[Toilet in a Catholic School in Cologne-Zollstock]
Werner Mantz was not the first modernist to wring inspiration from the washroom. In the 1910s and ‘20s, artists as varied as Marcel Duchamp and Edward Weston celebrated the sculptural possibilities of the porcelain toilet. Yet while their works decontextualized the common commode, Mantz confronts it in situ. His camera dryly describes the facilities of a Helmuth Wirminghaus-designed school in Cologne–one the many new buildings he documented for local architecture firms and the journals that promoted their work. Cologne experienced a building boom in the 1920s, and the structures rising up around Mantz’s studio engaged the principles of Bauhaus and Constructivist design. His celebrated views of the transforming city adapt this style in turn. They reveal him to be a master builder in his own right, structuring planes and shadows with an eye for absolute balance. Here, in the tight space of the stall, an entire composition coheres as if readymade. Light bounces off of the silver fixtures and the rim of the seat. Hygiene—a core tenet of modern institutional architecture—pronounces itself sterile lines and sleek surfaces. But squint, and one can almost forget the subject of this picture. In a bathroom, or a barroom, or on the streets of Cologne, the best photographers see shapes, tones, types of light. Mantz swung open this bathroom door to find a perfect play of volumes, voids, cylinders and spheres. His photographs flush them out for the rest of us to see.
Artwork Details
- Title: [Toilet in a Catholic School in Cologne-Zollstock]
- Artist: Werner Mantz (German, Cologne 1901–1983 Eijsden)
- Date: 1929
- Medium: Gelatin silver print
- Dimensions: Image: 8 13/16 × 6 9/16 in. (22.4 × 16.6 cm)
Sheet: 9 in. × 6 3/4 in. (22.9 × 17.1 cm) - Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2025
- Object Number: 2025.626
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
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Werner Mantz (German, Cologne 1901–1983 Eijsden)
1927
Werner Mantz (German, Cologne 1901–1983 Eijsden)
1928
Werner Mantz (German, Cologne 1901–1983 Eijsden)
1928
Werner Mantz (German, Cologne 1901–1983 Eijsden)
1929
Werner Mantz (German, Cologne 1901–1983 Eijsden)
1928
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