Otto umbehr biography
- German, 1902–1980 Otto Umbehr.
- Otto Maximilian Umbehr (January 18, 1902 – May 13, 1980), was a German photojournalist and artist who had studied in the Bauhaus and worked as a.
- Born 1902 in Duesseldorf, Umbo arrives at the Bauhaus in Weimar in autumn 1921, intending to become a painter.
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Bauhaus Photographer UMBO
Promoter of the “New Vision”
Otto Umbehr (Umbo) | The Dreamer, 1928/29 (Detail), Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau | © Phyllis Umbehr | Galerie Kicken Berlin | VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016
The work of photographer Otto Maximilian Umbehr, who was born in 1902 and took on the artist’s name of UMBO after 1923, has been purchased and preserved by three German museums. It puts a positive finish to UMBO’s difficult personal biography.
It has taken seven years of committed work to accomplish one of Germany’s most exciting collection combinations: the estate of the famous photographer UMBO (Otto Maximilian Umbehr) is now entirely in public ownership. Three museums have been able to secure the complete portfolio of the Bauhaus artist with the financial support of 14 patrons and sponsors. The participating establishments besides the Berlinische Galerie, are the Sprengel Museum in Hanover and the Bauhaus Dessau. The artist once lived and worked in all three places. 600 vintage prints are now being divided among the three museums, cor
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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 participat
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Otto Umbehr
Umbo studied at Bauhaus in Weimar from 1921 to 1923. After graduating, he settled in Berlin where he undertook various jobs before opening a portrait studio with Paul Citroen in 1926. Experimenting with photomontage, double exposure, collage, x-ray film and unusual camera angles, he produced innovative pictures which were included in the landmark exhibition ""Film und Foto"" (Stuttgart, 1926)
(...) Continue readingIn 1928 he joined the first cooperative photojournalist agency ""Dephot"", which he managed until its closure in 1933. He then worked as a freelance photojournalist, serving the German army from 1943 to 1945. During an air attack on Berlin in 1943, Umbo lost his entire archive (around 60,000 negatives). At the end of WWII he moved to Hannover and started to document post-war Germany. From 1957 to the early 1970s he taught photography in Bad Pyrmont, Hildesheim and Hannover.
Otto Umbehr - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
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