John Gutmann archive

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.

1905

John Gutmann born 28 May, Breslau, Germany.

1927

Receives B.A., Staatliche Academie fur Kunst und Kunstgerwebe zu Breslau; studies as a Masters student under Otto Mueller; also studies art history and philosophy at the University of Berlin.

1927-33

Paints, exhibits, and teaches art in Berlin; does post-graduate work at Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin and Berliner Akademie der Bildenden Kunste

1928

Receives M.A., Preussisches Schulkollegin fur Hohere Erziehung, Berlin.

1933

Purchases Rolleiflex camera and signs contract with Presse-foto, Berlin, before leaving Germany; arrives in San Francisco 31 December.

1934

Takes extended trip by bus from San Francisco to Vancouver, British Columbia, stopping in many places there and back.

1936

Begins teaching art, San Francisco State College. Terminates association with Presse-Foto and begins working for Pix, Inc. Publishes photographs in numerous national and international magazines including Saturday Evening Post, Time, Look, Life, National Geographic, U.S. Camera, Coronet, Asia Pictorial Press, and others.

1937

Teaches course on advertising art at the Jewish Community Center, San Francisco.

1938

Appointed Assistant Professor of Art, San Francisco State College; introduces courses on art history and studio photography.

1939

László Moholy-Nagy visits San Francisco and Gutmann serves as guide.

1942-45

Serves as cameraman with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, later attached to the Office of War Information (OWI) as a member of psychological warfare unit in the China, Burma, and India Theatre. Produces a body of official work for the U.S. Army, while also photographing and filming the culture and society of the region.

1946

Returns to teaching at San Francisco State College and establishes the creative photography program.

1949

Appointed Associate Professor of Art, San Francisco State College; produces two documentary films, The Chinese Peasant Goes to Market and Journey to Kunming, using footage shot while serving with the U.S. Army in China; marries artist, Gerrie von Pribosic in December.

1949-63

Establishes and directs international film program, “Art Movies,” at San Francisco State College.

1950

Travels to Mexico during the summer for post-graduate study in art history at the University of Mexico.

1953

Serves on jury for the Portland Art Museum’s exhibition Oregon Photography 1953.

1955

Appointed full Professor of Art, San Francisco State College.

1956

Meets Wynn Bullock.

1957

Travels on sabbatical in Portugal, Spain, Morocco, France, Italy, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and England; photographs and films modern European architecture for a prospective movie.

1962-73

Continues teaching at San Francisco State College, but due to protracted illness produces little photographic work.

1962

Lectures at Crocker Art Gallery, Sacramento, “The Newest in Avant Garde and Experimental Films” (15 March).

ca. 1964

John and Gerrie Gutmann divorce.

1968

Receives Distinguished Teaching Award from California State Colleges.

1970

Travels to Germany; visits Berlin for the first time since immigrating to the United States.

1973

Retires from full-time teaching; Professor Emeritus, San Francisco State University [formerly San Francisco State College]; begins to review and print images from his collection of negatives.

1974-77

Teaches part-time at San Francisco State University.

1974-98

Numerous solo and group exhibitions. See appendix A for list.

1977

Receives the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship with his proposal to review his earlier photographic work for the “visual use of language and popular emblems in American life during the 1930s and 1940s”; teaches seminar/workshop, “Visual Communication in the Arts, Anthropology, and Education,” University Extension, University of California Berkeley, La Mamelle Art Center (26-27 February).

1983

Produces the documentary film, Le Palais Ideal.

1984

Publishes monograph, The Restless Decade: John Gutmann’s Photographs of the Thirties, edited by Lew Thomas; lectures at Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego (November 29).

1985

Keynote speaker, Western Regional Conference of the Society for Photographic Education, Los Angeles.

1998

John Gutmann dies 12 June in San Francisco.

1999

The Photography of John Gutmann: Culture Shock published.