UMBO. PHOTOGRAPHER

UMBO - the »big bang« in modern photography

UMBO - at the latest since Herbert Molderings' 1995 retrospective of the artist, this name stands for a kind of »big bang« in modern photography in the mid-1920s: UMBO, born in 1902 in Düsseldorf as Otto Maximilian Umbehr, the second of ten chil­­-d­ren of a civil engineer and a teacher, is considered the inventor of the image of the New Woman, the new image of the street, and photographic report­age per se. His name stands for the departure of the German Youth Movement of the Wandervogel from the Wilhelminian era to the early Bauhaus.He also represents the media metropolis Berlin in the 1920s, spurred above all by immigrants from Eastern Europe, for a rapidly developing film, music, theater and cabaret scene, for glimpses into the ­backyards and kitchens of overflowing tenement houses. UMBO: This is the young artist plagued by self-doubt who becomes famous as a photog­rapher almost overnight thanks to the impulses ­received by his Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten and his artist friend Paul Citroen and hence participates in all ­important avant-garde exhibitions of his time; and who, according to the narrative, lives through National Socialism as an »anti« whose ­Berlin studio and archive is completely destroyed by bombs in 1943, and whose attempt to revive his former existence as a photographer of the avant-garde fails during the economic miracle of the West German post-war ­period in Hanover; whose expressive early, then new work is rediscovered in the 1970s; and who, in 1979, shortly before his death, has his first solo exhibition in a museum context in the Spectrum photo gallery at the »Kunstmuseum Hannover and Sprengel Collection«. The publi­cation, which presents a selection of 200 works and numerous ­documents, is essentially based on UMBO's estate. Protected and moved for decades by Phyllis ­Umbehr, the artist's daughter, and gallery owner ­Rudolf Kicken, UMBOs estate was acquired in 2016 thanks to the