2010-09-11
Munkácsi's revolution (part 9 / 11)
The shining through of an uncredited artist
::::: the road to oblivion
Looking back from now we can see that Munkacsi was trapped. He must have been a hurt ex-big timer, a vet from the previous century having to watch all those new artists march by him. He should have
changed for color and medium format, also he should have forgotten his former fame. But could this be really possible for anybody? Black and white photography today is still what it used to be at his time: it's fantastic, in photography it's the genuine form of sensing reality. It was deprecated for some time though - and this happened to be when Munkacsi would really have needed some nice commissions. Black and white won, Munkacsi won too - his pictures are just as fresh and amazing as some 70-80 years ago. What Munkacsi lost was just a battle - that happened to be the end of his life.
Fashion in the 1940's restarted with a conservative tone but it became success and today we can't see it but beautiful, just like music after Bach tempered scale. We love Dahl-Wolfe's visual poetry, she was reaching back to her fine-art studies and put sophisticated allusions into her work. Also she went color, and her gentle empathy for women opened a huge field in art for her to play. Her women were no longer just figures & shape - but persons with stories
(look at that wonderful Lauren Bacall picture (link) Wonderful, extremely wonderful. John Rawlings born in 1912 being a whole generation younger than Dahl-Wolfe and Munkacsi had a revolution too. He took color film out from the studio. He used available light too!
History repeats itself - now in color. Rawlings was a genius too, and his pictures are all beautiful, though it's also true that those taken outside are somewhat much more astonishing to our eyes (look at Gene Tierney, March 11, 1946 - here: (link), or the wonderful Vogue outtake in Maillot (link)).
Vogue was already a leading fashion mag representing luxury, sophisticated out of reach elegance of high society, cold beauty. This was elite, a new aristocracy. Horst P. Horst was there on board and Vogue became Vogue owing not just very little to his photography too. So life went on - without Munkacsi.
Is this a shame? Well. The shame is that despite being a big time photographer - that is a big time artist, he only got credited for his skills, not for his art. We wish he'd been regarded as a great artist and not only as a great star, he probably would not have died penniless with an open can of spaghetti in his fridge with a fork in it.
Life was changing and not for his favor. But still he could have had some commissions in a world where in just about every second a new expensive photograph got published and someone went home with a roll of money in his/her pocket. If only we could send an art manager back to hist time, get him to the MoMA and get him accepted as a great artist - for he himself was too busy with survival to take the time and necessary efforts to achieve this.
When André De Dienes (who was told by a fortuneteller at his young age that the double "M", the "MM" will play an important rle in his future) went to America he could bargain quite a great fee owing to the fantastic reputation of the Hungarian photographers, to Martin Munkacsi's in the first place (you'll read this in János Bodnár's wonderful interview-short-story). In 1938 Dr. Agha hired André De Dienes for Vogue. In 1942 Dienes had to leave and for a time he worked for a catalog (Montgomery World). It was called "fashion" too but of course we can imagine the difference between Vogue and a catalog. In 1943 Dr. Agha had to leave Vogue too.
Hoyningen-Huene left Bazaar in 1945 and went to Hollywood. WEEGEE Arthur Fellig went to Hollywood too and quit hist former art starting a totally new thing - manipulated images (quite a change for a hardcore documentarist). Some stayed, some left. Munkacsi happened to be on the non-staying side. We wish he had some place to go.
We wish he hadn't been world's and Bazaar's best paid photographer in the 1930's so he could stand a fair chance to get along in the 1940's. We wish we he could make it to the MoMA and get accepted as an artist - which he truly was.
Speaking of MoMA when he got to America Edward Steichen noticed him. Steichen the pioneer photographer however went to the war, he was this type. Munkacsi didn't. He fled from the war - that would have meant a tragic death for him in a camp like for the dear Doctor, Dr. Salomon (who got caught by the nazis in Holland and killed in Auschwitz in 1944 - after a month he got there).
Nobody knows why but Steichen as the curator of MoMA never reached out for the great photographer who could really use some acknowledgment. Of course it doesn't work like that - at least it really didn't. But Munkacsi was left there in a total oblivion. When he died in 1963 an it was Steichen's successor, John Szarkowski at the MoMA's photographic department (who also had been to the war). MoMA like other art institutes refused to take his photographs even for free. That's how they ended up in dusty cardboard boxes in a warehouse like time-capsules waiting for some nicer times to come.
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Photographs linked and/or appearing in this article belong to Ullstein Verlag (Ullstein Bild) (Munkacsi's Berliner period), to the Harper's Bazaar and ICP.org (International Center of Photography) and F.C. Gundlach respectively.
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következő fejezet: finally: shining through
a cikk fejezetei:
-JP-
2010-09-11