Uneasy Collaborations: Rudolf Wittkower and Helmut Gernsheim

This lecture, given by Professor Christy Anderson (Department of Art, University of Toronto) explores the collaboration between the photographer Helmut Gernsheim and the architectural historian Rudolf Wittkower, then head of the Fototeca at the Warburg Institute, London, during the early 1940s. Gernsheim was hired by the Warburg to document important buildings for the newly formed National Buildings Record and for various publications including the exhibition catalogueBritish Art and the Mediterranean (1948). Through their work together, he and Wittkower forged an important, though ultimately fraught, partnership. Wittkower’s growing interest in English Baroque architecture, and in particular in what he called its ‘isolated balanced surface patterns’ needs to be seen in the context of Gernsheim’s distinctive approach to these buildings. Gernsheim’s own fame has been based primarily on his later work as a collector and historian of photography. Yet he was active as an architectural photographer throughout his long lifetime, and through various publications his work reached a wide and influential audience.

Open to all, free admission