Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Tate Modern in London. J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Center Pompidou in Paris. Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. It is not the least of the museums that have acquired work by the German-Dutch photographer Werner Mantz (1901-1983). More than thirty art institutions on four continents have his sculptures in their collection. Yet he is relatively unknown in the Netherlands.
A retrospective exhibition in the Bonnefanten museum in Maastricht, a world first, should change that. The oeuvre of Mantz is summarized in three hundred vintage photos, who had a Jewish mother and exchanged Germany for the Netherlands for good because of the Nazi regime.
He lived in Maastricht for a long time, but his strongest work dates from before that. In the 1920s and 1930s he was commissioned to photograph German residential complexes and villas designed by the architects of the ‘Nieuwe Bouwen’ movement, a movement that had become famous. These recordings later became highly sought after. In 2006, an American museum auctioned one such print for $72 thousand; converted to the current price level, this is about 111 thousand euros.
Mantz was born in Cologne. There he made a name for himself as a portrait and product photographer. He even managed to turn an egg grading machine, a technical novelty at the time, into something artistic with his heavy glass plate camera. Not only did he have a good eye, he was also a master at using natural light.
See the geometric image he shot around 1930 of the new Weiße Stadt residential complex in Cologne. He zoomed in on a facade with staggered windows with sharp shadows (from balconies, according to another photo). “Let the sun work for you,” he once wrote. ‘Sun and clouds often contribute more to an image than I do.’
His strong compositions and his meticulously prepared use of daylight – he sometimes waited a long time for the right conditions – made the buildings he immortalized look even more modern than they already were.
Around 1932, the flow of orders for Mantz dried up; after the stock market crash on Wall Street, the German economy had entered a deep crisis. Together with his friend and associate Karl Mergenbaum, who ran the darkroom, he opened a second studio in Maastricht. ‘They decided to bet on two horses’, explains Clément Mantz, the 74-year-old son of the photographer who participated in the retrospective in Bonnefanten.
The advance of the Nazis also played a role in this. In November 1938, supporters of Hitler attacked Jews on a large scale during the so-called Kristallnacht. That was the signal for the duo to move to Maastricht. Around that time, Mantz received major orders from the province of Limburg: he recorded the state mines and the newly constructed provincial roads.
When he moved to the Netherlands, he had taken his parents and his mother’s twin sister with him. During the German occupation, thanks to a doctor’s note, Mantz was able to protect his Jewish mother and aunt from deportation to a concentration camp for a long time. In June 1944 he went into hiding with his family. A few months later, the city was liberated.
Mantz then earned his money mainly with portrait photography. Quite special: in his studio at the Vrijthof he only used daylight. ‘Looking back at the thousands of portraits Mantz made, it is striking how he managed to give each individual their own appearance’, writes guest curator Frits Gierstberg of the Nederlands Fotomuseum (which manages much of the photographer’s work) in the catalog of the exhibition.
Remarkably enough, Mantz did not look up much new architecture in the Netherlands with his camera after the war, while construction was carried out energetically in a number of cities. Didn’t he get assignments as a German? Didn’t he even try because of his German accent? Shortly before the war he was arrested in Venlo when he was commissioned there to shoot bridges. That had resulted in a night in jail and a note in a file that prevented him from becoming a Dutchman.
Which certainly also played a role: his business in Maastricht flourished. “He had plenty of work,” said Clément Mantz. In addition to the portrait studio – Mantz was a recognized children’s photographer – he did all kinds of commercial jobs. However, he has never had a Dutch client outside Limburg. The gap between the rivers above and below may be to blame, Gierstberg suggests. A character trait of Mantz may not have helped either, thinks son Clément. “He was very headstrong. He was against vaccinations. He also refused to take out insurance. We only discovered this when he slipped on an oil slick in a Paris garage in the late 1960s and broke his hip.’
In 1971, Werner Mantz retired and closed his studio. His name was hardly known outside Maastricht. Four years later, the change began. His German architectural photos attracted a lot of attention at a group exhibition in Cologne. When these were also exhibited in 1977 during Documenta, the five-yearly festival of modern art in Kassel, the rediscovery was a fact.
“But my father always knew his job was good,” says Clément Mantz. ‘In the 1950s he had put all his best photos aside for purchase by a museum in Cologne. He just didn’t talk much about it.’
Werner Mantz: The Perfect EyeBonnefanten, Maastricht, until 26/2.