Erwin Blumenfeld - Photographs New York Thursday, April 4, 2019 | Phillips

Photographs

New York Auction 4 April 2019

  • Provenance

    Jane Corkin Gallery, Toronto

  • Literature

    Blumenfeld, The Photographic Nudes of Erwin Blumenfeld: The Naked and the Veiled, p. 96, variant

  • Catalogue Essay

    Blumenfeld’s oeuvre exhibits not only his impact on fine art and fashion photography, but his passion for pushing the boundaries of the medium. Amidst the Dadaist movement in post-World War I Europe, the embrace of Surrealism led artists to abandon traditional darkroom practices and explore techniques such as cameraless imagery, photomontage, distortions, multiple exposures, and solarization. Like his contemporaries such as Man Ray, Herbert Bayer, and Paul Citroen, Blumenfeld experimented with many of these practices. Solarization, evident in the present lot, was achieved by exposing the print to light during the development process. The effect transformed the already carefully constructed nude composition into an even more dynamic image with a reversal of the positive and negative tones, producing a soft glow throughout.

Property from a Private West Coast Collection

171

Erwin Blumenfeld

Amsterdam

circa 1933
Unique gelatin silver print, solarized from a paper negative.
11 7/8 x 9 1/4 in. (30.2 x 23.5 cm)
Signed in stylus on the recto; signed by the sitter, Marina Schinz, in ink, typed credit, '495a keizersgracht' address, copyright credit and estate stamps on the verso.

Estimate
$10,000 - 15,000 

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Photographs

New York Auction 4 April 2019