1897 – 1969
Erwin Blumenfeld was born on 26 January 1897 in Berlin. In his hometown, the young Blumenfeld frequented the artistic bohemia and became friends in particular with the poet Walter Mehring, the muse Else Lasker-Schüler, and the artist George Grosz. In 1916, he created his first montages, sending them to his fiancée, in the tradition of Valentine’s Day. In 1918, he left Germany for Amsterdam and founded the Commission for Dadaist Culture in Holland with his childhood friend Paul Citroen. From 1923 to 1935, he ran a leather goods shop in Amsterdam. He made montages and wrote in a small room above the shop, when he could, between two customers; on weekends, he was a Sunday painter. In 1933, on the creative side, he devoted himself entirely to photography. In 1935, the leather goods business went bankrupt and Blumenfeld moved to Paris as a portrait photographer. His first photographs were published in the magazine Photographie. Arts et métiers graphiques in 1935. In March 1936, he exhibited at Pierre Vorms’ Galerie Billiet. In 1937, Tériade published Blumenfeld in the first issue of its new magazine Verve. With the Second World War, Blumenfeld was interned as a German national in the camps of Montbard, Loriol, Le Vernet, Catus and Agen. In 1941, he emigrated to New York where he shared a studio with photographer Martin Munkácsi. Success came very quickly, with, first and foremost, fashion contracts for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and many other Condé Nast magazines. In 1943, he opened his own studio at 222 Central Park South in Manhattan. In 1969, Blumenfeld died in Rome of a heart attack. His autobiography was published only posthumously; it has since been translated into several languages.
