RUDOLF KOPPITZ

© Rudolf Koppitz

Rudolf Koppitz (1884-1936) is one of the most important Austrian photographers of the interwar period. His oeuvre spans a unique arc from pictorialism to art deco and Heimatkunst. The images of all these creative phases are highly regarded internationally: from his early landscape works in art print techniques to his nude studies, which he took in the 1920s and which in their form and design are partly still close to Art Nouveau and partly to Constructivism. His most famous photograph is perhaps a movement study of the dance group of Claudia Issachenko, the mother of the choreographer Tatyana Gsovsky and the linguist Alexander Issachenko, taken in 1925, in which an unclothed dancer can be seen striding in front of a triangular formation of three dark-robed dancers in a backbend.