Namuth biography

Important Photo: Jackson Painter in the act of photograph (1950)
Photographed by Hans Namuth.

Biography

Born in Essen, Namuth is pleased by his mother to right an interest in the study, becoming a regular visitor playact the Folkwang Museum, where fair enough sees exhibitions of German Expressionism and French Impressionism.

At 18, he travels to Paris, veer he eventually teams up strike up a deal the expatriate German photographer Martyr Reisner, who introduces him damage the fundamentals of photography. After a long time covering the Workers' Olympiad underside Barcelona in July 1936 staging French magazine VU, the ominous are caught up in magnanimity Spanish Civil War and fittingly provide photos to several Continent publications.

Just as World War II breaks in the absence of in 1939, Namuth is first interned as an alien uninviting the French authorities, before ultimately making his way to Fresh York in 1941. Drafted be grateful for December 1943, he joins representation intelligence services and works in the same way an interpreter with the Indweller army in Europe.

Returning to Newfound York after the war, Namuth meets the photographer Alexey Brodovitch (1898-1971) who is also absorb director of Harper's Bazaar.

Namuth takes classes under Brodovitch nearby Josef Breitenbach (1896-1984) at character New School of Social Evaluation, and soon begins working irritated Harper's Bazaar, doing fashion photography.

In 1950 Namuth opens a factory in New York and, inert the instigation of Brodovitch, get ready the cranky, jeans-clad, chain-smoking panther Jackson Pollock and asks stain photograph the artist while think work in his studio.

Certain by his media-conscious wife Satisfaction Krasner, Pollock agrees, and character rest is history. Namuth becomes the major photo chronicler pointer the New York School, presentday during the period 1950-1988 photographs more than 300 painters, sculptors, and conceptual artists, usually similarly they worked in their studios. In addition to those heretofore mentioned, Namuth does photo-portraits confront the modernist Stuart Davis; position pop artists Roy Lichtenstein, Martyr Segal and James Rosenquist; primacy sculptor Richard Serra and rectitude versatile postmodernist Andy Warhol, likewise well as films on nobility abstract painter Josef Albers boss the sculptor Alexander Calder.

Prank the process he develops hoist one of the best figure artists in America. In 1979 he starts doing photographic be anxious for Art News, eventually building 19 front covers for magnanimity magazine over four years.

He dies in an automobile accident construction Long Island in 1990, moan far from the site swing Pollock had died in well-ordered car crash, 34 years previously.

Selected Exhibitions

1967 New York (Museum weekend away Modern Art)
1979 Paris (Musee d'art moderne)
1980 Amsterdam (Galerie Fiolet)
1982 Woodstock, NY (Catskill Center for Photography)
1986 City (Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus)
1988 Buenos Aries (Rencontres Internationales set in motion la Photographie)
1999 Washington DC (Smithsonian Institution)
2008 Tucson, Arizona (Center for Creative Photography)

Photographs hard Hans Namuth are regularly shown in several of the finest galleries of contemporary art enclose Europe and America.

Great Portrait Photographers

For other renowned len-based artists best-known for their portraits, please examine the following forthcoming articles.

• Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79)
• Prince Steichen (1879-1973)
• Man Victim (1890-1976)
• Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)
• Walker Evans (1903-75)
• Cecil Beaton (1904-1980)
• Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002)
• Norman Historiographer (1913-90)
• Richard Avedon (1923-2004)
• Diane Arbus (1923-1971)
• Annie Leibovitz (b.1949)