“An aristocrat by heritage, an anarchist by conviction, a seductress by nature and a wanderer by vocation”, Kati Horna – as the artist Juan Luis Díaz praises – was born Katalin Deutsch Blau on May 19, 1912, at the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She died at the turn of the millennium, leaving behind a vast and slippery body of work that, perhaps due to her roots in photojournalism rather than fine art, has so far escaped much of the fanfare. recently extended to her best friends Leonora Carrington and, to a lesser extent, Remedios Varo. The first New York gallery exhibition of her work, “Kati Horna: In Motion,” scratched the surface of a body of work that encompasses war photography, agitprop, and a motley surrealism divorced from any organized art movement.
The daughter of a prosperous Jewish family in Budapest, Horna moved to Berlin in 1930, where she and her partner, Hungarian socialist Paul Partos, grew up in the intellectual circle of dissident Marxist Karl Korsch, a key political influence on Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht. Fleeing Berlin following the Reichstag fire five years later, the couple eventually found themselves in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, living in what the artist called a “delirium of poverty”. Two photographs exhibited at Ruiz-Healy dated from the inauguration of Horna “Flea market(Flea Markets) from 1933 to 1937 and captured this echt emporium of strange surrealism – with its dolls and dress forms discarded amidst the material waste of the long 19th century – seen through the unbiased gaze of a photojournalist. “I was in Paris but I never went to their rallies,” Horna said of the Andre Breton clique. “I didn’t like their idea of going to cafes to chat.”
Indeed, in 1937 Horna was in Barcelona, at the forefront of the anarchist propaganda effort during the Spanish Civil War and in controversial solidarity with the Republican government and the Stalinist Communist Party. (Always close to Korsch, she shared his commitment, against these factions, to revolutionary collectivization and workers’ self-management.) His contributions to the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) – the Spanish federation of anarchist trade unions – and his numerous affiliated publications was unfortunately not represented in this exhibition, apart from the photomontage Subida a la catedral, Barcelona (Ascending to the Cathedral, Barcelona), 1938/1960, which superimposes the ghostly, Garboesque image of a woman’s face on a stone wall in the titular city’s Gothic Quarter. Published after devastating Republican losses in CNT organs Libre-Studio And Umbral (where it was part of a broadcast subtitled WE FIGHT UNTIL DEATH OR VICTORY), this unnerving, peopleless photograph seems to abandon the possibility of the latter, and perhaps even concedes creeping disillusionment with what Horna’s daughter – having learned, decades later, of her mother’s hidden political past – would characterize herself as “the chimera of revolutionary anarchism”.
Escaping the advance of fascism across Europe in 1939, Horna and her second husband, Andalusian artist José Horna, settled permanently in Mexico, where she found success as an editorial photographer and joined a community of like-minded souls among the inhabitants of the capital. the emigrant intelligentsia (or “those European sluts,” as Frida Kahlo would call her sororal triad with Varo and Carrington). Much of the art in this exhibition reflected this incestuous togetherness – see the improvised photos of Carrington painting and Varo smoking or mugging for the camera with her painter husband Gunther Gerzso at Carrington’s wedding to Emerico “Chiki ” Weiss. Carrington also served as a model for Horna’s provocatively titled series “Oda a la necrofilia(Ode to Necrophilia), 1962, three prints of which were exhibited at Ruiz-Healy. Order of the ephemeral magazine battled SNOB, the selections here have captured the artist nude, leaning or sitting on an unmade bed, as she watches over a white mask resting on a pillow. Disturbing amalgams of chilly eroticism, scenic pictorialism and a rather literal fetishism (the mask takes the place of an absent corpse), these afterimages of a playful funeral rite transcend, through a strange alchemy, the sum of their parts and the candied depth of memory. died. They are kissing, pace Horna, the Breton cry of the heart: “Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, frozen-explosive, magical-circumstantial, or it will not be.
