GERTRUDES ALTSCHUL: FILIGRANA" exhibition

MASP OPENS GERTRUDES ALTSCHUL EXHIBITION

One of the main female photographers working in Brazil, Altschul was one of the few female members of Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante

 

The MASP opens, on 27.8.21, the exhibition Gertrudes Altschul: filigree. The curatorship is signed by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the museum, and Tomás Toledo, chief curator of the institution. On show until 30.1.22, the exhibition will bring together 64 photographs, in vintage vintagethat cover the short but fruitful ten years of the artist's production, who worked from 1952 to 1962.

 

Gertrudes Altschul was a pioneering figure in the context of Brazilian modernist photography: a woman photographer at a time when portable cameras were just starting to become popular and in a scenario still dominated by men. Although widely recognised in the photographic milieu in the country, her work remains celebrated only in specialist circles, and is rarely published or exhibited. She was a member of Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB), which created the first wave of modern photographers in São Paulo, founders of the so-called Paulista School, of which she was one of the main exponents. Her main themes were modern Brazilian architecture and botanical motifs, especially leaves.

 

The MASP has 12 vintage photographs in its collection vintage of Altschul that will be in the exhibition, part of the Comodato MASP FCCB, which were presented in the museum for the first time in the show Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante: from the archive to the networkin 2016, curated by Rosângela Rennó. The Museum of Modern Art in New York - MoMA also has 12 vintage photographs vintage in its collection and works by the artist are in the exhibition Fotoclubismo - Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946-1964, organized by curator Sarah Hermanson Meister and curatorial assistant Dona Ostrander, on show until September of this year at the American institution. A photo of Gertrudes, by the way, is on the cover of the MoMA catalogue about the exhibition.

 

The opening coincides with that of Maria Martins: Imagining Desireabout one of the most instigating figures of Brazilian modern art. The curator is Isabella Rjeille, curator at MASP, and the assistant curator is Fernanda Lopes, Casa Roberto Marinho - the Rio de Janeiro institution is the museum's partner in this project.

 

This year, the MASP, guided by the theme of Brazilian Stories, will have exhibitions exclusively of women artists. On the same day, 27.8, the museum opens the Video Room: Zahy Guajajaracurated by Adriano Pedrosa, and The Changing Collection: Recent Donations which brings together 13 works by artists incorporated into the museum's collection and expresses the ongoing work being done to strengthen the presence of women in the collection. It is curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Amanda Carneiro, assistant curator at MASP.

 

TRAJECTORY

Gertrudes Altschul (Germany, 1904 - São Paulo, Brazil, 1962) lived in Berlin until 1939, when she migrated to Brazil, together with her husband, Leon Altschul, fleeing, like many other Jewish families, from Nazi persecution. In São Paulo, where

established, founded with his partner a hat adornment factory - at the time, the 1930s and 40s, a fundamental piece of clothing. He divided his time between the production of flowers and other ornaments for hats, which were distributed in fashion shops, and photography. 

 

At first, Altschul recorded the daily life of the city, family activities and his work, in photographs edited into albums. At the end of the 1940s he began to get closer to Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante - FCCB, a group that brought together photographers aligned with the movement known as the Paulista School, one of the pillars of modern photography in Brazil. After starting to attend FCCB meetings, sending her photographs to be assessed by the members, in 1952 she was accepted as a member, being one of the few women in the group - alongside Barbara Mors, Dulce Carneiro, Menha Polacow and Nair Sgterenyi. From an amateur photographer, who took photos on family trips, Altschul became an artist exploring modern photography techniques in vogue at the time. 

 

Altschul's photographic production was very much in line with the language of modern Brazilian photography, which sought to break with the classical principles of composition, exploring geometric and abstract aspects of the images and experimenting with plays on light, shadow, lines, rhythms and planes. The main themes of his photographs were modern Brazilian architecture and botanical motifs, particularly leaves (a direct relationship with his work for hat-making). 

 

"Altschul is a great example of modern Brazilian photography and of the so-called Paulista School of Photography. Her photographs of architecture, a compulsory theme at the FCCB, are iconic and very much represent that moment, but she also has a particularity: her interest in botany", explains Tomás Toledo. Even in a country with such exuberant vegetation as Brazil, this characteristic was not shared with other modern photographers.  

 

Altschul's photographic language was based on techniques such as solarization (which consists of inverting the shades of black and white), construction of small scenes (table top), geometrisms, photogram (technique of producing the photograph directly on the sheet of photographic paper using a beam of light), use of unusual angles and closed frames, which sought the loss of reference of what was being represented. "The most striking thing about her technique was the fine and delicate work of editing, cutting and superimposing negatives, which reveal the extreme manual skill for which she was known," says Toledo.

According to the curator, she had an ability to fool the eye, transform situations into geometry and abstract the referential image. During the research for the exhibition, carried out in partnership with Isabel Amado, who is responsible for rescuing Altschul's work and curator of the artist's collection, it was possible to make interesting discoveries - Amado was the curator of the show A modern woman at Casa da Imagem in São Paulo, in 2015, the first about the photographer. Together with the FCCB, Altschul made trips around Brazil visiting places that could generate good themes and

photos. "We find, for example, scenes of a fair in a country town and portraits of children, works that reveal Altschul's characteristic sensitivity, and which show the subtlety of the artist's gaze," he says. 

 

ABOUT FOTO CINE CLUBE BANDEIRANTE

Founded in 1939, more than 5 thousand members have passed through the four addresses of Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante - from the 22nd floor of Martinelli Building to 1108 Augusta Street, in São Paulo, where it is still active today. Like several groups and clubs that proliferated throughout the world in the 20th century, the FCCB was part of a great network for the exchange of photographic images. Through its salons, exhibitions and publications, it was, for many decades, the most important São Paulo's centre of information and technical teaching of photography, of dissemination of criticism, precepts and correspondences among photography enthusiasts, amateurs or professionals. The FCCB had among its members names as Geraldo de Barros, Chico Albuquerque, German Lorca, Thomaz Farkas, Gaspar Gasparian, Eduardo Salvatore, Marcel Giró, Madalena Schwartz and José Yalenti. 

 

CATALOGUE 

This will be the first monographic publication on the artist. Richly illustrated and with versions in Portuguese and English, organized by Pedrosa and Toledo, the catalogue will include texts by the curators and by Abigail Lapin Dardashti, Heloisa Espada, Helouise Costa, Paula Victoria Kupfer, and Sarah Hermanson Meister - MoMA curator who organized the exhibition on photoclubism on display at the museum -, besides a biographical note by Guilherme Giufrida. Contact proof sheets showing the artist's editing process, as well as some album pages, will be reproduced in the publication. More information: on the site masploja.org.br and at the museum's physical shop. The graphic design is by Alles Blau studio.

 

SERVICE

GERTRUDES ALTSCHUL: FILIGREE

27.8.21 - 30.1.22 

Address: avenida Paulista, 1578, São Paulo, SP

Telephone: (11) 3149-5959

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