UMBO. FOTOGRAF

UMBO – a „big bang“ in modern photography

UMBO – at the latest since the retrospective of this artist mounted by Herbert Molderings in 1995, the name has stood as a synonym for a kind of „big bang“ in modern photography in the mid-1920s: UMBO, born in Düsseldorf in 1902 as Otto Maximilian Umbehr, the second of ten children of a civil engineer and a teacher, is regarded as the inventor of the image of the New Woman, of the new image of the street, of photographic reportage as such. His name stands for the youthful departure of the Wandervogel movement from the Wilhelmine era into the early Bauhaus. It stands equally for Berlin as a media metropolis of the 1920s, spurred on above all by immigrants from Eastern Europe, for a rapidly developing film, music, theatre and cabaret scene, for glimpses into the backyards and kitchen-living rooms of overflowing tenement blocks. UMBO: this is the young artist plagued by self-doubt who, thanks to the impulses 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, so the story goes, survives National Socialism as an „anti“, whose Berlin studio and archive are completely destroyed by bombs in 1943, and whose attempts to resume his earlier existence as a photographer of the avant-garde fail in Hanover during the economic miracle of the West German post-war years; whose expressive early work, and subsequently his New Objectivity work, is rediscovered in the 1970s; and who, in 1979, shortly before his death, still experiences 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, draws essentially on UMBO’s estate. Guarded and moved for decades by Phyllis Umbehr, the artist’s daughter, and by the gallerist Rudolf Kicken, UMBO’s estate was acquired jointly in 2016 by the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, the Berlinische Galerie and the Sprengel Museum Hannover, thanks to the commitment of numerous partners. More than 600 photographs and extensive source material, supplemented by earlier acquisitions of the partner institutions Berlinische Galerie and Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau 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 with the complicated courses of history of his time can be answered only vaguely: the only early pictures to have survived are those that UMBO passed on to friends as his best, or gave to a few collectors. In the course of the digitisation of image holdings, moreover, photographs keep being washed to the surface that circulated – not always under UMBO’s name – in the press agencies and publishing houses of those years. Nevertheless the material, supplemented by selected press publications, yields an extremely multi-layered, dazzling picture, an artist’s biography of the twentieth century full of discontinuities, ruptures and unanswered questions. Not least, they revolve 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 Hannover, 8/2–12/5/2019
Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, 21/2–25/5/2020