The Mary and Leigh Block Gallery’s large exhibition for Rudolf Koppitz is as interesting for the old photographs it presents as for what the presentation says about new attitudes toward photo-graphic history.
Here is the work of a gifted image-maker who during his life–1884 to 1936–became world famous and had exhibitions including as many as 500 photographs, yet since his death has been known, if at all, for one picture: a theatrical, even stagey, one in which a female nude symbolizes death.
The rediscovery of such an artist is, like his earlier eclipse, not an event that happens accidentally. Both have to do with the nature of the artist’s work as well as the opinions of scholars who determine its place in history. So, just as the retrospective “Rudolf Koppitz: Viennese `Master of the Camera’ ” reintroduces a great many beautiful photographs, the change in attitude that rescued the artist from oblivion now invests his photographs with the idea that their beauty is again historically significant.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, photographers were divided into two camps: professionals and amateurs. Koppitz was unusual insofar as he gave up a professional career in photography to join the amateurs, who were revitalizing the medium.
In Koppitz’s native Austria, as well as in England and the United States, the impulse toward art in photography expressed itself by making prints look like paintings or etchings. Called Pictorialism, the style involved elaborate printing processes and many handmade additions. Koppitz’s best-known image, for example, has a bare foot on one of the figures drawn rather than photographed.
This kind of doctoring was as common to Pictorialism as the soft-focus and granulated surfaces that seemed to dissolve subjects in Impressionist light; and from his earliest known landscape–a 1908 image of trees in bloom before a cathedral in Vienna–Koppitz was a master of it, often coloring his prints to heighten it further.
In North America, however, Pictorialism was on the wane among modern photographers only two years after Koppitz adopted it. For better and worse, histories always emphasize the pioneers who change its direction rather than the settlers who keep to an older track, polishing and refining.
Koppitz remained a Pictorialist in documentary photographs of World War I (he was a reconnaissance flier), modern dance images, nude studies and portraits. His sense of design became more streamlined and abstract, though even when he appeared to project a rectangle of light on two dancers whose movements he analyzes, Koppitz could not resist shattering the image into sepia-tinted motes that take the edge off his geometry.
In many ways, he was a Romantic whose sensibilities were formed by end-of-the-century Viennese aesthetics. He certainly was influenced by the exotic, erotic decorative paintings by Gustav Klimt. And his own photographs of studios, no matter how spare or bohemian, retain some of the hothouse aestheticism of interiors by Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann and the Vienna Workshops.
Koppitz stopped short of the modernism that led many Viennese artists to distort the visible world for the sake of intense emotional expression. But he did use representational forms to give access to spiritual states and was therefore close to a movement in painting and sculpture known as Symbolism.
The problem in the eye of history was how long Koppitz persisted, for Symbolism, like Pictorialism, had disappeared from the avant-garde vocabulary decades before he created his famous “Movement Study” (1925) that brought together the 19th Century myth of the fatal woman with the severity of Nathalia Goncharova’s designs for the 1923 ballet “Les Noces” and the unconstrained expressivity of Isadora Duncan’s forays into nude dancing.
This signature image, like some of Koppitz’s nude self-portraits, is at once formally compelling and symbolically absurd, for even manipulated photography is tied more strongly to the world of appearances than painting or sculpture.
Symbolist art was crucial in giving a generation of artists the courage they needed to invent forms of pure color and line that might better address the interior states they were after; it was, in that sense, a way station. For Koppitz, however, it was home, and he created a number of photographs, delicately poetic to electrically charged, that in relation to the most advanced art of the 1920s nonetheless look outdated and emotionally heavy.
The development of Koppitz’s final decade has no direct parallel with other visual art of the period. But as his contemporary, Polish composer Karol Szymanowski, moved from a lavish, decadent style to a new simplicity inspired by the mountain people of his homeland, so in a sense did Koppitz, who began making silver prints that sought to capture the daily life and customs of rural Austrians.
These clean, clear images of peasant faces and homes are some of the strongest in Koppitz’s output, yet the horrors of National Socialism were close enough in time for later historians to see how the innocent pictures sought a kind of Aryan ideal–which was a different, more powerful reason to keep their creator out of an international spotlight.
Today, the pioneers of photography have been thoroughly examined. So the time has finally come to examine closely the “little masters” of the medium, particularly those from Europe.
Koppitz is only the second Austrian photographer of the century to be given a major in-depth treatment–Heinrich Kuhn was the first. And the catalog for the present exhibition is the sole text in English to focus entirely on his achievements. This is a good moment, then, to begin thinking about the history of 20th Century photography, for the show goes some way to remind us of the kind of secondary but accomplished figures our existing histories have managed to happily, carelessly, leave out.
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`Rudolf Koppitz:
Viennese “MASTER OF THE CAMERA”
When: Through March 9
Where: Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, 1967 South Campus Drive, Evanston
Admission: Free
Call: 847-491-4000
