« John Gutmann (1905–1998) was one of America’s most distinctive photographers. Born in Germany where he trained as an artist and art teacher, he fled the Nazis in 1933 and settled in San Francisco, reinventing himself as a photo-journalist. Gutmann captured images of American culture, celebrating signs of a vibrant democracy, however imperfect. His own status as an outsider—a Jew in Germany, a naturalized citizen in the United States—informed his focus on individuals from the Asian-American, African-American, and gay communities, as well as his photography in India, Burma, and China during World War II. Gutmann’s interests in painting and filmmaking, his collections of non-Western art and artifacts, and his pedagogy, all figure in a body of work at once celebratory and mysterious.

Gutmann was born to prosperous German-Jewish parents, in Breslau, Germany (since 1945, Wrocław, Poland). At age twenty-two, he graduated from the regional Academy of Arts and Crafts, where he studied with leading Expressionist painter Otto Müller. In 1927 Gutmann moved to Berlin, where he taught art to schoolchildren, participated in group exhibitions, and in 1931 had a solo show at the prestigious Gurlitt Gallery. However, his career was interrupted by the rise to power of the National Socialists in early 1933. While his family made plans to immigrate to New York, Gutmann set out on his own with San Francisco as his destination, and photography as his new profession. Before departing Germany, he acquired a Rolleiflex camera, hastily shot three rolls of film, and managed to secure a contract from the Berlin office of Presse-Photo. Making the most of a bad situation, he explored a new life as a foreign correspondent who would supply the very modern European illustrated press with views and reports from the American West.

By 1936, he had broken his contract with the Berlin press agency and made a new one with Pix in New York. By 1937, he had begun to teach art regularly at San Francisco College (later San Francisco State University), and this became his primary profession after a World War II era stint in the U.S. army. Gutmann retired his professorship in 1973 and began to reassess his body of work, sorting through boxes of negatives and making new prints of selected examples from the 1930s. It was a well-timed exercise: not only did Gutmann’s images satisfy a growing historical appetite for Depression-era photography, they also seemed compatible with certain kinds of experimental photography then emerging in the contemporary art scene. Before his death in 1998, Gutmann had seen his work featured in gallery and museum exhibitions, catalogues, and monographs.

By bequeathing his rich archive of nearly 5000 modern photographic prints, negatives, tearsheets, letters, and some drawings and early art prints to the CCP, John Gutmann has left us with the task of pursuing the rich knots, braids, tangles and threads in his complex life and work that unfolded over a most tumultuous and provocative century of modernity  » By ccp

John Gutmann-Arm-Breast Abstract, 1935 click on for full size

John Gutmann-Naked Save the Veil,1939

John Gutmann-Naked Breasts, Covered Face, 1939

John Gutmann-Her Breasts in My Robe, 1937

John Gutmann-Two Nudes Attracted,1937

John Gutmann-Lesbian Foreplay, 1937

John Gutmann-Love Play, 1937

John Gutmann- elevation ,1935

John Gutmann-Two Beauties, 1935

John Gutmann-Striped Sweater on Blanket, Oregon, 1934

John Gutmann-Obsessive Fixation, 1935

John Gutmann-Light Through Shades on Ruthie, 1935

John Gutmann-Upside-Down Nude in Studio, 1937

John Gutmann-Profile Torso,1937

John Gutmann-Celestial Body, 1935

John Gutmann-Woman-Body, 1935

John Gutmann-Breast and Steel, 1934

John Gutmann-Nude on Studio Couch, Contacts on Wall, 1935 –

John Gutmann-Billy on My Couch, 1935

John Gutmann-Nude on Couch, 1937

John Gutmann-Long Hair, 1937

John Gutmann-Looking Down at Nude Akiko, 1934

John Gutmann-Sex and Crime,1935

John Gutmann-Eyes, 1939

John Gutmann-Irene in Pillbox Cowled, 1939

John Gutmann-Eye of Seduction, 1939

John Gutmann-Young Eyes, Flowers for the Prom, 1940

John Gutmann-In the Background-The Pimp, New Orleans, 1937

John Gutmann-Li in Round Hat, 1937

John Gutmann-Laura, 1934

John Gutmann-Beautiful Vanessae, 1935

John Gutmann-Friedel, Berlin, 1935

John Gutmann-Memory of Friedel, Berlin, 1937

John Gutmann-Phenomenal Self Portrait, 1937

John Gutmann-Red Hair Adorned, 1939

John Gutmann-Sweet Ruthie,1935

John Gutmann-Billy, Singer and WPA Actress, 1935

John Gutmann-Veiled Profile,1941

John Gutmann-Cup of Coffee and Cigarette, 1950

John Gutmann-Very Close Profile,1962

John Gutmann-The Stare, 1939

John Gutmann-The Cry, 1939

John Gutmann-Innocence, Young H.B. Through the Broken Glass of a Window, 1939

John Gutmann-Self Portrait,Sick, 1934

John Gutmann-Death Trap, Self Portrait 1936

John Gutmann-Phenomenal Self Portrait, 1937

John Gutmann-Protoplasmic Self Portrait, 1937

John Gutmann-Self Portrait,Sick, 1934

John Gutmann-The Dream, 1935

John Gutmann-Shrug of the Shoulder,1935

John Gutmann-Portrait of a Chinese Opera Actor in Female Roles, 1939

John Gutmann-Striped Sweater on Blanket, Oregon, 1934

John Gutmann-Hats, New York, 1987

John Gutmann-The Ancestor1970

John Gutmann-Corridor of the Catacombs, Guanajuato, Mexico, 1960

John Gutmann-Mummies in the Catacombs of Guanajuato, Mexico, 1960

John Gutmann-Mexican Women and Nuns Worshipping, 1960

John Gutmann-Self-Portrait with Lady Day, 1989

John Gutmann-Self Portrait with Nitro Patch, New York, 1989

See also the first article