People in 1940s and '50s America talked of Erwin Blumenfeld (Berlin 1897 – Rome 1969) in the same breath as Cecil Beaton and Man Ray. For a time he was the highest paid photographer in the world, with magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar queuing up to use his pictures.
Most of the published studies of his life and work virtually ignore Blumenfeld’s lengthy residence in the Netherlands (1918 – 1936). However, this first major exhibition about his ‘Dutch years’ reveals that all the ingredients that were later to make Blumenfeld’s photographs so prized were already clearly apparent in the work he did here. Moreover, the satirical, politically charged sense of humour that Blumenfeld exhibited in his collages and photocollages of the 1920s and ’30s shows that he was never willing to conform to social mores in general and the norms of fine art photography in particular. This is why Blumenfeld is today regarded as one of the greatest innovators in the history of 20th-century photography.