Emil Otto Hoppé Unveiling a Secret:
Photographs of Industries, 1912-1937
Curated by Richard Rinehart
Director of the Samek Art Museum at Bucknell University
“The industrial changes were, for Hoppé, a blending of art and science, a modern combination that is uniquely romantic, even spiritual.”
— Urs Stahel, Exhibition Curator
In the twenties and thirties, German-born, British photographer E.O. Hoppé set out to depict the romance of global industrial might. Traveling throughout Germany, Britain, the United States, India, and Australia, among other countries, he photographed the brave new technological landscape of industry, seeing its gargantuan machines as both technology and art.
This exhibition presents for the first time Hoppé’s iconic industrial images of the modern era, a subject he approached with formal idealism only to discover a darker landscape within: the preparation of machines and weapons that were part of the technology used in the Second World War.
WORKS
192 modern and vintage prints
DIMENSIONS
12 x 14 to 24 x 30 (inches)
30.5 x 35.5 to 61 x 76.2 (cm)
SPACE REQUIREMENTS
523 linear feet (159.41 linear meters)
INQUIRIES
exhibitions@curatorial.org
626.577.0044
FEE
$20,000 for an eight-week period
CURATOR BIOGRAPHY
Urs Stahel is a freelance writer, curator, lecturer and consultant. Curator of MAST in Bologna, consultant of the MAST collection of industrial photography, and visiting fellow at the University of Arts, London.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Emil Otto Hoppé (1878-1972) was one of the most important art and documentary photographers of the modern era whose artistic success rivaled those of his peers, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), Edward Steichen (1879-1973) and Walker Evans (1903-1975). Hoppé was one of the most renowned portrait photographers of his day, as well as a brilliant landscape and travel photographer. His strikingly modernist portraits describe a virtual Who’s Who of important personalities in the arts, literature, and politics in Great Britain and the US between the wars. Among the hundreds of well-known figures he photographed were George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, G.K. Chesterton, Leon Bakst, Vaslav Nijinsky and the dancers of the Ballets Russes, and Queen Mary, King George, and other members of the Royal Family.
PUBLICATION
Emil Otto Hoppé: The German Work
(Steidl, 2016)