Trude Fleischmann

A photographer of theatre stars, dancers and intellectuals; an artist whose portraits of contemporaries like Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos or Albert Einstein have become famous, whose motion studies of nude dancers in the 1920s caused quite a sensation … Trude Fleischmann (1895–1900) without any doubt ranks among the greats of 20th century female photography. She was one of those self-confident young Jewish – and female – photographers who read the signs of the times, opened their own studios in post-war Vienna and made their careers in a male-dominated sphere with works that were bolder and more modern than their forerunners’.

In the 1920s, when society was in a euphoric mood and open for aesthetic experimentalism, the “New Woman” arrived on the scene, striving for emancipation and independence. Trude Fleischmann epitomised the very image of a young, self-assured woman. Her studio became an important haunt of Vienna’s cultural circles – that is until 1938, when her career was temporarily stopped dead by the “Anschluss”. After her expulsion she managed to re-establish herself as a professional photographer in New York.

First Comprehensive Exhibition

Two decades after her death, the Wien Museum dedicates a comprehensive exhibition to Trude Fleischmann, focussing on her Vienna period from 1920 to 1938. The exhibition not only features her best known photos but also works hitherto unknown: In fact, Fleischmann was a very versatile photographer; her oeuvre goes far beyond her famous studio shots and is way more comprehensive and thematically wide-ranging than has been assumed. A large part of the photographs on display is owned by the Wien Museum, which holds one of the most comprehensive and internationally renowned collections of Fleischmann’s works.