Photo Record
Images
Metadata
Photographer |
Théodore Brauner (1914-2000) |
Title |
Untitled (Hedda) Co. 1961. Conceptual Portrait of the artist Hedda Sterne |
Date |
ca. 1961 |
Medium |
Vintage gelatin silver print, chemically enhanced |
Description |
Born in Vienna, Théodore Brauner was taken to Romainia, his family's home country, at age 4. His father, a poet, was involved in Theosophy; his older brother, Victor, was a noted Surrealist painter. In 1931, age 23, he joined the Surrealist group Alge in Bucharest. With them, in 1934, he made his first photographs without a camera, using direct sunlight (and sometimes moonlight) exposure. He called these images Solarfixes. After leaving Romania in 1942, he immigrated to Israel in 1944, where his Solarfixes were exhibited for the first time in Jerusalem (1952). The next time they would be exhibited as a group would be at his posthumous 2001 show at the Janos Gat Gallery in New York City. Solarfixes use neither a camera nor a darkroom. Brauner wrote of his approach: "I find myself unimpeded by rules, free and independent. I impose my own set of rules. My white is latent black, my rainbow goes from infra-white to ultra-black. The revelation is seized just as the paper, soaked in the usual liquids (fixative, developer) turns into light or a transparency in the color of flames or ashes." He considered the Solarfixes to be his most important achievement, and resisted gallery offers to show them, preferring to see them on museum walls; he did not want them sold or separated. He believed this body of work to be his most important achievement, wanted them to be seen complete, as a long personal odyssey. Brauner settled in Paris in 1956. The following year he began work on a series of "photographic anthropomorphisms," collectively titled The Masks. This conceptual portrait of his fellow Romanian, the artist Hedda Sterne (1910-2011), is part of that series and was made during Brauner's visit to New York City in 1961-62. Gift of Edvard Lieber. |
Catalog Number |
2015.004 |
Object Name |
TQAPrint, Photographic |
Current Exhibition |
Crosscurrents: Selections from the Permanent Collection |