UMBO. FOTOGRAF.

UMBO - a "big bang" of modern photography

UMBO - this name has been synonymous with a kind of "big bang" of modern photography in the mid-1920s at the latest since the retrospective of this artist organised by Herbert Molderings in 1995: UMBO, born Otto Maximilian Umbehr in Düsseldorf in 1902, the second of ten children of a civil engineer and a teacher, is regarded as the inventor of the image of the New Woman, the new image of the street, photographic reportage par excellence. His name stands for the youthful departure of the travelling birds from the Wilhelmine era to the early Bauhaus. It also stands for the media metropolis of Berlin, which in the 1920s was mainly inspired by Eastern European immigrants, for a rapidly developing film, music, theatre and cabaret scene, for glimpses into the backyards and kitchens of overflowing tenements. UMBO: This is the self-doubting young artist who, thanks to the impulses he received from his Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten and his artist friend Paul Citroen, becomes famous as a photographer virtually overnight and takes part in all the important avant-garde exhibitions of his time; who, according to the story, survives National Socialism as an "anti", whose Berlin studio and archive are completely destroyed by bombs in 1943 and whose attempts to reconnect with his former existence as an avant-garde photographer in the economic miracle of post-war West Germany in Hanover fail; whose expressive early and then neo-objective work was rediscovered in the 1970s; and who in 1979, shortly before his death, had his first solo exhibition in a museum context at the Spectrum Photogalerie in the "Kunstmuseum Hannover mit Sammlung Sprengel". This publication, which presents a selection of 200 works and numerous documents, is largely based on UMBO's estate. Protected and moved for decades by Phyllis Umbehr, the artist's daughter, and gallery owner Rudolf Kicken, UMBO's estate was acquired jointly by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, the Berlinische Galerie and the Sprengel Museum Hannover in 2016 thanks to the commitment of numerous partners. More than 600 photographs and extensive source material, supplemented by earlier acquisitions from the partner institutions Berlinische Galerie and Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, and in the case of the Sprengel Museum Hannover from the post-war archive REPORT/ Simon Guttmann, London, form the background. And yet the question of how this photographer was interwoven into the complicated historical processes of his time can only be answered vaguely: only those early pictures that UMBO passed on to friends as his best or gave to a few collectors have survived. In the course of the digitisation of image collections, photographs that circulated - not always under UMBO's name - in press agencies and publishing houses from those years have also repeatedly floated to the surface. Nevertheless, the material, supplemented by selected press publications, provides an extremely multi-layered, colourful picture, an artist's biography of the 20th century full of discontinuities, breaks and unanswered questions. They revolve not least around the failure of the avant-garde and the difficulty of building on its successes after the Second World War. The publication UMBO. FOTOGRAF. therefore offers the opportunity to re-examine the many projections associated with the name UMBO more than two decades after the first retrospective.

Exhibitions:
Sprengel Museum Hanover, 8/2-12/5/2019
Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, 21/2-25/5/2020