March 15th 2001

BILL BRANDT - KNOWN AND UNKNOWN

Edwynn Houk Gallery March 15th - May 5th 2001 New York

The Edwynn Houk Gallery, exclusive representative of the Estate of Bill Brandt, presents a retrospective exhibition of vintage photographs by England's pre-eminent master of photography. The prints are culled from the original personal collection of Noya Brandt, the photographer's widow. Several of these prints were featured in the landmark Bill Brandt retrospective at the International Center of Photography (New York) in 1999. The show opens March 15, 2000 and runs through May 5, 2001.

Bill Brandt's unique body of work composes England's sole major contribution to 20th century historic photography. Welding together the two dominant currents of modernist photography, the documentary and the surreal, Brandt developed his own intensely expressive style which ranged from symbolic visions of the English social spectrum to moody landscapes, and from bold portraits to highly abstract nudes.

Brandt (British, b. Germany 1904-83) began his career in Paris in 1929 as Man Ray's assistant. In 1931 he settled in London to work on his first important project, the production of the classic book The English at Home. In it, Brandt recorded the marked contrasts underlying British society, with its sharp separation between the worlds of the "upstairs" and "downstairs", of high society and of the working class. This first publication was followed in 1936 by A Night in London, an exploration of the city's darker aspects inspired by Paris de Nuit, the work of Brandt's good friend Brassaï. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Brandt supported himself as a photojournalist. His celebrated chronicles of industrial towns hit by economic hardship in the north of England, and of London in the time of the Blitz transcend however the limitations of the documentary genre and are infused with a distinctly surrealist sensibility.

In the post-war period, Brandt's work underwent a shift in focus. As Brandt himself explained it his "main theme of the past few years had disappeared; England was no longer a country of marked social contrast." Brandt then turned to nudes, portraits and landscapes, giving his surrealist inspiration full sway over his vision.

Although not always understood at the time, Brandt's series of nudes are considered today as his most innovative work. With their dramatic use of the contrasting values of black and white, and with their exploration of optical deformations, the nudes read as daring studies in abstractions, reminiscent of Henry Moore's sculptures. At the same time, Brandt developed the symbolist potential of photography in a series of landscapes inhabited by the spirit of Romanticism and directly inspired by the writings of poets and novelists such as Emily Brontë.

Himself an important figure of the British artistic and intellectual scene, Brandt produced striking portraits of celebrated contemporaries, such as Francis Bacon, E.M. Forster, Dylan Thomas and Henry Moore.

In 1969, New York's Museum of Modern Art honored Brandt with a first retrospective of his work. Several solo shows followed at both museums and galleries in Europe and the United States. In 1981, two years before Brandt's death, the Royal Photographic Society inaugurated its National Center of Photography in Bath with a retrospective. In 1999, the International Center of Photography (New York) presented a retrospective of rare vintage prints. This was accompanied by the publication of the comprehensive monograph Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt.

The Bill Brandt retrospective held at Edwynn Houk Gallery feature several unpublished and heretofore unknown photographs. The unknown work begins with nudes from 1928-1929, taken while Brandt was Man Ray's assistant in Paris and which predate Brandt's iconic nude studies in abstraction by 20 years.

The show will include a number of pieces from the French races, taken at the Auteuil race tracks in 1931 and which clearly anticipate on the work which was to become so famous in The English At Home such as the "Tic-Tac Men at Ascot".

Also featured are early exhibition prints of the surrealist work from Barcelona and Madrid done in 1932 and 33, and exhibition prints of the powerful social documentary work from Hungary in 1933 which include a moving and pivotal series on the living conditions of gypsies in Hungary.

The show will present most of the famous works from the series of The English at Home, of Nude distortions, and of Portraits. It will also include unpublished works from each series and a number of early unpublished photographs taken shortly after Brandt's arrival in England.

A number or works are mounted exhibition prints last shown in the 1930's.