Photographer Aurel Bauh

Known in particular for literature and fine arts, the Romanian avant-garde is also represented by some outstanding names in the field of photography.

Christine Leșcu, 28.11.2015, 14:03

Known in particular
for literature and fine arts, the Romanian avant-garde is also represented by
some outstanding names in the field of photography. One such example is Aurel
Bauh, who is better known in western Europe and the US than in his home country
Romania. A Romanian-born Jew, he studied in Berlin in the 1920s with the
Ukrainian sculptor Alexander Archipenko and then in Paris with Fernard Leger,
one of the first French painters to exhibit cubist paintings. The work of Aurel
Bauh focused less on documentary photography and more so on art photography. He
moved to Bucharest towards the end of the 1930s, where he lived until 1960.
Academy member Emanuel Badescu tells us more about the work of Aurel Bauh
created in Romania:

Aurel Bauh
comes from Oltenia, in southern Romania. He was born in Craiova in 1900. We
know little of his early school years, but we do have records about his time in
Paris while he was in his early 20s. He was in close contact with the Romanian
artists who lived and worked in the French capital at a time when the
avant-garde movement was flourishing. He was familiar with the exhibitions of
the artists who represented this artistic movement, including photographers
like Man Ray. Towards the end of Carol II’s rule, Aurel Bauh returned to
Romania, moving to Bucharest. He had one studio on Popa Rusu Street and another
on the Victory Boulevard, called Studio 41.

This studio
became a meeting place and inspiration for several avant-garde artists, such as
Sasa Pana, Jules Perahim, Harry Brauner, and Geo Bogza. In 1938, Bauh had his
firs exhibition of ‘photo paintings’, titled Same Age as Brassai and Man Ray.
In the 1950s, when the terrible communist regime in Romania was just beginning,
Aurel Bauh managed to publish a surprising album with photos. It is now in the
archives of the Romanian Academy Library, and Emanuel Badescu described it
for us:

Remarkably, in
1957 he gathered together all his works about Bucharest, and created a
singularly beautiful album, because it is the only one, or one of the few
albums about Bucharest that has as its theme the beauty of the city. It is no
wonder that the album has a short but superb foreword written by another pariah
of early communism in Romania, Tudor Arghezi. These two great artists joined
hands in this album entitled ‘Bucharest’, an album, which, aside from the
poetry of the images, has another feature, which you could not find even in the
work of Christian photographers of the time. In its pages we find a great
number of photos depicting worshippers entering Christian Orthodox churches.
Perusing the album, we easily notice that Aurel Bauh had a vast fine art
experience. It seems he appreciated Impressionist painters, especially Monet. In
this album there are several photos that point to the French master. He wanted
to capture an aspect that his peers did not: the poetry of the city, its
architectural styles – art nouveau and art deco – the monumentality of
buildings or sculpture ensembles such as Carol Park, images from Cismigiu Park,
and the Dambovita canal. They all have a special poetry and recall
Impressionist painters.

In 1960, Aurel
Bauh managed to emigrate to Paris, where he died in 1964. His photos, highly
valued today, can be found in private collections, in France and elsewhere. You
can even find his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2011, one of
the exhibitions at the Les Promenades Photographiques Festival in Vendome was
dedicated to his work.