Ellen Thorbecke

Ellen FROM Thorbecke PEKING TO PARIS

The Nederlands Fotomuseum cherishes the archive of Ellen Thorbecke Archive Ellen Thorbecke negatives

638 contact prints

637

Ellen Thorbecke’s archive was entrusted to the Nederlands Fotomuseum in 2008 by the photographer’s daughter. It consists of 638 black and white negatives in 6x6 format in hand-written packaging and registration cards in a wooden box. All negatives are digitized. In addition, there are original contact prints and the books published by her.

The Nederlands Fotomuseum watches over more than 175 archives of photographers from the Netherlands and places them in a contemporary context. The Fotomuseum stores these in high-quality cool storage and conserves, registers, digitizes and presents the collection via digital channels as well as in publications and exhibitions.

The Fotomuseum also manages the copyrights to Ellen Thorbecke’s oeuvre.

Ellen FROM Thorbecke PEKING TO PARIS

Ellen Thorbecke

7

FOREWORD

193

Birgit Donker

8

PREFACE

ARTISTIC SYNERGY

The collaboration between Friedrich Schiff and Ellen Thorbecke Ruben Lundgren

Ruben Lundgren

11

THE PHOTOBOOKS OF ELLEN THORBECKE

201

ALTERNATIVE TRAVEL GUIDES

257

PROMISED LAND

284

BIOGRAPHY & BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hong Kong & Shanghai (1936-1941)

Rik Suermondt

33

BEIJING AND THE CHINESE INTERIOR

China, Please Smile! and Peking Studies (1931-1934)

107

SUBJECTIFIED PORTRAITS

The Middle East and the founding of Israel (1944-1945)

Rik Suermondt

People in China (1935)

143

EN ROUTE

165

PARIS

From the Java-China-JapanLine to the Zuyder Zee (1935-1936)

An incomplete photoreportage (1936)

5

PREFACE

RUBEN LUNDGREN

Some photographic archives, however small, are like priceless gems, safely stored away to be presented to the public decades later. As time passes, their true value becomes clear. In spring 2014 I realised that the Ellen Thorbecke archive is one of these gems. While researching the history of Chinese photobooks, I came across her fabulous Peking Studies (1934) and People in China (1935), which she created in collaboration with illustrator and painter Friedrich Schiff.

Such was the quality of these ‘no-brainers’ as my co-author, the renowned photographer and collector Martin Parr called them that, despite the high price, we bought them immediately in order to study them more closely. They feature in our review, The Chinese Photobook, from the 1900s to the Present (2015), along with two of her other books; a record number for an individual photographer, and an honour Thorbecke shares only with her contemporary, the famous Chinese photographer Lang Jingshan.

At the launch of our book at Pakhuis De Zwijger in Amsterdam my former art history lecturer and historian of photography Rik Suermondt gave a lecture about Ellen Thorbecke’s photobooks.

In 1998 he had tracked down the archive of her work, which was in the safekeeping of her daughter Evelyn, and a year later he curated an exhibition of her work for the national museum of ethnology Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden, featuring fifty new baryta prints and her China publications. He also wrote the first biography of Ellen Thorbecke. At a dinner prior to the launch he told me how difficult it had been at that time to draw attention to her work. There was no money for a catalogue, and he only just managed to arrange for the photographs to be displayed in a small exhibition space rather 8

than in the museum restaurant. The opening ceremony was also a minimalist affair. But the national daily NRC Handelsblad unexpectedly decided to place an announcement as a scoop on its front page, resulting in many people eventually turning up for the opening. The guests – without the usual refreshments – showed great interest in her work. Where the fabulous baryta prints are now, two decades later, remains a mystery. We suspect that the museum gave them away.

Clearly there has been a huge improvement in the appreciation of photography as an art form and as part of the cultural heritage in the Netherlands over the past twenty years, certainly now that we have four museums of photography.

Photobooks are also more highly prized as art objects and the role of female photographers in the history of photography is better acknowledged. Above all, however, China’s status in the world is completely different these days. It has transformed from a newly emerging economy to potentially the world’s biggest superpower.

All these changes have had a major impact on the way Ellen Thorbecke’s work is perceived.

It now attracts more interest also beyond the Netherlands. In the People’s Republic, too, there is a demand for the few images that exist of the dynamic decades before the communist regime came to power. This was a time of ‘East Meets West’, when Chinese photography briefly flourished as well. Thorbecke’s unique and empathetic view of the country is perhaps appreciated even more by the descendants of the people whom she described on her typewriter and photographed with her Rolleiflex over eighty years ago.

Chinese collectors I encounter at auctions and antique fairs have a great interest in the 1930s, and with good reason. It was then that a modern Chinese identity first began to take shape, as the ‘century of humiliation’ resulting from foreign intervention and subjugation gradually came to an end.

The work Thorbecke produced in Paris and the Middle East also warrants a mention. This book is the first to include the photographs she took in the ‘cité d’amour’ in 1936, for a photobook that was never published. Some are beautiful vintage prints of streetscenes which were recently discovered within the family in the United States.

It also features some magnificent images of Palestine which she published in her book about the founding of Israel, Promised Land (1947), never before seen by the public.

Rik Suermondt and I have done our best to present as complete an impression as possible of the work of Ellen Thorbecke. We would like to thank the staff at the Nederlands Fotomuseum, and director Birgit Donker, who supported my idea of showcasing Thorbecke’s work from the very beginning. Special thanks go to project manager Martijn van den Broek, who managed to keep the exhibition and publication on track, even through the dark days of the coronavirus pandemic. We are also indebted to several of Thorbecke’s relatives. Particularly her daughter Evelyn Thorbecke, who spoke extensively to

Rik Suermondt in 1998 about the life and work of her mother. And granddaughter Kirsti Järvinen, who contributed greatly to the current monograph and exhibition. The same is true of sinologist Gerd Kaminski, whose indefatigable efforts to promote the work of Friedrich Schiff were also vital to our project.

I hope that visitors and readers will experience as much pleasure as I did on my journey from Peking to Paris in the footsteps of the brilliant photographer and journalist Ellen Thorbecke.

Envelope containing the introduction from the children’s book 3 in 1 (1934)

9

‘The Camel-driver’ from the book People in China, 1935

10

THE PHOTOBOOKS OF ELLEN THORBECKE

publications already mentioned, they include Mysterious China (1937), Hong Kong (1939) and Shanghai (1941). When the archive was transferred to the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam in 2008, more than 450 other 6x6 negatives came to light, most of them of photos taken in the Middle East and in Paris, and in total 637 separate contact prints.3 This essay focuses on her six published photobooks. What makes them so distinctive? And, working as a Western correspondent, what picture does she sketch of China and of the development of Israel?

VIBRANT BERLIN RIK SUERMONDT

Journalist and photographer Ellen Thorbecke (born Ellen Kolban, 1902-1973) spent most of the 1930s in China, working as a correspondent for newspapers in Berlin and living as the partner and later wife of the Dutch envoy, Willem Thorbecke.1 To illustrate her articles, she took a series of portraits and photographed street scenes in rural areas of China and in the cities of Peking (now Beijing), Shanghai and Hong Kong. The material formed the basis for five unique books, for which she herself wrote the texts while Austrian artist Friedrich H. Schiff contributed cartoon-style drawings and watercolours. The publications demonstrate a warm interest in people at all levels in Chinese society and an understanding of the international forces at play in China’s turbulent interwar period.

They record the changing identity of the young Republic at a time when age-old traditions (the imperial dynasties) were giving way to Western modernisation. In 1947, Thorbecke published her sixth and last book, Promised Land, an optimistic account of the development of the Jewish state of Israel in what was then British-ruled Mandatory Palestine.

In Britain, the United States and the Far East, the publication of Peking Studies (1934), People in China (1935) and Promised Land (1947) brought Ellen Thorbecke a degree of fame. In the Netherlands – where, from 1960 onwards, she and her husband spent half of each year living in The Hague – she remained for a long time virtually unknown. In 1998, a small part of her China archive was discovered at the home of her daughter Evelyn in Amsterdam.2 It consists of 184 6x6 negatives, a dummy book containing 70 pasted-in photographic prints, and five published photobooks. In addition to the three

Ellen Thorbecke was an unusual woman in many different ways. She was unconventional and socially poised, had flair, pursued wide cultural and political interests, and possessed a wealth of artistic talent. She was one of a number of spirited, modern-minded career women who lived in the liberal German Weimar Republic and aspired to blaze their own trails in the world. The child of wealthy landowner Rudolf Kolban and Austrian opera singer Hermine

Photographer unknown, Ellen Thorbecke, ca. 1930

1.

This essay is an expanded version of my earlier biography of Ellen Thorbecke, published in: Photolexicon, volume 16, no. 32 (November 1999).

2.

After my former tutor Kees Maaswinkel of the University of Utrecht’s Institute of Art History had brief contact with Evelyn Thorbecke in 1985, I visited her in 1998 at her home in Amsterdam. My visit was directly motivated by the purchase of People in China. Evelyn was immediately willing to show me the archive, to allow me to write a biography and to assist in the preparation of an exhibition at the National Museum of Anthropology in Leiden.

3.

See https://collectie.nederlandsfotomuseum.nl Ellen Thorbecke, consulted on 6 September 2020.

11

BEIJING AND THE CHINESE INTERIOR China Please Smile! and Peking Studies (1931-1934) The main theme of Ellen Thorbecke’s (1902-1973) publications on China is the clash of Eastern tradition and Western innovation.

The first volume to result from her work was the dummy China, Please Smile!, produced in close collaboration with Austrian artist Friedrich Schiff (1908-1968). The book design is a striking combination of pasted-in photographs, text and pen-and-ink drawings. On the first page we meet the two cartoon-style protagonists: Englishman Mr. Pim – the stereotypical Western colonial sporting a pith helmet, pipe and camera – and the hospitable Mr. Wu. Together, they travel around Beijing and the Chinese interior. Their discussions inform the reader about Chinese traditions and customs, and the meaning of historical landmarks. The aim was to foster cultural understanding and to rectify the negative image of China that had persisted in the West ever since the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901).

China, Please Smile! remains unpublished, but Peking Studies appeared in 1934. The photobook was an example of the ethnographic and tourist publications for which a market had emerged in the inter-war period, as the colonial powers pursued expansionist policies. It again features Mr. Pim and Mr. Wu, who guide the reader around the monuments of Beijing and introduce us to some distinctive residents of the city. Ellen Thorbecke photographed the architecture of the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven, a Buddhist burial ritual and young apprentices at the Chinese theatre. She also took pictures of the characters who populated the city’s streets, including fortune tellers, barbers and rickshaw coolies. There are virtually no photographs of the Western residents in the Legation Quarter and their lifestyle. Schiff ’s drawings, however, portray a more worldly and sophisticated Beijing, possibly inspired by his time in Shanghai.

31

Chongwenmen Gate

32

Lunching on the Pavement

33

34

PRELIMINARY VERSION OF PEKING STUDIES This small, loose-leaf dummy shows for the first time the interplay between Ellen Thorbecke’s photography and Schiff’s illustrations. The eighteen original photo prints with typed captions and six drawings are pasted on separate pages. Children and the Chinese food culture are the central theme. Some pages reveal the initial outlines of the book eventually published

by Kelly & Walsh in 1934.

35

Guichets du Louvre and Pont du Carrousel

166

167

168

169

This book tells the story of a free-spirited woman who holds a singular position in international photography. In 1931, Ellen Thorbecke (1902-1973), born Ellen Kolban, travelled to China from Berlin to join her partner, the envoy Willem Thorbecke. As a journalist she purchased her first camera before departing for Beijing, and from then on she spent much of her time photographing daily life. The resulting photobooks including Peking Studies (1934) and People in China (1935) give a rare impression of how people spent their lives in the Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Paris and the Middle East of her day.

Edited by Ruben Lundgren Text and editorial support by Rik Suermondt