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Untitled

Kati Horna Hungarian
1950, printed ca. 1960
Not on view
Born in Budapest, Horna was a deeply cosmopolitan photographer whose work straddles politically engaged photojournalism and Surrealist poetics. In the early 1930s, she left Budapest for Berlin and Paris, honing her skills alongside other avant-garde artists of her generation. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she relocated to Spain, where she documented the war's effect on the lives of ordinary citizens, publishing her photographs in anarchist magazines. In 1938 she fled Spain for Mexico, joining a circle of left-wing artists and intellectuals who cultivated their own idiosyncratic versions of European Surrealism. This photograph of a wax museum display in Mexico City is a perfectly poised study in Surrealist juxtposition. The reflection of a young girl (possibly Horna's daughter) hovers ghostlike in the center of an uncanny scenario devoted to tuberculosis ("La Peste Blanca"), featuring a woman on her deathbed presided over by a swimsuit-clad mannequin gazing into a hand-mirror.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Untitled
  • Artist: Kati Horna (Mexican (born Hungary), Szilasbalhás 1912–2000 Mexico City)
  • Date: 1950, printed ca. 1960
  • Medium: Gelatin silver print
  • Dimensions: Image: 7 7/8 × 7 7/8 in. (20 × 20 cm)
  • Classification: Photographs
  • Credit Line: Purchase, Joyce F. Menschel Gift, 2018
  • Object Number: 2018.200
  • Curatorial Department: Photographs

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El Botellón (The Water Bottle)
Kati Horna
1962
Stairway to the Cathedral, Kati Horna Hungarian, gelatin silver print
Returned to lender
Stairway to the Cathedral
Kati Horna
1938
Militiamen in a Trench, Kati Horna Hungarian, gelatin silver print
Returned to lender
Militiamen in a Trench
Kati Horna
1937–38
Haile Salassie, Former Emperor of Ethiopia, Photographed at the Railway Station of Geneva on His Arrival to the League of Nation's Historic Session, Lucien Aigner Hungarian, Gelatin silver print
Haile Salassie, Former Emperor of Ethiopia, Photographed at the Railway Station of Geneva on His Arrival to the League of Nation's Historic Session
Lucien Aigner
1935
Ballet Practice at the Grand Opera, Paris, Lucien Aigner Hungarian, Gelatin silver print
Ballet Practice at the Grand Opera, Paris
Lucien Aigner
1934

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