Anton BRUEHL
Australia 1900 – United States of America 1982
United States from 1919

not titled [Boat hull (Anton Bruehl's ketch 'Yarra')] 1933
gelatin silver photograph
image 24.6 (h) x 19.6 (w) cm
Purchased 2000
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
NGA 2000.378

For his own pleasure, Bruehl photographed the ribs of his custom-designed ketch Yarra while it was under construction– a simple and bold composition. Since his start in commercial advertising in 1926, Bruehl’s advertising work garnered awards and ensured his place at the top of the profession, and yet he was keen to maintain his profile as an artist-photographer. He had his first one-person show in New York at Alma Reed’s Delphic Studios in 1931. An entrepreneur of vision, Reed also gave the photographers Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter their first New York exposure. Reed would later exhibit and publish photographs from Bruehl’s Mexican trip at the end of 1933. Bruehl’s work was also exhibited in New York in 1932 at the gallery of Julien Levy, the great promoter of Surrealist and avant-garde art in the States, alongside prominent figures in Modern photography such as Margaret Bourke-White, Berenice Abbott and Paul Strand.