Calf

Author: Marijke Peyser

In Berlin, where he was born, the young German-Jewish photographer Erwin Blumenfeld became acquainted with the avant-garde artists Helmut Herzfield (later known as John Heartfield) and George Grosz. Blumenfeld went to the Netherlands after the First World War, and in 1921 married Lena Citroen, the cousin of his friend and fellow artist Paul Citroen. Through them he met many Dutch artists. All the same, he was happy to be free of ‘the suffocating Dutch swamp’, when he left for France in 1936.^[1]

Blumenfeld had a shop in Amsterdam that sold luxury leather goods and bags: the Fox Leather Company at 116 Kalverstraat, later at number 151. Behind the second shop he discovered a fully equipped darkroom.^[2] When business began to drop off, Blumenfeld started to photograph his predominantly female customers there.^[3] When he arrived in Paris in March 1936 he showed his photographs at Galerie Billiet. His work appeared in the magazine Verve and the prestigious specialist journal Photographie, and he was introduced to the trend-setting fashion magazine Vogue. His innovative fashion photographs launched his career.^[4] In 1941, with the help of the Hebrew Aid Society, Blumenfeld managed to flee to New York, where in the 1940s and 1950s he became all the rage in leading fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Cosmopolitan.

In Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection there is a work that has nothing to do with the sophisticated world of fashion. Calf is a monstrous apparition: the head of a calf has been placed on a bust of Venus. In no way whatsoever does the image refer to an innocent newborn animal. In the early 1930s Blumenfeld took several photos of the head, some he titled Dictator. The ghostly images seem to allude to the impending mass destruction. It is possible that Calf was shown at a group exhibition in Paris in 1937 under the title Dictator. When he saw the portrait, with a title that appeared to refer to the German Führer, the German ambassador was so outraged that he demanded its removal from the exhibition.[5]

It was not the first time that Blumenfeld had expressed his loathing of the Nazi regime by means of his photographs. On the night Adolf Hitler seized power, 30 January 1933, Blumenfeld made a portrait depicting him as the living incarnation of death. The German ambassador may have been aware of that. Despite its removal from the gallery the photograph became well-known. Francis Picabia, for example, took Calf as the point of departure for his L’Adoration du veau (1941-42). Picabia accurately reproduced the head of the animal. The outstretched hands at the bottom of the composition evoke associations with the adoration of the golden calf, the worship of a false god.^[6]