Getty Museum
Bauhaus Band
Creator
T. Lux FeiningerAmerican Photographer · 1910–2011
All works by this person →T. Lux Feininger was born in Berlin and spent his early years in Germany. He studied art at the Bauhaus School in Berlin under, among others, László Moholy Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer, yet he was unable to study photography there because it was not taught until 1929. Feininger learned it nevertheless, and in 1927 he went to work for the Berlin photo agency DEPHOT. Two years later he participated in t
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1931–1932
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
>The sheer prevalence in number, of clowning and grimacing pictures, is an indication of what I am speaking of...not only were my "models" everlastingly ready to "cut up," but I, too, must have been very ready to photograph their antics. My self critique led me to conclude that I was protesting against something in these pictures...I had judged the "official" Bauhaus tone-setters...guilty of taking themselves too damned seriously, and that they needed "taking down." Thus T. Lux Feininger recalled the mood informing his picturemaking during his time as a student at the German crafts school, the Bauhaus. This playful photograph shows three unidentified members of the Bauhaus band with their instruments humorously juxtaposed and a ladder that neither leans on any wall nor leads anywhere. The smiling man at the center, wearing a bow tie and bellboy's cap, strums the banjo held by the grinning man at the right, who in turn appears to singlehandedly support the ladder upon which a third man plays the slide trombone in a dramatic, downward thrust parallel to the lines of the ladder. Influenced by the Jazz Age, both players and photographers evoke the lively spirit of that revolutionary movement in music.
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