Erwin Blumenfeld

Berlin Dada

According to Blumenfeld’s official archive, in Berlin he moved in circles that included Paul Citroen, George Grosz, and Walter Mehring, and after World War I he produced Dada collages and drawings.Before photography became his profession, Blumenfeld was already accustomed to cutting existing images apart and joining them into new meanings.^*1 The official site separates collage, experimental photography, fashion, and color into distinct sections while presenting them as parts of one artistic career.^*2 Across that continuity, solarization and multiple exposure appear less as fashionable decoration than as extensions of a Dada-derived approach that treated an image as material open to subsequent manipulation.

The official bibliography of monographs also shows how later scholarship has examined the Dada work, the Paris period, and the New York color photographs in their own depth.^*3 Helen Adkins’s study Erwin Blumenfeld: “I Was Nothing But a Berliner” devotes 223 pages to the montages of 1916–33, using her doctoral research to examine the early Dada period on its own terms. Seen as a sustained body of work, this Dada production cannot be reduced to a youthful avant-garde prelude decorating the later fashion career. His experience cutting advertisements, postcards, newspapers, and photographic fragments and reversing their meanings against authority and bourgeois values had already established a distrust of the photograph as a finished copy of reality.^*29

Amsterdam to Paris

The official exhibition history traces Blumenfeld from Film und Foto in 1929 through postwar exhibitions at MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, and institutions in Berlin and Tokyo.^*4 A retrospective at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum used roughly 290 works to trace a life marked by two world wars and migration and a career extending from Dada to nudes and fashion.^*5 Blumenfeld began using the darkroom in his leather-goods shop in Amsterdam and turned to photography professionally after the business failed. That sequence connects his choice of photography to both economic conditions and the production environment immediately available to him.

The way photography became a profession in Amsterdam also complicates any narrative in which later experiment followed a shift from “pure art” into commerce. The shop darkroom provided an immediate entry into production, while portrait commissions became paid work that supported him; experiment and commissioned photography therefore shared the same environment from an early stage. Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s continuous presentation of Dada, nudes, and fashion reflects the fact that these fields were not joined only in retrospect.^*5 Reducing Blumenfeld’s avant-garde work to a prehistory of his later images of beautiful women also removes its political dimension. The Dictator (1937), held by the Jewish Museum in New York, combines a calf’s head with a figure of Venus in a satire of a fascist leader, showing that photography and montage had a political edge well before Blumenfeld’s later internment and exile.^*21

Exposure, Reversal, and Fragmentation

Berlinische Galerie connects Blumenfeld’s Dada collages of 1916–33 to his background as a Jewish Berliner, his contacts with Grosz and the circle around Der Sturm, and his caustic satire of authority.^*6 A Fotomuseum Den Haag retrospective traces his movement from the Amsterdam darkroom to Paris fashion work and documents his continuing use of double exposure, distortion, and solarization.^*7 The Jewish Museum of Belgium treats Dada ideas, political concerns, and artistic experiment as parts of one activity and incorporates wartime internment and Blumenfeld’s 1941 move to New York into that photographic history.^*8

The Face and Reproduction

MoMA’s artist record shows Blumenfeld included from the late 1940s in exhibitions devoted to formal experiment in photography, including Abstraction in Photography, Color Photography, and In and Out of Focus.^*9 In Portrait of E.L., shadow, exposure, and contour destabilize the face, leaving the portrait deliberately unsettled.^*10 By this point, Blumenfeld had already developed the method that would later turn a face from descriptive information into shape in his fashion work. In the Dada collages, existing images cut from newspapers and other printed matter were severed from their original captions and placed into new relations. Multiple exposure and solarization use different procedures, but both refuse to accept the photographed image as its final meaning. Berlinische Galerie’s early works make clear that the radical cropping of faces in his later Vogue photographs did not appear suddenly as an advertising device.^*6

This continuity does not require the claim that Blumenfeld simply carried Dada ideology unchanged into fashion magazines. Political satire in collage and magazine photographs designed to make products attractive operated within different institutions and toward different ends. What they share is an operation: cutting, reversing, or multiplying an image until the final result departs from what the camera first recorded. Writing in Frieze, Sarah E. James reads Blumenfeld’s work within a visual culture extending from Berlin Dada through French Surrealism to New York fashion. In the late 1930s, Verve placed his photographs of bodies transformed by wet fabric and distortion in the same publication as works by Man Ray, Brassaï, and Raoul Ubac. Multiplication of the body, solarization, and veiling therefore intersected with broader Surrealist methods for destabilizing vision and desire.^*30 Blumenfeld also kept avant-garde procedures active outside the gallery. The same critical account points to Brassaï, Ilse Bing, Lotte Jacobi, Gisèle Freund, and Florence Henri as photographers who crossed among studio work, reportage, fashion, and avant-garde magazines. Blumenfeld’s distinction lies less in being “artistic despite being commercial” than in continuing to use fragmentation, repetition, and erasure of faces and bodies inside pages designed to sell products.^*30

Vogue and Color

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Multiple Exposure Portrait, Amsterdam, several orientations of the same person overlap, preventing the portrait from settling into a single face.^*11 By making post-exposure manipulation part of the process, Blumenfeld moved the photograph beyond a one-directional record of a person present at a given moment. On the January 1, 1950 cover of Vogue, only one eye, red lips, and a beauty mark remain against white. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection record preserves the magazine cover itself as the object.^*12 Jean Patchett for Vogue likewise privileges line, contrast, and shapes formed on the printed surface over complete descriptive information about the face or body.^*13

Art Direction

London’s National Portrait Gallery describes Blumenfeld across Dada, experimental nudes in Amsterdam, fashion in Paris, and magazine work in New York.^*14 A Barbican retrospective similarly placed his reputation as a fashion photographer in the same career as his experimental photographs, self-portraits, and nudes.^*15 Magazine work gave Blumenfeld a place to test the final form of a reproduced image through color proofs, cropping, type, and negative space. In color photography, the colors recorded on a negative or slide are not identical to those reproduced in magazine printing. His experiments therefore depended on anticipated proofs and printed results as well as on lighting at the moment of exposure. Steidl’s reconsideration of his New York color slides alongside original magazine pages shows how the works now familiar to us were formed through exchanges between photographic originals and reproductions.^*18 The 1950 Vogue cover presents this logic in an extreme form. Its white field is an active pictorial element that makes the colors of the eye and lips more forceful; the unprinted area has become part of the design. Reducing descriptive information makes the cover legible at a distance and allows the image to function simultaneously as portrait, graphic design, and brand sign.^*12

The January 1950 “Doe Eye” cover began with a black-and-white portrait radically simplified in the darkroom, then acquired its blue eye and red lips through the magazine’s color process. Vogue Italia described this production sequence in connection with Foam’s retrospective. The finished cover is a reproduced image produced through the overlap of Blumenfeld’s photographic work and the magazine’s printing process.^*22 Tokyo Photographic Art Museum registers the image as Jean Patchett, Vogue, New York, dated 1950, and identifies it as the cover of the January issue of American Vogue. It is therefore more precise to view it as a cover image designed for a specific magazine issue than simply as a photograph of a face.^*24 This environment became more institutionalized in New York. Mason Klein’s Modern Look examines American magazines from 1930 to 1960 as a visual culture jointly produced by photographers and designers who emigrated or fled from Europe and by art directors including Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman. Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman, and Irving Penn belonged to the following generation working within this publishing environment. Blumenfeld’s color experiments were therefore made within commercial publishing systems that integrated photography, typography, negative space, color separation, and printing into a final image, not as autonomous works merely transferred to magazine pages.^*32

War, Exile, and Commerce

The University of Iowa’s International Dada Archive places Blumenfeld within the documentary record of international Dada and makes it possible to consult his early collages without separating them from his later photography.^*16 Corkin Gallery’s From Dada to Vogue likewise presents a continuous history from collages made after 1919 to photographs from the 1940s.^*17 Steidl’s Studio Blumenfeld: Color, New York, 1941–1960 reexamines original magazine pages alongside color slides that remained unpublished for many years, reconsidering the relationship between images known through print and their photographic originals.^*18

Reassessing Avant-Garde and Fashion

Foam’s Erwin Blumenfeld in Color centered the New York color work and examined how experiments developed in black and white through double exposure, distortion, and solarization moved into color.^*19 Jeu de Paume’s retrospective materials connect drawings, collages, photomontages, Dutch portraits, black-and-white Paris fashion photographs, and New York color work from the late 1910s through the 1960s across more than three hundred works and documents.^*20 Taken together, Blumenfeld’s fragmentation of women’s faces and bodies has a double character. It intensifies the idealized feminine image produced by fashion magazines while cutting, erasing, and multiplying the face so that the sitter does not appear as a stable portrait subject. There is not enough evidence to define this operation simply as liberation or critique. The tension lies in the coexistence of commercial beauty production and avant-garde techniques that destabilize the image on the same page. Focusing only on Blumenfeld’s success after exile would also turn persecution and internment in Europe into a prelude to the glamour of New York. As the Jewish Museum of Belgium incorporates war and displacement into his artistic history, the change of his working base was not solely a free career choice. Entry into a new magazine market and the loss of an earlier basis of life have to be considered together.^*8 Recent reassessments of Blumenfeld’s color work have also moved beyond the image of an artist defined by eccentric darkroom techniques. Research by Foam and Steidl reconsiders shooting, darkroom work, color slides, and magazine printing as a continuous process. In this account, the photographer designs the conditions of the final reproduced image as well as making the exposure.^*19

The Jewish Museum’s Modern Look examines American magazines of the 1930s through the 1950s as sites where photographers and designers arriving from Europe worked in conjunction with art directors such as Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman. Blumenfeld’s American period belongs to a history in which the avant-garde visual languages of migrants entered mass-printed magazines, not solely to a story of individual talent flourishing after exile.^*23 A 2022 exhibition at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme focused on 1930–50 and used roughly 180 works and documents, including unpublished series, to connect Blumenfeld’s success in Paris, internment in France, renewed internment in Morocco, and move to the United States in 1941. Keeping the coercive circumstances of that movement within the history of the work prevents New York fashion photography from becoming a simple success story about overcoming wartime rupture.^*25 Blumenfeld was also exhibited outside commercial magazines during his own lifetime. MoMA included him in In and Out of Focus in 1948.^*26 In 1950, his work appeared in Color Photography.^*27 In 1951, he was also included in Abstraction in Photography.^*28 His work was therefore shown, alongside his success in fashion, in settings concerned with experiment, color, and abstraction in postwar photography.

Given this exhibition history, later reassessment cannot be adequately described as the elevation of a commercial photographer into art. Magazine covers, museum exhibitions, and private darkroom experiments were already proceeding at the same time. Blumenfeld’s autobiography Eye to I also provides an important supplementary source for interpreting the work. Held by the ICP Library, it allows readers to examine how Blumenfeld later narrated Berlin, war, business, internment, exile, and the magazine world. Because autobiography constructs a life through memory, its factual claims require comparison with archives and scholarship; it is nonetheless useful for seeing that Blumenfeld did not organize his own life into a simple success narrative from “pure artist” to commercial photographer.^*31 James also links Blumenfeld’s legacy to William Klein’s fashion photography and films. Both accepted commissions from the fashion industry while using exaggeration, fragmentation, and satire to unsettle its surfaces from within. In this lineage, Blumenfeld can be understood as a photographer who made work at the point where avant-garde procedures and commerce collided inside the same print culture.^*30