Josef Breitenbach

[1] Josef Breitenbach was born into a middle-class wine-merchant Jewish family, and came of age during the chaotic years of the First World War and its troubled aftermath.

He attended Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich (philosophy and art history, 1914 to 1917) and became active in the Youth Section and later the Pacifist wing of the Social Democratic Party.

In 1918, he took part in the Soviet-inspired Bavarian coup d’état, which was the first spark of the revolutionary fire that swept over Germany in the wake of the armistice.

Although the revolution was short-lived, the ties he forged with the radical circles of Munich's intelligentsia later helped him establish his reputation as a photographer.

Munich was a stronghold of libertarians and refined peoples, whose spirit Breitenbach captured in theatrical portraits of his friend, the journalist Theo Riegler.

In early 1934 a band of Sturmabteilung (SA) storm troopers, members of Hitler's private army, banged on the door of Josef's studio looking for Hans.

Interned by the French as a suspicious alien, then drafted into a civilian corps composed of foreigners, Breitenbach eventually escaped to New York from Marseille in 1941.

Since his death, there have been 26 one-person exhibitions of his work, shown New York, Paris, Berlin, Munich, and multiple other locations in both Europe in the United States.