“AN UNWAVERING PRECISION… ALMOST PAINFUL IN ITS PURITY”

JACOBI, Lotte. Photograph signed. Albert Renger-Patzsch. Wamel, Germany: circa 1963. Vintage gelatin silver print (measures 7 by 10 inches), signed on print recto. Matted and framed, entire piece measures 14 by 16 inches. $2600.

Vintage gelatin silver print (measures 8 by 10 inches) of Jacobi’s elegantly composed portrait of her friend and colleague, renowned photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch—”master of the dynamic close-up” (Parr & Badger), signed by Jacobi on print recto.

Forced to flee Germany in the1930s, Lotte Jacobi made her first trip back to Europe in the early 1960s. In Germany "she visited Albert Renger-Patzsch… whose work she had admired for years but whom she had never met" (Wise, 25). Shortly after her return home Jacobi "showed Renger-Patzsch's photographs in her gallery in Deering, New Hampshire"—only one year before his death. As a young photographer at the center of 1920s Berlin's dynamic art world, Jacobi would have readily known Renger-Patzsch's Die Welt ist Schön (The World is Beautiful, 1928), whose images "have an unwavering precision that is almost painful in its purity" (New York Times). Through this and his 1931 work Eisen und Stahl (Iron and Steel), Renger-Patzsch became known as a "master of the dynamic close-up" (Parr & Badger I:125). "The New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) style he sparked was one of Germany's most pervasive modernist movements" (Roth, 50). Like Jacobi, much of Renger-Patzsch's early photographic work was lost in the war. Jacobi took this eloquently crafted image of her fellow photographer, standing at the edge of the picture frame and framed again by the clean lines of a doorway, in Wamel, Germany, where he lived from 1945 until his death. Scarce vintage gelatin silver print signed by Jacobi in blue ink at the lower right corner of the print. Wise, 84. From the estate of Lotte Jacobi.

A fine print, scarce signed.