Bhnenknstler (Self-portrait)

Beginning in 1919 and ending in 1933, Erwin Blumenfeld, a Dadaist and then later a New York fashion photographer, created collages in the true Dada spirit of irreverence and obsession. He and his closest friend from boyhood, Paul Citroen, worked together as the propagators of the anti-art movement in Holland between the World Wars. ALthough the two were close, they were highly competitive, according to Blumenfeld's son Yorick. In an exhibition catalogue for the Rachel Adler Gallery, New York from 1988 (six years after the Stockeregg exhibition), Erwin Blumenfeld: Dada Collage and Photography, Yorick wrote on his father's collages, "Isolated in Amsterdam, Blumenfeld hoisted his own Dada flag and turned to his major obsessions: sex, women, religion, death and self. The collages he made in the period 1919-1933 shed much light on his iconoclasm: his admiration and contempt for the church, his fascination for nuns, his irreverence for the art establishment of his day. But above all, Blumenfeld was preoccupied by his own image, hence his life long fascination with the shadows dividing his own profile as well as the animus/anima aspects of his personality."