LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  PHOTOGRAPHS PART II  / 

105

PETER KEETMAN (German, b. 1916) SPIEGELNDE TROPFEN

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PETER KEETMAN (German, b. 1916) SPIEGELNDE TROPFEN
PETER KEETMAN (German, b. 1916) SPIEGELNDE TROPFEN "Peter Keetman, Prien a. Chiemsee, Jensenstra. 11" inscribed in pencil on verso signed "Keetman" in pencil on verso artist's stamp in purple ink on verso with artist's signature below in pencil vintage gelatin silver print mounted on board 11 1/2 x 15 1/8 in. (29.2 x 38.4 cm) 1950 PROVENANCE From the artist to Private Collection, GERMANY LITERATURE Reinhold Misselbeck, "Deutsche Lichtbildner," WEGBEREITER DER ZEITGENÖSSISCHEN PHOTOGRAPHIE, Cologne, 1987, p. 10 (illustrated) Peter Keetman, FOTOFORM, Berlin, 1988, cover and p. 53 (illustrated twice) Wulf Herzogenrath, "Subjektive Fotografie," DER DEUTSCHE BEITRAG 1848-1963, Berlin, 1989, p. 51 (illustrated) Rolf Sachsse, PETER KEETMAN: BEWEGUNG UND STRUKTUR, Cinubia, Amsterdam, 1996, p. 46 (illustrated) Barbara Auer, "Zwischen Abstraktion und Wirklichkeit," FOTOGRAFIE DER 50er JAHRE, ludwigshafen-am-Rhein, 1998, p. 37 (illustrated) Peter Keetman studied photography in Munich from 1935 to 1937 and worked in the studio of Gertrud Hesse in Duisburg from 1937 to 1939. Severely wounded during the war, he was not able to work again until 1947, when he undertook advanced studies in photography in Stuttgart. He was a founding member of "Fotoform" in 1949 and began a career as a freelance industrial and advertising photographer the following year. Keetman participated in the landmark exhibition, Subjektive Fotografie, organized in Saabrücken in 1951 by Otto Steinert. It celebrated a rebirth of creativity in European photography after years of suppression by the National Socialists. Subjektive Fotografie looked back to the "New Photography" of the twenties but with a heightened desire for self-expression. At the time of the exhibition Steinert wrote, "Those commonplace and merely beautiful pictures, which thrive mainly thanks to the charm of some actual object, are thrust into the background in favour of experiments and fresh solutions. Adventures into the realm of optics are still for the most part unpopular. But only that photography which enlists the help of the experimental will be able to lay bare all the technical formation of the visual experience of our times" (Quoted in >>SUBJEKTIVE FOTOGRAFIE<<: IMAGES OF THE FIFTIES, Essen, Museum Folkwang, 1984, p. 6). Wary of the manipulation of photography for propaganda by the previous totalitarian regime, many German photographers turned to abstraction, concurrent with a new wave of abstract painting. A translation of the present lot's title could be "Looking-glass drops." This bold, graphic pattern of oil droplets in water is a perfect example of "Subjektive Fotografie." A comment in the catalogue for the exhibition, perhaps in reference to this image, suggests that the drops of oil "seem in themselves to be small worlds" (reprinted in ibid., p. 152), another expression of the desire to be freed from the recent past.
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