial seas. It is balanced by another large fish that it is almost nose to nose with. Both fish are scrawled in pencil, as if from the hand of a scribbling child. These fish are not fully formed, and the face of the one at the upper right takes the shape of a stark triangle (the only geometric shape in a work filled with frenzied, organic lines). The fish’s outward gazing eye looks up and back as if mindful of the other small fishes that come into focus as they appear to weave in and out of sand that has been stirred up from the seafloor.

If we look closely, we notice that some of the fishes in both the upper right and lower left portions of the canvas share nearly continuous lines, causing confusion about where one fish stops and another one starts.

André Masson, Battle of Fishes (detail), 1926, sand, gesso, oil, pencil, and charcoal on canvas (Museum of Modern Art)

Red paint resembling blood flows from some of the fish. These splashes of red punctuate the work’s otherwise sandy tones and suggest primal seafloor battles. All of this imagery evokes the sense of danger and the deep sea. 

Sand painting and untamed art 

At the canvas’s lower right, a large sandy patch sits opposite the largest fish. Masson made this patch, and the ones that balance it to form another diagonal trending towards the upper left, with an experimental process of throwing sand onto a glued or gessoed canvas that he developed in the 1920s. He combined this new process with the practice of automatic drawing, a form of mark-making thought to reveal subconscious creativity that he also began experimenting with in the early 1920s. This process, mark-making without coordination between the eye and the hand, fascinated many of the artists associated with the Surrealist movement.

During the mid-1920s Masson explored automatic drawing with paint, a material that traditionally requires a deliberate approach and frequently reloading paint on a brush. To allow a more spontaneous paint flow, Masson began squeezing paint directly from the tube (an innovation that would later inspire a younger generation of artists, including American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock). Masson’s Battle of Fishes is a prime example of what became known as his “sand paintings” by pouring gesso onto a canvas, smearing it around, improvising with his fingers, and throwing sand onto the sticky surfaces to create a textured, earthy ground.  He then poured on the red paint and added his charcoal and pencil, combining painting and drawing. Pouring glue and paint, and throwing sand, ensured that gravity and chance also played significant roles in the creation of the work of art.  

Battle of Fishes, also speaks to Masson’s fascination with the art of children and untrained artists. The Surrealists looked to such unrefined works because they saw in them untamed creativity thought to represent subconscious processes. In the hands of an artist such as Masson, however, the crudeness of children’s drawings functioned as a strategy to bypass cultural expectations that had defined art for centuries.

Surrealism and trauma

Portrait of André Masson, 1931, in his workshop on rue Blomet in Paris, photograph by Lotar Eli ( MNAM/CCI RMN)

Masson’s process reveals a lot about his interest in Surrealism—an art and literary movement that began in France. Surrealism responded to the violence of WWI and explored emerging ideas about psychology, dreams, and subconscious processes initially elaborated by psychologist Sigmund Freud.

Masson served in the French military in World War I. He was seriously injured, hospitalized, and institutionalized for what was then called “shell-shock” (today known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD—a mental disorder caused by experiencing severe emotional or physical trauma that afflicts many soldiers). The mental and physical traumas of the war affected an entire generation of artists, many of whom began questioning the legitimacy of cultural norms and governmental systems that could lead to the terror and tragedy experienced during the First World War. For Masson, the war reinforced the idea that the human condition, as all animal life, is characterized by violence and the impetus to survive.  This idea became a major theme in his art, and one that is alluded to in Battle of Fishes. 

Masson’s experiences caused him to gravitate towards other artists who had endured wartime trauma, including André Breton, who founded the Surrealist movement after serving as a medic for traumatized WWI soldiers. Masson joined the Surrealists in the early 1920s, and his studio apartment in the Montparnasse section of Paris became a nexus for artists and writers and their Surrealist experiments. These included the practices of automatic drawing (an offshoot of the automatic writing) and the creation of exquisite corpses.

André Masson, Battle of Fishes (detail of lower left), 1926, sand, gesso, oil, pencil, and charcoal on canvas (Museum of Modern Art)

This interest in chance, subconscious creativity, and metamorphosis of forms can be seen in Battle of Fishes in the thrown sand, the scribbled figures, and the red paint squirted directly from the tube. The interest in hybrid forms that captivated the Surrealists can also be seen in the interlocking figures of the fish (notice how the upper fin of the big fish at the lower left simultaneously looks like another, smaller fish). Hybrid forms such as these have also been interpreted as representing Masson’s fascination with the themes of violence and metamorphosis as well as “the precariousness of existence.” [1] 

In the book Surrealism and Painting, Breton described Masson’s painting as fundamentally aligned with Surrealist values. According to Breton, Masson’s work recontextualized and juxtaposed objects from different contexts to create a kind of “event” in which the objects, newly situated, resonated with the echoes of their past lives and with future, dreamlike possibilities. For Breton, Masson’s spontaneity and free-flowing combination of forms resonated with the group’s affinities for dream-like imagery,  evoking a sense of deep-seated creativity. [2]

This interest in the collage-like imagery of dreams can also be seen in Battle of Fishes, in which the sandy forms of the seafloor seem to vacillate between the underwater seascapes of the murky depths and a rugged mountainous terrain. The tension between what lies on the surface and the repressed subconscious impulses below function as much as the dynamic linear forms in this mixed media work to energize the image. It is just this kind of vitality—and an emphasis on the dynamism of life itself—that Masson sought to convey with his art.

László Moholy-Nagy, Fotogramm (Photogram), 1926, gelatin silver print, 9 7/16 × 7 1/16 inches (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Looking at Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy’s abstract photogram (a photograph made without a camera) we are left pondering what it is, precisely, we are looking at. At first glance, we can make out the outline of an outstretched hand that has traced itself by light onto the sensitized paper surface. Superimposed over the hand are a series of diagonal lines, that vary in tone from nearly white to dark gray to nearly black. Above these abstract lines is the outline of what appears to be a paintbrush filled with disembodied fingers, positioned as if to suggest that it was once held in the hand observed below.

Detail, László Moholy-Nagy, Fotogramm (Photogram), 1926, gelatin silver print, 9 7/16 × 7 1/16 inches (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The photogram is the end result of a sophisticated darkroom practice. It features a series of shadows layered one atop another, suggesting that the photogram was not made in a single moment, but in a series of moments. Taken as a whole, the composition is at once abstract and representational, richly toned and starkly black and white, it is darkness and light, suggestive of photography but also divorced from photography’s presumed truth to appearance. This is not the sort of view typically produced by the camera. Instead, it forces the viewer to question what a photograph is and what sort of vision this “new” form of photography produces.

For Moholy-Nagy, the photogram was exemplary of a new experimental, and inherently modern, approach to photography that he called the New Vision, which put the technological medium of photography on par with abstract painting.

László Moholy-Nagy, Yellow Circle, 1921, oil on canvas, 135 x 114.3 cm (The Museum of Modern Art)

Fotogramm‘s date and its abstraction from observed reality situates it within the larger context of interwar avant-garde art and photography, but its resistance to the clearly defined categories of painting or photography gets to the ambivalent nature of this cameraless form of photography. Moholy-Nagy’s photograms from this period reflect his preoccupation with overlapping, often intersecting, geometric forms of varying transparencies seen in his earlier paintings.

Moholy-Nagy’s experimentation with cameraless photograms brought together his interests in technology, in materials (taken from the Constructivist faktura and the Bauhaus emphasis on materials), in new ways of seeing, and in his belief that art could bring about a positive change in the world.

Like the other avant-garde artists who took up photograms in the interwar period (Christian Schad, Man Ray, El Lissitzky, Alice Lex-Nerlinger, and Rosa Rolanda), Moholy-Nagy was not a professional photographer with an established professional or studio practice. Instead, like his colleagues (who were affiliated with Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus), he was a painter seeking to break from the constraints of traditional easel painting.

Left: László Moholy-Nagy, Photogram, 1926, gelatin silver print, 23.9 x 18 cm (Museum Folkwang, Essen; photo: Moholy-Nagy Foundation); right: László Moholy-Nagy, Photogram, 1926, gelatin silver print, 23.97 × 17.94 cm (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

What did photography offer that painting and sculpture did not? For Moholy-Nagy, photography, especially its cameraless form, represented a new way of seeing and experiencing the world, and a means of expanding our sensory perception by bringing it into alignment with the modern world—the world of industry, technology, new materials, and a burgeoning mass media that bombarded people as never before with images in the pages of magazines and illustrated newspapers. By showing us a new way of looking at the world, photograms, Moholy-Nagy believed, could aid in expanding our visual literacy, making us more critical consumers of visual culture.

What is a photogram?

Although the literature on photograms in the 1920s speaks frequently of “invention,” recounting dramatic origin stories by self-serving avant-garde artists, the practice of placing sundry objects on sheets of (light) sensitized paper is as old as photography itself. In fact, it’s older. Experiments with cameraless image making date to the late 18th century, and were described by Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy in 1802, several decades before the announcement of the invention of the medium of photography:

When the shadow of any figure is thrown upon the prepared surface, the part concealed by it remains white, and the other parts speedily become dark. [1]

Anna Atkins, Spiraea aruncus (Tyrol), 1851–54, cyanotype, 35.1 x 24.6 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

An example of pictorialism. Alfred Stieglitz, Winter, Fifth Avenue, 1893, printed 1894, carbon print, mount: 55.8 × 45.2 cm (National Gallery of Art)

The basic process for creating a photogram, later taken up by William Henry Fox Talbot, Anna Atkins, and countless others, remained largely unchanged throughout the 19th and into the 20th centuries. Maintained through the decades by amateurs and scientists in the form of hand and leaf prints, the photogram took on a new life and new subject matter in the 1920s.

At a moment when modern art fully embraced abstraction, “art” photography in the early part of the 20th century was decidedly less modern and still in the throes of pictorialism. In Moholy-Nagy’s eyes, pictorialist-inspired photography “misunderstood” the basic tenets of the medium and was too much like Impressionism to be of use to the modern artist. [2] Instead, he proposed a novel approach: photography should make use of those materials fundamental to itself—light and the sensitive surface.

The photosensitive layer—plate or paper—is a tabula rasa where we can sketch with light in the same way that the painter works in a sovereign manner on the canvas with his own instruments of paint-brush and pigment. . . . Whoever obtains a sense of writing with light by making photograms without a camera, will be able to work in the most subtle way with the camera as well. [3]

For Moholy-Nagy, photograms were the true basis for photography, not the camera. Therefore, for Moholy-Nagy, photography was about more than just photographic semblance and the use of a camera to reproduce nature. Photography was about light. Despite eschewing the camera, photograms could still evoke the technological (and modernity) through the use of electric light. Light was the medium and the message.

Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, 1925, gelatin silver print, 9.3 x 6.3 cm (The Museum of Modern Art)

Production—reproduction

In July 1922, before Moholy-Nagy and his then-wife, Lucia Moholy, began experimenting with photograms, he published the essay “Production—Reproduction,” in which he advocated for the “productive” use of media traditionally used for reproduction—photography, film, and the phonograph/gramophone. [4] Moholy-Nagy believed that photography was only capable of moving forward if it was used in innovative ways to expand sensory perception and allow for new visual experiences. By using light sensitive plates or paper (without the aid of the camera) to create images that captured light effects produced by mirrors and lenses (and a range of other substances like oils and gels), photograms could bring about new relationships and new ways of seeing—a “new vision.” He believed that this “New Vision” was more closely aligned with the rapidly changing experience of the modern world. Moholy-Nagy’s “truth to materials” approach echoed the goals of Constructivism, his teaching at the Bauhaus, and his utopian views about art’s capacity to initiate positive change in society if utilized in a “productive” way.

László Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Photographie, Film (Painting, Photography, and Film), Bauhaus Bücher 8 (Bauhaus Books), 1927 (The Museum of Modern Art)

Painting, Photography, Film

The cameraless photograph was key to Moholy-Nagy’s theorization of photography in his book Malerei, Photographie, Film (Painting, Photography, and Film), which was published in 1925 by Bauhaus Books. The book was concerned with teaching people to see the modern world in new ways through the “productive” use of photographic techniques that offered new perspectives. The photogram was key to this new approach to photography, which he linked visually, and in writing, to such practices such as the X-ray and astronomical photography. Although a number of artists had been working with photograms since the early 1920s, Painting, Photography, and Film helped bring Moholy-Nagy’s “new vision” for photography, with photograms at its center, to the broader public, thus initiating a conversation about photography as a modern art form.

Josef Hoffmann, Brooch, 1907, silver, partly gilt, agate, coral, lapis lazuli, malachite, turquoise and other semi- precious stones (private collection)

One glance at the brooch designed by Josef Hoffmann and we get an immediate sense of the person who wore it: sophisticated, uncompromising, worldly, and wealthy, with a deep commitment to a new and modern idea of beauty. Held in a rigid scaffolding of thin metal lines, the brooch holds its luxury in perfect check. The visual pleasure of the object comes not only from the richness of its varied materials—coral, lapis, gold, agate—but from the exquisite asymmetry of the left and right sides. Nature and culture are held in perfect balance here, the dazzling organic beauty of the stones countered by the geometric order and the austerity of the metal outlines, the solidity and weight of the gems playing against the open space of the brooch. One can imagine the woman who wore it living in a world in which her most prized possession would be a gilt cigarette holder.

The brooch perfectly embodies the aesthetic of the Vereinigung für Kunsthandwerk (Arts and Crafts Association) Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshops, abbreviated WW). Like many other design movements of the first decades of the 20th century, it aimed to improve real life, but only for the small elite circle that floated from salon to opera to cafe along the Ringstrasse, the main boulevard of Imperial Vienna. Despite its Imperial splendor, the city was roiled by antisemitism, conflicts between the various ethnic and language groups within the Empire, class conflict, and new ideas about gender and sexuality that bumped up against a deeply conservative culture.

Founding and aims

The Wiener Werkstätte (WW) grew out of the Vienna Secession, an organization formed in 1897 to offer artists greater aesthetic freedom and connection to wider European currents. Embracing the motto of “To Each Age its Art, to Art its Freedom,” Secession artists turned their back on the historical styles then dominant (Gothic, or classical, for example), and instead aimed to embrace the modern world. Rather than invoking well known figures from mythology or Christianity, the artists of the Secession wanted to express new ideas on love, nature, human existence, etc. and to do so using a new language based on non-Western and folk sources, as well as direct inspiration from nature. The same was true for the Wiener Werkstätte.

In 1903, architect Josef Hoffmann and graphic designer Kolomon Moser (both Secession members), formed the WW and remained committed to the Secession’s freedom, and openness to the new—but for utilitarian objects. Their endeavor was financially supported by the wealthy textile manufacturer Fritz Waerndorfer. The project was deeply ambitious, incorporating work in varied media including leather, paper, ceramics, graphic design, furniture, woodwork, and jewelry. In 1910, the WW expanded into fashion and textile design, with showrooms across Europe and in New York.

Located just outside the historic center of Vienna, the workshops would expand to 100 workers. Female designers such as ceramicist Valerie (“Vally”) Wieselthier and fashion designer Maria Likarz played a prominent role. In contrast to many early 20th-century European movements that would aim for mass production, such as the Bauhaus, the WW emphasized handicraft over mass production, a focus evident in the very name of Wiener Werkstätte. In the program for the WW, Hoffmann wrote:

That immeasurable damage caused on the one hand by inferior methods of mass production, on the other, by the mindless imitation of bygone styles, has become a mighty torrent of world-wide proportions. We have lost contact with the culture of our forefathers and are tossed hither and thither by a thousand different desires and considerations. For the most part, handiwork has been ousted by the machine. . . . [1]

Despite the great freedom of the designers, the objects produced by the WW were strongly united by a shared aesthetic. Like Josef Maria Obrich’s Secession building or Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, the WW excelled in a kind of linear surface design (called flaschenkunst). Its designers exhibited a taste for luxury materials, repeated patterns, and an underlying geometrical scaffolding. As in the brooch, this resulted in a sophisticated beauty that derived less from extraneous ornament and instead from the beauty of materials, and the slightly elongated and asymmetrical proportions.

Josef Hoffmann, Palais Stoclet (Brussels), c. 1905–11 (photo: PtrQs, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Gesamtkunstwerk and life as art

While many artists and architects in the early 20th century were drawn to the notion of the total aesthetic environment, or Gesamtkunstwerk, perhaps no movement embodied it more than the WW. The concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk was originally derived from the operas of Richard Wagner. The composer saw theater productions as places where all of the arts would work in unison to create an overwhelming sensory and emotional experience, embodied in productions like Wagner’s opera cycle of The Ring.

Dining room of the Palais Stoclet, Brussels, c. 1905–11, designed by Josef Hoffmann. Wall frieze by Gustav Klimt includes enamel, mother-of-pearl and gold leaf.

For visual artists interpreting the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, every last detail of the lived environment would become part of a coordinated ensemble, turning life itself into a giant work of art. The entire aesthetic could as well be read from a brooch as from a building. The most complete embodiment of the Gesamtkunstwerk was Hoffmann’s Palais Stoclet, built in Brussels for Adolphe Stoclet. Given an unlimited budget, Hoffmann, Klimt, and assorted WW craftsmen turned the entire house into a coordinated environment, from the two dimensional exterior, lacking historical references, to the gleaming knobs on the bathtubs. Every element partook of a refined luxury, with polished stone, wood, metal, and gems fitted into severe geometric compositions.

Left: Morris Chair, c. 1866; right: Kolomon Moser, Highback Chair, c. 1902

In its rejection of the shoddy machine-made environment and the desire to transform life into an aesthetic program, the WW drew on the earlier British Arts and Crafts movement. But if its upholding of craft workshops relates back to the Arts and Crafts ethos, the WW could not be more different. In Britain, the artist William Morris had celebrated a do-it-yourself spirit, simplicity in workmanship, and a genuine inspiration from nature. In contrast, in the objects turned out by the WW, nature is fitted into a pre-existing schema, glamorous and refined rather than rustic. Materials are polished and cut to the finest degree. Kolomon Moser’s Highback Chair differs from William Morris’s armchair in its willful lack of concern for comfort, embodying the philosophy that it is “better to look good than to feel good.” One can hardly sink into the stiff lines and taut back of Moser’s chair. The self-conscious sitter utilizing such a chair would seem concerned, first and foremost, with being seen in it, rather than being comfortable. Like the brooch, the chair displays a repetition of geometric elements, in a contained field. Its luxury comes from its slightly exaggerated proportions and austere design.

Josef Hoffmann, Flatware, 1905, manufactured by the Wiener Werkstätte, Vienna (The Museum of Modern Art)

The same can be said for the silverware designed by Hoffmann for the WW. In contrast to the sleek and understated cutlery, earlier formal silver tableware, like this eighteenth-century tureen, looks fussy, overdone, and decadent. The animals, crests, and large foliage ornamentation seems to obscure the shape and surface of the vessel rather than to enhance it and are redolent of a world of aristocracy and staid manners.

Edme-Pierre Balzac, Tureen with Cover, 1757–59, silver, 26 × 23.2 × 39.1 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In contrast, Hoffmann’s table service is stripped of any surface embellishments. Lacking the extraneous curves and floral designs of the tureen, the proportions of the flatware echo those of the chair, and the brooch–elongated, elegant and asymmetrical. The implements are designed to impress rather than for ease of use or serving. This set seems to be less about satisfying appetite and far more about looking good while eating. If the straight lines make it hard to get that soup on the spoon, so be it. Such silverware was designed to be wielded in a dining room conceived as a work of art, playing against the elongated shapes of furniture, the rhythms of the wallpaper, the patterns of the rug, the light fixtures, and the after-dinner schnapps set.

Wiener Werkstätte Dress, possibly designed by Emile Louise Flöge

One imagines walking into a dinner party in such a WW dining room, dressed appropriately, of course, in WW clothing, where the shapes of the garment and its texture and pattern upstage the body completely. The loose-fitting Wiener Werkstätte dress (above) was entirely modern in its overthrow of corsets and the hourglass silhouette of 19th-century fashion. Like the brooch, the Secession building, and the other WW objects, the dress restricts its decoration to limited fields, which work against the dark fabric and proportions, giving it an understated elegance.

Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, 1905, 70.7 x 35.6 in. (Neue Pinakothek, Munich)

So, too, these Wiener Werkstätte designs are like the portraits painted by Gustav Klimt, balancing decadent touches of ornament against geometric severity. It is surely no coincidence that this aesthetic emerged in Imperial Vienna, a city that remained buttoned up and proper despite the chaos of the time and its parliamentary crises, social unrest, religious and ethnic divisions that teemed beneath the surface.

World War I: a finale

While the style of the WW perfectly expressed the taste of its wealthy and highly cultured patrons, the Austro-Hungarian empire in which it flourished would not last much longer, the end of World War I bringing it to a finale. Already by 1914, the WW had run into severe economic woes and was reliant on its new patron/benefactor Otto Primavesi and a series of financial restructurings. A banker by trade, Primavesi and his wife, Eugenia, were among the most important patrons of both Josef Hoffmann and painter Gustav Klimt.

Mäda Primavesi (daughter of Otto and Eugenia Primavesi),oil on canvas, 1912–13, oil on canvas, 149.9 x 110.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Aesthetically liberating and beautiful, the WW was only for those who had the wealth, freedom, and education to fully appreciate it. Given its inward-facing focus on a small circle of cultured patrons, and on the ultimate refinement of taste, the Wiener Werkstätte floundered financially during the First Austrian Republic, a time period framed by the two world wars. Such focus on rarified aesthetics was hard to sustain in a period of material shortages and worker agitation.The deep depression that spread over Europe in the early 1930s led to the Wiener Werkstätte’s demise; the objects produced in its workshops remind us of a world, too, that has all but disappeared. Yet the near-exact reproductions of Hoffmann’s brooch that sell today for $8,000 in the gift shop of New York City’s Neue Galerie reveal the continuing hold that the Wiener Werkstätte has on our contemporary taste and our collective fantasies.

Ruins of the Mausoleum of Augustus, 28 B.C.E. as it appeared in 2019 (photo: Jamie Heath, CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome, a large circular tomb, is a key monument for exploring the reuse, reinterpretation, and rediscovery of antiquities over time, and it has a long, complex history that continues to resonate today.

The tomb was constructed in 28 B.C.E. on the ancient military training grounds known as the Campus Martius (Field of Mars). It was commissioned by Gaius Octavius, the thirty-year old adopted heir to Julius Caesar who would become Emperor Augustus the following year. Enormous and elaborate, the Mausoleum represented the political ambitions of Augustus and his family, and made a public statement about his aspirations for permanent rule. The tomb’s burial chamber eventually held the ashes of Augustus, his family, and succeeding emperors of the patrician (noble) Julio-Claudian family. The maintenance of his legacy was so important to him that Augustus denied burial in the tomb to family members he considered disloyal to him—even his beloved and only natural-born child Julia.

Speculative reconstructions of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassos from Sir Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method for Students, Craftsmen & Amateurs (London, : B. T. Batsford, 1924), page 113.

Once likely clad in travertine (a light-colored limestone), Augustus’ mausoleum consisted of five concentric walls, with rooms in the outer two corridors supporting the building’s weight, and, following earlier Hellenistic tombs such as the monumental Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (c. 350 B.C.E.), a funerary room in the center contained family urns. Augustus’ urn was probably located in the middle of this room, directly below what is thought to have been a bronze statue of him in heroic pose atop the mausoleum.

Aerial view of the mausoleum in 2019 showing the central cylinder housing Augustus’s burial chamber (photo: Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali – Roma Capitale)

Archaeologists believe the mausoleum’s entry arch was approximately fifteen feet high and flanked by two bronze plaques engraved with Augustus’ Res Gestae Divi Augusti (Deeds of the Divine Augustus)—Augustus’ first-person account of his life and accomplishments. The entryway also displayed two pink granite obelisks that Augustus brought to Rome after his victory against Roman general Marcus Antonius (better known as Mark Antony) and his lover, Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII, at the naval battle of Actium (31 B.C.E.).

Medieval fortifications and traces of ancient travertine cladding, Mausoleum of Hadrian (Castel Sant’Angelo), Rome (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The Mausoleum through the ages

After being used as a tomb for more than a century, the mausoleum was abandoned. In the twelfth century, the noble Colonna family occupied the mausoleum and transformed it into a defensive castle. (Emperor Hadrian’s mausoleum across the Tiber River would undergo a similar transformation two centuries later, becoming the Castel Sant’Angelo). In the sixteenth century, the Florentine Soderini family purchased the mausoleum, and constructed a fashionable outdoor museum at the top with a hanging garden adorned with ancient statues. 

Garden (detail), Jan Goeree, A Reconstruction of the Mausoleum of Augustus and a View of the Ruins, before 1704, pen and black ink, brush and brown wash, red chalk, 33.4 x 20.6 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Auditorium Augusteo, 1890

By the eighteenth century, the Portuguese Marquis Benedetto Correa de Sylva transformed the mausoleum’s roof into an arena for the “Game of the Buffalo” (“Giostra della Bufala”—a spectacle resembling Spanish bullfights), and other tournaments and firework displays. Though the amphitheater subsequently changed owners, it continued as a venue for entertainment, even after passing into the hands of the Papal State (1802), the Kingdom of Italy (1873), and finally the Rome Municipality.

In 1908, restored and with a new stage on its ancient cylindrical base, the mausoleum was renamed the Auditorium Augusteo, and became one of the most renowned concert halls in Europe.

Primo colpo di piccone (First stroke of the pick), Mussolini swinging pickaxe near Mausoleum of Augustus from Giuseppe Moretti, “Lo scavo e la ricostruzione dell’Ara Pacis Augustae.” Capitolium, 1938: 479–490.

The Mausoleum in the early 20th century: fascism and a new piazza (Piazza Augusto Imperatore)

On October 22, 1934, during the height of the authoritarian Italian fascist regime (1922–45), the Mausoleum underwent a new, long-lasting refashioning. Dictator Benito Mussolini wielded a pickaxe for the cameras while he launched the massive demolition of more than 100 late-Renaissance buildings and other structures that had accumulated around Augustus’ Mausoleum over the centuries, and cleared nearly 100,000 square feet of land. Inspired by Romanita’, a cultish approach to Roman classical tradition, Mussolini wanted to “liberate” the ancient tomb of Augustus from later architecture and celebrate its imperial origins. Declaring (incorrectly) that countless archaeological treasures still existed inside the mausoleum, Mussolini toppled the famous Auditorium Augusteo and surrounded the mausoleum with roads and buildings, creating what is today the Piazza of Emperor Augustus (Piazza Augusto Imperatore) by 1937.

Mussolini initiates demolition to isolate the Mausoleum of Augustus, Newsreel, 1937 (Istituto Luce Cinecittà)

Mussolini’s unearthing of the Mausoleum was part of a larger government program called the Bimillenario that took place in 1938 to honor Emperor Augustus’ 2000th birthday. The fascist government considered the Emperor Augustus a “rare genius” who embodied the ideal imperial culture of ancient Rome. By associating Mussolini with Augustus, the administration felt they could further their propagandist goal of influencing their audiences and spreading their political message of the “genius of the dictator” (genio del duce).

Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of Augustan Peace), 9 B.C.E. (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Mussolini at the inauguration of the Ara Pacis pavilion, September 23, 1938

A dictator’s reinterpretation of antiquity

During the construction of the Piazza of Emperor Augustus, fragments of the Augustan Altar of Peace (Ara Pacis) were unearthed from another part of the ancient Field of Mars, from beneath Palazzo Chigi (the official residence of the Italian prime minister). The Altar of Peace is an elaborate sacrificial altar built by Roman senators in 9 B.C.E. to honor Emperor Augustus’ military victories in Spain and Gaul. The altar’s decorative relief carvings included mythical founders of Rome and members of the Iulio-Claudian family. Such decoration appealed to the Fascist government as they sought to visually align their politics with a mythic, sacred past. Famous among antiquarians, pieces of the Ara Pacis had already been extracted in the 16th century and scattered all over the world, from the Uffizi in Florence to the Louvre in Paris.

As part of the Augustan celebrations, Mussolini ordered the repatriation, or return, of the missing pieces of the Ara Pacis, its full restoration, and a new highly visible location for it adjacent to the Mausoleum of Augustus (which was not its original site). Although it proved impossible to acquire all the missing pieces, the altar was reconstructed within a concrete-and-glass enclosure designed by architect Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo and a bronze copy of the Res Gestae was installed on its eastern side. On September 23, 1938, the 2000th birthday of Augustus, the Piazza of Emperor Augustus was inaugurated.

Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo, Instituto Nazionale office building also known as Palace B or Palazzo Nord, 1936–38 (photo: Bulgari Hotel Roma)

Palace B (Palazzo Nord) and buildings framing the piazza

To further define the Piazza of Emperor Augustus, Morpurgo designed three monumental buildings, fusing modern and classical styles and incorporating ancient Roman types of ornamentation, such as mosaics, relief carvings, and Latin inscriptions.

Ferruccio Ferrazzi, The Birth of Rome, 1938, mosaic, Istituto Nazionale Fascista Previdenza (Reed College)

A striking mosaic designed by Ferruccio Ferrazzi depicting “The Myth of Rome” appears on the façade of Morpurgo’s Palace B or Palazzo Nord, located along the north side of the mausoleum. Made with glazed ceramic tesserae (tiles) and divided into three sections, the standing youth in the center represents Rome’s Tiber River holding a boat containing Romulus and Remus, twin brothers of semi-divine parentage discovered on the river and believed to have founded Rome. A she-wolf, who nursed the twins, looks up from below. Above, Neptune, god of the sea, leads his horses. On either side, six divinities represent work and prosperity, themes important to the Fascist party.

One of a pair of angels carrying a fasces, 1938, travertine relief, Istituto Nazionale Fascista Previdenza (photo: Martin G. Conde, FLICKR / RARA 2022 (11 June 2020, all rights reserved).

A Neo-Latin inscription below Ferrazzi’s mosaic, installed against rusticated  stones and between two winged victories holding fasces (bundles of rods with axes symbolizing power in ancient Rome and reappropriated as a Fascist party symbol), honors and links Augustus and Mussolini.

Piazza Augusto Imperatore

Mussolini kept three Renaissance and Baroque churches intact in the Piazza of Emperor Augustus. Politics likely motivated his preservation of these ecclesiastical buildings, given a treaty he signed with the Vatican in 1929 that protected the Church financially and established Catholicism as the state religion. Morpurgo designed a brick overpass connecting two of the churches on the piazza’s west side (see photo above). Additionally, the imposing Baroque apse of Basilica of SS. Ambrose and San Carlo al Corso juts into the piazza’s east side. In this way, Mussolini literally framed the ancient Mausoleum of Augustus and unified Augustan, Christian, and Fascist Rome.

Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo, Instituto Nazionale office building also known as Palace A or Palazzo Est, Piazza Augusto Imperatore, 1936–38 (photo: Lalupa, CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the same year that Mussolini celebrated the Bimillenario of Augustus, he also established the Italian Racial Laws (Leggi Razziali), directed mainly against Jews and immigrants from Italy’s colonies in North and East Africa. Vittorio Morpurgo, the architect of Piazza Augusto Imperatore, was Jewish on his father’s side. In order to shield himself (the laws excluded Jews from holding public office, working in higher education, or for the fascist government), he declared himself non-religious and added his Catholic mother’s surname Ballio to Morpurgo.

Antiquity revealed in the 20th and 21st centuries

While Italy’s Fascist government was defeated at the end of World War II, the Piazza of Emperor Augustus and the ruins that Mussolini excavated remain, as do the Fascist-era buildings that frame them. Outlasting a fallen dictator, these important antiquities and surrounding modern buildings continue to be put to new uses and to offer new discoveries. 

Over time, popular responses to the piazza and its ruins have changed. After World War II, the Piazza of Emperor Augustus became controversial, criticized as “blatantly Fascist.” By the early twenty-first century, the antiquities revealed by Mussolini, separate from their Fascist associations, became celebrated as exquisite objects of national, archaeological, and cultural significance. Today, while the Fascist-era decorations and architecture remain protected by a government zoning plan, the archaeological monuments such as the Ara Pacis Augustae are emphasized.

Richard Meier & Partners, Ara Pacis Augustae Museum, 1995–2006, Rome (photo: Steven Zucker CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

In 2006, American architect Richard Meier designed a new enclosure for the Ara Pacis that replaced the protective shell created by Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo. With a fountain in front of the entrance, the new building is oriented on a north-south axis and has less of an association with the adjacent piazza. The museum display, supplemented with portraits of the Julio-Claudian family and a scale model of the Ara Pacis in its ancient setting, focuses more on Augustus than Mussolini.

Although long designated as a heritage site, Augustus’ Mausoleum itself is also undergoing a re-discovery. Archaeologists, architects, and curators are working with Rome’s Superintendency of Archaeology to complete archaeological fieldwork and prepare the site for visitor access. Although a difference in height exists between the original level of the mausoleum and the surrounding area, lead architect Francesco Cellini has designed a new entrance that meets the mausoleum’s original grade level and reveals more ancient travertine pavements, including the remains of a possible paved processional route that linked the tomb with the Pantheon in the Campus Martius. In this way, he and his team hope to “reinsert the monument into a network of urban relations.”  

Reuse of Vittorio Morpurgo’s Palace B is also planned. The Italian luxury brand Bulgari, known for its glamorous jewelry, will install a high-end hotel inside. Palace B’s original ornamental features will reportedly be retained. But as with the new Ara Pacis Museum, the Bulgari Hotel emphasizes the ancient Imperial rather than the fascist past, quoting in their publicity only a portion of the façade’s Latin inscription devoted to Augustus: “This is the place where the Emperor Augustus’ soul flies through the air.” Mussolini, originally included in the inscription, is not mentioned, reminiscent of the ancient practice of damnatio memoriae, a Latin phrase meaning “condemnation of memory,” when a person is excluded from official historical accounts.

This furry tea service was a touchstone for Surrealism, but the artist was a victim of her own success.

Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936, fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, cup 4–3/8 inches in diameter; saucer 9–3/8 inches in diameter; spoon 8 inches long, overall height 2–7/8 inches (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris

A luncheon with fur

The story behind the creation of Object, an ordinary cup, spoon, and saucer wrapped evocatively in gazelle fur, has been told so many times its importance in modernist history transcends the fact it might be apocryphal (of dubious authenticity). The twenty-two year old Basel-born artist, Meret Oppenheim, had been in Paris for four years when, one day, she was at a café with Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar. Oppenheim was wearing a brass bracelet covered in fur when Picasso and Maar, who were admiring it, proclaimed, “Almost anything can be covered in fur!” As Oppenheim’s tea grew cold, she jokingly asked the waiter for “more fur.” Inspiration struck—Oppenheim is said to have gone straight from the café to a store where she purchased the cup, saucer, and spoon used in this piece. This amusing story belies the importance of Object and the critical acclaim and public fascination that has elevated it to point where it has become the definitive surrealist object…ultimately to Oppenheim’s dismay.

Cup detail, Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936, fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, cup 4–3/8″ in diameter; saucer 9–3/8″ in diameter; spoon 8″ long, overall height 2–7/8″ (The Museum of Modern Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

What is a Surrealist object?

Oppenheim’s Object was created at a moment when sculpted objects and assemblages had become prominent features of Surrealist art practice. In 1937, British art critic Herbert Read emphasized that all Surrealist objects were representative of an idea and Salvador Dalí described some of them as “objects with symbolic function.” In other words, how might an otherwise typical, functional object be modified so it represents something deeply personal and poetic? How might it, in Freudian terms, resonate as a sublimation of internal desire and aspiration? Such physical manifestations of our internal psyches were indicative of a surreality, or the point in which external and internal realities united, as described by André Breton (one of Surrealism’s founders and theorists) in his first Manifesto of Surrealism.

Spoon detail, Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936, fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, cup 4–3/8″ in diameter; saucer 9–3/8″ in diameter; spoon 8″ long, overall height 2–7/8″ (The Museum of Modern Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Visceral responses

What, then, do we make of this set of be-furred tableware? Interpretations vary wildly. The art historian Whitney Chadwick has described it as linked to the Surrealist’s love of alchemical transformation by turning cool, smooth ceramic and metal into something warm and bristley, while many scholars have noted the fetishistic qualities of the fur-lined set—as the fur imbues these functional, hand-held objects with sexual connotations.

In a 1936 issue of the New Yorker Magazine, it was reported that a woman fainted “right in front of the fur-bearing cup and saucer [while it was on exhibit at MoMA]. “She left no name with the attendants who revived her – only a vague feeling of apprehension.”¹ Such visceral reactions to Oppenheim’s sculpture come closest, perhaps, to what were likely the artist’s aspirations. In an interview later in life, Oppenheim described her creations as “not an illustration of an idea, but the thing itself.”

Unlike Read and Dalí, Oppenheim stresses the physicality of Object, reinforcing the way we can readily imagine the feeling of the fur while drinking from the cup, and using the saucer and spoon. The frisson we experience when china is unexpectedly wrapped in fur is based on our familiarity with both, and the fur requires us to extend our sensory experiences to fully appreciate the work. Object insists we imagine what sipping warm tea from this cup feels like, how the bristles would feel upon our lips. With Oppenheim’s elegant creation, how we understand those visceral memories, how we create metaphors and symbols out of this act of tactile extension, is entirely open to interpretation by each individual, which is, in many ways, the whole point of Surrealism itself.

Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936, fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, cup 4–3/8″ in diameter; saucer 9–3/8″ in diameter; spoon 8″ long, overall height 2–7/8″ (The Museum of Modern Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Presentation problems

In spite of our individual response, the interpretation of Object has been complicated by the ways it was assigned meaning by others. When Object was finished, Oppenheim submitted it to Breton for an exhibition of Surrealist objects at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris in 1936.  However, while Oppenheim preferred a non-descriptive title, Breton took the liberty of titling the piece Le Déjeneur en fourrure, or Luncheon in Fur.  This title is a play on two nineteenth-century works: Édouard Manet’s infamous modernist painting Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeneur sur l’herbe) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s erotic novel Venus in Furs. With these two references, Breton forces an explicit sexualized meaning onto Object. Recall that the original inspiration for this work was implicitly practical: when Oppenheim asked the waiter for more fur for her cooling teacup, it was suggested as a way to keep her tea warm, and not necessarily as overtly sexual.

Meret Oppenheim, Das Paar (The Couple), pair of brown shoes attached at the toes, original version 1936, remade 1956

The meaning of others

Certainly we cannot assume that the spark of the idea for this piece and the piece itself are necessarily related, but the way meanings have been ascribed to Oppenheim’s pieces by others has plagued many of her works.

Art historian Edward Powers has noted that when Oppenheim sent her Surrealist object Das Paar to a photographer before submitting it for exhibition, the photographer took the liberty of tying up the laces before photographing it. When Breton saw the photo with tied laces, he dubbed this object à délacer which in French means to untie, typically either shoes or a corset. The title and laced shoes together suggest the potential act of undressing and a fascination with exposing the female body. However, when Oppenheim later described Das Paar (with the laces untied), she stated it was an “odd unisexual pair: two shoes, unobserved at night, doing ‘forbidden’ things.” She expressly assigned no gender, and suggests the “forbidden” acts already taking place between anthropomorphized shoes. She takes a more literal approach, the shoes as expressive things in themselves, rather than symbolically resonant of something else.

Meret Oppenheim, Bee-covered bicycle seat, found photograph, 1954

This is not to suggest that all her interactions with Breton were negative. When she happened across a wonderfully disturbing photograph of a bicycle seat covered in bees, she mailed it to Breton, who republished the found photograph as an artistic contribution by Oppenheim in the third issue of the new Surrealist publication Medium.

Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936, fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, cup 4–3/8″ in diameter; saucer 9–3/8″ in diameter; spoon 8″ long, overall height 2–7/8″ (The Museum of Modern Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Dangerous success

Yet, the early acclaim for the fur-covered Object had a negative effect on Oppenheim’s early career.  When it was purchased by The Museum of Modern Art and featured in their influential 1936–37 exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism,” visitors  declared it the “quintessential” Surrealist object. And that is how it has been seen ever since. But for Oppenheim, the prestige and focus on this one object proved too much, and she spent more than a decade out of the artistic limelight, destroying much of the work she produced during that period. It was only later when she re-emerged, and began publicly showing new paintings and objects with renewed vigor and confidence, that she began reclaiming some of the intent of her work. When she was given an award for her work by the City of Basel, she touched upon this in her acceptance speech: “I think it is the duty of a woman to lead a life that expresses her disbelief in the validity of the taboos that have been imposed upon her kind for thousands of years. Nobody will give you freedom; you have to take it.”

Joaquín Torres-García, Composition, 1931, oil on canvas, 91.7 x 61 cm (The Museum of Modern Art) © estate of the artist

Broncia Koller, Sitting (Seated Nude Marietta), 1907, oil on canvas, 107.5 x 148.5 cm (Collection Eisenberger)

An unusual female nude

At first glance, we might take Broncia Koller’s Sitting (Seated Nude Marietta) as just another painting of a horizontal nude woman, hardly something rare in the history of European art (see Titian’s Venus of Urbino as an example). But another look persuades us that there is something different about this painting. Rather than lounging seductively and turning her body to the viewer, the subject here is in the act of sitting up attentively, her legs stretched out before her. She lacks both the marble smoothness and the ideal proportions of the typical female nude in western art history.

Frederic Leighton, Bath of Psyche, 1890, oil on canvas, 189.2 x 622 cm (Tate)

Wounded Amazon, Roman, 1st–2nd century C.E. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Frederic Leighton’s Bath of Psyche provides a good example of a 19th-century nude painted according to the principles laid down by the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Standing in a Greek bathhouse, Psyche’s body is as lean and polished as the Ionic columns and marble steps behind her. She casts the eyes of her face downward, allowing the viewer a vicarious look at her body as she removes her thin toga. Her pose, with raised arm, evokes both the classical nudes of antiquity (ancient Greek and Roman art), and allows for maximum visual consumption of her body.

Against the rules of both classical statuary and of Academic painting, Marietta reveals a small bit of pubic hair. Her soft stomach and thin arms lack the perfect proportions of Leighton’s Psyche and her skin neither glows nor resembles flawless stone. Instead of a coy expression, she fixes a curious and intent gaze back at the viewer. Her setting feels more reminiscent of a doctor’s office or a light-flooded studio than a Greco-Roman building or a sensual lair, removing the erotic undercurrent.

Henri Fantin-Latour, Still life, 1866, oil on canvas, 73 x 59.5 cm (Kröller-Müller Museum)

In contrast to the vertical format of Leighton’s work, the composition of Koller’s work is horizontal. Scholar Julie Johnson compares the sheet she sits on to the tablecloth under a still life, a comparison echoed as well in the shallow space and design of the work.

Perhaps Koller is reminding us that we’re looking at a painting, not a flesh and blood figure. Here, Marietta is an abstraction, a series of shapes and colors and textures. The artist draws our attention to the decorative and geometric qualities of the image, rather than any underlying sexual charge.

Abstraction and the aesthetic of the Secession

Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, 1905, oil on canvas, 179.8 x 90.5 cm (Neue Pinakothek, Munich)

James McNeil Whistler, Harmony in Gray and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander, 1872–4, 190.2 × 97.8 cm (Tate)

The setting of the painting is stark. The artist has divided the background into a series of unequal squares and rectangles, which play against the triangles of the nude’s elbows, pubic region, and feet. In the asymmetrical squares and the framing of the figure’s head, the portrait recalls Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, painted two years earlier. So, too, does the play of diaphanous white against shades of grey, a subtle visual harmony that harks back to James McNeil Whistler’s nuanced portraits in monochrome and neutrals.

Koller’s nod to the portraiture of Klimt was deliberate. Both socially, and professionally, Koller’s art was bound to the circle of the Vienna Secession, a group of (male) artists working in the fine arts, architecture, and design, beginning in 1897. The leading lights of the Secession, such as Klimt, designer Kolomon Moser, and architect Josef Hoffmann were regular guests at the home of Koller and her husband, physician Hugo Koller, in Oberwaltersdorf (south of Vienna), as were notable musicians and philosophers. Koller exhibited in the all-important Kunstschauen (Art shows) of 1908 and 1909, alongside Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oscar Kokoschka.

In 1913 Koller joined the Bund Österreichischer Künstler (Federation of Austrian Artists), a rare artistic group open to both men and women, alongside artists from the Wiener Werkstätte (an Arts and Crafts Cooperative founded in 1903) and the Secession. As scholars Megan Brandow-Faller and Julie Johnson have shown, the Vienna Secession was not open to women members, but Koller was clearly showing herself to have absorbed its many stylistic tenets.

Broncia Koller and Viennese modernism

Left: Broncia Koller (photograph); right: Broncia Koller, Self-Portrait, c. 1905–10, oil on canvas

Koller hailed from an upper middle-class Jewish family and began to study art seriously at the age of eighteen. Despite the radical modernism exploding in many domains of culture―from art, to psychoanalysis, to music―Vienna was a conservative city, where women were prohibited from studying at the Vienna Art Academy. Like many women, Koller found a way around this by taking private lessons and then going abroad to study in Munich. Rather than marrying in her 20s, like the vast majority of her peers, Koller dedicated herself to artistic study and exhibiting. Her works were shown at important exhibits in Vienna, Munich, Leipzig and at the Woman’s Building in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At the age of 33, Koller married the Catholic physician Hugo Koller, with whom she returned to live in Vienna in 1903. Neither her marriage, nor the birth of a daughter and son, stopped her from continuing her artistic career. Koller joined the Association of Austrian Women Artists in 1910 to argue for women’s integration into the art world.

If Koller could not officially join the Secession, she nevertheless was an astute practitioner of the style practiced by the foremost artists in Vienna at the time (often referred to as Viennese Modernism). The flatness of Sitting, where the top two-thirds of the painting looks as flat as a postcard, along with its delicate asymmetries, were common features of the avant-garde in Vienna. The play of gold against white is seen not only in works like Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze  of 1902, but also in the architecture of leading Viennese figures such as Joseph Maria Olbrich and Otto Wagner. But in a number of ways, Koller’s work is more radical and more of a departure from nineteenth-century precedents. In comparison to Klimt’s Gold Period works, or even the ornamental bands of gold swirls that frame Stonborogh’s face, Koller restricts the gold to a small square behind Marietta’s head, relying more on abstraction. Her painting eschews the decorative charm of women’s fashion, seen in the works of Klimt and Whistler. And while Klimt and many of his contemporaries continue to paint women in mythological and allegorical guise, Marietta is clearly a contemporary model in a studio.

Woman as vision / invisible women

By the early 1930s, Broncia Koller’s career was lost to art history. Despite her extraordinary artistic talent and insight, like so many of her fellow women artists in early twentieth-century Europe, Koller’s work and career would come to be almost completely erased; an art critic in the 1930s would refer to her as “the talented wife of a prominent husband.” Her role at the center of Vienna’s elite social circles led some to see her as a dilettante rather than a brilliant interpreter of the Secession aesthetic. The year of her death, 1934, saw the rise of fascism and increasing antisemitism. Had she lived to see the Anschluss—the annexation of Austria by the Nazis in 1938—Koller, like many of her Jewish colleagues, would have been subjected to hatred and violence, and later deportation and murder. She was gone by then but her children, half-Jewish, had a precarious existence in Vienna until the end of the war.

Koller’s work fell into obscurity and only in 1961 was her art once again exhibited, thanks to the efforts of her daughter, Sylvia. It took until 1980 before she received a one-person exhibit in a museum. Only during the past decade, along with other women artists from early 20th-century Vienna, has Koller become better known, rather than a marginal figure on the fringes of the (male) Viennese Secession. Her early success, followed by the near demise of her public visibility, reminds us that both canons of art history, and attitudes towards gender fluctuate with historical forces and currents.

Alexander Rodchenko, At the Telephone, 1928, gelatin silver print, 39.5 × 29.2 cm (MoMA)

Alexander Rodchenko’s 1928 photograph At the Telephone shows a woman, seen from above, leaning against the wall as she speaks into the telephone. The unusual overhead perspective, the cropping (which suggests a momentary glimpse from above), and the way in which the the walls, the gleaming telephone box, and floorboards read as lines and shapes—hints at the radical nature of this photograph—and of New Vision photography.

Revolutionary Photography

In the years after the 1917 Russian Revolution and the shift to socialism, Russian Constructivist artists like Alexander Rodchenko were concerned with making a new socially productive, utilitarian art that would support the bourgeoning communist society. Under communism, the collective, rather than the individual, was the primary focus of artists, designers, and architects. Rodchenko, who previously had worked in painting and sculpture, took up photography in the mid-1920s. At this time, he was preoccupied with the following question: How does one express the idea of Revolution with the camera? [1]

One way he answered this question was by shifting the perspective. Taken from above, the radically foreshortened view of a woman on the telephone dominates the left side of the picture. We do not see her face or what she looks like, and her hands, one of which appears as disembodied fingers clutching the wall while the other grasps the new telephone, are emphasized. Strong verticals, from the floorboards to the graffitied wall and the telephone, are broken by the diagonal of the woman’s body and outstretched leg and its shiny black patent leather shoe. Stark contrasts of light and dark and a careful attention to the varied texture of elements in the frame—the shiny black shoe, the grain of the wooden floorboards, the rough texture of the wall, the gleaming black of the telephone—reveal the artist’s sharp focus on his subject. But the resulting image is abstract (similar, in fact, to his earlier abstract paintings) and remarkably flat, as if an exercise in contrast, and hard geometries.

Alexander Rodchenko, Construction No. 128, 1920, oil on canvas
62 x 53 cm (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow)

This is not your typical image of a woman on the telephone. We do not, for example, see her body straight on, in what Rodchenko disparagingly called “belly-button” photography. Instead of holding the camera at his waist (as was done with earlier cameras, like the Kodak brownie), using his handheld camera (that could be aimed from the eye, and was understood to be an extension of it) he photographed her from above. In part, this use of unusual angles, which was characteristic of his photographs from this period, was intended to force the viewer to actively engage with the image over time, because it would have taken the viewer a moment to recognize the subject due to its unexpected angle. Thus, this radical new perspective, a birds-eye view, was meant to change the viewer’s perception, to make us see the world anew and become more aware of our environment.

Alexander Rodchenko, Gathering for a Demonstration, 1928, gelatin silver print, 22.54 x 14.29 cm (Minneapolis Institute of Art)

Rodchenko was also concerned with the photograph’s ideological content. At the Telephone was part of a magazine story about the steps in the production of a newspaper, which sometimes involved gathering and relaying information using telephones, which were celebrated as a new technology in Russia after the Revolution in 1917. Although the Five-Year Plan—a government initiative for the rapid industrialization of the country—started in 1928, the same year as Rodchenko’s photograph, the emphasis on the role of new technologies is striking. The telephone spoke to one of the technological achievements of the Soviet state, and, as part of a magazine story, it encouraged readers to embrace progress, change, and new perspectives. At the Telephone also emphasized the participation of women in the publication of the newspaper and the use of the telephone in everyday life.

Painting is Dead and the Turn to Photography

Photography had taken on a new importance in the years after the Russian Revolution in 1917, from the use of photomontage in advertising, posters, and books, to the use of photography to promote the activities of the new regime. Photography, which involved a machine (the camera), was seen as aligned with modern world (the world of telephones, airplanes, and automobiles). But it could also be aligned with communist ideology. As reproducible media, photography and film could take the place of painting and sculpture as art forms that could reach the masses.

Earlier in the decade, artists including Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Gustav Klucis, took up photomontage for masses-focused, utilitarian purposes that included advertising, typography, and propaganda. The institutions they were working for or with had the authority of the government or were government sponsored. Narkompros, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, administered all aspects of education and culture, and many of the artists, including Tatlin and Rodchenko, occupied positions in Izo (the Section of Visual Arts of Narkompros). Rodchenko also taught at Vkhutemas (the Higher State Artistic-Technical Workshops), which was the principal state art school.

This shift to photomontage signaled the rise of  “Productivism” after 1921—the term used to describe the shift by Constructivist artists after 1921 to the production of utilitarian objects (posters, advertisements, kiosks, clothing) and designs for manufacturing. But Rodchenko’s engagement with photomontage lasted only a few years, and he abandoned it in 1924 when he began making still photographs.

Alexander Rodchenko, Chauffeur, 1929, gelatin silver print, 29.8 × 41.8 cm (MoMA)

Not “Belly-Button” Photography

When Rodchenko purchased a handheld camera in Paris in 1925, he sought out new ways to create meaningful work that moved beyond traditional approaches to photography. After the formation of the magazine New Left (1927–28), which was extensively illustrated with photographs, Rodchenko took on a prominent role as designer and photography editor. At the Telephone ran in issue 11 (1928). He had already written a series of essays that detailed his views on photography and its role in society in issue five (1928):

Photography possesses old points of view, those of man standing on earth and looking straight ahead. What I call ‘shooting from the belly button’— with the camera hanging on one’s stomach.

I am fighting against this standpoint and shall continue to do so, as will my comrades, the new photographers.

Photograph from all viewpoints except “from the belly button,” until they all become acceptable.

The most interesting viewpoints today are “from above down” and “from below up,” and we should work at them. . . I want to affirm these vantage points, expand them, get people used to them. Alexander Rodchenko [2]

For Rodchenko, these new angles would encourage active viewing and expand our perception of the world around us.

Aleksandr Rodchenko, Novyi LEF. Zhurnal levogo fronta iskusstv, 11, 1928, letterpress, 22.9 x 15.3 cm (MoMA)

Aleksandr Rodchenko, Sawmill Worker, 1930, gelatin silver print (MoMA)

Despite Rodchenko’s revolutionary approach to photography, he was accused (in 1928, the same year he made At the Telephone) in the pages of Soviet Photography of being more concerned with style over substance, and with plagiarizing avant-garde artists like László Moholy-Nagy. Although he defended himself in a series of written rebuttals, official state-sanctioned photography had shifted away from Rodchenko’s radical viewpoints to prefer optimistic and naturalistic views of Soviet life referred to as Socialist Realism. The government argued that Socialist Realism could be easily understood by workers, many of whom were illiterate.

Toward the end of the 1920s, Rodchenko began to focus on photo-essays, many of which valorized labor (such as Sawmill Worker). At the Telephone was made in 1928 before he consciously switched to photojournalism around 1929, but it reveals his ongoing interest in depicting the rapidly changing world (of newspapers, cameras, and telephones) in new and unexpected ways. His favored viewpoints, from above or below, were made possible, not coincidentally, by the introduction of handheld cameras (a new technology) in the mid-1920s.

Gertrud Arndt, Self-Portrait with Veil, 1930, gelatinous silver print, 22.9 x 14.3 cm (MoMA)

Femininity and masquerade

In Arndt’s Self-Portrait with Veil, we see a woman with tightly pursed lips staring straight ahead with a doll-like expression. Layers of lace and fringe cover her upper body and lace veils her face. Her head is crowned with abundant flowers. Without knowing that the picture was taken in 1930, we might assume that it belonged to a less modern era because of the antiquated details she presents.

Why would quintessentially modern “New Woman” Gertrud Arndt represent herself as trapped in the layers of ultra-feminine attire reminiscent of traditional folk costume?

This portrait is part of a series of 43 staged self-portraits Arndt called Maskenporträts (Masked Portraits). Arndt took her Self-Portrait with Veil by shooting into the bathroom mirror. The “drag bag” that she used for her costuming in these photos contained veils, hats, bits of lace, paper flowers, and other fancy, feminine—but outmoded—accessories. Layers of lace, floral patterns, and feathers—various competing textures for connotations of femininity—cover every area of the portrait. The artist may have taken some inspiration from traditional folk dress from her birthplace in a border region now part of Poland.

In the photographs from this series, Arndt tacitly refers to Joan Riviere’s 1929 psychoanalytical essay “Womanliness as Masquerade,” which suggested that women use their femininity as a form of Masquerade—or “drag”—to make themselves seem less threatening in the face of anticipated retribution from men when women dare to seek power or respect in a patriarchal society. [1]

Arndt’s layers and textures almost merge the figure and the background, wedding the subject to these gendered accessories. The textiles suffocate her, domesticize her, and mark her as someone subsumed by traditional gender roles that indicated that women should be confined to the home. The veil, the flowers, and the feathers hide her short, bobbed “New Woman” haircut. Arndt’s choice to pose herself among so many textures, clothes, and props in Self-Portrait with Veil suggests she was well aware of the power of photography to interrogate gender roles. She created an ironic image of herself as an old fashioned woman, blandly merging with her dated, over-decorative interior (even though her actual house interior was strikingly modern).

Gertrud Arndt, Self-Portrait, 1926 (Bauhaus Archive)

In a very different self-portrait she made at her studio in 1926, Arndt styled herself in short sleeves and a knee-length skirt with her short-bobbed hairstyle (all modern stylistic departures from the corseted hour-glass figures and elaborate upswept long hair-dos of the prior era). Self-Portrait with Veil, made just four years later, provides a stark contrast with Arndt’s 1926, Self-Portrait.

Florence Henri, Self-Portrait, gelatin silver print, 1928

Self-Portrait with Veil also contrasts with images of the New Woman who are shown outdoors, with cars, dressed in knee-length, loose-fitting dresses, and cloche hats. Arndt’s departure from the commonly seen image of the “New Woman” is clear if we compare her Self-Portrait with Veil to Florence Henri’s Self-Portrait. Henri, like Arndt, was a woman photographer at the Bauhaus, a prominent modernist institution. Her portrait was made one year earlier than Arndt’s veiled portrait. While Arndt’s self-portrait displays a masquerade of femininity, Henri’s focuses on the gender-boundary-questioning that was typical of the “New Woman.”

In Self-Portrait, Henri has negated nearly all visible signifiers for femininity—except her use of lipstick and eyeshadow—and even added a pair of reflective “balls” to reinforce her point.  Henri’s experimental framing, strong diagonal lines, and hard-edged modernism echo the work of László Moholy-Nagy who taught at the Bauhaus. While just one year later, Arndt seems aligned with the Bauhaus Photography Master (teacher) Walter Peterhans in his concern for soft textures and layering.

Walter Peterhans, Portrait of the Beloved, 1929, gelatin silver print, 28.3 × 25.7 cm (Smart Museum of Art, Chicago)

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #17, 1978, gelatin silver print, 19.1 x 24 cm (MoMA)

For Gertrud Arndt, taking photographs of herself in various costumes and accessories while playing roles became a private form of entertainment, and reflected the common use of photography at the Bauhaus. Arndt was an enrolled student at the Bauhaus from 1923–1927, and after she graduated and was living in Bauhaus faculty housing with her instructor husband, she was a guest student in the Photography workshop from 1929–1932. Arndt’s Masked Portraits preceded Cindy Sherman’s well-known Untitled Film Still self-portrait series by almost 50 years, but provided a clear precedent for the examination of traditional gender roles using photography.

With her heavy-lidded, faraway gaze and her prim pursed lips, in 1930 Gertrud Arndt was living in the middle of a mature Modernist project in which, as a woman, she could not participate as much as she once hoped. She could not study architecture at the Bauhaus, and she was placed in the Weaving workshop (with most other Bauhaus women) while she was a student. While she turned her back on textile production, in her self-portrait she buries herself in layers of textiles and accessories coded as “feminine” to make an ironic point about the too often stifling position for women at the Bauhaus.  The youthful hope embedded in her 1926 “New Woman” self-portrait from her student days had only four years later drowned in a costumed image of an old doll, when she was only 27.

Lotte Jacobi, Albert Einstein, gelatin silver print, 1938, 25.1 x 18.7 cm

A portrait of Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein wears a leather jacket and sits in a tall-backed upholstered chair. His hand loosely holds a fountain pen suspended over ink-layered pages. His heavy-lidded, faraway gaze is soft, pensively disconnected from both his writing and the photographer who is observing him. He appears entirely lost in thought. The focus is also a bit soft, which renders Einstein’s immediately recognizable, almost electrified tufts of white hair even softer. The leather jacket picks up the ambient light from an unseen window and its myriad folds envelop the thinker’s arms and buttoned-up upper body. The leather jacket, which became a stylish, edgy fashion accessory for men in the late 1930s, seems “off-brand” for Einstein. The jacket calls attention to his body—perhaps strange for someone so celebrated for his mind. Einstein looks comfortable, casual, and somewhat fragile in this delicate portrait.

Lotte Jacobi took this photograph of the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, at his home in Princeton, New Jersey (at the time he was a professor at the university). Both Jewish, the two had been family friends a decade earlier in Germany. Einstein had renounced his German citizenship for political reasons after leaving Nazi Germany in 1933, and Jacobi had been forced to emigrate to the United States from Nazi Germany after she too renounced her German citizenship in 1935. She also settled on the East Coast, but in New York City—not too far from Einstein in Princeton.

Jacobi and Einstein collaborated on the crafting of his media image in a series of late-1930s Princeton portraits commissioned by Life magazine. Einstein agreed to sit for the photo session only if Lotte Jacobi was assigned to photograph him. [1] The image of Einstein in a leather jacket is unusual in that it catches him in a less-guarded, less-constructed moment than the others and offers the viewer a glimpse of the world-famous theoretical physicist as an individual, rather than as a stereotyped professor.

Lotte Jacobi, Albert Einstein standing at his Piano, 1938 (negative); 1978 (print), halftone print, 17.8 × 12.7 cm (Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University)

More formal portraits

Jacobi’s portrait Albert Einstein standing at his Piano, from the same session, conveys a more expected portrait of an intellectual: standing, hand on a shining clean surface, holding a pipe (not smoking it), in front of a bookcase filled with orderly bound volumes.  His gaze is focused on the camera’s lens so that he appears to look at the viewer. He is posing for the camera to convey intellectual dignity. Besides the portrait of Einstein in the leather jacket, Jacobi’s other photographs from 1938 include at least two in which Einstein is wearing a three-piece suit,  holding a pipe, making eye contact with the viewer, and looking professorial. These photographs project a carefully crafted image of a scholarly man.

The full-page lead image for the two page article on page 48 of the April 11, 1938 number of Life was a head-and-shoulders color studio portrait of Einstein wearing a dark suit with a pipe in his mouth, looking directly into the camera, taken by Gösta P. G. Ljungdahl (who is honored with a portrait and a brief bio on p. 61 of the magazine). Einstein’s The Evolution of General Physics, a general audience introduction to his theory of relativity, had just been published.

The full-page lead image for the two page article on page 48 and 49 of the April 11, 1938, Life Magazine

Lotte Jacobi contributed three black and white photographs to the spread on page 49: a close-up of Einstein’s hands resting on a cleared surface, in which we glimpse his leather jacket, a portrait of his house exterior in New Jersey, and an image of Einstein in his leather jacket, grasping his chin with a world-weary expression, standing over a pile of unopened mail. The caption for the last image states: “The daily mail pile harasses the scientist.” For Life magazine’s editors, Einstein’s disorderly home milieu and leather jacket attire were acceptable as long as there was a specific focus on the daily deluge of correspondence. Jacobi’s photograph of Einstein’s hands was captioned “Hands and brains are the only tools Einstein uses” with the photograph reinforcing the labor of his hands rather than the time he spent thinking. Jacobi’s portrait of Einstein as lost in contemplation and seemingly unaware of the camera was deemed an undignified portrayal. [2]

Lotte Jacobi, Albert Einstein in Caputh Germany, 1928 (Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)

A decade earlier, Jacobi took a series of photographs of Einstein at his house in Caputh, Germany—comparably close to Berlin as Princeton is to New York City. This series featured the Einsteins sailing on the lake, and relaxing in somewhat-rumpled knit leisurewear. In these photographs from a decade earlier than the Princeton portrait, we are confronted with a leisure-time Einstein in his most comfortably casual attire. These photographs were taken seven years after he won the Nobel Prize for Physics, and would have been among the few that Jacobi was able to take with her from Germany. She was forced to leave most of her photographic prints and negatives behind, and they were destroyed by Nazis or lost.

Their friendship and collaborations continued in the U.S. Once there, Einstein helped Jacobi meet other prominent exiles in New York City, like German writer Thomas Mann, Austrian director Max Reinhardt, and his Austrian actress wife Helene Thimig, who all became Jacobi’s earliest U.S. portrait subjects.

Life Magazine and Photography

Jacobi too adopted the “messy hair, don’t care” look for her own self-portrait in Berlin. Lotte Jacobi, Self-Portrait, Berlin, platinum print, c. 1930, printed c. 1980, 36.2 × 26.35 cm (LACMA)

Jacobi’s intimate and revealing style of portraiture did not meet with the approval of Life magazine’s photo editors. Publisher Henry R. Luce required images of prominent people that reaffirmed the American public’s preconceived perceptions of them, rather than prompting new insights about their characters or inner lives. Jacobi’s portrait of Einstein in his casual bomber jacket did not convey enough gravitas for his social position.

Beginning weekly publication in 1936, Life magazine quickly became a window on the world for its largely American, white, upper middle-class, urban—and subsequently, suburban—readership. With Life, Luce, already successful with Time magazine, sought to “reveal, every week, aspects of life and work which have never before been seen by the camera’s miraculous second sight. By giving pictures their own magazine, [Life] intends that the camera shall at last take its place as the most convincing reporter of contemporary life.” [3]

Perhaps what we now find most interesting about Jacobi’s portrait is the way she captured the action of thinking performed by one of our most historically prominent thinkers. Jacobi seems to have been able to see more facets of Einstein than the editors of Life cared to share with their readership.

Lotte Jacobi, Head of a Dancer, 1929, gelatin silver print, 17.8 x 22.8 cm (Saint Louis Art Museum, © Lotte Jacobi Archive, University of New Hampshire)

We are preconditioned to be attracted to human faces and Lotte Jacobi gives us such a face, and little else, served up on a dark platter and staring at us. Facial features stand out as dark areas, bowing eyebrow lines, and assertively made-up lips against pale gray, with the highest contrast reserved for the highlight on the black irises against the white of the eyes. These facial features, enhanced by the dark lipstick, eyeliner, and eyebrow pencil typical of stage make-up, also reflect the prevailing fashion and beauty standards of the late 1920s. The eyes meet the viewer’s gaze and are also positioned below the center of the frame. But then, nothing in the composition is truly centered. The chin is cut off by the photograph’s lower edge, and the oval of the hat’s wide, black brim is cropped on every side. The incomplete curve of the hat frames and isolates the face. It adds a dynamism and tension that makes the stillness and cut-off chin of the frontal face even more striking. The subject’s dark hair is barely visible against the black of the hat behind it.

A dancer?

The title of Jacobi’s photograph informs us that this is no ordinary head. It is “the head of a dancer.” But really, it is only her face. The context of the making of this photograph is not known. It is a curious photograph of a dancer because we are not shown her full body or any of the lines—like the curves and angles made by the spine, neck, and limbs—that are so crucial in the art of dance. Movement is quietly implied by the composition through the interrupted spiral that begins at the chin and moves outward through the hat brim rather than any visible bodily movement having been captured in it. Head of a Dancer is primarily a composition of visual elements—including a face— rather than a portrait. The sitter is not even named in the title.

Lotte Jacobi, Portrait of Anna May Wong, gelatin Silver Print, 1930

In contrast, Jacobi’s 1930 Portrait of Anna May Wong is more of a traditional portrait depiction of a dancer, and less of an abstract composition. Anna May Wong was an American actress working in Berlin. In Jacobi’s photograph we see the actress’s whole body, captured while dancing in an elaborate costume.

While Jacobi’s photographs from this period frequently name the sitter in the title, Head of a Dancer is an exception. Who was this dancer, and why was her body not shown? Many museum collections (but not all) identify the model for Head of a Dancer as Russian dancer Niura Norskaya who performed with ballerina Anna Pavlova. The fact that the sitter is not always identified by name in the photograph’s title may tell us something about what was important to Jacobi: it is more composition than portrait.

Lotte Jacobi: fourth generation photographer for the Atelier Jacobi

Lotte Jacobi made Head of a Dancer while she was still living in Berlin, an entertainment capital during the Weimar Republic (1919–33). She came from a family of photographers. Her great-grandfather visited Paris between 1839 and 1842, purchased a camera and a license to use it, and according to family lore, was trained by the pioneering French portrait photographer Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Her grandfather and her father ran the Atelier Jacobi. She grew up around her father’s photography studio, first in Posen (before it became Polish) until 1921, when they moved the business to Berlin. Jacobi made her first pictures with a pin-hole camera her father made for her in about 1909. She graduated with formal training from the State Academy for Photo Design in Munich before returning to Berlin in 1927.

With her family’s commercial photography studio as her background, it is notable that Jacobi graduated from her formal training just as many artists were embracing the medium of photography for artistic ends and not just for reportage, advertising, and portraiture. By 1929, according to The Museum of Modern Art, Jacobi was one of the artists included in the traveling international exhibition of the “New Photography,” Fotografie der Gegenwart (Photography of Today), though her name did not appear on the pamphlet that accompanied the exhibition. [1]

While working as a young photographer in Berlin, she photographed people from the entertainment world, as well as literary and scientific figures such as Thomas and Heinrich Mann and Albert Einstein.

Leaving Berlin for the United States

Jacobi left Berlin behind in 1935 to avoid Nazi persecution as a Jewish woman, a leftist, and a so-called “Degenerate Artist.” She would have left earlier, but her father’s ill health stalled her departure. His death prompted her emigration to the United States.

There are no known prints of Head of a Dancer from the time it was taken. Jacobi was not able to take many prints with her as she left Germany, and retained only a small portion of her glass plates and negatives. Much of her work from Berlin was destroyed by the Nazis after she left. She was able to return to Germany after World War II, in 1962 and later in 1970, but she was never able to find and recover her earlier work in spite of repeated efforts to contact family, friends, newspapers, and publishing houses. [2] Head of a Dancer was important enough to Jacobi as an artist that she saved it among the few negatives she brought with her to the United States. The photograph is now widely reproduced and appears in several museum collections, thus having more impact than it did in 1929 when it was taken.

Compositional precedents 

Josef Albers, Shielded from Homage to the Square: Ten Works by Josef Albers, 1962, one from a portfolio of ten screenprints, 43 x 42.9 cm (MoMA)

The composition is at once deceptively simple and complexly balanced. It evokes the color and tonal studies that fellow German-American expatriate artist Josef Albers explored in his decades-long painting series Homage to the Square. Jacobi gives us the “squaring of the circle” instead. Whereas Albers paints tonally contrasting, stable concentric squares, Jacobi offers her tonal contrasts in dynamically arrayed ovals, the face being the smaller oval inserted in the larger oval of the hat brim. This dynamism is then contained by the frame which squares off the circling curves.

Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait in Tuxedo, 1927, oil on canvas, 139.5 x 95.5 cm (Harvard Art Museums)

Lotte Jacobi’s photograph was right in step with the Neue Sachlichkeit (or New Objectivity) movement of her own time. We can see the same frank, pitilessly “objective,” almost confrontational, acknowledgement of the viewer that Jacobi offers in Head of a Dancer in Max Beckmann’s celebrated 1927 painting Self-Portrait in Tuxedo. In its shared concern with stark contrasts and abstract shapes, Beckmann’s dark self-portrait is also equally a tonal composition. Jacobi’s radically cropped and framed composition was also a hallmark of New Vision photography from the late 1920s, practiced by her contemporaries like Lucia Moholy and Florence Henri. New Vision’s unexpected angles and unforgiving detail offered viewers a fresh perspective on their known world, just as Jacobi’s portrait reveals a disembodied, face-only view of a dancer.

Anticipating later experimental photographs

We may look at this 1929 Head of a Dancer as a composition that anticipated Jacobi’s later experimental photographs in the 1940s and 50s that she called Photogenics. In these late works she fully embraced abstract tonal composition that she had begun to explore in Head of a Dancer, becoming completely non-objective in her later work. Head of a Dancer exemplifies Jacobi’s lifelong commitment to photography as a fine art practice not always wedded to journalism or commercial ends.

Horst P. Horst, Mainbocher Corset, modeled by Madame Bernon, photographed Aug. 15, 1939, gelatin silver print, published in American Vogue (Sept. 15, 1939), pg.19; published in French Vogue Dec. 1939 (Victoria and Albert Museum)

How did the German-born fashion photographer Horst P. Horst capture the anxiety and sorrow he felt as he fled France for the United States just prior to the outbreak of World War II?

In this starkly lit black-and-white photograph we see a model from behind, wearing a corset laced up the back with the tightening ribbons pooling and dripping off the edge of the balustrade against which she is perched. We see only the model’s torso, bowed head, and outstretched upper arms, folded inward at the elbows. The model’s face is mostly hidden; we see her ear and the shiny waves of her coiffed hair. Her corseted torso forms a C-shaped curve, contrasting the sharp angle made by the right side of her nipped-in waist and the curve of her right hip.

The Mainbocher Corset, featured in this photograph, was made by corset maker Detolle for the American couturier, brought an end to the loose fitting, straight silhouettes of the Jazz Age in favor of a slim-waist, fuller-bust, controlled-hourglass figure.

Diego Velázquez, The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’), 1647–51, oil on canvas, 122.5 x 177 cm (The National Gallery, London)

This shift in fashion to a familiar ideal shape for women from a bygone era was called the “Velasquez silhouette” in the Vogue article that accompanied Horst’s image, after Diego Velázquez’s well-known 17th-century painting Rokeby Venus. [1] In 1914, Mary Richardson, a British subject agitating for women’s right to vote, slashed this painting of what many considered an extraordinarily beautiful woman to protest the arrest of suffragette Emily Pankhurst. The painting was carefully restored, but Richardson’s attack underscores the strong emotions this image could still trigger almost 300 years after it was painted. While Horst omitted the mirror in his photograph, we see the echoes of the Rokeby Venus in the Mainbocher Corset—in the position of the right arm, the narrow waist above a curved hip, and the near concealment of the model’s face that no mirror reveals.

Left: Horst P. Horst, Mainbocher Corset, modeled by Madame Bernon, photographed Aug. 15, 1939, gelatin silver print, published in American Vogue (Sept. 15, 1939), pg.19; published in French Vogue Dec. 1939 (Victoria and Albert Museum); right: unpublished version that was not retouched, with the gap visible on the left side of the photograph

While the published versions of the photo were retouched to make the model’s waist even more slender and to remove the gap made at the top left edge of the corset, the photographer explained that he preferred the photo with the visible gap between the corset and the model’s body, finding it more alluring.

Horst’s sketchbook, undated

In Horst’s sketches to work out the composition, he included a vase with a rose, alluding to historical images of Venus and linking the model’s torso to a still life object. The final version of the studio image omits this element to keep the viewer’s focus on the curving torso, positioned to the right of the center of the frame, balanced by the dangling ribbons on the model’s left, another reference to Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus recalling the ribbons spilling out of Cupid’s hand and over the mirror he holds. Perhaps leaving these unfurled ribbons also signals the unravelling Horst felt in leaving Paris. 

Still from Madonna, “Vogue” official music video, directed by David Fincher, recorded in December 1989, released on March 27, 1990

The photograph has an elegance, as well as a feeling of stillness and melancholy that continued to influence fashion photography for decades after it was taken, inspiring pop-star Madonna to appropriate its composition at the end of her music video for the song Vogue, released in 1990. 

Influences and the making of Mainbocher Corset 

Horst P. Horst was born in Germany in 1906 as Horst Bohrman. As a teenager, he studied carpentry and set design at the Hamburg School of Arts and Crafts and befriended Eva Weidemann, a dancer, ten years his senior, who worked with Lothar Schreyer at the Weimar Bauhaus. Lothar Schreyer was an early Weimar Bauhaus instructor, the first Master of the Theater department who was heavily steeped in the mysticism so common for the time. Weidemann introduced Horst to the Bauhaus teachings, though she was not a student there herself, but rather a performer in Schreyer’s experimental theatrical works. 

Erich Consemüller, Bauhaus Scene, 1926

Horst claimed the Bauhaus influenced his aesthetic, which we can see in the asymmetrical framing and the dramatic lighting as well as the spare setting and focus on a singular object. However, Erich Consemüller’s 1926 photograph of a seated woman contrasts with Horst’s 1939 image. In Consemüller’s photograph the masked model is comfortably supported by the tense fabric bands of her chair, while Horst’s model is constricted by fabric in tension and is not comfortably seated. 

Leni Riefenstahl, Pommel Horse, gelatin silver print, 1936

George Hoyningen-Heune, The Divers, gelatin-silver print, 1931

Perhaps even more striking is the influence of the German Neoclassicism of the 1920s and 1930s with its admiration for beautifully sculptural human bodies, as seen in the work of Leni Riefenstahl from the 1936 Munich Olympics which reflected Nazi aesthetics.

Horst moved to Paris in 1930 to apprentice under modernist architect Le Corbusier, but soon met Vogue photographer and Baltic Baron George Hoyningen-Heune who introduced him to Paris’s fashionable world and his own photographic work, becoming both Horst’s mentor and partner (see Hoyningen-Heune’s photograph of Horst’s torso from 1931). Through his connection to Hoyningen-Heune, Horst began as a studio fashion photographer for Paris Vogue in 1931. 

Horst made Mainbocher Corset, which would become his most well-known photograph, just prior to leaving Paris for New York on August 15th, 1939. He recalled 45 years later:

It was the last photograph I took in Paris before the war. I left the studio at 4:00am, went back to the house, picked up my bags and caught the 7:00am train to La Havre to board the Normandie. We all felt that war was coming. Too much armament, too much talk. And you knew that whatever happened, life would be completely different after…. This photograph is peculiar—for me, it is the essence of that moment. While I was taking it, I was thinking of all that I was leaving behind.

[2]

Two weeks later, the Second World War began when Hitler invaded Poland. Horst’s photograph was published in American Vogue on September 15th, 1939. The Mainbocher Corset—and the American couturier’s return to a slim-waist, fuller-bust, controlled hourglass figure ideal after the loose fitting, straight silhouettes of the Jazz Age— had been intended to appear in the October issue of French Vogue, but the magazine did not to publish issues in either October or November, due to uncertainty at the outset of World War II, so the photo was not published until December. An anonymous editorial in the December 1939 French Vogue lamented the passing frivolities of fashions produced the previous August but asserted that the fashion industry was too important to France and its working economy to simply shut the industry down due to the war. The designed pages of the ready-to-print but now outmoded October issue were included in the December French Vogue but at such reduced size that Horst’s Mainbocher Corset image was robbed of its considerable aesthetic power. By the time the photograph was published, both the photographer and the corset’s couturier had relocated from Paris to the United States, far from both the center of fashion and the European theater of war.

From Vogue to vogueing

Horst P. Horst, Mainbocher Corset, modeled by Madame Bernon, photographed Aug. 15, 1939, gelatin silver print, published in American Vogue (Sept. 15, 1939), pg.19; published in French Vogue Dec. 1939 (Victoria and Albert Museum)

What is it about this photograph that continues to speak to us today? The stark lighting and dramatic contrast draw our attention to the model’s bowed head and the hidden face, a posture that expresses fear or sorrow. The corset was being relaunched as a fashion accessory for the 1939 fall collections in Paris. This can be read as the tragic trapping of woman in an uncomfortable and fetishized garment that she cannot even put on or remove by herself. The tangled, falling ribbons streaming from the back of the confining contraption add a chaotic element that belies the straitlaced attempt at maintaining control. The model’s posture, and the lack of visible lower limbs, add to the sense that this is an image of entrapment and bound stasis, on the brink of collapse. While the photograph conveys the timeless qualities of elegance that were so prized in Horst’s fashion work, the emotional impact he achieved rises above any simple product advertisement. 

Still from Madonna, “Vogue” official music video, directed by David Fincher, recorded in December 1989, released on March 27, 1990

It is precisely this emotional impact that Madonna seized upon and reinvested for her own purpose in her music video for Vogue. In the Material Girl’s multiple layered appropriation (she not only appropriates Horst’s image, but also the dance and aesthetics of New York Drag Ball culture, created by gay men of color in the 1980s), she dials down the melancholy, strikes the pose, and turns the entrapment into agency as a signifier for the only power women are afforded under patriarchy: sexual allure.

Madonna, “Vogue” official music video (beginning at 4:26), directed by David Fincher, recorded in December 1989, released on March 27, 1990

David Fincher, the video’s director, takes advantage of the moving image and shows Madonna’s back, filmed in elegantly lit black and white, seated on a similar marble balustrade. Writhing in her corset near the culmination of the video, as she sings “let your body move to the music,” she lifts her arms while she wriggles. Unlike Horst’s model in the Mainbocher Corset, Fincher finally gives us a full profile view of Madonna’s face as she powerfully speaks the word “Vogue.” 

Horst, in 1939, as Europe was on the brink of war, makes a final image in Paris that journeys across oceans and time to fifty years later transform a magazine title into a concept and a verb.