Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, Kyotographie presents the first Japanese exhibition of Alfred Ehrhardt (1901-1984), a major photographic artist of the German avant-garde.

Composer, painter, and filmmaker, as well as photographer, Ehrhardt studied at the Bauhaus (then in Dessau) in 1928-29 and attended Josef Albers’s preliminary course. At the end of his stay, he joined the Art Academy of Hamburg where he directed a preliminary course on Materials Study, the first of its kind outside the Bauhaus.

In the early 1930s, Alfred Ehrhardt took an active part in Hamburg’s artistic life. But his modernist conceptions and his propinquity to the Bauhaus led him to be dismissed from his teaching post immediately after the National Socialists seized power. In 1933, he moved to Cuxhaven near the North Sea, where he made his living as an organist. It is there, where the Elbe river empties into the Wadden Sea, a region characterized by extensive tidal flats, that he discovered his new vocation as a photographer. The natural structures created by the action of the sea and the wind upon the sand fascinated him and inspired his remarkable series “Das Watt” (”The Tidelands”) (1933-36), which was published as a book in 1937 and is still viewed as a classic of the genre today. This was the beginning of a thorough and methodical exploration of various forms of nature. Between 1938 and 1941, he produced several series of photographs investigating crystals, as well as sea organisms such as shells, snails, corals, and sponges. His scientific interests led him at the same time to explore the field of microphotography and document the tremendous diversity of form in snow crystals. These photographic inventories of rare beauty look back to the German Naturphilosophen and the work of scientists studying the geometry of nature in the 19th and early 20th centuries, in particular Ernst Haeckel. They also reveal the influence of Josef Albers, Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Later, Ehrhardt created as many as fifty documentary films, including “Dance of the Shells” (1956), which received numerous awards.

With his unique blend of abstraction, minimalism, serial form, scientific inquiry, and the graphic quality of his work, Ehrhardt in a way straddles the two major trends in photography of his time: New Objectivity and New Vision. What Ehrhardt learned in the Bauhaus preliminary course is reflected in the compositional precision of his photographs, and in his exploration of the qualities of materials and the texture of surfaces. His experience as a musician also made him sensitive to visual rhythm, dynamics and counterpoint. At the core of his work lies the idea—central for the Bauhaus and, earlier, German Romanticism—that the study of nature, its underlying laws, and “timeless, elementary, primal forces” should be the starting point for artistic creation.

Scenography: Endo Architect & Associates

Exhibition organized in cooperation with the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation, Berlin

Around the exhibition:

14 April 2019: lecture by Kotaro Iizawa on the influence of Bauhaus on Japanese photography, followed by a talk with Christiane Stahl, director of the Alfred Ehrhardt