Nathan LernerVintage Signed Silver Gelatin Photograph Chabad Shul Pletzl Paris Judaica Photo, c.1970

Details

Description

17 Rue des Rosiers Paris, France.
A small Shul in the old Jewish quarter of Paris (the Pletzel), known as … Read more 17 Rue des Rosiers Paris, France.
A small Shul in the old Jewish quarter of Paris (the Pletzel), known as the ‘Zibetzin’, located at 17 Rue De Rosiers, The Lubavitcher Rebbe was known to have frequented the ‘Zibetzin’ Shul for learning and Davening when he resided in Paris prior to and during WWII. (three of his predecessors, earlier Chabad Rebbes, are also said to have prayed there). Similar to Frederic Brenner, Roman Vishniac and Micha Bar Am this is a sensitive study of Jewish life in Europe.

Nathan Lerner (1913–1997) was an influential Chicago photographer whose work helped define his city. The New York Times wrote that his work "was inextricably bound up in the history of visual culture in Chicago" He was Henry Darger's landlord and discovered Darger's work shortly before his death.

Mr. Lerner's long career was inextricably bound up in the history of visual culture in Chicago. Born in 1913 to immigrants from Ukraine, he began studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago at the age of 16, taking up the camera to perfect his compositional skills. When Lerner was 18 years old he left to study with Samuel Ostrovsky, a Russian-French, post-impressionist painter, who was interested in expressing light. At 22 he began doing a kind of photojournalism, developing his well-known series on ''Maxwell Street,'' an immigrant neighborhood hit hard by the Depression, and also photographing the southern Illinois mining area. In 1937 Archipenko, the well-known sculptor, recommended the New Bauhaus school to Lerner. Archipenko had moved to Chicago to teach at the New Bauhaus, which was under the direction of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Lerner became one of its first scholarship students and turned increasingly to photographic experimentation. He began making semi-abstract, strongly Constructivist images involving luminous projections, solarization, photograms and other methods. Lerner invented the first light box which allowed photographers to create abstract studies of objects and light. The light box is mentioned by Moholy-Nagy in The New Vision (1939) and reproduced by Gropius in his Bauhaus 1914-1928 catalogue for the Modern Museum of New York (1938).In 1939 he became the assistant of Gyorgy Kepes, head of the school's light workshop; together, they wrote ''The Creative Use of Light'' (1941). With Charles Niedringhaus in 1942 he developed a machine for forming plywood that was used in making most of the school's furniture.
After working as a civilian light expert for the Navy in New York during World War II, Mr. Lerner returned to the school, now called the Institute of Design, and was named education director by Walter Gropius after Moholy-Nagy's death in 1946. He left in 1949, opening a design office that became nationally known for its furniture, building systems and glass and plastic containers (including bottles for Revlon and Neutrogena and the Honeybear honey container).
From 1966 to 1977, Lerner taught as a distinguished professor of design philosophy at the University of Illinois. While throughout his life he had pursued photography as an art form, during this period he primarily concentrated on creating graphic abstractions and working with color enlargements for the first time, as did many other major photographers such as Ansel Adams, Walker Evans and Harry Callahan, late in their own careers.
In 1968 Mr. Lerner married Kiyoko Asia, a classical pianist from Japan, and over the next two decades made numerous trips to Japan, where he took his first color photographs, as well as Mexico. He had his first solo exhibition of photography in 1973 and thereafter exhibited regularly in galleries and museums in the United States, Europe and Japan. His work is included in photography and design collections around the world.
Mr. Lerner will also be remembered as the man who discovered and helped to preserve the art of Henry Darger, one of the century's great outsider artists, whose work is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of American Folk Art in Manhattan. Mr. Lerner knew Darger only as an idiosyncratic recluse who rented a room in an old rooming house on Chicago's then-neglected North Side, which he bought in 1953 largely to prevent its destruction. After Darger's death in 1972, Mr. Lerner found that the room was crammed with Darger's fantastical writings and paintings and arranged for them to be exhibited. See less