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Gael Newton on the Anton Bruehl collection at the NGA
Published in Artonview winter 2006
Anton Bruehl (1900-1982) was the doyen of advertising photography in New York from the late 1920s. He is best known today as a pioneer of brilliant colour photography produced under exclusive contract to the Conde Nast magazine group. Bruehl also specialised in theatre studies often recreating sets and scenes from musicals in his studio for absolute quality control. He was equally acclaimed internationally in art photography salons and in 1933 also published an award winning book of photographs of Mexico in a classic straight documentary style.
Despite his German name, Anton Bruehl was not one of the many European photographers drawn or driven to America in the 1930s instead he was from the dry regions of South Australia being born in Hawker in 1900. His German-born father was a well respected and technically inventive medical doctor a skill passed on as Anton was also a meticulous technician and skilled craftsman in his own right.
In February 2006 Anton Bruehl Junior, a businessman and art collector in San Francisco, presented his personal collection of his father’s work to the National Gallery of Australia through the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia.
The Anton Bruehl Gift is the largest in value ever to have been presented to the photography collection. In the art store at the Gallery the work of Anton Bruehl’s work keeps company with that of his Australian contemporary Max Dupain, as well as a gem like collection of mid 20th century American advertising photography.
A selection of iconic Bruehl prints were acquired in 2000-2002 some with funds from Dr Peter Farrell. In 2001 hearing of the Gallery’s purchases while in Australia Anton Bruehl Jr called at National Gallery of Australia and met with me and viewed the Gallery’s collection of American advertising photography. Contact was maintained through the following years and in 2004 I was able to visit the Bruehl’s in San Francisco where seated on a couch I first heard Anton jr wanted his collection to come to Australia.
The Bruehl Gift including 112 photographs including some 20 original colour images covers Bruehl’s career from the 1920s through to the figure studies of the 1950s. While making a number of business trips Anton Bruehl jr has no strong connections with Australia; his singular gesture is in recognition of his father’s birth place, he simply said ' it felt right’.
Anton Bruehl first took up photography as a teenager after his older brother Martin gave him a box camera and continued developing his skills in Melbourne where he trained as an electrical engineer and worked at an American engineering firm where he found colleagues also interested in camera art. Bruehl immigrated to New York in 1919 to work for Western Electric. Some years after his arrival in New York Bruehl was inspired to make photography his vocation after studying and teaching at Clarence White’s School of Photography in New York.
Bruehl was originally in partnership briefly with Ralph Steiner who worked with Bruehl on launching a hugely popular series of photographic tableaux advertisements for Weber and Heilbroner fabrics run in the pages of the New Yorker in 1927-30. In these images cut-out paper figures of three men in suits were seen carrying on through various travels and adventures through out which their clothing triumphed. The ‘Fabric Group’ ads won Bruehl the Art Directors Club Medal for 1928. Bruehl opened his second larger studio in Lexington Avenue in 1927 and persuaded his brother Martin, a structural engineer in Australia, to immigrate to New York as well. The brothers brought their parents to live in America.
The Bruehl studio began to supply images regularly for Condé Nast publications – Vogue, Vanity Fair and House and Garden. At Nast’s instigation and despite the cut backs in most magazines during the Depression, Bruehl worked with photo-technician Fernand Bourges on developing very high quality colour photographs. The first of 195 Bruehl-Bourges process colour photographs appeared in the May 1932 issue of Vogue. The cost of production was enormous but so was the meticulous and inventive tableaux Bruehl designed for each job.
Bruehl became an American citizen in 1940 when he married journalist Sara Barnes. They had three children, Steven, David and Tony ( later the donor of the NGA’s Bruehl gift). The Bruehl studio remained in operation until 1966. Anton retired to Florida in the 1970s and died in San Francisco in 1982. The Bruehl family never returned to Australia but interestingly Anton named the beloved sailboat he built, the Yarra.
The National Gallery of Australia held an exhibition of Anton Bruehl's photographs.
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