by Bettina Rudhof

It is not uncommon for key decisions to come about by coincidence.

A telling example was provided by New York investment banker Henry Mendelssohn Buhl whilst opening his exhibition entitled Speaking with Hands – Photographs from the Buhl-Collection in Essen’s Museum Folkwang. Every bit the accomplished stand-up comedian, he related how he had obtained an unusual commission in the 1980s through a case of mistaken identity. The banker happened to be near a wedding that was taking place when the newly weds asked him whether he could take a few snaps of the proceedings. The upshot was so astounding that he was soon approached again. Instead of turning the work down, he fitted it into the heavy schedule of his main profession and enjoyed it so much that he ended up documenting wedding festivities, fashion shows and sporting events in photographic form for the next 12 years. He retired from his main job in 1993 at the age of 64 to devote himself exclusively to his real passion – works of contemporary art, most notably from the world of photography.

When he succeeded in acquiring a silver gelatine print of the famous shot that the photographer Alfred Stieglitz had taken in 1920 of the hands of his partner, the painter Georgia O’Keefe, as she sat sewing, he was inspired to build up an entire collection of photographs on the subject of the human hand. Stieglitz’s famous photograph captures the graceful female gesture of hands sewing in a well-nigh timeless pictorial composition.

That the 171 most significant items from the “Buhl Collection” have been on show in Essen since 19 May is admittedly no coincidence but it did involve co-operation of a very unusual kind. Following shows of the pictures in New York’s Guggenheim Museum and its namesake in Bilbao, the collector asked his friend Jürgen W. Braun, long the Managing Director at hardware makers FSB, to look out for a venue in Germany. The latter needed no second asking and soon obtained the support of the Head of the Photographic Collection at the Museum Folkwang , Ute Eskildsen, and of the Museum’s Director Hartwig Fischer. Furthermore, Mr Braun then saw to it that FSB became the event’s main sponsor – a step that is hardly a coincidence, since the company has spent the past 125 years addressing itself to the production of door handles and the related issues of holding and grasping not only in practical terms but also at all times from a theoretical and aesthetic perspective. (1)

The collection is being presented to a concept by curator Jennifer Blessing, who had already overseen the exhibition in New York and published a marvellous catalogue for it. On show are photographs taken by 150 internationally acclaimed artists between 1850 and 2003 whose principal motif is the human hand. There is no end to the novel and differing ways in which the hand or hands are used to characterise individuals as a whole, pars pro toto. As a means of illustrating this correlation, the curator has structured the collection, independently of when the individual photographs originated, along thematic lines, distinguishing – amongst other things – between “gesticulation” and “gesture” or between “group shots” and individual portraits”.

Thus, the famous shot of the English Pre-Raphaelite artist and Bohemian Aubrey Beardsley taken in 1894 is to be found next to a portrait that Alexander Rodchenko produced of his mother in 1924, as she was taking her glasses into her clearly overworked hands for the purpose of reading a note. In both instances, the hand is portrayed in a way that encapsulates the destiny lived out by the person to whom it belongs. It was in the same vein that Andy Warhol called a Polaroid he took of his hand in 1986 Self Portrait. The exhibition covers both the hands of the famous and famous photographs of the hands of the lesser known. No one knows the name of this angry boy, for instance, whose portrayal holding a toy grenade caused the skills of Diane Arbus, the lady behind the lens, to become famous the world over (Child with a Toy Grenade, Central Park, New York 1962).

Neither do we know the identity of the migrant having her finger-prints taken as she enters America, though Andreas Feininger, the man who took her picture in 1942, is today internationally regarded as being a mould-breaking photographic artist. Alongside more recent works such as these, the exhibition in Essen also includes works by legends from the history of photography: Nadar, James Nasmyth and Ansel Adams are represented alongside early avant-garde artists Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Eliezer Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko. The curator’s ordering of themes allows pictures from the early days of the Soviet Union to be grouped next to the captivating Roman portrait that Robert Rauschenberg produced of his painter friend Cy Twombly in 1952 (Cy and Relicts 1952). Another photo by Rauschenberg shown elsewhere in the exhibition makes it clear that his art was not primarily out to enchant the beholder. It bears the title Norman’s Place #2 and only partially frames its subject. It is hard to say which of these two photographic exercises by the pop-art painter is the lovelier, since they are both so strikingly composed.

Some items surprise or shock the viewer, variously depicting people without hands (Gilles Peress, French Hospital, Sarajevo 1993), severed hands (Paul McCarthy, Right Hand 2001) or hands clasping a lover’s genitals (Wolfgang Tilmans, Lutz & Alex holding cock 1992). As so often in his work, Tilmans plays tricks with the beholder by adopting the aesthetics of advertising photographs given over to some concept of youth culture whilst at the same time employing motifs that would never appear in such material.

Also on show, to conclude, are some of the most seminal examples of photographic production such as Edward Muybridge’s Movements of the Hand series of 1887 or the no less impressive collection of images produced by Pedro E. Guerrero in 1953 in which, amidst much gesturing, Frank Lloyd Wright explains his architectural design drafts. And I almost forgot to mention my own favourite photo, which Robert Doisneau took in 1952. It shows Pablo Picasso at the kitchen table in his house at Vallauris in the south of France. His soft roguish gaze is directed elsewhere and briefly diverts the viewer’s attention away from the practical joke Picasso is playing on us: the hands resting on the table are not his own but ones that have been fashioned out of bread dough.

The “Speaking with Hands” exhibition runs from 20 May to 30 July 2006 at Essen’s Museum Folkwang and is open daily (except Mondays) from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (midnight on Fridays). It will then be moving on to St. Petersburg.

(1) In supporting the exhibition in Essen, FSB is continuing a tradition based around humanity’s most important work resource. The process has included initiating events and workshops conducive to a new understanding of hands and handles as well as publishing no fewer than 16 books on the subject. The first of these, "Greifen und Griffe", which Jürgen W. Braun authored together with Otl Aicher back in the mid-1980s, undertakes a fundamental analysis of the nature of holding and in the process reflects upon the civilisational significance of the hand and its own work resources.