Front / Recto

  • Title Untitled, from On the Needles of These Days (Na jehlách těchto dní ) (1945)
  • Negative Date 1934–35
  • Print Date 1934–55
  • Medium Gelatin silver print
  • Dimensions Image 3 9/16 x 3 3/8" (9 x 8.5 cm)
    Sheet 3 11/16 × 3 1/2" (9.4 × 8.9 cm)
    Mount 6 11/16 × 5 15/16" (17 × 15.1 cm)
  • Place Taken Prague
  • Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
  • MoMA Accession Number 1873.2001
  • Description

    In the early years of the twentieth century, with the step-up in production of factory-made off-the-rack clothing, shops were looking for ways to attract new customers. Mannequins with lifelike faces, anatomically accurate torsos, and interchangeable limbs replaced the headless, featureless wire cages of old dressmaker’s forms. Photographers seized upon the new mannequins, immediately seeing their potential as human analogues: their frozen expressions and gestures mimicked real emotion but were obviously artificial, giving them uncanny life and gratuitous, ready-made irony. One of the first to avail himself of the mannequin’s magic was Eugène Atget, whose photographs were published by the Surrealists. Atget’s mannequin photographs also appeared in the exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart in 1929 and in Atget: Photographe de Paris, a widely distributed monograph—the first such study of a modern photographer—simultaneously published in three cities in 1930. Among the artists thus introduced to the mannequin motif was the sensitive Czech avant-garde poet, photographer, editor, painter, and collagist Jindřich Štyrský.

    Štyrský became friendly with André Breton, Paul Eluard, and other Surrealist artists and writers in Paris in the years between 1925 and 1928. Like them, he was especially drawn to the bizarre, erotic, and morbid and to the symbolic forms in which they appeared in popular culture. Štyrský trawled the streets of Paris and Prague, looking for such subjects and finding, among others, a fortune-teller’s sign reading “Human Life in Pictures”; a music box; caskets; moldering cupids; artificial limbs; and other treasures of flea markets, sideshows, and window displays. He rarely presented these loaded objects in their entirety, but rather, moving in close, he cropped them into little picture poems. Štyrský contact printed his negatives through a paper mask to straighten and crop them, then arranged his photographs in series: Frog Man, Man with Blinkers, and Paris Afternoon.

    In 1941 Štyrský published a clandestine edition of On the Needles of These Days (Na jehlách těchto dní), a book of photographs in which the images were accompanied by Jindřich Heisler’s poems. Because there were many arrests and deportations of Jews in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, for the four years of the war Štyrský and his partner, the artist Toyen, sheltered Heisler, who was Jewish, in their bathroom. Their collaboration was therefore an underground activity. This print of a mannequin in the window of a Prague shop comes from a maquette for the book. It is mounted with adhesive at the top two corners to a folded folio of cream-Toned, textured paper with “XII” written in red pencil directly beneath the image and “12” in green pencil on the verso of the print. The hand-edited, black printed text for the previous spread (“XI”) appears on the verso of the folio. [1] Later published, in 1945, as a book with gravure plates, the original edition with tipped-in photographs was handmade, extremely limited, and, because of the war, of low production quality. However, the very fact of the publication’s dire existence, the apt pairing of two talents, and their brooding, poignant work, at times lyrical but more often oblique, resonates. Although Štyrský had made another photograph of this mannequin, his Venus of Prague, when she was partially clothed and surrounded by the city reflected in the store window (à la Atget), he chose this naked version for the book. By editing context from the image, Štyrský brought to the fore the isolated and mutilated condition of life in Europe or, as Heisler wrote, the starkness of “her eternal misery.”

    —Maria Morris Hambourg, Hanako Murata

    [1] The maquette is no longer intact. In addition to this print The Museum of Modern Art has one other, and several more are in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Back / Verso

  • Mount Type Mount (original)
  • Marks and Inscriptions

    Inscribed in red pencil on small mount recto, bottom center: XII. Inscribed in green pencil on sheet verso, center: 12. Printed in black ink on large mount verso, bottom center: Pronikne-li světlo do tmavých koutů tak složitého/mechanismu ticha, zůstává ztrnulé nad krásou lhostej-/nosti, která zblbla v šílenství tohoto věku. Inscribed in pencil on large mount verso, bottom right: P 84 03 004.

    [1] "If light penetrates into the dark corners of such a complicated mechanism of silence, it remains frozen above the beauty of indifference, which went bonkers in the madness of the present age."
  • Provenance Possibly the artist; probably to a private collection, Paris, or to the artist's daughter [1]; to Galerie Rudolf Kicken, Cologne, 1984 [2]; purchased by Thomas Walther, November 6, 1997 [3]; purchased by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2001.
    [1] MacGill/Walther 2001(3), p. 22; and Rudolf Kicken, conversation with Simon Bieling, Kicken Berlin, February 17, 2004.
    [2] MacGill/Walther 2001(3), p. 22; and Kicken archival no. P 84 03 004 on large mount verso.
    [3] MacGill/Walther 2001(3), p. 22; and Galerie Rudolf Kicken invoice no. 97/1107, November 6, 1997.

Surface

  • Surface Sheen Glossy
  • Techniques Mount
    Retouching (additive)
  • PTM
    View of the recto of the artwork made using reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) software, which exaggerates subtle surface details and renders the features of the artwork plainly visible. Department of Conservation, MoMA
  • Micro-raking
    Raking-light close-up image, as shot. Area of detail is 6.7 x 6.7 mm. Department of Conservation, MoMA
    Raking-light close-up image, processed. Processing included removal of color, equalization of the histogram, and sharpening, all designed to enhance visual comparison. Department of Conservation, MoMA

Paper Material

  • Format Unknown
  • UV Fluorescence Recto negative
    Verso no data
  • Fiber Analysis No fiber data available
  • Material Techniques Developing-out paper
  • XRF

    This work was determined to be a gelatin silver print via X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry.

    The following elements have been positively identified in the work, through XRF readings taken from its recto and verso (or from the mount, where the verso was not accessible):

    • Recto: P, S, K, Ca, Zn, Br, Sr, Ag, Ba
    • Mount: Al, Si, K, Ca, Fe, Zn, Sr, Ba

    The graphs below show XRF spectra for three areas on the print: two of the recto—from areas of maximum and minimum image density (Dmax and Dmin)—and one of the verso or mount. The background spectrum represents the contribution of the XRF instrument itself. The first graph shows elements identified through the presence of their characteristic peaks in the lower energy range (0 to 8 keV). The second graph shows elements identified through the presence of their characteristic peaks in the higher energy range (8 to 40 keV).

    Areas examined: Recto (Dmax: black; Dmin: green), Verso or Mount (blue), Background (red)
    Elements identified: Al, Si, P, S, Ag, K, Ca, Ba
    Areas examined: Recto (Dmax: black; Dmin: green), Verso or Mount (blue), Background (red)
    Elements identified: Fe, Zn, Br, Ag, Sr

In Context

Related Images

Jindřich Heisler and Jindřich Štyrský. On the Needles of These Days (Na jehlách těchto dní). Prague: Fr. Borový, 1945
Page 28: Jindřich Štyrský. Untitled. 1935. Reproduced in On the Needles of These Days (Na jehlách těchto dní). 1945. Gelatin silver print, 3 9/16 x 3 3/8" (9 x 8.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Her endless sadness of the dawn beginning with languid movements of money. Her immense boredom preventing the males from laying their eggs in her. Her eternal misery,
Page 46: Jindřich Štyrský. Untitled. c. 1934. Reproduced in On the Needles of These Days (Na jehlách těchto dní). 1945. Gelatin silver print, 3 1/2 x 3 3/8" (9 x 8.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Rudolf Kicken
Night after night melts away and the while muscles of the day, insolent and frightened, pursued and pursuing, trembling in the soup and in the dense rows of machines, these white muscles, both healthy and ill, convulsively stretched between love and hate, between yes and no, these white muscles with lamed legs, collapsing in a blaze of gold, tinkle out persistently their much-loved gladiators’ march.
On the Needles of These Days. Trans. Jean-Boase-Beier and Jindřich Toman. Berlin: Edition Sirene, 1984

Historical Publications

  • Heisler, Jindřich, and Jindřich Štyrský. Na jehlách těchto dní, p. 29 (as untitled photograph). Prague: Fr. Borový, 1945.

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