Exhibition dates:
Exhibition curators: Dr Simone Förster together with Anna Volz
Aenne Biermann (1898-1933)
Self-Portrait with Silver Ball
1931
Gelatin silver print
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg
Another strong woman, another inspirational female avant-garde 1930s photographer. Just look at the darkness of the pear in her photograph Fruit Basket (1931, below). The photographer proclaims the beauty and decay of nature. Magnificent.
Marcus
Many thankx to the Pinakothek der Moderne for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on thep hotographs for a larger version of the image.
For the autodidact Aenne Biermann (1898-1933) the camera was a means of closing in on things and situations in her immediate environment. From the mid 1920s onwards she found great pleasure in capturing unfamiliar and unexpected views of everyday experiences and events in her photographs. Although Aenne Biermann worked in relative isolation with regard to the avant-garde developments in larger cities, comprehensive displays of her work were shown at all major modern photographic exhibitions from 1929 onwards. Her oeuvre, created within just a few years – Aenne Biermann died in 1933 following an illness – is now regarded as one of the most important within the Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement in photography and New Objectivity.
The exhibition comprises some 100 original photographs from the holdings of the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation that boasts one of the most extensive collections of Aenne Biermann’s work. Selected works from public and private collections, together with records and archival documents, illuminate the artist’s work and career.
#PinaBiermann
Aenne Biermann (1898-1933)
Gartenkugeln [Garden Balls]
Nd
Silver gelatine print
Aenne Biermann (1898-1933)
Ficus elastica
1926-28
Silver gelatine print
46.7 x 35 cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann und Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
An avid amateur mineralogist, it was through her collection of rocks that in 1926 she met the geologist Rudolf Hundt, who commissioned her to photograph his specimens the following year for his scientific work. Her photographs of minerals transformed her practice from the early personal views of her children to the close-up, direct studies of form that would define her photographs of plants and people that followed and make her a central figure in New Objectivity photography. Thus 1926 began a period of intense productivity for Biermann that lasted until her untimely death, from liver disease, at the age of thirty-five, in 1933.
Mitra Abbaspour on the Museum of Modern Art website [Online] Cited 03/08/2019
Aenne Biermann (1898-1933)
Finale
before October 1928
Silver gelatine print
47.4 x 34.8 cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann und Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Aenne Biermann (1898-1933)
A Child’s Hands
1928
Silver gelatine print
12.3 x 16.6 cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann und Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Aenne Biermann (1898-1933)
Lady with Monocle
1928/29
Silver gelatine print
17 x 12.6 cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann und Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Aenne Biermann (1898-1933)
View from my Studio Window
1929
Silver gelatine print
23.6 x 17.3 cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann und Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Today, Aenne Biermann (1898-1933) is considered one of the major proponents of ‘New Photography’. Although she was only active as a photographer for a few years and, unlike her female colleagues Florence Henri, Germaine Krull and Lucia Moholy, for example, had neither an artistic training nor moved within the avant-garde circles of major urban centres, Aenne Biermann developed her own markedly modern pictorial style that established her position as a representative of contemporary avant-garde photography within a very short time. Clear structures, precise compositions with light and shadow, as well as cropped images focussing on specific details are characteristic of Aenne Biermann’s photography. They elicit a unique poetry from the people and objects in her everyday surroundings and establish an ‘intimacy with things’, as Aenne Biermann wrote in 1930.
Growing up in a Jewish factory owner’s family on the Lower Rhine, Aenne Biermann did not move on to higher education; instead, her musical skills were furthered and she was given piano lessons. Following her marriage to the merchant Herbert Biermann in 1920, she moved to Gera / Thuringia and became part of an upper-middle class, intellectual society that was extremely open to modern movements in art and culture and cultivated these within its own local radius. For Aenne Biermann, the starting point for her close involvement with photography was the birth of her children Helga (1920) and Gerd (1923). Initially used merely as a medium to document her children’s progress, from the mid 1920s Aenne Biermann developed her own, creative sphere in her photographic work. She focussed her camera on plants, objects, people and everyday situations and used the medium as an artistic means to access her own personal surroundings.
In 1928 the art critic Franz Roh arranged for the photographer’s first solo exhibition to be held at the Graphisches Kabinett Günther Franke in Munich and presented her work in Das Kunstblatt, a trend-setting monthly magazine for contemporary art in Germany. This led to her participation in numerous major exhibitions of modern photography, such as Film und Foto (1929), and solo exhibitions in Oldenburg, Jena and Gera. Aenne Biermann’s pictures received awards in photographic competitions and were published in books, art magazines and illustrated journals. In 1930 her photographs appeared in Franz Roh’s Fototek series of books: Aenne Biermann. 60 Fotos is one of the rare monographs of a photographer’s work of the time.
As a result of the artist’s early death and the family’s forced emigration in the 1930s, a large part of the photographer’s archive was lost. Its whereabouts remains unknown to this day. In more than forty years of extensive and intense research Ann and Jürgen succeeded in assembling a large number of images that give a representative picture of Aenne Biermann’s œuvre and now form one of the largest collections of the photographer’s work.
The presentation comprises more than 100 original photographs, 73 of which are, in part, large-format exhibition prints from the holdings of the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation. Loans from the Museum Folkwang, Essen, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Gera, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Kunstbibliothek, the Münchner Stadtmuseum, the Galerie Berinson, Berlin, the Franz Roh Estate and the Dietmar Siegert Collection, Munich, as well as the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Archive, Zülpich, complement the exhibition.
Press release from the Pinakothek der Moderne [Online] Cited 28/07/2019
Aenne Biermann (1898-1933)
Contemplation
1930
Silver gelatine print
58 × 42 cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann und Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Aenne Biermann (1898-1933)
Repair
1930/31
Silver gelatine print
24.8 x 18 cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann und Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Aenne Biermann (1898-1933)
Rail Tracks
1932
Silver gelatine print
24.1 x 17.5 cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann und Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Aenne Biermann (1898-1933)
Fruit Basket
1931
Silver gelatin print
16.6 x 23.6 cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann und Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Aenne Biermann (1898-1933)
Eggs
1931
Silver gelatin print
17 x 23.9 cm
Photo: Sibylle Forster
Ann und Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
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