Albert Renger-Patzsch: Joy Before the Object - Softcover

Donald Kuspit; Albert Renger-Patzsch

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0893815594 ISBN 13: 9780893815592

Publisher: Aperture, 1997

Synopsis

Photographs by Albert Renger-Patzsch
Preface by Weston Naef
Essay by Donald Kuspit

Albert Renger-Patzsch: Joy Before the Object is the first major publication in English on this influential German photographer, who is one of the founders of modern European photography. Amid the climate of intellectual, artistic, and political ferment in Germany between the wars, the idea of "beauty" was being redefined.

About this title

About the Author

Donald Kuspit is one of America's most distinguished art critics. Winner of the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism, given by the College Art Association, he is a Contributing Editor to Artforum, Sculpture, New Art Examiner, and Tema Celeste magazines, as well as Editor of Art Criticism. Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, he also holds honorary degrees from Davidson College, the San Francisco Institute of Arts, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he has been the A. D. White Professor at-Large at Cornell University. Dr Kuspit has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is the author and editor of hundreds of articles and books, most recently The Rebirth of Painting in the Late 20th Century and Psychostrategies of Avant-Garde Art.

From Booklist

Renger-Patzsch was sometimes considered the German Edward Weston because he, too, used photography in its purest, most transparent form--for sharply focused, beautifully detailed black-and-white prints. We know him for his close-ups of plants, animals, and industrial forms and for his pristinely composed views of trees and forests (trees were his spiritual "home" as subjects). Many of these appeared in his important 1928 volume, Die Welt ist sch{™}on, which was influential in the movement known as New Objectivity. This volume, bearing a title that better characterizes Renger-Patzsch's attitude, is a representative selection of his work. The accompanying "critical-biographical profile" of the photographer (Renger-Patzsch didn't call himself an artist, nor photography art) by Donald Kuspit wrestles most importantly with early critical response, especially the early dismissal of Renger-Patzsch by Marxist critic Walter Benjamin. Gretchen Garner

Edition details

• Publisher: Aperture
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0893815594
• ISBN 13: 9780893815592
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80