ladislav foltyn’s

belated debut

Iva Mojžišová

He never thought of his photographs as art. That may be why he had no objections when a certain foreign gallery keeper took the major part of his best photographs out of the country. Therefore, today we have before us but fragments of his photographic work.

He never attempted to come with his photographs before the public - with the exception of two or three. And here, too, each time someone else took care they be published. The first one appeared in a portfolio collected by the Bauhaus students over seventy years ago1. A pity though, that his photographic activity remained unknown, especially when, after this lapse of time, we realize how important each photograph involved in the creation of the principles of the New Objectivity must have been. It is all the more delicate in the Slovak context, as precisely Foltyn’s pictures were probably the first made in this spirit.

He became familiar with a camera when still a little boy. During the summer holidays in 1914, while staying with his uncle who owned a little shop with jewels and cameras at Pozheda in Yugoslavia, he had the first opportunity to see a focusing screen and observe passers-by out in the square through the range-finder of a Boxtengor. He tried his own camera on the “beauties of Slovakia“ as a secondary school student and carried it with him, together with a violin, also during his studies of architecture in Brno and Vienna. However, he then devoted most of his time not to photography, but to music which formed a natural pendant to his rational disposition.

He started with serious photography at the Dessau Bauhaus. It is well known that photography was already pursued during the Weimar period of Bauhaus, particularly after the arrival of László Moholy-Nagy and his wife Lucia. Less known is the fact that photography was not on the curriculum even after Bauhaus had to move to Dessau. When Hannes Meyer became director of the school, he brought training closer toward resolving social,
economic and technical issues and called upon Walter Peterhans, a man well versed in mathematics and also familiar with photography, to assume teaching of both these subjects. It was precisely at that time, in 1929, that Ladislav Foltyn was admitted to the Dessau basic course.

      A couple of months earlier, in the spring of that year, Stuttgart had hosted the exhibition Film und Foto which be-came famous as the most significant review of photographic modernism of the twenties. It meant a turning point, the end of an era of experimenting with the potentiality of this medium and the setting out on the road of a new vision and photographic grasp of objects.

      The standing of photography at Bauhaus was as if split, but it was so in appearance only and applied solely to those who had come before Peterhans. The impact of Moholy-Nagy, his theories and his dynamic and explosive ways, full of contrasts and filled with inventions, was not totally lost.

      However, Peterhans’s example of an exact, calm and contemplative reflection of the objective world was eliciting a grow-ing response. Ultimately, the New Objectivity came to be a challenge to the epoch and a presage of the coming thirties which brought in the end of radical utopias, substituting them for anxiety and disillusion, particularly in Germany.

      Foltyn found himself precisely at this crossroads. “Peterhans has influenced me for life,“ he says. Through a happy coincidence of circumstances, however, this case did not involve solely an attractively suggestive model. It came out later that much of what might have been considered as “taken over“ stemmed directly from Foltyn’s self-cognition and his becoming aware of his own dispositions and leanings. Among the most striking of them was his humility toward what he saw and his sense of uncovering the essence of things2. A role may have been played here by the fact that Foltyn’s major subject with Peterhans was not photography, but mathematics. The latter occupied far more space in the spiritual atmosphere of Bauhaus than might seem at first sight. Paul Klee then emphasized that algebra and geometrical problems teach to analyze, penetrate into depths and avoid taking over the ready-made, that they are a schooling toward the essential, in contrast to impression...

      The first task was to photograph crumpled newspapers in such a way that letters in front and also in depth be equally sharp. No requirements were made on individual creativity and nothing at all was said about art. The material studies were to be without any aesthetic ambitions, but nobody quite adhered to that. After all, the teacher himself was an aesthete par excellence, his example of neglecting form would have been in a harsh contrast. It might be said instead that considerable attention was devoted precisely to questions of form. Once again, as often happened at that time, prescriptions on the programme failed quite to tally with the shape of the finished works. The Bauhaus photographers for the most part went in for particularities. They did not wish to resemble one another. This stemmed from those particularities that by which they can be recognised even today.

      However, in photography of the New Objectivity, neither the choice of objects, nor their arrangment could be made to rest on the attractiveness of the topic. In this sense, Foltyn made proof of an even ascetic consistency. The subject was minimized: a glass, a piece of textile - a combination of natural and glass fiber, metal tubes, netting, a plate with oranges. A common and simple reality, but specially sited in space - though likewise simple. A restraint similar to that in the topic also controls the remaining compositional elements of photography. Nothing appeared that would dynamize the picture, no sharp black-and-white contrasts, no sharp lighting or dramatic shades, no unusual angles of view, no dynamizing of the composition with the aid of diagonals. Everything was subordinated to a will to present things as faithfully as possible. To show a nonliving object or landscape the way a human eye does not see it: in silence and motionless, uneventfully, laconically and clearly. Direct scattered light permitted to reflect as distinctly as possible the properties of the material. Foltyn’s - the architect’s right-angled view in which horizontals and verticals predominated - for in contrast to diagonals, they had their own indubitable definiteness - appeared as if in agreement with Kandinsky’s precept on two warm and two cold elements of the basic space that in common make up the dyad of rest.

      Here, some other of Kandinsky’s words emerge which he allegedly often addressed to his students: not “either - or“, but “and“3. An exact way of representation need not exclude imaginativeness. With Foltyn we find photographs in which that “and“ ended in a thoroughly evident self- expression. The apparently banal take of the slender neck of a violin in the picture My Violin, betrays a deep emotional relationship. The photograph of a tuning fork with the score of Bach’s Sonata for a violin solo called Self-Portrait, carries a sense of personal deposition and simultaneously is a message to those able to read the score.

      Foltyn’s photographic work, whether from the Bauhaus times or later, was never connected with utilitarian goals, even though as architect, he was a convinced functionalist. What then was his intent when he did not focus either on reportage4 or document, did not pursue commercial publicity, nor photograph architecture, had not the impression that he was doing art and never showed his pictures to anybody? He himself replies that photography meant to him an opportunity more deeply to immerse himself into reality. Through it he endeavoured to come to know the properties of materials, to see things more clearly and arrive at an understanding of shapes and spatial relations.

      The most fitting designation for such a kind of photography might perhaps be “Photographic Etudes“. Hence, exercises that should cause simplicity to look simple. And this is by no means an easy task, for as the photographer Jaromír Funke holds, the road from objective to expressive simplicity is a mountain tour after the beauties of glaciers...

      Just as études are not meant for concert performances, so also Foltyn’s photographs never crossed the threshold of his studio, his inner and outer lonesomeness... That may also be why they had no original names, he has marked them only now, after these many decades. But it is evident that they originated in series, or cycles - Vienna with its empty Prater and deserted Wienerwald, a beggar from Krásna Hôrka and proletarian children at play, nonpathetic countrywomen from Spi‰ and a silent landscape seen in its essential shape and light structure. It seems that precision and materiality may be attractive and poetic.

        The torso of Ladislav Foltyn’s photographic work, of this technician seeing and thinking analytically, this architect with a musician’s soul, this passionate reader of Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann, a socially sensitive man, is worth noting, be it only because it shares in the making of modern Slovak photography. As one of the very first he went out to search new ways of creating and particularly its new meaning. At the same time he preserved a surprising measure of independence from modernism’s imperatives. And those must have been especially pressing - after all, he was right in the very centre.

Notes:

1) This is a photograph of pipes in a folder-book of Peterhans’s students of 1929, in which authors’ names are not given and which was reproduced as an anonymous picture in Fotografie am Bauhaus (Hrsg. J.Fiedler), Berlin 1990, p.98. Among authors who could be identified up to now, are Gertrud Arndt, Irene Hoffmann, Hinnerk Scheper.

2) This trait was already noticed in Foltyn at the annual rating for the school year 1929-1930 at Bauhaus. Alfred Arndt, head of the department for interior furnishing, remarked that “his ability rapidly to grasp that which is the most essential should be specially emphasized“ - this was also corroborated by Mies van der Rohe with his signature.

3) Under Kandinsky, Foltyn went through the course Introduction into artistic forming and under Klee, that of Artistic forming.

4) An exception was a reportage of a forcible court eviction of a proletarian family, anonymously published in the Sunday Supplement to the daily Rote Fahne. It was published through the care of a student at Bauhaus, the photographer Willi Jungmittag who, as a regular contributor to this journal, was executed by the Nazis shortly after their coming to power.

Biography

Ladislav foltyn  was born at Spišská Nová Ves on September 2, 1906. He studied architecture at the Deutsche Hochschule in Brno 1924-28, at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna 1928-1929, at the Bauhaus in Dessau 1929-1932.

Individual Exhibitions

He exhibited his photographs for the first and last time at a compulsory individual exhibition as an undergraduate of the basic course at Bauhaus in Dessau, 1930.

Collective Exhibitions

He never took part in any collective exhibition.