ART REVIEW : Women, and Europe, on the Edge : In the 1920s and 1930s, as a new Getty exhibition makes plain, a sizable number of women turned to the camera as a medium for their own self-invention.

Around 1930, Else Thalemann made an extensive series of photographs chronicling the transformation of the Ruhrgebiet , a rapidly industrializing section of Germany’s Ruhr River Valley that came to play a pivotal role in arming the nation for a devastating, expansionist war. Among the pictures is a fearsome image of a grim-faced young boy standing in a field, seemingly trapped between two worlds of awesome power.

In the foreground at the left, a hefty peasant woman, seen from behind, laboriously turns the soil with a shovel. In the distance at the right, equally anonymous steel mills and coke furnaces rise against the flat, gray sky. Thalemann held her camera low to the ground, just above the grass, so that the woman and the factories seem to be Gargantuan presences.

These faceless symbols loom over the small boy, who stands between them looking warily in our direction. It’s as if the youth is emblematic of a new Germany, caught between the powerful memory of an agrarian past, personified by the stolid peasant woman (his mother?), and an authoritative industrial future, recorded in the towering factories that substitute for mountains on the landscape’s horizon.

In her way, too, the photographer turns out to be emblematic of the period. Not much is known about Else Thalemann, whose work is among some 50 prints in “Women on the Edge: Twenty Photographers in Europe, 1919-1939,” at the J. Paul Getty Museum. More should be, given the provocative nature of this picture.

Part of the reason for her relative obscurity is that, as was common for contract work of the day, her published pictures were officially attributed to her employers, Heinrich Hauser and Ernst Fuhrmann. She was caught between worlds of her own: Women were moving rapidly into hitherto restricted areas of social and public life, and thus becoming increasingly emancipated, while still being significantly held in check. Thalemann could be employed as a photojournalist, but her own identity was a subterfuge.

This engaging Getty exhibition, which remains through Nov. 28, was organized by Judith Keller and Katherine Ware, curators in the museum’s department of photographs. More than half the artists included are German, and of those that are American, French, British and Swiss, almost all were active in Germany between the wars.

Not surprisingly, the influence of the Bauhaus is everywhere to be seen. The Bauhaus idea of an independent, avant-garde art school revived, updated and democratized the ancient system of artist-apprenticeship. Lucia Moholy, Ellen Auerbach, Grete Stern, Florence Henri and many others worked or studied with or married Bauhaus masters, who sought to replace the old instructional training of aristocratic academies.

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The show’s decided German emphasis, which may in part have been dictated by the scope of the Getty’s collection, seems significant. For, in some respects, the period separating the close of World War I and the start of World War II was less a time of peace than merely a politically anxious, socially tumultuous timeout in one, big, 20th-Century upheaval in Europe. Germany was its epicenter.

The exhibition, while far too small to comprehensively address its complex and important theme of the changing characterization of womanhood in the decades between the wars, nonetheless provides a coherent and thoughtful introduction to a topic of great moment. In the 1920s and 1930s, as the show makes plain, a sizable number of women turned to the camera as a medium for their own self-invention.

A democratization of art had been implicit in the very invention of the camera a century before. The capacity for persuasive image-making was now in the hands of more kinds of people than at any time in history--more kinds, including women. Technological advances in the 1920s further enhanced the promise, as cameras became smaller and mass production brought down prices.

In the show, the idea of photographic self-invention is sometimes evoked in simple ways, through formal maneuvers and the choice of subjects. Grete Stern, for instance, photographed her own face upside-down while lying on a pillow, then turned the picture right-side up. The result is an oddly compelling picture of a woman’s subtly destabilized face.

Together with Ellen Auerbach, her partner in a commercial firm named ringl + pit (after their schoolgirl nicknames), she also photographed a stylish woman with sharply bobbed hair, eyebrows tweezed into pencil-thin lines, applying lipstick in a mirror. The model’s face is like a blank canvas, on which she happily paints her new identity; its artifice and mutability are further implied by the mirror’s reflective surface.

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Elsewhere the inventiveness is more abstract or conceptual. Hilde Hubbuch made abstract photograms by placing objects directly on light-sensitive paper. Dora Maar--more familiar to art history as Picasso’s model and mistress--joined together disparate painted and photographed images, then rephotographed them to create ominously Surrealist scenes.

Florence Henri likewise made collages and rephotographed them, typically creating adventurous, Constructivist pictures that were used in advertising. Her photograph of Columbia record albums creates a visually crisp and airy hall of mirrors.

When the National Socialist party assumed power, it soon began to apply the brake to a variety of social changes, including the emancipation of women. In place of pictorial inventiveness and artistic self-invention, a nostalgic populism was embraced. A remarkable example of the effort can be seen in the work of a Nazi party member included in the show.

The six photographs by a hitherto obscure artist named Erna Lendvai-Dircksen pull you up short, so fundamentally different are they from everything else around them. Most are formally idealized portraits of farmers, peasants and other Germanic folk-types, which seem to record life in another, long-lost time.

Lendvai-Dircksen was born in 1883 and is thus the earliest artist represented in the show. (She died in 1962.) Already an adult at the time of the first World War, she had been born into the century that saw European concepts of nationalist identity first created, then codified. In the 1930s, her atmospheric photographs of earthy men and women of the Fatherland brought those symbols back into view.

The Getty show includes the work of several great photographers, including Henri, ringl + pit and Lisette Model. By including Lendvai-Dircksen, it also deftly throws a monkey-wrench into a complacent assumption made by most Americans, which is that real art is by definition good for you. This little Nazi’s photographs are indeed real art, and they are undeniably malignant.