Student Dormitory, Brno, Czechoslovakia, ca. 1930
Gelatin silver print
39.6 x 29.5 cm (15-5/8 x 11-5/8in.)
84.XM.148.82

Meaningful innovation in photography in the 1920s and 1930s was by no means restricted to artists in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, and New York, although the germi- nal influences tended to be disseminated to progressive regional centers from the capitals west of the Danube. Prague, with its axis oriented toward Berlin, was an important outpost of Modernism in Eastern Europe. Russian Constructivism, the New Objectivity of Germany, and French Surrealism were studied, digested, and reborn with new and often highly independent identities. Funke's photograph and the architectural subject represented in it demonstrate how quickly creative ideas were transmitted from one place to another. The dramatic viewpoint of the photograph and the radical, forty-five-degree rotation from plumb would have been unthinkable without Rodchenko's (related to-->> 143-44) experimental Construc- tivist studies of 1927-29. The design of these buildings likewise reveals the influ- ence of Walter Gropius's designs for the faculty residence at the Dessau Bauhaus.