John Gutmann (German 1905-1998)
Mardi Gras in New Orleans: The Southern temperament of a high school band leader, 1937
Vintage ferrotyped gelatin silver print on single-weight paper
Photographer’s credit stamp with typewritten title labels on verso
Print size: 10 x 8 inches
Mat size: 17 x 14 inches
Condition: Overall Good/Fair; handling marks visible only in raking light; corners slightly chipped, RARE vintage print
JG-NO-020
Retail: $5500
BIO:
Born in Germany and trained as a painter, Gutmann took up photography shortly before he arrived in the United States in 1933. With a European’s cultural background, and an eye trained in the German avant-garde aesthetic, Gutmann observed aspects of American culture that eluded that of Americans themselves. Though Edward Weston was the acknowledged master in California at the time Gutmann made these photographs, Gutmann’s work was not self-consciously aesthetic like Weston’s and other of the f/64 group; rather, it is ironic, ethnographic, and often ambiguous. Though full of social observation, it is motivated not by a desire to reform or change, but only to observe.
Gutmann has been the subject of a number of important museum exhibitions internationally, as well as a recipient of a 1977 Guggenheim fellowshipJohn Gutmann (1905–1998) was one of America’s most distinctive photographers. Born in Germany where he trained as an artist and art teacher, he fled the Nazis in 1933 and settled in San Francisco, reinventing himself as a photo-journalist. Gutmann captured images of American culture, celebrating signs of a vibrant democracy, however imperfect. His own status as an outsider—a Jew in Germany, a naturalized citizen in the United States—informed his focus on individuals from the Asian-American, African-American, and gay communities, as well as his photography in India, Burma, and China during World War II. Gutmann’s interests in painting and filmmaking, his collections of non-Western art and artifacts, and his pedagogy, all figure in a body of work at once celebratory and mysterious.
Gutmann was born to prosperous German-Jewish parents, in Breslau, Germany (since 1945, Wrocław, Poland). At age twenty-two, he graduated from the regional Academy of Arts and Crafts, where he studied with leading Expressionist painter Otto Müller. In 1927 Gutmann moved to Berlin, where he taught art to schoolchildren, participated in group exhibitions, and in 1931 had a solo show at the prestigious Gurlitt Gallery. However, his career was interrupted by the rise to power of the National Socialists in early 1933. While his family made plans to immigrate to New York, Gutmann set out on his own with San Francisco as his destination, and photography as his new profession. Before departing Germany, he acquired a Rolleiflex camera, hastily shot three rolls of film, and managed to secure a contract from the Berlin office of Presse-Photo. Making the most of a bad situation, he explored a new life as a foreign correspondent who would supply the very modern European illustrated press with views and reports from the American West.
By 1936, he had broken his contract with the Berlin press agency and made a new one with Pix in New York. By 1937, he had begun to teach art regularly at San Francisco College (later San Francisco State University), and this became his primary profession after a World War II era stint in the U.S. army. Gutmann retired his professorship in 1973 and began to reassess his body of work, sorting through boxes of negatives and making new prints of selected examples from the 1930s. It was a well-timed exercise: not only did Gutmann’s images satisfy a growing historical appetite for Depression-era photography, they also seemed compatible with certain kinds of experimental photography then emerging in the contemporary art scene. Before his death in 1998, Gutmann had seen his work featured in gallery and museum exhibitions, catalogues, and monographs.
By bequeathing his rich archive of nearly 5000 modern photographic prints, negatives, tearsheets, letters, and some drawings and early art prints to the CCP, John Gutmann has left us with the task of pursuing the rich knots, braids, tangles and threads in his complex life and work that unfolded over a most tumultuous and provocative century of modernity. – CCP
Monographs:
1984: The Restless Decade: John Gutmann’s Photographs of the Thirties, Max Kozloff & Lew Thomas
1985: Gutmann, Art Gallery of Ontario by Maia-Mari Sutnik
1989: John Gutmann: 99 fotografias / America 1934-1954 by Marvin Heiferman
1997: Parelles in Focus by John Gutmann
2000: Photography of John Gutmann: Culture Shock by John Gutmann and Sandra S. Phillips
2009: John Gutmann: The Photographer at Work by Sally Stein and Douglas R. Nickel
Collections:
CCP
ICP
The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art
MoMA
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
SFMOMA
Stanford University and more
Select Solo Exhibitions:
1980: John Gutmann: Photographs, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
1983: John Gutmann: Women, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
1983: John Gutmann: Ten Photographs, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
1991: John Gutmann: Vintage Contact Prints, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
1988: John Gutmann: Taking Pictures – Signs, Graffiti and Tattoos 1935-1987, Fraenkel Gallery
1985: John Gutmann: Vintage Prints, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
PIX Publishing Agency:
We are now representing a large collection of prints from P.I.X. (PIX) Publishing Inc., the photography agency founded in New York City in November 1935 by German photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt & George Karger and photography agents Leon Daniel (chief of Associated Press in Berlin from 1927-1935) & Celia Krutschuk, all of whom fled Nazi Germany and found their new homes in NYC.
In 1973, the PIX Publishing agency archive was donated to an east-coast library where housed until 2018. PIX represented such photographers as Cecil Beaton, Ferenc Berko, Edouard Boubat, Josef Breitenbach, Robert Capa, Joe Clark, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Ed Feingersh, Laura Gilpin, John Gutmann, Nina Leen, Don McCullin, Marion Post-Wolcott, Willy Ronis, Fred Stein, Ezra Stoller, Julian Wasser, Garry Winogrand, George Zimbel and many more.
PIX also worked with the prestigious agencies Camera Press, Dalmas, Gamma, and Holmes-Lebel, among others. PIX also represented Gökşin Sipahioğlu and Gilles Caron, the founders of world-renowned SIPA Press.
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