CRAACE researchers will be taking part in online conferences in April 2021.
On 15 April, CRAACE PI Matthew Rampley will present his paper ‘The Search for Spirit and the Late Writings of Max Dvořák’ at the conference The Influence of the Vienna School of Art History II, organised on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Max Dvořák’s death by the Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.
A portrait of a man and a woman, overlapping in one image through the merging of two negatives. She, looking pensive and serious, he, excited and happy. Dissecting the images, thin white lines add an additional layer to the composition, splitting it into six uneven parts.
With all these different elements, which overlap and interrupt each other, and create a lively impression of two portraits, February’s Artwork of the Month is quite a playful image – despite its rather prescriptive title: Experiment with Two Negatives at the Bauhaus. Indeed, the photograph is one of the most experimental works by its author, the Slovak photographer Irena Blühová (1904–1991). It not only gives us a glimpse into student photography at the Bauhaus but also relates to less explored aspects of the school’s history – social photography and student activism – and the role in it of one of Slovakia’s best-known interwar photographers.
‘How much does the Austrian President Masaryk receive as his salary?’[1] Alice Schalek (1874–1956) was asked this question by a Japanese reporter in Tokyo during her journey there in 1923–24. Perceptions changed a lot after the First World War. The enterprising and renowned traveller Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937) had evidently been more successful with his countless diplomatic trips and obtained more publicity than the actual leaders of the first Austrian Republic, such as Karl Renner (1870–1950) or, later, Ignaz Seipel (1876–1932). And this might as well describe Schalek’s mission and the purpose of her trips: venturing into political affairs and social events in foreign countries and utilising them to promote herself (and, to a lesser extent, the interests of Austria). For this, the journalist and photographer Schalek literally had to explore new ways of entrepreneurship, especially as a woman travelling the world on her own.
This is what it looks like, my child, this world, that is what you have been born into, there are those born to shear and those born to be shorn. That, my child, is what it looks like in this world of ours and that of other countries, and if you, my child, do not like it, then you will just have to change it.
Set above a busy photo-collage of a newborn baby surrounded by newspaper cut-outs, these words call out for action in a world of political tension. Together with the images below it, they show a violent and turbulent world in which the baby seems already lost in its first moments of life. Forming part of a series of six photo collages created in Vienna in the early 1930s, This Is What It Looks Like gives a glimpse into anti-fascist photographic work in interwar Austria.
Since May 2018 a touring exhibition has been taking place of work from the photographic studio of Rudolf Sandalo (1899–1980). With an impressive and informative bi-lingual catalogue that includes high quality reproductions of nearly 280 photographs, it is worth trying to visit it at the City of Prague Museum, where it is still due to be on display.[1] Sandalo is little known outside of the Czech Republic, but he is noteworthy as the author of an extensive portfolio of photographs of the modern architecture that was built in Brno in the 1920s and 1930s. Almost single-handedly, he shaped the present-day image of the city as a major centre of central European modernism. This exhibition is important, not only for its attention to an oeuvre of great significance for Brno and Czechoslovak interwar culture, but also for the wider questions it raises about modern architecture and the role of photography in shaping how we see it.
