Opening of Moriz Nähr exhibition
27.08.2018
Leopold Museum shows important innovator of photography in “Vienna around 1900”
Presentation at the Graphic Cabinet highlights the unconventional photographer’s thematic and stylistic diversity
Vienna (OTS)– With the exhibition “Moriz Nähr. Photographer of Viennese Modernism” the Leopold Museum shines the spotlight for the first time on the multi-faceted oeuvre of this highly unconventional photographer of Viennese Modernism. Moriz Nähr is currently considered one of the most important innovators of photography in “Vienna around 1900” and is mentioned in the same breath as Eugène Atget, the photographic chronicler of the city of Paris. Nähr’s work traces an arc from landscape photography and portraiture, via architectural photographs of the “urban landscape” of Vienna to documentations of the Vienna Secession’s exhibition stagings from 1898. Nähr enjoyed a life-long friendship with the “artist of the century” Gustav Klimt, whom the Leopold Museum is also currently devoting an exhibition to, and the two artists shared a special network of eminent personalities from the arts, culture and philosophy.
“The legends that have formed around Moriz Nähr are based on the one hand on his close ties with Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession, and on the other on his relationships with the family of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Imperial House of Habsburg, especially with the heir to the throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand who named him his court photographer in 1908. Fellow artists and photographers, as well as bourgeois and archducal highnesses from the House of Habsburg all held his photographic oeuvre in the highest esteem.”
Uwe Schögl, the exhibition’s curator
Divided into six aspects, the presentation conveys the thematic and stylistic variety of Nähr’s oeuvre – the exhibition opens with his self-stagings, followed by his landscapes and urban landscapes. The presentation features the works he executed in his capacity as photographer of the Vienna Secession as well as those works created in connection with his long-standing friendship with Gustav Klimt and his close ties to the Wittgenstein family.
The exhibition illustrates how Nähr gradually moved away from the originally depicted motif or event towards a free and unfettered use of photographic design principles, such as viewpoint, perspective, lighting and image detail. The autonomous character of Nähr’s work is owed to his adventurous, playful handling of esthetics, depiction principles and stylistic devices within diverse pictorial genres.
“The oeuvre of this singular photographer, which consists of commissioned photographs and of results of his freelance work, is shown in a comprehensive manner and in connection with the art of his time well into the late 1920s at the Leopold Museum’s Graphic Cabinet. The exhibition highlights the correlations between photography, painting and architecture, as well as the special artistic and biographical ties between Moriz Nähr and Gustav Klimt.”
Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum
Multi-faceted oeuvre of an unconventional photographer
More than 70 years after his death, Moriz Nähr is among the Austrian photographers whose work fetches high prices at auctions and trade shows, even though profound research into his life and oeuvre has only just begun.The exhibition at the Leopold Museum presents the artist in all his various facets. He was both a photographer of urban scenes and landscapes who was appreciative of the arts, a creative interpreter of portraits, an architectural and exhibition photographer of the Secession and the “Wittgenstein House”, a documentarian for the Austrian Imperial family, a chronicler for the Wittgenstein family and not least connected to Gustav Klimt through their inspiring artist friendship.
The exhibition comprises a total of 98 objects, including 84 photographs, a photo album, a graphic work, several paintings, some letters as well as other archival material. Featured in the presentation are works from numerous private collections, from the collections of the Austrian National Library, the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, the Albertina, the Wien Museum, the Klimt Foundation, the ARGE Sammlung Gustav Klimt, IMAGNO Brandstätter Images, the photographic collection OstLicht as well as from the antiquarian bookshop Georg Fritsch.
The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue in German and English with essays by Uwe Schögl and Markus Kristan as well as an introduction by Hans-Peter Wipplinger. Uwe Schögl is currently working with the directors of the Klimt Foundation, Peter Weinhäupl and Sandra Tretter, to compile a catalogue raisonné of Moriz Nähr’s oeuvre, which is due to be published next year.
Opening celebrations
The opening celebrations, hosted by Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger together with the exhibition’s curator Uwe Schögl (Austrian National Library), were attended by several hundred guests, among them Monika Faber (Photoinstitut Bonartes), the collector Elisabeth Leopold, Sylvia Eisenburger (Gesellschaft der Freunde der bildenden Künste), Peter Weinhäupl and Sandra Tretter (Klimt Foundation), Belvedere curator Franz Smola, the artists Martha Jungwirth and Walter Vopava, APA-OTS CEO Martina Wiesenbauer-Vrublovsky, Leopold Birstinger (Association of Friends of the Leopold Museum), the collectors Diethard and Waltraud Leopold, Gerald Piffl (APA-Picturedesk), Irina Kubadinow (Naturhistorisches Museum), Helene von Damm, Gustav Klimt descendant Gustav Huber with his wife Brigitta, Felizitas Schreier, Hannah Liko (foreign ministry), Peter Schubert (Jugendstil-Archiv), Andreas Maleta, the curators Heike Eipeldauer and Verena Gamper (Leopold Museum), the designer Brigitte Huber-Mader, Markus Führer (entrepreneur), Peter Baldinger (graphic designer), and many others.
Pictures of the opening: APA-Fotogalerie
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