Art Review : Yesterday’s Excitement Is Today’s Cliche

The black-and-white pictures of Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966) are among the duller examples of early 20th century Modernist photography, but for an odd reason. In the 1920s they represented a sharp and dramatic departure from the norm. Today, their tired legacy is so blandly familiar as to make indulgence in this ancestral source-work feel more like a duty than a pleasure.

At the J. Paul Getty Museum, curator Joan Gallant Dooley’s “The Magic of Material Things: Albert Renger-Patzsch” assembles 41 prints by the German photographer, along with several of his books. The Getty is the most important repository of Renger-Patzsch’s work outside Germany--its collection numbers about 200 works--and half the photographs on view date from the 1920s, the artist’s most historically significant period. The others span the rest of his 40-year career.

Renger-Patzsch was among the first of an international retinue of artists determined to sweep away the misty romanticism of Pictorialist photography, which had come to dominate photographic practice. Rather than mimic painting, in an effort to endow photography with the legitimacy afforded art, Renger-Patzsch pioneered a clear, clean, straightforward style of work.

The mechanical reality of a camera was emphasized as eminently appropriate for making art in a newly industrial world. Like such American counterparts as Edward Weston and Paul Strand, the photographer began to use the machine to dramatize a formal structure in the visible world.

The “magic of material things” would be revealed, Renger-Patzsch believed, through a kind of close looking done with a camera. Hired in 1921 to photograph plant specimens for a planned scientific book, he developed a particular format that served him for many years, regardless of whether his subject was a foxglove or an industrial machine part, a cactus or a factory smokestack.

In this format, Renger-Patzsch’s subjects are typically pressed up close to the surface, where they fill the picture’s frontal plane. The intimate sense of an object singled out for scrutiny is further pumped up by the general absence of a background, which is either a blank screen or an empty sky or a blurred and insignificant space behind. Coziness is enhanced by the evenness of the light, which clarifies intricacies of the forms.

The only discernible context for an object photographed in this way is the process involved in seeing it--up close and personal, as it were. Plucked from the worlds of industry and nature, Renger-Patzsch’s images are presented as icons.

As such, the pictures are endowed with a distinctly modern aura of secular veneration. The camera acquires the status of a consecrating tool, which had hitherto been largely reserved for the painter’s brush.

Renger-Patzsch also sought to coax forth correspondences among the material things he photographed. In three pictures in the show, for example, the vivid cubic forms of a translucent crystal of rock salt are echoed in the chunky angularity of a brute, steel machine part and of an ordinary house in Essen, the town where he lived before the war. Elsewhere, the rhythmic pattern on the trunk of a palm tree recalls the repetitive pattern of bricks on a factory smokestack.

This structural connectedness among disparate objects, revealed across typologies by an artist working with a camera, suggested something new for the imagery within a photograph. One important context for a camera picture, Renger-Patzsch understood, is simply the existence of other photographs.

Photographs are casually regarded as conveying pictorial truths, because they contain a worldly image in a way no painting can; but no photograph really stands alone. Each is a fragment. Renger-Patzsch was instrumental in making that point central to his work, by publishing books whose pictures were carefully sequenced. Call it comparative photography.

His book “Die Welt ist Schon” (The World Is Beautiful) was wildly influential when published in 1928. One hundred full-page photographs of plants, machines, animals, factories and such were assembled to underscore structural similarities among the diverse things of the world.

Two copies are on view at the Getty. One is opened to a page showing a picture of a tightly coiled snake, its spiraled body sheathed in a crisp armor of spiraling scales. The other is closed, its revealing cover stamped with a dual image of a palm tree and an electrical tower, their formal similarities subtle but self-evident.

The books, displayed inside a case, cannot be perused by museum visitors. However, a sense of Renger-Patzsch’s image-sequencing can be gleaned from the exhibition, where such pictures as the rock crystal, machine part and Essen house are juxtaposed. The show has been usefully installed to evoke the way his pictures might have been laid out in a book, rather than according to the chronological order in which they were made.

For all the significance of Renger-Patzsch’s work, though, a certain staleness permeates the show. The German was responsible for creating a style that was quickly absorbed as a slick corporate motif. It became a staple of annual reports and industrial yearbooks, prevalent to the point of ubiquity even today.

His work was employed for such purposes--witness “Cows at the Mouth of a River,” which was used for a 1936 Krupp corporate newsletter. Five spotted cows dot the foreground, a row of river barges and tugboats occupy the middle ground and a line of factories articulates the distant horizon. Formally it’s a compelling picture, but today it’s hard not to see it as a sort of Archer-Daniels-Midland view of the world. Eternal continuity is pictured, in an image made as the world was careening toward cataclysmic collapse.

* J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, through March 31. Closed Mondays. Parking reservations required: (310) 458-2003.