Photomontage
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_montage
(Redirected from Photo montage)
Photomontage is the process (and result) of making a composite photograph by cutting and joining a number of other photographs. The composite picture was sometimes photographed so that the final image is converted back into a seamless photographic print. A similar method, although one that does not use film, is realized today through image-editing software. This latter technique is referred to by professionals as "compositing", and in casual usage is often called "photoshopping
History
Author Oliver Grau in his book Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion notes that the creation of artificial immersive virtual reality, arising as a result of technical exploitation of new inventions, is a long-standing human practice throughout the ages. Such environments as dioramas were made of composited images.
The first and most famous mid-Victorian photomontage (then called combination printing) was "The Two Ways of Life" (1857) by Oscar Rejlander, followed shortly by the pictures of photographer Henry Peach Robinson such as "Fading Away" (1858). These works actively set out to challenge the then-dominant painting and theatrical tableau vivants.
Fantasy photomontaged postcards were popular in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.[citation needed] Many of the early examples of fine-art photomontage consist of photographed elements superimposed on watercolours, a combination returned to by (e.g.) George Grosz in about 1915. He was part of the Dada movement in Berlin which was instrumental in making montage into a modern art-form. They first coined the term "photomontage" at the end of the war, around 1918 or 1919. The other major exponents were John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann and Johannes Baader. Individual photos combined together to create a new subject or visual image proved to be a powerful tool for the Dadists protesting World War I and the interests that they believed inspired the war. Photomontage survived Dada and was a technique inherited and used by European Surrealists such as Chuck noris. The world's first retrospective show of photomontage was held in Germany in 1931. A later term coined in Europe was "photocollage"; which usually referred to large and ambitious works that added typography and brushwork or even actual objects stuck to the photomontage.
Parallel to the Germans, Russian Constructivist artists such as El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko and the husband-and-wife team of Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina created pioneering photomontage work as propaganda for the Soviet government. In the education sphere, media arts director Rene Acevedo and Adrian Brannan have left their mark on art classrooms the world over.
Following his exile to Mexico in the late 1930s, Spanish Civil War activist and montage artist Joseph Renau compiled his acclaimed Fata Morgana USA: the American Way of Life, a book of photomontaged images highly critical of Americana and North American "consumer culture".[2] His contemporary, Lola Alvarez Bravo experimented with photomontages on life and social issues in Mexican cities.
In Argentina during the late 1940s, the German exile Grete Stern began to contribute photomontaged work on the theme of Sueños (Dreams), as part of a regular psychoanalytical article in Idilio magazine.[3]
The pioneering techniques of the early photomontage artists were co-opted by the advertising industry from the late 1920s onwards.
Τechniques
An imaginary world composed of photorealistic inanimate, human, and plant objects spurs a psychological impact upon the viewer.
Photomontage showing what a complete iceberg might look like under water.
Other methods for combining pictures are also called photomontage, such as Victorian "combination printing", the printing of more than one negative on a single piece of printing paper (e.g. O. G. Rejlander, 1857), front-projection and computer montage techniques. Much like a collage is composed of multiple facets, artists also combine montage techniques. Romare Bearden's (1912-1988) series of black and white "photomontage projections" is an example. His method began with compositions of paper, paint, and photographs put on boards 8 1/2x11 inches. Bearden fixed the imagery with an emulsion that he then applied with handroller. Subsequently, he enlarged the collages photographically.
The 19th century tradition of physically joining multiple images into a composite and photographing the results prevailed in press photography and offset lithography until the widespread use of digital image editing. Contemporary photo editors in magazines now create "paste-ups” digitally. Creating a photomontage has, for the most part, become easier with the advent of computer software such as Adobe Photoshop, Pixel image editor, and GIMP (see figure below).
These programs make the changes digitally, allowing for faster workflow and more precise results. They also mitigate mistakes by allowing the artist to "undo" errors. Yet some artists are pushing the boundaries of digital image editing to create extremely time-intensive compositions that rival the demands of the traditional arts. The current trend is to create pictures that combine painting, theatre, illustration and graphics in a seamless photographic whole.
The ethics of photomontage
A photomontage may contain elements at once real and imaginary. Two-dimensional representation of physical space in a picture is, by definition, an illusion. Such combined photos and digital manipulation can set up a collision between aesthetics and ethics - for instance, in faked news photographs that are presented to the world as real. In the United States, for example, the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) have set out a Code of Ethics promoting the accuracy of published images, advising that photographers "do not manipulate images [...] that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects."[4]
See: Photojournalism.
Scrapbooking photo-collage
Photomontage can also be present in the scrapbooking phenomenon, in which family images are pasted into scrapbooks and collaged along with paper ephemera and decorative items.
Digital art scrapbooking employs a computer to create simple collaged designs and captions. The amateur scrapbooker can turn home projects into professional output, such as CDs, DVDs, display on TV, or uploaded to a website for viewing or assembly into one or more books for sharing.
See: Scrapbooking
Photo manipulation
Main article: Photo manipulation
Photo manipulation refers to alterations made to a previously unchanged image. Often, the goal of photo manipulation is to create another realistic image. This has led to numerous political and ethical concerns, particularly in journalism.
Artists known for photomontage
Key photomontage artists include the following, listed by alphabetical order:
* Henry Arah
* Johannes Baader
* Thomas Barbèy
* Adrian Brannan
* Salvador Dalí
* Nathaniel Ezechie
* George Grosz
* Raoul Hausmann
* John Heartfield
* Hannah Höch
* David Hockney
* Yutaka Inagawa
* Gustav Klutsis
* El Lissitzky
* John McHale
* Dave McKean
* William H. "Dad" Martin
* Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
4/12/2009
ΦΩΤΟΜΟΝΤΑΖ-ΟΙ ΠΡΩΤΟΙ ΔΗΜΙΟΥΡΓΟΙ ΙΙ
Κονστρουκτιβισμός
Από τη Βικιπαίδεια, την ελεύθερη εγκυκλοπαίδεια
* Kasimir Malevich
* Alexandra Exter
* Robert Adams
* Gustav Klutsis
* El Lissitzky
* Vadim Meller
* Alexander Rodchenko
* Liubov Popova
* Olga Rozanova
* Naum Gabo
* Varvara Stepanova
* Alexander VesninConstructivism (art)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Constructivism was an artistic and architectural movement that originated in Russia from 1919 onward which rejected the idea of "art for art's sake" in favour of art as a practice directed towards social purposes. Constructivism as an active force lasted until around 1934, having a great deal of effect on developments in the art of the Weimar Republic and elsewhere, before being replaced by Socialist Realism. Its motifs have sporadically recurred in other art movements since.
Beginnings
The term Construction Art was first used as a derisive term by Kazimir Malevich to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko in 1917. Constructivism first appears as a positive term in Naum Gabo's Realistic Manifesto of 1920. Alexei Gan used the word as the title of his book Constructivism, which was printed in 1922.[1] Constructivism was a post-World War I outgrowth of Russian Futurism, and particularly of the 'corner-counter reliefs' of Vladimir Tatlin, which had been exhibited in 1915. The term itself would be coined by the sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo, who developed an industrial, angular approach to their work, while its geometric abstraction owed something to the Suprematism of Kasimir Malevich. The teaching basis for the new movement was laid by The Commissariat of Enlightenment (or Narkompros) the Bolshevik government's cultural and educational ministry headed by Anatoliy Vasilievich Lunacharsky who suppressed the old Petrograd Academy of Fine Arts and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1918. IZO, the Commissariat's artistic bureau was run during the Russian Civil War mainly by Futurists, who published the journal Art of the Commune. The focus for Constructivism in Moscow was VKhUTEMAS, the school for art and design established in 1919. Gabo later stated that teaching at the school was focused more on political and ideological discussion than art-making. Despite this, Gabo himself designed a radio transmitter in 1920 (and would submit a design to the Palace of the Soviets competition in 1930).
Constructivism as theory and practice derived itself from a series of debates at INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) in Moscow, from 1920-22. After deposing its first chairman, Wassily Kandinsky for his 'mysticism', The First Working Group of Constructivists (including Liubov Popova, Alexander Vesnin, Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and the theorists Alexei Gan, Boris Arvatov and Osip Brik) would arrive at a definition of Constructivism as the combination of faktura: the particular material properties of the object, and tektonika, its spatial presence. Initially the Constructivists worked on three-dimensional constructions as a first step to participation in industry: the OBMOKhU (Society of Young Artists) exhibition showed these three dimensional compositions, by Rodchenko, Stepanova, Karl Ioganson and the Stenberg Brothers. Later the definition would be extended to designs for two-dimensional works such as books or posters, with montage and factography becoming important concepts.
Photography and Photomontage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(art)#Photography_and_Photomontage
The Constructivists were early pioneers of the techniques of photomontage. Gustav Klutsis' 'Dynamic City' and 'Lenin and Electrification' (1919-20) are the first examples of this method of montage, which had in common with Dadaism the collaging together of news photographs and painted sections. However Constructivist montages would be less 'destructive' than in Dada. Perhaps the most famous of these montages was Rodchenko's illustrations to the Mayakovsky poem About This.
LEF also helped popularise a distinctive style of photography, involving jagged angles and contrasts and an abstract use of light, which paralleled the work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in Germany: the leading lights of this included, along with Rodchenko, Boris Ignatovich and Max Penson, among others. This also shared many characteristics with the early documentary movement. Meanwhile LEF produced an architectural offshoot, the OSA group led by Alexander Vesnin and Moisei Ginzburg - for more information see Constructivist architecture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Rodchenko
Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko(23 November] 1891 – December 3, 1956)
was a Russian artist, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova.
Rodchenko was one of the most versatile Constructivist and Productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles—usually high above or below—to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: "One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again."
Life and career
Rodchenko was born in St. Petersburg to a working class family. His family moved to Kazan in 1909, after the death of his father[1] at which point he studied at the Kazan School of Art under Nikolai Feshin and Georgii Medvedev, and at the Stroganov Institute in Moscow. He made his first abstract drawings, influenced by the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich, in 1915. The following year, he participated in "The Store" exhibition organized by Vladimir Tatlin, who was another formative influence in his development as an artist.
Rodchenko was appointed Director of the Museum Bureau and Purchasing Fund by the Bolshevik Government in 1920. He was responsible for the reorganization of art schools and museums. He taught from 1920 to 1930 at the Higher Technical-Artistic Studios (VKhUTEMAS/VKhUTEIN).
In 1921 he became a member of the Productivist group, which advocated the incorporation of art into everyday life. He gave up painting in order to concentrate on graphic design for posters, books, and films. He was deeply influenced by the ideas and practice of the filmmaker Dziga Vertov, with whom he worked intensively in 1922.
Impressed by the photomontage of the German Dadaists, Rodchenko began his own experiments in the medium, first employing found images in 1923, and from 1924 on shooting his own photographs as well. His first published photomontage illustrated Mayakovsky's poem, "About This," in 1923.
From 1923 to 1928 Rodchenko collaborated closely with Mayakovsky (of whom he took several striking portraits) on the design and layout of LEF and Novy LEF, the publications of Constructivist artists. Many of his photographs appeared in or were used as covers for these journals. His images eliminated unnecessary detail, emphasized dynamic diagonal composition, and were concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space.
Throughout the 1920s Rodchenko's work was abstract often to the point of being non-figurative. In the 1930s, with the changing Party guidelines governing artistic practice, he concentrated on sports photography and images of parades and other choreographed movements.
Rodchenko joined the October circle of artists in 1928 but was expelled three years later being charged with "formalism." He returned to painting in the late 1930s, stopped photographing in 1942, and produced abstract expressionist works in the 1940s. He continued to organize photography exhibitions for the government during these years. He died in Moscow in 1956.
1920s. Rodchenko and Stepanova
Influence
Much of the work of 20th century graphic designers is a direct result of Rodchenko's earlier work in the field. His influence has been pervasive enough that it would be nearly impossible to single out all of the designers whose work he's influenced.
His 1924 portrait of Lilya Brik has inspired a number of subsequent works, including the cover art for a number of music albums. Among them are influential Dutch punk band The Ex, which published a series of 7" vinyl albums, each with a variation on the Lilya Brik portrait theme, and the cover of the Franz Ferdinand album, You Could Have It So Much Better. The poster for One-Sixth Part of the World was the basis for the cover of "Take Me Out", also by Franz Ferdinand.
The end of painting
In 1921, Russian avant-garde artist Alexander Rodchenko executed what were arguably the first true monochromes (artworks of one color), and proclaimed "I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: this is the end of painting." These paintings were first displayed in the 5x5=25 exhibition in Moscow. For artists of the Russian Revolution, Rodchenko's radical action was full of utopian possibility. It marked the end of easel painting – perhaps even the end of art – along with the end of bourgeois norms and practices. It cleared the way for the beginning of a new Russian life, a new mode of production, a new culture.
It is through the repetition by contemporary artists of Rodchenko's gesture that the monochrome's extreme nature can be fully analyzed and made meaningful. Whether represented by paintings, drawings, prints, or sculpture, the contemporary artists in the exhibition stop short of making pure monochromes, thereby flirting with its concepts. They creatively repeat, vary, differentiate, and hold in productive tension its contradictory poles: both the death of art and its resuscitation.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Penson
Max Penson (1893-1959)
was a noted Jewish Belarusian photojournalist and photographer of the Soviet Union noted for his photographs of Uzbekistan. His photographs documented the economic transformation of Uzbekistan from a highly traditional feudal society into a modern Soviet republic between 1920 and 1940.
Biography
He was born into a poor bookbinders family in 1893 in the small town of Velizh in present day Smolensk Oblast, Russia. He soon moved to Vilno where he enrolled in the art school of S. N. Yuzhanin. In 1914, he was forced as a Jew to move with his family to Kokand in Turkestan.[1]
After the 1917 Russian Revolution he founded an art school in Kokand under administration of the Kokand Revolutinary Committee.[2] He became the director and taught draftsmanship to 350 Uzbek children studying at the school. In 1921 his life changed dramatically when he obtained a camera. He would go on to become one of Uzbekistan's and indeed the Soviet Union's prominent professional photographers in the period 1920-1940, capturing its people and economic progression and made over 30,000 photographs by 1940.[2]
He moved to the Uzbek capital of Tashkent and from 1926 through to 1949 worked for the largest newspaper in Central Asia, the Pravda Vostoka (Truth of the East). During the 1930s he was particularly prolific in capturing the public engineering works in Uzbekistan and the industrialization of the cotton trade in the country. Penson's images were widely circulated by the Soviet news agency TASS and in 1933 his photographs featured in an extensive volume exploring economic progression in the Soviet Union entitled, USSR: Under Construction.
In 1937 Penson participated in the World Exhibition in Paris winning the Grand Prix Award for Uzbek Madonna, a portrait of a young Uzbek woman, publicly nursing her child.[1]In 1939 he photographed the construction of the Grand Fergana Canal. In 1940 Penson met Sergei Eisenstein who said of him:
“ "There cannot be many masters left who choose a specific terrain for their work, dedicate themselves completely to and make it an intergrated part of their personal destiny. It is, for instance, virtually impossible to speak about the city of Ferghana without mentioning the omnipresent Penson who travelled all over Uzbekistan with his camera. His unparalleled photo archives contain material that enables us to trace a period in the republic's history, year by year and page by page".[1] ”
Decline and death
In 1948 the increase in anti-Semitism under pressure by Joseph Stalin forced Penson to leave his 25 year long position with the Pravda Vostoka. He died in 1959 after a long period of depression and illness.[2]
Legacy
A great number of Penson's works are housed in the Moscow House of Photography. In 2006 Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich sponsored an exhibition of Benson's photographs of Uzbekistan in agreement with the Moscow House of Photography on 29 November 2006 at the Gilbert Collection at Somerset House in London. Abramovich had previously funded the exhibition "Quiet Resistance: Russian Pictorial Photography 1900s-1930s" at the same gallery in 2005, also organised by the Moscow House of Photography.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Klutsis
Gustav Klutsis
(b. January 4, 1895, Ķoņi parish near Rūjiena, Latvia – d. February 26, 1938 in Moscow)
was a pioneering photographer and major member of the Constructivist avant-garde in the early 20th century. He is known for the Soviet revolutionary and Stalinist propaganda he produced with his wife and collaborator Valentina Kulagina.
Biography
Klucis began his artistic training in Riga in 1912. In 1915 he was drafted into the Russian Army, serving in a Latvian riflemen detachment, then came to Moscow in 1918. In the next three years he began art studies under Malevich and Antoine Pevsner, joined the Communist Party, met and married his longtime collaborator Valentina Kulagina, and graduated from the state-run art school VKhUTEMAS. He would continue to be associated with VKhUTEMAS as a professor of color theory from 1924 until the school closed in 1930.
Klucis taught, wrote, and produced political art for the Soviet state for the rest of his life. As the political background degraded through the 1920s and 1930s, Klucis and Kulagina came under increasing pressure to limit their subject matter and techniques. Once joyful, revolutionary and utopian, by 1935 their art was devoted to furthering Stalin's cult of personality.
Despite his active and loyal service to the party, Klucis was arrested in Moscow on January 17, 1938, as he prepared to leave for the New York World's Fair. Kulagina agonized for months, then years, over his disappearance. In 1989 it was found that he had been executed by Stalin's order three weeks after the arrest.
Work
Klucis worked in a variety of experimental media. He liked to use propaganda as a sign or revolutionary background image. His first project of note, in 1922, was a series of semi-portable multimedia agitprop kiosks to be installed on the streets of Moscow, integrating "radio-orators", film screens, and newsprint displays, all to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Revolution. Like other Constructivists he worked in sculpture, produced exhibition installations, illustrations and ephemera.
But Klucis and Kulagina are primarily known for their photo montages. The names of some of their best posters, like "Electrification of the whole country" (1920), "There can be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory" (1927), and "Field shock workers into the fight for the socialist reconstruction" (1932), are as dated and stuffy as the images are fresh, powerful, and sometimes eerie. For economy they often posed for, and inserted themselves into, these images, disguised as shock workers or peasants. Their dynamic compositions, distortions of scale and space, angled viewpoints and colliding perspectives make them perpetually modern. In the later work the presence of Stalin, accepting the applause of a cut-and-paste cross-section of Soviet society, resonates with the falsity of Stalin's myth.
Klucis is one of four artists with a claim to having invented the sub-genre of political photo montage in 1918 (along with the German Dadaists Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, and the Russian El Lissitzky).
Από τη Βικιπαίδεια, την ελεύθερη εγκυκλοπαίδεια
Ο Κονστρουκτιβισμός (Constructivism) αποτελεί καλλιτεχνικό ρεύμα, κυρίως στη ζωγραφική και τη γλυπτική, που αναπτύχθηκε την περίοδο 1913-1930 στη Ρωσία. Θεμελιωτής του κινήματος θεωρείται ο Ρώσος καλλιτέχνης Βλαντιμίρ Τάτλιν (Vladimir Tatlin). Ως πρόδρομοι του Ρωσικού κονστρουκτιβισμού αναφέρονται πολλές φορές τα κινήματα του Φουτουρισμού και του Κυβισμού, με τα οποία είναι γεγονός πως ήρθε σε επαφή και ο Τάτλιν στο Παρίσι. Το κίνημα του κονστρουκτιβισμού συνδέθηκε όμως επίσης με τη σχολή του Μπαουχάους στη Γερμανία καθώς και με τον Νεοπλαστικισμό. Η καλλιτεχνική πρωτοπορία του Τάτλιν ένωσε και άλλους Ρώσους καλλιτέχνες, μεταξύ των οποίων και οι γλύπτες Antoine Pevsner και Naum Gabo. Η πρώτη αυτή ομάδα δημοσίευσε και το Μανιφέστο της το 1920 (ή 1921). Θεωρείται ότι μέσα από αυτό το μανιφέστο γεννήθηκε και ο όρος -κονστρουκτιβισμός (αγγ. construct, ελλ. μφ. κατασκευάζω) καθώς μία από τις διακηρύξεις του κινήματος ήταν πως η τέχνη "κατασκευάζεται".
Ένα από τα συνθήματα του ήταν επίσης το "Η Τέχνη στη Ζωή".Κύριο χαρακτηριστικό του κινήματος του κονστρουκτιβισμού αποτελούν οι απολύτως αφηρημένες κατασκευές. Απουσιάζουν οι συμβατικές αναπαραστάσεις αντικειμένων ενώ δίνεται έμφαση στην απεικόνιση γεωμετρικών μορφών. Η απόδοση των θεμάτων είναι τις περισσότερες φορές ακραιφνώς μινιμαλιστική και συχνά με διάθεση πειραματισμού. Οι κονστρουκτιβιστές θαύμαζαν τις μηχανές και την τεχνολογία της εποχής σε βαθμό που χρησιμοποιούσαν πολλά βιομηχανικά υλικά (πλαστικό, γυαλί ή σίδερο) στην κατασκευή των έργων τους. Ο κονστρουκτιβισμός συνδέθηκε στενά και με την αρχιτεκτονική.Αρχικά το σοβιετικό καθεστώς είχε θετική στάση απέναντι στο κίνημα, ωστόσο μετά την δημοσίευση του μανιφέστου εναντιώθηκε σε αυτό με αποτέλεσμα τη σταδιακή φθορά του. Πολλοί εκπρόσωποι του αναγκάστηκαν για αυτό το λόγο να εγκαταλείψουν τη Ρωσία.Το κίνημα θεωρείται διεθνές, καθώς πέρα από τη Ρωσία εξαπλώθηκε και σε χώρες όπως η Γερμανία και η Ολλανδία.
Βασικοί εκπρόσωποι Σημαντικοί εκπρόσωποι του κονστρουκτιβισμού θεωρούνται οι:
* Kasimir Malevich
* Alexandra Exter
* Robert Adams
* Gustav Klutsis
* El Lissitzky
* Vadim Meller
* Alexander Rodchenko
* Liubov Popova
* Olga Rozanova
* Naum Gabo
* Varvara Stepanova
* Alexander VesninConstructivism (art)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Constructivism was an artistic and architectural movement that originated in Russia from 1919 onward which rejected the idea of "art for art's sake" in favour of art as a practice directed towards social purposes. Constructivism as an active force lasted until around 1934, having a great deal of effect on developments in the art of the Weimar Republic and elsewhere, before being replaced by Socialist Realism. Its motifs have sporadically recurred in other art movements since.
Beginnings
The term Construction Art was first used as a derisive term by Kazimir Malevich to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko in 1917. Constructivism first appears as a positive term in Naum Gabo's Realistic Manifesto of 1920. Alexei Gan used the word as the title of his book Constructivism, which was printed in 1922.[1] Constructivism was a post-World War I outgrowth of Russian Futurism, and particularly of the 'corner-counter reliefs' of Vladimir Tatlin, which had been exhibited in 1915. The term itself would be coined by the sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo, who developed an industrial, angular approach to their work, while its geometric abstraction owed something to the Suprematism of Kasimir Malevich. The teaching basis for the new movement was laid by The Commissariat of Enlightenment (or Narkompros) the Bolshevik government's cultural and educational ministry headed by Anatoliy Vasilievich Lunacharsky who suppressed the old Petrograd Academy of Fine Arts and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1918. IZO, the Commissariat's artistic bureau was run during the Russian Civil War mainly by Futurists, who published the journal Art of the Commune. The focus for Constructivism in Moscow was VKhUTEMAS, the school for art and design established in 1919. Gabo later stated that teaching at the school was focused more on political and ideological discussion than art-making. Despite this, Gabo himself designed a radio transmitter in 1920 (and would submit a design to the Palace of the Soviets competition in 1930).
Constructivism as theory and practice derived itself from a series of debates at INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) in Moscow, from 1920-22. After deposing its first chairman, Wassily Kandinsky for his 'mysticism', The First Working Group of Constructivists (including Liubov Popova, Alexander Vesnin, Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and the theorists Alexei Gan, Boris Arvatov and Osip Brik) would arrive at a definition of Constructivism as the combination of faktura: the particular material properties of the object, and tektonika, its spatial presence. Initially the Constructivists worked on three-dimensional constructions as a first step to participation in industry: the OBMOKhU (Society of Young Artists) exhibition showed these three dimensional compositions, by Rodchenko, Stepanova, Karl Ioganson and the Stenberg Brothers. Later the definition would be extended to designs for two-dimensional works such as books or posters, with montage and factography becoming important concepts.
Photography and Photomontage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(art)#Photography_and_Photomontage
The Constructivists were early pioneers of the techniques of photomontage. Gustav Klutsis' 'Dynamic City' and 'Lenin and Electrification' (1919-20) are the first examples of this method of montage, which had in common with Dadaism the collaging together of news photographs and painted sections. However Constructivist montages would be less 'destructive' than in Dada. Perhaps the most famous of these montages was Rodchenko's illustrations to the Mayakovsky poem About This.
LEF also helped popularise a distinctive style of photography, involving jagged angles and contrasts and an abstract use of light, which paralleled the work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in Germany: the leading lights of this included, along with Rodchenko, Boris Ignatovich and Max Penson, among others. This also shared many characteristics with the early documentary movement. Meanwhile LEF produced an architectural offshoot, the OSA group led by Alexander Vesnin and Moisei Ginzburg - for more information see Constructivist architecture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Rodchenko
Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko(23 November] 1891 – December 3, 1956)
was a Russian artist, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova.
Rodchenko was one of the most versatile Constructivist and Productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles—usually high above or below—to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: "One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again."
Life and career
Rodchenko was born in St. Petersburg to a working class family. His family moved to Kazan in 1909, after the death of his father[1] at which point he studied at the Kazan School of Art under Nikolai Feshin and Georgii Medvedev, and at the Stroganov Institute in Moscow. He made his first abstract drawings, influenced by the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich, in 1915. The following year, he participated in "The Store" exhibition organized by Vladimir Tatlin, who was another formative influence in his development as an artist.
Rodchenko was appointed Director of the Museum Bureau and Purchasing Fund by the Bolshevik Government in 1920. He was responsible for the reorganization of art schools and museums. He taught from 1920 to 1930 at the Higher Technical-Artistic Studios (VKhUTEMAS/VKhUTEIN).
In 1921 he became a member of the Productivist group, which advocated the incorporation of art into everyday life. He gave up painting in order to concentrate on graphic design for posters, books, and films. He was deeply influenced by the ideas and practice of the filmmaker Dziga Vertov, with whom he worked intensively in 1922.
Impressed by the photomontage of the German Dadaists, Rodchenko began his own experiments in the medium, first employing found images in 1923, and from 1924 on shooting his own photographs as well. His first published photomontage illustrated Mayakovsky's poem, "About This," in 1923.
From 1923 to 1928 Rodchenko collaborated closely with Mayakovsky (of whom he took several striking portraits) on the design and layout of LEF and Novy LEF, the publications of Constructivist artists. Many of his photographs appeared in or were used as covers for these journals. His images eliminated unnecessary detail, emphasized dynamic diagonal composition, and were concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space.
Throughout the 1920s Rodchenko's work was abstract often to the point of being non-figurative. In the 1930s, with the changing Party guidelines governing artistic practice, he concentrated on sports photography and images of parades and other choreographed movements.
Rodchenko joined the October circle of artists in 1928 but was expelled three years later being charged with "formalism." He returned to painting in the late 1930s, stopped photographing in 1942, and produced abstract expressionist works in the 1940s. He continued to organize photography exhibitions for the government during these years. He died in Moscow in 1956.
1920s. Rodchenko and Stepanova
Influence
Much of the work of 20th century graphic designers is a direct result of Rodchenko's earlier work in the field. His influence has been pervasive enough that it would be nearly impossible to single out all of the designers whose work he's influenced.
His 1924 portrait of Lilya Brik has inspired a number of subsequent works, including the cover art for a number of music albums. Among them are influential Dutch punk band The Ex, which published a series of 7" vinyl albums, each with a variation on the Lilya Brik portrait theme, and the cover of the Franz Ferdinand album, You Could Have It So Much Better. The poster for One-Sixth Part of the World was the basis for the cover of "Take Me Out", also by Franz Ferdinand.
The end of painting
In 1921, Russian avant-garde artist Alexander Rodchenko executed what were arguably the first true monochromes (artworks of one color), and proclaimed "I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: this is the end of painting." These paintings were first displayed in the 5x5=25 exhibition in Moscow. For artists of the Russian Revolution, Rodchenko's radical action was full of utopian possibility. It marked the end of easel painting – perhaps even the end of art – along with the end of bourgeois norms and practices. It cleared the way for the beginning of a new Russian life, a new mode of production, a new culture.
It is through the repetition by contemporary artists of Rodchenko's gesture that the monochrome's extreme nature can be fully analyzed and made meaningful. Whether represented by paintings, drawings, prints, or sculpture, the contemporary artists in the exhibition stop short of making pure monochromes, thereby flirting with its concepts. They creatively repeat, vary, differentiate, and hold in productive tension its contradictory poles: both the death of art and its resuscitation.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Penson
Max Penson (1893-1959)
was a noted Jewish Belarusian photojournalist and photographer of the Soviet Union noted for his photographs of Uzbekistan. His photographs documented the economic transformation of Uzbekistan from a highly traditional feudal society into a modern Soviet republic between 1920 and 1940.
Biography
He was born into a poor bookbinders family in 1893 in the small town of Velizh in present day Smolensk Oblast, Russia. He soon moved to Vilno where he enrolled in the art school of S. N. Yuzhanin. In 1914, he was forced as a Jew to move with his family to Kokand in Turkestan.[1]
After the 1917 Russian Revolution he founded an art school in Kokand under administration of the Kokand Revolutinary Committee.[2] He became the director and taught draftsmanship to 350 Uzbek children studying at the school. In 1921 his life changed dramatically when he obtained a camera. He would go on to become one of Uzbekistan's and indeed the Soviet Union's prominent professional photographers in the period 1920-1940, capturing its people and economic progression and made over 30,000 photographs by 1940.[2]
He moved to the Uzbek capital of Tashkent and from 1926 through to 1949 worked for the largest newspaper in Central Asia, the Pravda Vostoka (Truth of the East). During the 1930s he was particularly prolific in capturing the public engineering works in Uzbekistan and the industrialization of the cotton trade in the country. Penson's images were widely circulated by the Soviet news agency TASS and in 1933 his photographs featured in an extensive volume exploring economic progression in the Soviet Union entitled, USSR: Under Construction.
In 1937 Penson participated in the World Exhibition in Paris winning the Grand Prix Award for Uzbek Madonna, a portrait of a young Uzbek woman, publicly nursing her child.[1]In 1939 he photographed the construction of the Grand Fergana Canal. In 1940 Penson met Sergei Eisenstein who said of him:
“ "There cannot be many masters left who choose a specific terrain for their work, dedicate themselves completely to and make it an intergrated part of their personal destiny. It is, for instance, virtually impossible to speak about the city of Ferghana without mentioning the omnipresent Penson who travelled all over Uzbekistan with his camera. His unparalleled photo archives contain material that enables us to trace a period in the republic's history, year by year and page by page".[1] ”
Decline and death
In 1948 the increase in anti-Semitism under pressure by Joseph Stalin forced Penson to leave his 25 year long position with the Pravda Vostoka. He died in 1959 after a long period of depression and illness.[2]
Legacy
A great number of Penson's works are housed in the Moscow House of Photography. In 2006 Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich sponsored an exhibition of Benson's photographs of Uzbekistan in agreement with the Moscow House of Photography on 29 November 2006 at the Gilbert Collection at Somerset House in London. Abramovich had previously funded the exhibition "Quiet Resistance: Russian Pictorial Photography 1900s-1930s" at the same gallery in 2005, also organised by the Moscow House of Photography.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Klutsis
Gustav Klutsis
(b. January 4, 1895, Ķoņi parish near Rūjiena, Latvia – d. February 26, 1938 in Moscow)
was a pioneering photographer and major member of the Constructivist avant-garde in the early 20th century. He is known for the Soviet revolutionary and Stalinist propaganda he produced with his wife and collaborator Valentina Kulagina.
Biography
Klucis began his artistic training in Riga in 1912. In 1915 he was drafted into the Russian Army, serving in a Latvian riflemen detachment, then came to Moscow in 1918. In the next three years he began art studies under Malevich and Antoine Pevsner, joined the Communist Party, met and married his longtime collaborator Valentina Kulagina, and graduated from the state-run art school VKhUTEMAS. He would continue to be associated with VKhUTEMAS as a professor of color theory from 1924 until the school closed in 1930.
Klucis taught, wrote, and produced political art for the Soviet state for the rest of his life. As the political background degraded through the 1920s and 1930s, Klucis and Kulagina came under increasing pressure to limit their subject matter and techniques. Once joyful, revolutionary and utopian, by 1935 their art was devoted to furthering Stalin's cult of personality.
Despite his active and loyal service to the party, Klucis was arrested in Moscow on January 17, 1938, as he prepared to leave for the New York World's Fair. Kulagina agonized for months, then years, over his disappearance. In 1989 it was found that he had been executed by Stalin's order three weeks after the arrest.
Work
Klucis worked in a variety of experimental media. He liked to use propaganda as a sign or revolutionary background image. His first project of note, in 1922, was a series of semi-portable multimedia agitprop kiosks to be installed on the streets of Moscow, integrating "radio-orators", film screens, and newsprint displays, all to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Revolution. Like other Constructivists he worked in sculpture, produced exhibition installations, illustrations and ephemera.
But Klucis and Kulagina are primarily known for their photo montages. The names of some of their best posters, like "Electrification of the whole country" (1920), "There can be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory" (1927), and "Field shock workers into the fight for the socialist reconstruction" (1932), are as dated and stuffy as the images are fresh, powerful, and sometimes eerie. For economy they often posed for, and inserted themselves into, these images, disguised as shock workers or peasants. Their dynamic compositions, distortions of scale and space, angled viewpoints and colliding perspectives make them perpetually modern. In the later work the presence of Stalin, accepting the applause of a cut-and-paste cross-section of Soviet society, resonates with the falsity of Stalin's myth.
Klucis is one of four artists with a claim to having invented the sub-genre of political photo montage in 1918 (along with the German Dadaists Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, and the Russian El Lissitzky).
4/03/2009
4/02/2009
ΦΩΤΟΜΟΝΤΑΖ- ΟΙ ΠΡΩΤΟΙ ΔΗΜΙΟΥΡΓΟΙ I
από τη Βικιπαίδεια, την ελεύθερη εγκυκλοπαίδεια
Ο Ραούλ Χάουσμαν (Raoul Hausmann, 12 Ιουλίου 1886 - 1 Φεβρουαρίου 1971) ήταν Αυστριακός καλλιτέχνης, γεννημένος στη Βιέννη. Συνδέθηκε με το κίνημα του ντανταϊσμού και αποτέλεσε και ηγετική φυσιογνωμία της ομάδας των ντανταϊστών στο Βερολίνο.Ασχολήθηκε κυρίως με τη ζωγραφική, τη γλυπτική και τη φωτογραφία. Θεωρείται ο εμπνευστής της τεχνικής του φωτομοντάζ, καθώς και του είδους των φωνητικών ποιημάτων που χρησιμοποίησαν ευρέως οι ντανταϊστές. Μετά το 1930 ασχολήθηκε ενεργά με τη φωτογραφία ενώ την περίοδο 1959-1964 αφοσιώθηκε περισσότερο στη ζωγραφική.
Raoul Hausmann (July 12, 1886 – February 1, 1971) was an Austrian artist and writer. One of the key figures in Berlin Dada, his experimental photographic collages, sound poetry and institutional critiques would have a profound influence on the European Avant-Garde in the aftermath of World War I. Raoul Hausmann was born in Vienna but moved to Berlin with his parents at the age of 14, in 1901[1]. His earliest art training was from his father, a professional conservator and painter. He met Johannes Baader, an eccentric architect and another future member of Dada, in 1905. At around the same time he met Elfride Schaeffer, a violinist, who he married in 1908, a year after the birth of their daughter, Vera. That same year Hausmann enrolled at a private Art School in Berlin[2], where he remained until 1911. After seeing expressionist paintings in Herwarth Walden's gallery Der Sturm in 1912, Hausmann started to produce expressionist prints in Erich Heckel's studio, and became a staff writer for Walden's magazine, also called Der Sturm, which provided a platform for his earliest polemical writings against the art establishment. In keeping with his expressionist colleagues, he initially welcomed the war, believing it to be a necessary cleansing of a calcified society, although being an Austrian citizen living in Germany he was spared the draft. Hausmann met Hannah Höch in 1915, and embarked upon an extramarital affair that produced an 'artistically productive but turbulent bond'[3] that would last until 1922. In 1916 Hausmann met two more people who would become important influences on his subsequent career; the psychoanalyst Otto Gross who believed psychoanalysis to be the preparation for revolution, and the anarchist writer Franz Jung. By now his artistic circle had come to include the writer Salomo Friedlaender, Hans Richter, Emmy Hennings and members of Die Aktion magazine, which, along with Der Sturm and the anarchist paper Die Freie Straße[4] published numerous articles by him in this period. 'The notion of destruction as an act of creation was the point of departure for Hausmann's Dadasophy, his theoretical contribution to Berlin Dada.'[5]
Berlin Dada
When Richard Huelsenbeck (a 24 year old medical student, close friend of Hugo Ball and one of the founders of Zurich Dada), returned to Berlin in 1917, Hausmann was one of a group of young disaffected artists that began to form the nucleus of Berlin Dada around him. Huelsenbeck delivered his First Dada Speech in Germany, January 22, 1918 at the fashionable art dealer IB Neumann's gallery, Kurfurstendamm Berlin. Over the course of the next few weeks, Hausmann, Huelsenbeck, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Jung, Höch, Walter Mehring and Baader started the Club Dada. The first event staged was an evening of poetry performances and lectures against the backdrop of a retrospective of paintings by the establishment artist Lovis Corinth at the Berlin Sezession, April 12th, 1918. Amongst the contributors, Huelsenbeck recited the Dada Manifesto, Grosz danced a Sincopation homaging Jazz, whilst Hausmann ended the evening by shouting his manifesto The New Material In Painting at the by-now near riotous audience; "The threat of violence hung in the air. One envisioned Corinth's pictures torn to shreds with chair legs. But in the end it didn't come to that. As Raoul Hausmann shouted his programmatic plans for dadaist painting into the noise of the crowd, the manager of the sezession gallery turned the lights out on him."[6]
Photomontage
The call for new materials in painting bore fruit later the same year when Hausmann and Höch holidayed on the Baltic Sea. The guest room they were staying in had a generic portrait of soldiers, onto which the patron had glued photographic portrait heads of his son five times. "It was like a thunderbolt: one could - I saw it instantaneously - make pictures, assembled entirely from cut-up photographs. Back in Berlin that september, I began to realize this new vision, and I made use of photographs from the press and the cinema." Hausmann, 1958[ The photomontage became the technique most associated with Berlin Dada, used extensively by Hausmann, Höch, Heartfield, Baader and Grosz, and would prove a crucial influence on Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitsky and Russian Constructivism. It should also be pointed out that Grosz, Heartfield & Baader all laid claim to having invented the technique in later memoirs, although no works have surfaced to justify these claims. At the same time, Hausmann started to experiment with sound poems he called "phonemes"[8], and poster poems originally created by the chance lining up of letters by a printer without Hausmann's direct intervention.[9] Later poems used words were reversed, chopped up and strung out, then either typed out using a full range of typographical strategies, or performed with boisterous exuberance. Schwitters' Ursonate was directly influenced by a performance of one of hausmann's poems, fmsbwtazdu at an event in Prague in 1921.[10]
Der Dada: A New Periodical
After Hausmann contributed to the first group show, held at Isaac Neumann's Gallery, April 1919, the first edition of Der Dada appeared in June 1919. Edited by Hausmann and Baader, after receiving permission from Tristan Tzara in Zurich to use the name, the magazine also featured significant contributions from Huelsenbeck. The periodical contained drawings, polemics, poems and satires, all typeset in a multiplicity of opposing fonts and signs. At the beginning of 1920, Baader (President of All The World) Hausmann (the Dadasopher) and the 'World-Dada' Huelsenbeck undertook a six week tour of Eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia, drawing large crowds and bemused reviews.[11] The programme included primitivist verse, simultaneous poetry recitals by Baader and Hausmann, and Hausmann's Dada-Trot (Sixty-One Step) described as 'a truly splendid send-up of the most modern exotic-erotic social dances that have befallen us like a plague...'[12]
The First International Dada Fair, 1920
Organised by Hausmann, Grosz and Heartfield, along with Max Ernst, the fair was to become the most famous of all Berlin Dada's exploits, featuring almost 200 works by artists including Francis Picabia, Hans Arp, Ernst, Otto Dix & Rudolf Schlichter, as well as key works by Grosz, Höch and Hausmann. The work Tatlin At Home, 1920, can be clearly seen in one of the publicity photos taken by a professional photographer; the exhibition, whilst financially unsuccessful, gained prominent exposure in Amsterdam, Milan, Rome and Boston.[13] The exhibition also proved to be one of the main influences on the content and layout of Entartete Kunst, the show of degenerate art put on by the Nazis in 1937, with key slogans such as 'Nehmen Sie DADA Ernst' (Take Dada seriously!) appearing in both exhibitions.
The Mechanical Head
The most famous work by Hausmann, Der Geist Unserer Zeit - Mechanischer Kopf (Mechanical Head [The Spirit of Our Age]), c. 1920, is the only surviving assemblage that Hausmann produced around 1919-20. Constructed from a Hairdresser's wig-making dummy with various measuring devices attached, including a ruler, pocket watch mechanism, typewriter and camera segments and a crocodile wallet.[14]
Friendship With Schwitters
Huelsenbeck finished his training to become a doctor in 1920 and started to practice medicine; By the end of the year he had published the Dada Almanach and The History of Dadaism, two historical records that implied that Dada was at an end; in the aftermath, Hausmann's friendship with Kurt Schwitters deepened, and Hausmann started to take steps toward International Modernism. In September 1921, Hausmann, Höch, Schwitters and his wife Helma undertook an 'anti-dada' tour to Prague. As well as his recitals of sound poems, he also presented a manifesto describing a machine 'capable of converting audio and visual signals interchangeably, that he later called the Optophone'.[16]After many years of experimentation, this device was patented in London in 1935. He also took part in an exhibition of photomontages in Berlin in 1931, organise by César Domela Nieuwenhuis[17]. In the late 1920s, he re-invented himself as a fashionable society photographer, and lived in a ménage à trois with his wife Hedwig and Vera Broido in the fashionable district of Charlottenberg, Berlin. Hannah Höch- by now herself living with a woman, Til Brugmann - left a sketch of Hausmann around 1931; "After I had offered to renew friendly relations and we met frequently (with Til as well). At the time he was living with Heda Mankowicz-Hausmann and Vera Broido in Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße in Charlottenberg. Elfrided Hausmann-Scheffer, Til and I went there often. But I always found it very boring. He was just acting the photographer, and the lover of Vera B, showing off terribly with what he could afford to buy now - the ésprit was all gone." Hannah Höch[18] In later years, Hausmann exhibited his photographs widely, concentrating on nudes, landscapes and portraits. As nazi persecution of avant-garde artists increased, he emigrated to Ibiza, where his photos concentrated on ethnographic motifs of pre-modern Ibizan life. He returned to Czechoslovakia in 1937, but was forced to flee again in 1938 after the German invasion. He moved to Paris, then Peyrat-le-Chateau, near Limoges until 1944 living illegally with his Jewish wife Hedwig in a quiet secluded manner. After the Normandy landings in 1944 the pair finally moved to Limoges. http://www.raoulhausmann.com/
is the anglicized name of the German photomontage artist Helmut Herzfeld. He chose to call himself Heartfield in 1916, to criticize the rabid nationalism and anti-British sentiment prevalent in Germany during World War I. In 1918 Heartfield began at the Berlin Dada scene, and the Communist Party of Germany. He was dismissed from the Reichswehr film service on account of his support for the strike that followed the assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. With George Grosz, he founded Die Pleite, a satirical magazine. After meeting Bertolt Brecht, who was to have an influence on his art, Heartfield developed photomontage into a form of political and artistic representation. He worked for two communist publications: the daily Die Rote Fahne and the weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ), the latter of which published the works for which Heartfield is best remembered.[1]
In 1933, after the National Socialists came to power in Germany, Heartfield relocated to Czechoslovakia, where he continued his photomontage work for the AIZ (which was published in exile); in 1938, fearing a German takeover of his host country, he left for England living in Hampstead. He settled in East Germany and Berlin after World War II, in 1954, and worked closely with theater directors such as Benno Besson and Wolfgang Langhoff at Berliner Ensemble and Deutsches Theater. In 1967 he visited Britain and began preparing a retrospective exhibition of his work, "photomontages", which was subsequently completed by his widow Gertrude and the Deutsche Akademie der Künste, and shown at the ICA in London in 1969. In 2005, Tate Britain held an exhibition of his photomontage pieces.
His photomontages satirising Adolf Hitler and the Nazis often subverted Nazi symbols such as the swastika in order to undermine their propaganda message.One of his more famous pieces, made in 1935 entitled Hurrah, die Butter ist Alle! (English: Hurray, the butter is gone!) was published on the frontpage of the AIZ in 1935. A parody of the aesthetics of propaganda, the photomontage shows a family at a kitchen table, where a nearby portrait of Hitler hangs and the wallpaper is emblazoned with swastikas. The family — mother, father, old woman, young man, baby, and dog — are attempting to eat pieces of metal, such as chains, bicycle handlebars, and rifles. Below, the title is written in large letters, in addition to a quote by Hermann Göring during food shortage. Translated, the quote reads: "Iron has always made a nation strong, butter and lard have only made the people fat".http://www.towson.edu/heartfield/artarchive.html
Abstract film
Abstract film is a subgenre of experimental film. Its history often overlaps with the concerns and history of visual music. Some of the earliest abstract motion pictures known to survive are those produced by a group of German artists working in the early 1920s, a movement referred to as "Absolute" Film: Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter (artist), Viking Eggeling and Oskar Fischinger. These artists present different approaches to abstraction-in-motion: as an analogue to music, or as the creation of an absolute language of form, a desire common to early abstract art. Ruttmann wrote of his film work as 'painting in time.'
Abstract films are non-narrative visual/sound experiences with no story and no acting. They rely on the unique qualities of motion, rhythm and form inherent in the technical medium of cinema to create emotional experiences[
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
1].
Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling , Walter Ruttmann, Oskar Fischinger
κινηματογραφιστες και πειραματικη εκφραση
(απο την Wikipedia)
Hans Richter (April 6, 1888 – February 1, 1976)
was a painter, graphic artist, avant-gardist, film-experimenter and producer.
He was born in Berlin into a well-to-do family and died in Minusio, near Locarno, Switzerland.
Germany
Richter's first contacts with modern art were in 1912 through the "Blaue Reiter" and in 1913 through the "Erster Deutsche Herbstsalon" gallery "Der Sturm", in Berlin. In 1914 he was influenced by cubism. He contributed to the periodical Die Aktion in Berlin. [2] His first exhibition was in Munich in 1916, and Die Aktion published as a special edition about him. In the same year he was wounded and discharged from the army and went to Zürich and joined the Dada movement.
Richter believed that the artist's duty was to be actively political, opposing war and supporting the revolution. His first abstract works were made in 1917. In 1918, he befriended Viking Eggeling, and the two experimented together with film. Richter was co-founder, in 1919, of the Association of Revolutionary Artists ("Artistes Radicaux") at Zürich. In the same year he created his first Prélude (an orchestration of a theme developed in eleven drawings). In 1920 he was a member of the November group in Berlin and contributed to the Dutch periodical De Stijl.
Throughout his career, he claimed that his 1921 film, Rhythmus 21, was the first abstract film ever created. This claim is not true: he was preceded by the Italian Futurists Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna between 1911 and 1912 [3](as they report in the Futurist Manifesto of Cinema [4]), as well as by fellow German artist Walter Ruttmann who produced Lichtspiel Opus 1 in 1920. Nevertheless, Richter's film Rhythmus 21 is considered an important early abstract film.
About Richter's woodcuts and drawings Michel Seuphor wrote: "Richter's black-and-whites together with those of Arp and Janco, are the most typical works of the Zürich period of Dada." From 1923 to 1926, Richter edited, together with Werner Gräff and Mies van der Rohe, the periodical G. Material zur elementaren Gestaltung. Richter wrote of his own attitude toward film:
"I conceive of the film as a modern art form particularly interesting to the sense of sight. Painting has its own peculiar problems and specific sensations, and so has the film. But there are also problems in which the dividing line is obliterated, or where the two infringe upon each other. More especially, the cinema can fulfill certain promises made by the ancient arts, in the realization of which painting and film become close neighbors and work together."
USA
Richter moved from Switzerland to the United States in 1940 and became an American citizen. He taught in the Institute of Film Techniques at the City College of New York. [5]
While living in New York, Richter directed 2 feature films, Dreams That Money Can Buy and 8x8: A Chess Sonata in collaboration with Max Ernst, Jean Cocteau, Paul Bowles, Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp and others, which was partially filmed on the lawn of his summer house in Southbury, Connecticut.
In 1957, he finished a film entitled Dadascope with original poems and prosa spoken by their creators: Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Kurt Schwitters.
After 1958 Richter spent parts of the year in Ascona and Connecticut and returned to painting. [5]
Richter was also the author of a first-hand account of the Dada movement titled Dada: Art and Anti-Art [6] which also included his reflections on the emerging Neo-Dada artworks.
Filmography
Dadascope (1961)
8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1957)
Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)
Vom Blitz zum Fernsenhbild (1936)
Keine Zeit für Tränen (1934)
Hallo Everybody (1933)
Europa Radio (1931)
Neues Leben (1930)
Alles dreht sich, alles bewegt sich (1929)
Everyday (1929)
Rennsymphonie (1929)
The Storming of La Sarraz (1929)
Zweigroschenzauber (1929)
Vormittagsspuk ("Ghosts Before Breakfast", with music by Hindemith) (1928)
Inflation (1927)
Filmstudie (1926) with music by Darius Milhaud
Rhythmus 25 (1925)
Rhythmus 23 (1923)
Rhythmus 21 (1921)
See also
* Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920's and 1930's
Viking Eggeling (21 October 1880, Lund – 19 May 1925, Berlin)
was a Swedish artist and filmmaker.[1] His work is of significance in the area of experimental film, and has been described as absolute film and Visual Music.
At the age of sixteen, the orphaned Eggeling moved to Germany to pursue an artistic career. He studied art history in Milan from 1901 to 1907, supporting himself with work as a bookkeeper. He lived in Paris from 1911 to 1915; he was acquainted with Amadeo Modigliani, Hans Arp, and other artists of the time.[2]
In Zurich in 1918, he was introduced to Hans Richter by Tristan Tzara. Richter wrote that "The contrast between us, which was that between method and spontaneity, only served to strengthen our mutual attraction...for three years we marched side by side, although we fought on separate fronts."[3] In 1920 they began experimenting with film. In collaboration with Erna Niemeyer, Eggeling made a film called Symphonie Diagonale, which was completed in 1924 and first exhibited in May 1925, just before his death.
Walter Ruttmann (28 December 1887 – 15 July 1941)
was a German film director and along with Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling was an early German practitioner of experimental film.
Ruttmann was born in Frankfurt am Main; he studied architecture and painting and worked as a graphic designer. His film career began in the early 1920s. His first abstract short films, "Opus I" (1921) and "Opus II" (1923), were experiments with new forms of film expression, and the influence of these early abstract films is especially obvious in the work of Oskar Fischinger in the 1930s. Ruttmann and his colleagues of the avant garde movement enriched the language of film as a medium with new form techniques.
Ruttmann was a prominent exponent of both avant-garde art and music. His early abstractions played at the 1929 Baden-Baden Festival to international acclaim despite their being almost eight years old. Together with Erwin Piscator, he worked on the experimental film "Melodie der Welt" (1929).
During the Nazi period he worked as an assistant to director Leni Riefenstahl on Triumph of the Will (1935). He died in Berlin.
Select Filmography
* Lichtspiel: Opus I (1921)
* Lichtspiel: Opus II (1923)
* Lichtspiel: Opus III (1924)
* Lichtspiel: Opus IV (1925)
* Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) in collaboration with Alberto Cavalcanti
* Melodie der Welt (1929)
* Wochenende (1930) [an experimental film with sound only, no image]
* Acciaio (Stahl, 1933)
* Altgermanische Bauernkultur (1934)
* Schiff in Not (1936)
* Mannesmann (1937)
* Henkel, ein deutsches Werk in seiner Arbeit (1938)
* Waffenkammern Deutschlands (1940)
* Deutsche Panzer (1940)
* Krebs (1941)
Oskar Fischinger (22 June 1900, Gelnhausen, Germany — 31 January 1967, Los Angeles) was an abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter. He made over 50 short animated films, and painted c. 800 canvases, many of which are in museums, galleries and collections worldwide. Among his film works is Motion Painting No. 1 (1947), which is now listed on the National Film Registry of the U. S. Library of Congress.
Early life
Born in Gelnhausen, Germany, Oskar Wilhelm Fischinger was the fourth of six children. His father ran a drugstore while his mother's family owned a combination brewery, tavern, and bowling alley. At an early age he dabbled in painting, encouraged by the painters who came to capture Gelnhausen's scenery.[1] Also interested in music (he took violin lessons), he apprenticed at an organ-building firm until the owners were drafted into the war. The next year he worked as a draftsman in an architect's office, until he himself was called to duty. He was rejected as being unhealthy, and the Fischinger family moved west to Frankfurt. There Fischinger attended a trade school and worked as an apprentice at a factory, eventually obtaining an engineer's diploma.
Early career
In Frankfurt he met the theater critic Bernhard Diebold, who in 1921 introduced Fischinger to the work and personage of Walter Ruttmann, a pioneer in abstract film. Inspired by Ruttmann's work, Fischinger began experimenting with colored liquids and three-dimensional modeling materials such as wax and clay. He conceptualized a "Wax Slicing Machine", which synchronized a vertical slicer with a movie camera's shutter, enabling the efficient imaging of progressive cross-sections through a length of molded wax and clay. Fischinger wrote to Ruttmann about his machine, who expressed interest. Moving to Munich, Fischinger licensed the wax slicing machine to Ruttmann and began working on the first production model. Upon delivery, Ruttmann found that hot film lights often melted the wax to a serious degree. Ruttmann gave up, though during this time Fischinger shot many abstract tests of his own using the machine (some of these are distributed today under the assigned title Wax Experiments).
In 1924 Fischinger was hired by American entrepreneur Louis Seel to produce satirical cartoons that tended toward mature audiences. He also made abstract films and tests of his own, trying new and different techniques, including the use of multiple projectors.
In 1926-27 Fischinger performed his own multiple projector film shows with various musical accompaniment. These shows were titled Fieber (Fever), Vakuum, Macht (Power) and later, R-1 ein Formspiel. (Keefer, 2005)
Facing financial difficulties, Fischinger borrowed from his family, and then his landlady. Finally, in an effort to escape bill collectors, Fischinger decided to surreptitiously depart Munich for Berlin in June 1927. Taking only his essential equipment, he walked 350 miles through the countryside, shooting single frames that were later released as a film in itself: Walking from Munich to Berlin.
Berlin
Arriving in Berlin, Fischinger borrowed some money from a relative and set up a studio on Friedrichstraße. He soon was doing the special effects for various films. His own proposals for cartoons were not accepted by producers or distributors, however.[2] In 1928 he was hired to work on Fritz Lang's space epic Frau im Mond, which provided him a steady salary for a time. On his own time, he experimented with charcoal-on-paper animation. He produced a series of abstract Studies that were synchronized to popular and classical music. A few of the early Studies were synchronized to new record releases by Electrola, and screened at first-run theatres with a tail credit advertising the record, thus making them, in a sense, the very first music videos.
The Studies -- Numbers 1 through 12 -- were well-received at art theaters and many were distributed to first-run theatres throughout Europe. Some of the Studies were distributed to theatres in Japan and the US. His Studie Nr. 5 screened at the 1931 "Congress for Colour-Music Research" to critical acclaim. In 1931 Universal Pictures purchased distribution rights to Studie Nr. 5 for the American public, and Studie Nr. 7 screened as a short with a popular movie in Berlin. The special effects Fischinger did for other movies led to his being called "the Wizard of Friedrichstraße". In 1932, Oskar also married Elfriede Fischinger, a first cousin from his hometown of Gelnhausen.
As the Nazis consolidated power after 1933, the abstract film and art communities and distribution possibilities quickly disappeared as the Nazis instituted their policies against what they termed "degenerate art". Fischinger continued to make films, and also found work producing commercials and advertisements, among them Muratti Greift Ein (Muratti Gets in the Act) (1934), for a cigarette company, and Kreise (Circles) (1933), for an ad agency. The color Muratti commercial with it stop-motion dancing cigarettes was a sensation, screening all over Europe. Though Fischinger at times ran afoul of the Nazi authorities, he nevertheless managed to complete his abstract work Komposition in Blau in 1935. It was well-received critically, and contrary to popular myth, was legally registered.
At this time an agent from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had screened a print of Komposition in Blau and Muratti in a small art theatre in Hollywood, and Ernst Lubitsch was impressed by the films and the audience's enthusiastic response to the shorts. An agent from Paramount Pictures telephoned Fischinger, asking if he was willing to work in America, and Fischinger promptly agreed.
Hollywood
Upon arriving in Hollywood in February 1936, Fischinger was given an office at Paramount, German-speaking secretaries, an English tutor, and a weekly salary of $250. With no immediate assignment, Fischinger sketched and painted.[3] He and Elfriede socialized with the émigré community, but felt out of place among the elites.
Oskar prepared the film Allegretto, tightly synchronized to Ralph Rainger's tune "Radio Dynamics". Allegretto was planned for inclusion in the feature film The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936). Unfortunately, he found that Paramount had changed the film project from Technicolor to black-and-white. Also, Paramount printed the black-and-white version intercut with various live action images, so it was no longer totally abstract. Fischinger left Paramount. Several years later, with the help of Hilla von Rebay and a grant from the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, he was able to buy the film back from Paramount. Fischinger then redid and re-painted the cels, and made a color version to his satisfaction. This became one of the most-screened and successful films of visual music's history, and one of Fischinger's most popular films.
All Fischinger's filmmaking attempts in America suffered difficulties. He composed An Optical Poem (1937) to Franz Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody for MGM, but received no profits due to studio bookkeeping systems. He designed the J. S. Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor sequence for Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940), but quit without credit because all studio artists simplified and altered all his designs to be more representational. According to William Moritz, Fischinger contributed to the effects animation of the Blue Fairy's wand in Pinocchio (1940).[4] In the 1950s, Fischinger did create several animated TV advertisements, including one for Muntz TV which unfortunately never aired.
The Guggenheim Foundation required him to synchronize a film with a march by John Philip Sousa in order to demonstrate loyalty to America, and then insisted that he make a film to Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, even though he wanted to make a film without sound in order to affirm the integrity of his non-objective imagery. Secretly, Fischinger composed the silent masterpiece Radio Dynamics (1942) which breathes slow pulsating rhythms and astonishing single-frame flickers of painterly images.
Frustrated in his filmmaking, Fischinger turned increasingly to oil painting as a creative outlet. Although the Guggenheim Foundation specifically required a cel animation film, Fischinger made his Bach film Motion Painting No. 1 (1947) as a documentation of the act of painting, taking a single frame each time he made a brush stroke -- and the multi-layered style merely parallels the structure of the Bach music without any tight synchronization. Although he never again received funding for a film, the breathtaking Motion Painting No. 1 won the Grand Prix at the Brussels International Experimental Film Competition in 1949. Three of Fischinger's films also made the 1984 Olympiad of Animation's list of the world's greatest films. (The latter two paragraphs only are from the Fischinger biography by film historian William Moritz at the Fischinger Archive website.
Lumigraph
In the late 1940s Fischinger invented the Lumigraph (patented in 1955) which others have called a type of color organ. Like other inventors of color organs, Fischinger hoped to make the Lumigraph a commercial product, widely available for anyone, but this did not happen.
The instrument produced imagery by pressing against a rubberized screen so it could protrude into a narrow beam of colored light. As a visual instrument, the size of its screen was limited by the reach of the performer. Two people were required to operate the Lumigraph: one to manipulate the screen to create imagery, and a second to change the colors of the lights on cue.
The device itself was silent, but was performed accompanying various music. Fischinger did several performance in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco in the early 1950s, performing various classical and popular music pieces, and many were impressed by the machine's spectacular images. In 1964 the Lumigraph was used in the science fiction film The Time Travelers, in which it became a 'love machine' (this was not Fischinger's intent, this was the decision of the film's producers). His son Conrad even built two more machines in different sizes. After Fischinger's death, his widow Elfriede and daughter Barbara did performances with the Lumigraph, along with William Moritz, in Europe and the US.
Today one of the instruments is displayed at Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, and is still played occasionally. In February 2007 Barbara Fischinger performed on this Lumigraph. Other Lumigraphs are in California. Film and video documentation of Elfriede's Lumigraph performances are at the Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles, CA.
Further Reading
* William Moritz, Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger, (London: John Libbey & Company; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004) ISBN 0-253-21641-9
* Fischinger Bibliography at CVM Fischinger Research Pages
* Clavier à lumières
* Color organ
* Louis Bertrand Castel
* Mary Hallock-Greenewalt
* Thomas Wilfred
* Klein, Adrian Bernard, 'Coloured Light An Art Medium' 3rd ed. The Technical Press, London, 1937
* Rimington, Alexander Wallace, 'Colour-Music The Art Of Mobile Colour' Hutchinson, London, 1912
(απο την Wikipedia)
Hans Richter (April 6, 1888 – February 1, 1976)
was a painter, graphic artist, avant-gardist, film-experimenter and producer.
He was born in Berlin into a well-to-do family and died in Minusio, near Locarno, Switzerland.
Germany
Richter's first contacts with modern art were in 1912 through the "Blaue Reiter" and in 1913 through the "Erster Deutsche Herbstsalon" gallery "Der Sturm", in Berlin. In 1914 he was influenced by cubism. He contributed to the periodical Die Aktion in Berlin. [2] His first exhibition was in Munich in 1916, and Die Aktion published as a special edition about him. In the same year he was wounded and discharged from the army and went to Zürich and joined the Dada movement.
Richter believed that the artist's duty was to be actively political, opposing war and supporting the revolution. His first abstract works were made in 1917. In 1918, he befriended Viking Eggeling, and the two experimented together with film. Richter was co-founder, in 1919, of the Association of Revolutionary Artists ("Artistes Radicaux") at Zürich. In the same year he created his first Prélude (an orchestration of a theme developed in eleven drawings). In 1920 he was a member of the November group in Berlin and contributed to the Dutch periodical De Stijl.
Throughout his career, he claimed that his 1921 film, Rhythmus 21, was the first abstract film ever created. This claim is not true: he was preceded by the Italian Futurists Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna between 1911 and 1912 [3](as they report in the Futurist Manifesto of Cinema [4]), as well as by fellow German artist Walter Ruttmann who produced Lichtspiel Opus 1 in 1920. Nevertheless, Richter's film Rhythmus 21 is considered an important early abstract film.
About Richter's woodcuts and drawings Michel Seuphor wrote: "Richter's black-and-whites together with those of Arp and Janco, are the most typical works of the Zürich period of Dada." From 1923 to 1926, Richter edited, together with Werner Gräff and Mies van der Rohe, the periodical G. Material zur elementaren Gestaltung. Richter wrote of his own attitude toward film:
"I conceive of the film as a modern art form particularly interesting to the sense of sight. Painting has its own peculiar problems and specific sensations, and so has the film. But there are also problems in which the dividing line is obliterated, or where the two infringe upon each other. More especially, the cinema can fulfill certain promises made by the ancient arts, in the realization of which painting and film become close neighbors and work together."
USA
Richter moved from Switzerland to the United States in 1940 and became an American citizen. He taught in the Institute of Film Techniques at the City College of New York. [5]
While living in New York, Richter directed 2 feature films, Dreams That Money Can Buy and 8x8: A Chess Sonata in collaboration with Max Ernst, Jean Cocteau, Paul Bowles, Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp and others, which was partially filmed on the lawn of his summer house in Southbury, Connecticut.
In 1957, he finished a film entitled Dadascope with original poems and prosa spoken by their creators: Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Kurt Schwitters.
After 1958 Richter spent parts of the year in Ascona and Connecticut and returned to painting. [5]
Richter was also the author of a first-hand account of the Dada movement titled Dada: Art and Anti-Art [6] which also included his reflections on the emerging Neo-Dada artworks.
Filmography
Dadascope (1961)
8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1957)
Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)
Vom Blitz zum Fernsenhbild (1936)
Keine Zeit für Tränen (1934)
Hallo Everybody (1933)
Europa Radio (1931)
Neues Leben (1930)
Alles dreht sich, alles bewegt sich (1929)
Everyday (1929)
Rennsymphonie (1929)
The Storming of La Sarraz (1929)
Zweigroschenzauber (1929)
Vormittagsspuk ("Ghosts Before Breakfast", with music by Hindemith) (1928)
Inflation (1927)
Filmstudie (1926) with music by Darius Milhaud
Rhythmus 25 (1925)
Rhythmus 23 (1923)
Rhythmus 21 (1921)
See also
* Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920's and 1930's
Viking Eggeling (21 October 1880, Lund – 19 May 1925, Berlin)
was a Swedish artist and filmmaker.[1] His work is of significance in the area of experimental film, and has been described as absolute film and Visual Music.
At the age of sixteen, the orphaned Eggeling moved to Germany to pursue an artistic career. He studied art history in Milan from 1901 to 1907, supporting himself with work as a bookkeeper. He lived in Paris from 1911 to 1915; he was acquainted with Amadeo Modigliani, Hans Arp, and other artists of the time.[2]
In Zurich in 1918, he was introduced to Hans Richter by Tristan Tzara. Richter wrote that "The contrast between us, which was that between method and spontaneity, only served to strengthen our mutual attraction...for three years we marched side by side, although we fought on separate fronts."[3] In 1920 they began experimenting with film. In collaboration with Erna Niemeyer, Eggeling made a film called Symphonie Diagonale, which was completed in 1924 and first exhibited in May 1925, just before his death.
Walter Ruttmann (28 December 1887 – 15 July 1941)
was a German film director and along with Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling was an early German practitioner of experimental film.
Ruttmann was born in Frankfurt am Main; he studied architecture and painting and worked as a graphic designer. His film career began in the early 1920s. His first abstract short films, "Opus I" (1921) and "Opus II" (1923), were experiments with new forms of film expression, and the influence of these early abstract films is especially obvious in the work of Oskar Fischinger in the 1930s. Ruttmann and his colleagues of the avant garde movement enriched the language of film as a medium with new form techniques.
Ruttmann was a prominent exponent of both avant-garde art and music. His early abstractions played at the 1929 Baden-Baden Festival to international acclaim despite their being almost eight years old. Together with Erwin Piscator, he worked on the experimental film "Melodie der Welt" (1929).
During the Nazi period he worked as an assistant to director Leni Riefenstahl on Triumph of the Will (1935). He died in Berlin.
Select Filmography
* Lichtspiel: Opus I (1921)
* Lichtspiel: Opus II (1923)
* Lichtspiel: Opus III (1924)
* Lichtspiel: Opus IV (1925)
* Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) in collaboration with Alberto Cavalcanti
* Melodie der Welt (1929)
* Wochenende (1930) [an experimental film with sound only, no image]
* Acciaio (Stahl, 1933)
* Altgermanische Bauernkultur (1934)
* Schiff in Not (1936)
* Mannesmann (1937)
* Henkel, ein deutsches Werk in seiner Arbeit (1938)
* Waffenkammern Deutschlands (1940)
* Deutsche Panzer (1940)
* Krebs (1941)
Oskar Fischinger (22 June 1900, Gelnhausen, Germany — 31 January 1967, Los Angeles) was an abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter. He made over 50 short animated films, and painted c. 800 canvases, many of which are in museums, galleries and collections worldwide. Among his film works is Motion Painting No. 1 (1947), which is now listed on the National Film Registry of the U. S. Library of Congress.
Early life
Born in Gelnhausen, Germany, Oskar Wilhelm Fischinger was the fourth of six children. His father ran a drugstore while his mother's family owned a combination brewery, tavern, and bowling alley. At an early age he dabbled in painting, encouraged by the painters who came to capture Gelnhausen's scenery.[1] Also interested in music (he took violin lessons), he apprenticed at an organ-building firm until the owners were drafted into the war. The next year he worked as a draftsman in an architect's office, until he himself was called to duty. He was rejected as being unhealthy, and the Fischinger family moved west to Frankfurt. There Fischinger attended a trade school and worked as an apprentice at a factory, eventually obtaining an engineer's diploma.
Early career
In Frankfurt he met the theater critic Bernhard Diebold, who in 1921 introduced Fischinger to the work and personage of Walter Ruttmann, a pioneer in abstract film. Inspired by Ruttmann's work, Fischinger began experimenting with colored liquids and three-dimensional modeling materials such as wax and clay. He conceptualized a "Wax Slicing Machine", which synchronized a vertical slicer with a movie camera's shutter, enabling the efficient imaging of progressive cross-sections through a length of molded wax and clay. Fischinger wrote to Ruttmann about his machine, who expressed interest. Moving to Munich, Fischinger licensed the wax slicing machine to Ruttmann and began working on the first production model. Upon delivery, Ruttmann found that hot film lights often melted the wax to a serious degree. Ruttmann gave up, though during this time Fischinger shot many abstract tests of his own using the machine (some of these are distributed today under the assigned title Wax Experiments).
In 1924 Fischinger was hired by American entrepreneur Louis Seel to produce satirical cartoons that tended toward mature audiences. He also made abstract films and tests of his own, trying new and different techniques, including the use of multiple projectors.
In 1926-27 Fischinger performed his own multiple projector film shows with various musical accompaniment. These shows were titled Fieber (Fever), Vakuum, Macht (Power) and later, R-1 ein Formspiel. (Keefer, 2005)
Facing financial difficulties, Fischinger borrowed from his family, and then his landlady. Finally, in an effort to escape bill collectors, Fischinger decided to surreptitiously depart Munich for Berlin in June 1927. Taking only his essential equipment, he walked 350 miles through the countryside, shooting single frames that were later released as a film in itself: Walking from Munich to Berlin.
Berlin
Arriving in Berlin, Fischinger borrowed some money from a relative and set up a studio on Friedrichstraße. He soon was doing the special effects for various films. His own proposals for cartoons were not accepted by producers or distributors, however.[2] In 1928 he was hired to work on Fritz Lang's space epic Frau im Mond, which provided him a steady salary for a time. On his own time, he experimented with charcoal-on-paper animation. He produced a series of abstract Studies that were synchronized to popular and classical music. A few of the early Studies were synchronized to new record releases by Electrola, and screened at first-run theatres with a tail credit advertising the record, thus making them, in a sense, the very first music videos.
The Studies -- Numbers 1 through 12 -- were well-received at art theaters and many were distributed to first-run theatres throughout Europe. Some of the Studies were distributed to theatres in Japan and the US. His Studie Nr. 5 screened at the 1931 "Congress for Colour-Music Research" to critical acclaim. In 1931 Universal Pictures purchased distribution rights to Studie Nr. 5 for the American public, and Studie Nr. 7 screened as a short with a popular movie in Berlin. The special effects Fischinger did for other movies led to his being called "the Wizard of Friedrichstraße". In 1932, Oskar also married Elfriede Fischinger, a first cousin from his hometown of Gelnhausen.
As the Nazis consolidated power after 1933, the abstract film and art communities and distribution possibilities quickly disappeared as the Nazis instituted their policies against what they termed "degenerate art". Fischinger continued to make films, and also found work producing commercials and advertisements, among them Muratti Greift Ein (Muratti Gets in the Act) (1934), for a cigarette company, and Kreise (Circles) (1933), for an ad agency. The color Muratti commercial with it stop-motion dancing cigarettes was a sensation, screening all over Europe. Though Fischinger at times ran afoul of the Nazi authorities, he nevertheless managed to complete his abstract work Komposition in Blau in 1935. It was well-received critically, and contrary to popular myth, was legally registered.
At this time an agent from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had screened a print of Komposition in Blau and Muratti in a small art theatre in Hollywood, and Ernst Lubitsch was impressed by the films and the audience's enthusiastic response to the shorts. An agent from Paramount Pictures telephoned Fischinger, asking if he was willing to work in America, and Fischinger promptly agreed.
Hollywood
Upon arriving in Hollywood in February 1936, Fischinger was given an office at Paramount, German-speaking secretaries, an English tutor, and a weekly salary of $250. With no immediate assignment, Fischinger sketched and painted.[3] He and Elfriede socialized with the émigré community, but felt out of place among the elites.
Oskar prepared the film Allegretto, tightly synchronized to Ralph Rainger's tune "Radio Dynamics". Allegretto was planned for inclusion in the feature film The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936). Unfortunately, he found that Paramount had changed the film project from Technicolor to black-and-white. Also, Paramount printed the black-and-white version intercut with various live action images, so it was no longer totally abstract. Fischinger left Paramount. Several years later, with the help of Hilla von Rebay and a grant from the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, he was able to buy the film back from Paramount. Fischinger then redid and re-painted the cels, and made a color version to his satisfaction. This became one of the most-screened and successful films of visual music's history, and one of Fischinger's most popular films.
All Fischinger's filmmaking attempts in America suffered difficulties. He composed An Optical Poem (1937) to Franz Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody for MGM, but received no profits due to studio bookkeeping systems. He designed the J. S. Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor sequence for Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940), but quit without credit because all studio artists simplified and altered all his designs to be more representational. According to William Moritz, Fischinger contributed to the effects animation of the Blue Fairy's wand in Pinocchio (1940).[4] In the 1950s, Fischinger did create several animated TV advertisements, including one for Muntz TV which unfortunately never aired.
The Guggenheim Foundation required him to synchronize a film with a march by John Philip Sousa in order to demonstrate loyalty to America, and then insisted that he make a film to Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, even though he wanted to make a film without sound in order to affirm the integrity of his non-objective imagery. Secretly, Fischinger composed the silent masterpiece Radio Dynamics (1942) which breathes slow pulsating rhythms and astonishing single-frame flickers of painterly images.
Frustrated in his filmmaking, Fischinger turned increasingly to oil painting as a creative outlet. Although the Guggenheim Foundation specifically required a cel animation film, Fischinger made his Bach film Motion Painting No. 1 (1947) as a documentation of the act of painting, taking a single frame each time he made a brush stroke -- and the multi-layered style merely parallels the structure of the Bach music without any tight synchronization. Although he never again received funding for a film, the breathtaking Motion Painting No. 1 won the Grand Prix at the Brussels International Experimental Film Competition in 1949. Three of Fischinger's films also made the 1984 Olympiad of Animation's list of the world's greatest films. (The latter two paragraphs only are from the Fischinger biography by film historian William Moritz at the Fischinger Archive website.
Lumigraph
In the late 1940s Fischinger invented the Lumigraph (patented in 1955) which others have called a type of color organ. Like other inventors of color organs, Fischinger hoped to make the Lumigraph a commercial product, widely available for anyone, but this did not happen.
The instrument produced imagery by pressing against a rubberized screen so it could protrude into a narrow beam of colored light. As a visual instrument, the size of its screen was limited by the reach of the performer. Two people were required to operate the Lumigraph: one to manipulate the screen to create imagery, and a second to change the colors of the lights on cue.
The device itself was silent, but was performed accompanying various music. Fischinger did several performance in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco in the early 1950s, performing various classical and popular music pieces, and many were impressed by the machine's spectacular images. In 1964 the Lumigraph was used in the science fiction film The Time Travelers, in which it became a 'love machine' (this was not Fischinger's intent, this was the decision of the film's producers). His son Conrad even built two more machines in different sizes. After Fischinger's death, his widow Elfriede and daughter Barbara did performances with the Lumigraph, along with William Moritz, in Europe and the US.
Today one of the instruments is displayed at Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, and is still played occasionally. In February 2007 Barbara Fischinger performed on this Lumigraph. Other Lumigraphs are in California. Film and video documentation of Elfriede's Lumigraph performances are at the Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles, CA.
Further Reading
* William Moritz, Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger, (London: John Libbey & Company; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004) ISBN 0-253-21641-9
* Fischinger Bibliography at CVM Fischinger Research Pages
* Clavier à lumières
* Color organ
* Louis Bertrand Castel
* Mary Hallock-Greenewalt
* Thomas Wilfred
* Klein, Adrian Bernard, 'Coloured Light An Art Medium' 3rd ed. The Technical Press, London, 1937
* Rimington, Alexander Wallace, 'Colour-Music The Art Of Mobile Colour' Hutchinson, London, 1912
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