Kati Horna - Photographs New York Wednesday, October 11, 2023 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Like her countryman and friend Robert Capa, Hungarian-born Kati Horna (born Katalin Deutsch) became a citizen of the world through her photographic peregrinations in Germany, Spain, Paris, and Mexico. Horna photographed in Spain during the Civil War alongside Capa. While Capa focused on combat, Horna trained her camera on civilians whose lives were being destroyed by the conflict between the standing Republican Government and fascist forces lead by Generalissimo Francisco Franco. She focused especially on women and children, whose plight she felt was under-documented. In addition to reportage, Horna also created images, such as Subida a la catedral, Barcelona, that showed a more avant-garde approach to the medium, while maintaining her staunch humanist world view.  In Subida a la cathedral, Horna superimposes the cathedral wall, with its iron-barred windows, over the face of a woman, creating a meditation on of the church’s oppression of woman.

     

    After she was removed from Spain by the new Fascist Government she fled to Paris briefly, and ultimate settled in Mexico City, becoming part of that city’s brilliant artistic, literary, and political circles and continuing her own style of humanitarian photography.

    • Provenance

      Acquired from the artist's daughter

    • Literature

      America's Society, Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press, p. 133
      "La mujer española antes de la revolución," Libre-Studio: Revista de Acción Cultural al Servicio de la C.N.T., no. 9, March 1938, p. 13
      "Luchamos hasta la muerte o la Victoria por..." Umbral, no. 29, March 1938, p. 16
      Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, La Femme et le Surréalisme, p. 212
      Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, El surrealismo entre viejo y nuevo mundo, p. 214
      Bunkamura Museum of Art, Women Surrealists in Mexico, p. 167, no. 114
      Museo Nacional de Arte, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Los sentidos de las cosas: El mundo de Kati y José Horna, p. 58
      Jeu de Paume, Kati Horna, p. 103

41

Subida a la catedral, Barcelona

1938
Gelatin silver print, printed later.
9 7/8 x 7 1/2 in. (25.1 x 19.1 cm)
Signed in pencil and 'Foto KATI' stamp on the verso.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$5,000 - 7,000 

Contact Specialist

Sarah Krueger
Head of Department, Photographs
skrueger@phillips.com

 

Vanessa Hallett
Worldwide Head of Photographs and Chairwoman, Americas
vhallett@phillips.com

Photographs

New York Auction 11 October 2023