Lot 721 Dα

In 1926 Umbo, who had studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar and who, at that time, found himself in a serious crisis, began with photography, encouraged by his friend and fellow artist Paul Citroen. Fitted by Citroen with the necessary photographic equipment, the autodidact Umbo succeeded, with the first photographs he took, to revolutionise portrait photography of that time. Neither a lifelike and detailed nor a representative portrayal was his aim. With his experimental approach he created incunables of modern portrait photography with a highly abstract and graphical impression whose immediacy, due to their extremely close vision and radical details, the beholder can hardly elude. It was this new style of portraiture on which Umbo's reputation as a protagonist of the “New Vision” was based on. As a reward for his help, his friend and patron Paul Citroen received, between 1926 and 1930, the first print of each image which was considered by Umbo as truly accomplished. In August 1943, Umbo's apartment and studio in Berlin-Wilmersdorf were completely destroyed in an air raid, and all negatives and prints, that is to say his whole photographic work, was lost. When Citroen realized that there was a growing interest in photography of the 1920s, he turned back, in 1975, around 40 vintage prints of his most prominent images of the pre-war time to Umbo who never succeeded to follow up his success of that period and, by that time, was living in lean circumstances in Hanover. (For Umbo's life and work please see Herbert Molderings, op. cit.).
The works offered here are the first copy prints which were probably produced by one of Umbo's photographer friends in Hanover from the vintage prints shortly after their return in 1975. They stand out due to their high quality and closeness to the original prints as well as due to the fact that they are all masterpieces of Umbo's early work that were never editioned later on and which therefore are fairly rare.

We would like to thank Herbert Molderings for his kind advice concerning the origin of the prints offered here.