Hans Namuth

Hans Namuth was born in Essen, Germany, in 1915 and died in East Hampton, New York, in 1990. He was a photojournalist, portrait photographer, and documentary filmmaker. Originally trained as an actor, he fled Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power. He moved to Paris and began taking photographs. His photographs of the Spanish Civil War, taken in collaboration with George Reisner, were his first published photographs; some of them were printed in Life magazine. Namuth moved to New York City in the 1940s and studied photography at the New School for Social Research. Photographs he took while traveling in Guatemala were exhibited in 1949 in Washington, D.C. Namuth is perhaps most renowned for his photographic portraits of postwar American painters, especially Jackson Pollock. His photographs of Pollock, published in Artnews in 1951, were the first to show the artist at work in his studio, dripping and splashing paint onto upstretched canvas. His photographs of Pollock and other Abstract Expressionist painters were published in Artists 1950-1981: A Personal View (1981). In the early 1970s Namuth created a portfolio of early American tools; these were published in a book produced by Olivetti in 1975. He continued to explore tool imagery in photographs that communicate a preciseness of vision as well as a reverence for the objects.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.