Newsletter of The E.O. Hoppé Estate Collection

E.O. Hoppé: Fishing boats, Hamburg Harbour (Just Come In), Hamburg, 1925

Hoppé's German Photographs on Display

HAMBURG, GERMANY — Organized by the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Views of Hamburg: The City in the Painter’s Gaze exhibition features a variety of artistic studies of the German metropolis made in the first third of the twentieth century, a period of great social change and artistic experimentation. Ranging in style from Impressionistic to documentary, the 100 works in the exhibition include paintings of Hamburg by such artists as Pierre Bonnard and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner alongside photographs of the city by Modernist photographers Andreas Feininger, Herbert List, and E.O. Hoppé.

A native of Munich, Hoppé traveled extensively throughout Germany during the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s documenting Germany’s industrial buildup until WWII. In contrast, Hoppé also photographed Germany’s traditional rural towns and small villages during this period.

Views of Hamburg: The City in the Painter’s Gaze presents several of Hoppé’s vintage photographs of Hamburg harbor, the city’s port of trade. In these photographs, Hoppé photographically abstracts the geometrical forms of the cargo ships and gantry cranes that mark this part of the urban landscape.

In a related photographic essay published in 1928 titled “The Poetry of Iron and Steel” Hoppé’s declares industrial form has become the subject of his photographic abstraction. From the sharp geometric constructions of a mine head formed against the sky in Essen to the crisp industrial shine of the color cylinders in a printing works factory, Hoppé’s photographs capture the energy and dynamism of these purely functional structures. These compelling images draw attention to the aesthetics of mechanical design and show how Hoppé, along with his contemporaries, Albert Renger-Patsch and Werner Mantz, transformed industrial form into art.

View Hoppé's original 1928 article “The Poetry of Iron and Steel”.

Forthcoming Titles (2012–2013):

E.O. Hoppé: Nudes, 1909–1936 (Curatorial Assistance, 2012)
One Hundred Photographs: E.O. Hoppé and the Ballets Russes (Curatorial Assistance, 2012)
E.O. Hoppé: The German Work, Photographs 1925–1938 (Steidl, 2012)
E.O. Hoppé: Indian Subcontinent of the Cusp of Change (2012)
E.O. Hoppé: The British Machine, Photographs of Industrial Britain Between the Wars (2013)

Current Titles:
Hoppé Portraits: Society, Studio, and Street, Photographs 1909–1945 (National Portrait Gallery, 2011)
E.O. Hoppé’s Bombay: Photographs from 1929 (Marg Publications, 2010)
E.O. Hoppé’s Santiniketan: Photographs from 1929 (Marg Foundation, 2010)
E.O. Hoppé’s Amerika: Modernist Photographs from the 1920s (W.W. Norton, 2007)
E.O. Hoppé’s Australia (W.W. Norton, 2007)
Hoppé’s London (Guiding Light, London, August 2006)

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