Hugo Erfurth

(b Halle, 14 Oct 1874; d Gaienhofen, 14 Feb 1948). German photographer. He studied at the Kunstakademie in Dresden from 1892 to 1896 while also completing his photographic training with the court photographer H?ffert. During the following ten years he ran the Schr?der studio, acquiring the Palais des Grafen L?ttichau in 1906, where he set up his studio and later an art gallery. Dresden, the home of the painters' group Die Br?cke and the workshops of Otto Dix and Oskar Kokoschka, attracted many artists and writers, who visited the studio to have their portraits taken. Erfurth was considered their equal and was acquainted with many of them, notably Kokoschka, Erich Heckel, Dix and Klee, whom he photographed in 1920 (see Tausk, 1980, p. 64).

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Erfurth, Hugo (1874-1948), German photographer. After attending the Dresden Commercial School, Erfurth served a photographic apprenticeship (1892-6), then took over a leading Dresden studio. During the next two decades he prospered commercially, exhibited widely, and garnered many awards. Before 1914 he may also have taught at the Leipzig Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Design. In 1919 he co-founded the Society of German Photographers (Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner; GDL). Although he did significant work in industrial, theatrical, and especially dance photography (and experimented with photograms and photomontage) his main claim to fame was as one of 20th-century Germany's leading portraitists. In addition to royalty, aristocrats, and politicians—including Konrad Adenauer in 1927—his subjects belonged mainly to the cultural elite, including artists, designers, writers, and stage personalities. He was a close friend of the painter Otto Dix, and they portrayed each other many times. Stylistically, he developed from a Jugendstil-inflected decorative pictorialism in the 1900s to a cleaner, psychologically sharper, sometimes almost clinical approach after the First World War. In 1934 he moved to Cologne, where his studio and archive were bombed in 1943.

— Jens Jaeger

Bibliography

• Dewitz, B. v., and Schuller-Procopovici, K. (eds.), Hugo Erfurth, 1874-1948: Photograph zwischen Tradition und Moderne (1992)