MASI Lugano - Werner Bischof - Unseen Colour

1. Werner Bischof, Orchids (study), Zurich, Switzerland, 1943, Archival Pigment Print digitally remastered 2022, © Werner Bischof Estate / Magnum Photos

Beyond the shades of grey and white

    To launch the year of the MASI, the museum and the curators has decided to focus on an unknown part of a famous Swiss photographer: Werner Bischof. The artist who was born in Zürich in 1916 was mostly known for his controlled and stage photographs and his reportage during and after the Second World War.

    Now, it's more than 100 years after the artist birth, and it's time to reconsider his oeuvre in the history of Swiss photography and to discover new works. After the artist death, an estate was founded to house most of his works, after long years of research and inventory, Marco Bischof discovered new and unseen facets of his work, one of them being the subject of this exhibition.

    At the time when black and white photography was the trend, Berner Bischof was an outsider. He used and bought three cameras to experient this medium, a Rolleiflex (square negative), a Leica and a Devin Tri-Color Camera which is a camera based on a color separation system, which develops three films (blue, yellow and red) which later have to be assembled to create the colour negative.

    The subjects of those colourful photographs don't really change from the black and white photographs; it's still life, portrait and postwar reportage in Europe. 

The exhibition layout

2. Werner Bischof, The Reichstag, Berlin, Germany, 1946, Archival Pigment Print digitally remastered 2022, © Werner Bischof Estate / Magnum Photos

    In the exhibition of the MASI, which will later traveled to the Fotomuseum Winterthur the photographs (which are digital prints of the originals) are divided into sections based on the three cameras which the artist used during his life.

    The first section is dedicated to the Devin Tri-Color camera, which he used right from the beginning of his career. The Devin Tricolor Camera is a one-shot colour separation camera which sensor is exposed to three monochrome plates in a single exposure, each of them mounted behind a colour filter.

    This camera was invented and produced by the Devin Colorgraph Company based in New-York. The founder of the company patented the process in 1934. The camera is embodied in a metal enclosure, in it you have three plate-holders (red, green and blue) and two partial mirrors behind the lens. Like most of the cameras of the day, they were strange looking, fragile, heavy and quite complicated to use, even more when you can only use it with a tripod...

    At the time, he was still a student at the Zürich Kunstgewerbeschule, where he intended to become a painter, but he became a photographer by chance because the painting lessons were already full.

    During that time, he made photos in his studio, which is placed in a room of his house. Most of his photos are still life, light studies, abstract compositions which reveal the attentive, curious, experimental approach he developed after training at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich with Hans Finsler, pioneer of the 'Neue Sachlichkeit' (New Objectivity) movement. At the same school, another teacher also influences his work: Alfred Willimann.

    With that camera, he can do studio photography, but also commissions for advertising and fashion campaigns and experimentation. He experimented with the light and the shadows by using a photographic technique called Photograms, inspired by the practice of Moholy-Nagy (a professor of the Bauhaus).

    The second section of the exhibition is dedicated to the coloured photograph he made in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. All of those pictures was made with the medium format camera, the Rolleiflex 6 x 6, a more compared tool manufactured by Franke & Heidecke and later Rollei GmbH, in Germany. 

    With its simple construction and high-quality optics, the manufacturer was widely known and used by professional photographer, until much more versatile SLR cameras in 35mm (Nikon) and 6x6 (Hasselblad) formats spelled the end. 

    The Rolleiflex TLR was first made in 1927, shortly after the Rolleidoscop, a stereo camera with a focusing reflex viewfinder.

    During those time, he decided to focus on the reconstruction of Europe, and he traveled from Sardinian to Poland to Asia. He stayed in Love with Japan and stayed there for a year, exploring and photographing the interference of Western values and symbols of culture traditions.

    Another period, another camera. After he had returned from Asia, he decided to move back to Switzerland and to move on from the memories of the war and poverty to go back to nature. This time the artist uses a small Leica Camera to produce his trip to the States in 1953. 

    To afford this trip, he had to accept various commissions in New-York, including the reportage on the construction of an highway to be published in the magazine "The Lamp". He also decided to photographs American cities and their skyscrapers from above, by using a helicopter. Beside the wonderful photographs, Werner Bischof actually dislike the US, the lifestyle and the people.

    Nonetheless, he decided to explore the country and the continent with his wife Rosellina, between New-York, Mexico, Peru and Brasil.

Informations about the exhibition

Place: MASI Lugano

Date: 12.2.2023 – 2.7.2023

Curators: Ludovica Introini, Francesca Bernasconi and Marco Bischof

Ticket: Available at the front desk of the museum

Informations about the MASI

Piazza Bernardino Luini 6

CH-6900 Lugano

Phone: +41 58 866 42 40

Mail: info@masilugano.ch

© Lucas GASGAR / Lucas Art Talks 2023