Theodor Hofmeister

German, 1865 - 1943

BiographyHofmeister, Theodor Ferdinand Eduard (1868-1943) and Oscar Ludwig Robert (1871-1937), German amateur photographers, born and active in Hamburg. The remarkable creative partnership between Theodor, a businessman, and Oscar, a judicial official, made them leading exponents of German pictorialism and, as members of Hamburg's Society for the Encouragement of Amateur Photography, key figures in the ‘Hamburg School’ of art photography at the turn of the century. Their chosen medium was the large-format gum bichromate print; The Solitary Horseman (1903), for example, acquired by Alfred Stieglitz and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, measures 68.5 × 98?cm (27 × 38 1/2 in). While each major work was jointly planned, Oscar made the exposure, and Theodor undertook the complex production of the final print. Their portraits and somewhat melancholy north German landscapes won international acclaim, and six of their pictures appeared in the July 1904 issue of Camera Work. In the 1920s, however, their work was eclipsed by New Vision photography, and remained forgotten until rediscovered by Fritz Kempe in the 1960s.

The Hofmeisters clearly met the demands of theorists like Alfred Lichtwark and Ernst Juhl for an ‘artistic’ photography that would go beyond the mere reproduction of reality. But their non-naturalistic colours, sometimes near-abstract simplification of forms—already, for example, in Marsh Flowers (1897)—and use of integral frames matched modern tendencies in the visual arts generally. Like the contemporary graphic revival and the rise of the large-format watercolour, their claim to wall space, salon-worthiness, and serious prices challenged the hallowed supremacy of the oil painting.

— Robin Lenman

Bibliography

Kopanski, K. W., and Philipp, C. G. (eds.), Meisterwerke russischer und deutscher Kunstphotographie um 1900: Sergei Lobovikov und die Brüder Hofmeister (1999)

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