- Artist
- Werner Mantz 1901–1983
- Part of
- Portfolio
- Medium
- Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 223 × 165 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased with funds provided by the Photography Acquisitions Committee 2011
- Reference
- P79941
Summary
Title of WDR-radio programme, Cologne 1928, printed 1977 is a photograph by Werner Mantz. Taken from above, it shows a collection of eggs almost filling the frame, with just a small portion of their container visible in the bottom left-hand corner. The striking formal composition turns the everyday subject matter into an abstract motif. The sharp play of light and shadow outlines the silhouettes of the eggs, revealing details that would normally be neglected by the human eye, such as minuscule streaks and marks on the surfaces of the shells. The disordered layering of the eggs within the container adds a sense of depth to this otherwise flat, frontal depiction.
Title of WDR-radio programme, Cologne is part of a portfolio of ten small, black and white gelatin silver prints that were seected by Mantz towards the end of his life as representative of his finest work. They were reprinted in 1977 in collaboration with the Berlin-based gallery Schurmann and Kicken in an edition of twenty-five plus ten artist’s proofs. Tate’s group of ten prints is number twenty. Each print is signed and dated at the bottom of the image. This still life composition discloses an attention to form and a geometric precision that can be found in other photographs within the portfolio, particularly in those depicting architectural details of buildings (see Staircase Ursuliner Lyzeum, Cologne 1928, printed 1977, Tate P79944).
Mantz began his career primarily as a portrait and advertising photographer, setting up a studio in 1921, before becoming one of the most prominent photographers of the Neues Bauen movement of modernist architecture in Cologne. In 1926 he started receiving commissions as an architectural photographer from figures such as Wilhelm Riphahn, Erich Mendelsohn, Bruno Paul and other representatives of avant-garde architecture who were implementing Konrad Adenauer’s housing policy in the city. Echoing the transformation of urban areas across Germany, the policy aimed to address the post-war shortage of viable accommodation in Cologne by producing modern, functional and high-capacity housing. Mantz established a second studio in Maastricht in 1932, moving there in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution, and his focus returned principally to portraiture.
Mantz’s unpeopled photographs, with their focus on geometry emphasised by intense shadowing, often have an air of objectivity and cleanliness that highlights the functionality of the buildings he captured. His widely disseminated photographs also contributed to the international appreciation of modernist architecture, whereby architects around the world could acquaint themselves with the new building sensibilities emerging in Russia, Germany, America and France in particular. Along with Albert Renger-Patzch (1897–1966) and August Sander (1876–1964), Mantz was a key exponent of the New Objectivity movement in pre-war German photography. With his formal compositions he is considered a precursor to some of the most important movements in post-war European photography, including the formalist architectural photography of Bernd Becher (1931–2007) and Hilla Becher (1934–2015), and the detached objectivity of the work of Düsseldorf School artists like Thomas Struth (born 1954). The deep shadows Mantz employed also anticipate those seen in the architectural and landscape imagery created by American photographers such as Robert Adams (born 1937) and Lewis Baltz (1945–2014).
Further reading
Werner Mantz: Architekturphotographie in Köln 1926–1932, exhibition catalogue, Museum Ludwig, Cologne 1982.
Maria Morris Hambourg and Christopher Phillips, The New Vision: Photography Between the World Wars, exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1989, pp.78–9.
Gaia Tedone
March 2012
Arthur Goodwin
December 2018
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