VIENNA.- WestLicht, Museum for Photography, exhibits the unknown erotic photographs of painter Alfons Walde, about 120 works from the artist’s estate which rested unnoticed in a box for decades. The focus of his photography was on the female nude, the staging of the motifs ranging all the way to pornography. The use of Agfa colour film, then a recent invention, enabled Walde to render realistic scenes photographically, to be used as inspiration for his paintings. For the history of photography, which focuses overwhelmingly on black-and-white images, the discovery is a sensation, not only in terms of cultural history.

The exhibition introduces the landscape painter Walde (b. Oberndorf 1891, d. Kitzbühel 1958) as a passionate photographer whose photographic studies, taken predominantly from the 1920s to the 1940s, concentrate on the female form. Classical poses from the tradition of art history – for example, reminiscences of Ingres in Walde’s nudes photographed from behind – are found next to erotically charged, rather playful scenes. In photography, Walde cultivated a lustful gaze, he was a man of the eye, using his Leica to capture the fleeting moment. On the other hand, to him the point was always also the eroticism of photography itself, the interchanging glances, the game of watching and posing.

From the wealth of the archive – containing ca. 250 black-and-white film rolls, about 2,000 colour slides in addition to contact sheets and silver gelatine prints – curators Rebekka Reuter and Peter Weiermair have made their selections. The exhibition juxtaposes vintage and new prints of these unique colour slides with drawings and paintings by Walde – a juxtaposition illustrating the importance of photography for Walde’s overall oeuvre. The intimate relationship between the painter and his muses becomes obvious, making the photographs seem like foreplay in every sense of the word.

Book
Haymon Verlag will publish the catalogue SchauLust. The Erotic Photography of Alfons Walde, edited by Peter Coeln, also featuring an essay by Peter Weiermair and a conversation between Rebekka Reuter, Carl Kraus and Michael Walde-Berger. In German and English language.

Edition
Twelve selected photographs of nudes by Alfons Walde will be offered as fine art prints in a limited edition of 24 sets, each in a high-value edition box.