One still lesser-known group of works in the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation’s valuable collections and archives comprises a large number of photographs by the artist, church musician, art teacher and documentary filmmaker Alfred Ehrhardt (1901–84).

After being dismissed from his teaching post at the Hamburger Landeskunstschule (State School of Arts) in line with the Nazis’ cultural policy, Alfred Ehrhardt turned to working with the camera from 1933 onwards. As cantor and organist in Cuxhaven, the tidal flats became one of his motifs with which he could implement his concept of modern aesthetics and visual perception, as he had learnt while studying at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1928/29. With ‘Das Watt’ (Tital Flats; 1933–36) and ‘Die Kurische Nehrung’ (Curonian Spit; 1934) he created an extensive series of masterly photographs of nature and the landscape. He does not show the landscape so much as an atmospheric natural phenomenon but rather as a constantly self-perpetuating variation of forms moulded by elemental forces. Abstract surface structures and sculptural shapes correlate with concepts of a natural philosophy that sees a primal force in all things created and which Ehrhardt also renders visible in later series of works on crystals, shells and snails.

Pinakotheken München - Die Alte Pinakothek