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In The Spotlight contents page |    Illustrations - photographs essays:   Gael Newton  |   Belinda Hungerford  |  Anne O'Hehir   |  Caroline McGregor main Bruehl page      Bright Lights: New York Gael Newton AM The plates for this essay are presented separately on the Illustration Page   On 28 October 1919, Martin and Anton Bruehl arrived in San Francisco aboard the AS Sonoma from Sydney and promptly journeyed on to Manhattan to lodge with their uncle Morris Bruehl, at his drugstore at 1325 Second Avenue. In New York an exciting city awaited the Australian brothers. Its famous skyscrapers appealed to Siegwart Martin Bruehl, a twenty-four year old structural draughtsman, and its nightly constellation of bright lights to Anton Justus Bruehl, a nineteen-year-old electrical engineer.1 Their skills were well matched to the postwar boom in construction, technology and manufacturing in the United States, and both found employment in their chosen fields. While Anton would always vividly recall his first taste of pineapple and banana split in Honolulu while en route to the United States, no words survive of their hopes and expectations during their early years in New York. The brothers could hardly have imagined that by 1939 they would be working side by side as photographers from a vast midtown studio-workshop in the Grand Central Palace at 480 Lexington Avenue, the tenants of which formed a centre of the photographic industry. By that time Anton had achieved both fame and fortune from his personal and commercial photography, and was deeply respected by his professional peers. He was renowned in particular for brilliant colour photography, which was seen daily by millions of readers of Conde Nast publications and other leading American magazines. In 1919, the Bruehl brothers did not immigrate solely for personal advancement. They were also seeking a new home for their parents, who with their older sister Charlotte, a music teacher, were living in rural South Australia. Born in Germany in 1857, Dr Siegwart Bruehl had arrived in Australia from Berlin in 1882 and set up his practice as a physician, surgeon and ophthalmic surgeon at Hawker and outlying country towns near the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. Dr Bruehl returned to Germany in 1890 to marry Minna Viesel. Their children Charlotte and Martin were born in Hawker, South Australia, in 1892 and 1895, and Anton was born in 1900 in Naracoorte, further south in the state. The Bruehls lived at the coastal port of Denial Bay from 1903 to 1906. They then moved to the temperate adjacent state of Victoria, where Dr Bruehl practiced in various locations until 1914, after which he was based in the capital city of Melbourne. There Anton attended Christian Brothers High School in St Kilda. Both boys had technical aptitude and undertook vocational training, later taking up jobs in Melbourne as a structural draughtsman and electrical engineer respectively. Charlotte studied piano. During the First World War, Dr Bruehl came under unsubstantiated suspicion of harbouring ‘strong enemy sympathies’ and in 1914 his application for naturalisation was refused. With his wife and daughter, Dr Bruehl relocated to Hawker in 1917, where the doctor was technically a prisoner of war. Assisted by a supportive local solicitor, Dr Bruehl finally succeeded in his application to leave the country after forfeiting his assets to the Commonwealth. In January 1921, the elderly couple and their daughter left for the United States, two years after their sons had done so. None of the family would ever return.2 shadows and salons in Australia As is so often the case with professional photographers, the Bruehl brothers' engagement with the camera started in boyhood. Martin was interested first and around 1912 passed on his British box camera to Anton. Anton later told how he took up developing and printing pictures of local social gatherings and soon discovered that photography was 'a key to immediate popularity,' and by the time he went to work for an American engineering firm in Melbourne, he was 'a veteran! He was delighted also to discover that this workplace was run and staffed by photography enthusiasts who could build their own cameras – a habit he acquired. 'We bought, read, and visited every photographic book, journal, and exhibition that we could find!3 They also went out at weekends photographing along the Yarra River, and Bruehl noted that his colleagues were followers of romantic Pictorialist art photography, which at first he didn't care for, preferring 'human interest' subjects.4 Bruehl's hobby benefited from the lively photography scene in Melbourne in these years, which was supported by camera clubs and imported British photographic magazines, as well as local photographic and pictorial magazines. Australian amateur art photographers like Sydneysider Harold Cazneaux successfully exhibited in national and international Pictorial salons. There was little American influence, except via the large Kodak Company plant in Melbourne, however, the work of the avant-garde American Photo-Secession and its leader, Alfred Stieglitz, was known about, even if only one Australian in Melbourne subscribed to Stieglitz's magazine Camera Work. In 1913 the Victorian Photographic Affiliation held a large exhibition in Melbourne, and pioneer Pictorialist John Kauffmann presented 'one-man' shows of his soft-focus photographs in Melbourne in 1910 and 1914. The formation of an invitation-only Sydney Camera Circle by Harold Cazneaux and other Pictorialists in 1916 marked a new era of serious art photography, also seeking a nationalist style and subjects related to sunny Australia.5 Arrivals and revivals After his arrival in New York, Anton Bruehl worked for the Western Electric Company. This was the manufacturing arm of American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) and Bell Laboratories, so he was at the centre of a media revolution. The company's development of the loudspeaker would lead to the first 'talkies' being made at the plant in 1923. The subsequent launch of the first commercial radio station in New York in 1926 ushered in a revolution in advertising. The new media culture pushed the volume of commercial advertising in newspapers and illustrated magazines from 1409 million in 1919, to 2987 million in 1929.6 Most magazines were still illustrated by graphic artists throughout the 1920s but the role of photographers grew as advertisers discovered how photography could be manipulated to glamorise their products.7 High-profile art photographers began to appear as part of a magazine's identity; in 1923 publisher Conde Montrose Nast – who gave photographers credits in his magazines – appointed as his chief photographer Edward Steichen, the brilliant art photographer recently returned from France. That same year, Bruehl was looking to move on from electrical engineering, to 'work in which he would have more independence and more freedom of imagination!8 He could hardly have missed the new interest in commercial photography, but it was art photography that inspired him. As he later said: My hobby emigrated too. I continued to read books and magazines and attend photographic exhibitions. An exhibition of Clarence H White's students brought me to the point where I switched from engineering to photography. The exhibit was hung at The Art Center and I found it very impressive. So much so that I asked a woman sitting at the desk what kind of school it was and where I could find it. She answered both my questions and I went to the address that she gave me immediately. When I arrived the school was closed – but I saw Mr. White. He said he was sorry the school wasn't operating and I started to walk out. 'Maybe I could teach you privately,' he offered. Next day I asked Western Electric for a six month's [sic] leave of absence to try for a fulltime career of photography9 Already technically skilled and familiar with Pictorialist aesthetics, Bruehl progressed rapidly. He never went back to Western Electric. Bruehl was using his camera in the United States before 1923 and had most likely viewed earlier shows at the Art Center. This venue, on East Fifty-Sixth Street, Manhattan, had opened in 1921 and housed a federation of seven Arts and Crafts societies, including the Art Directors Club (ADC) and the Pictorial Photographers of America (PPA). Its goal was to raise the status of Arts and Crafts professionals. It had a program of monthly lectures and exhibits by the PPA, as well as by the students and alumni of the Clarence H White School of Photography, and in May 1923 the PPA mounted their first International Salon of Pictorial Photographers of America. The White School founder was Clarence H White, who had started as an amateur photographer in Ohio in the 1890s, rose fast through the ranks of camera clubs and salons, and was a member of the elite Photo-Secession group led by Stieglitz. From 1903 to 1912, his romantic images featured in Stieglitz's Camera Work, including a 1908 issue dedicated solely to his work. Having become a teacher in New York in 1914, White founded his own school in upper Manhattan to teach photography as 'a fine art with an established technique, but also a practical art, indispensable to modern commerce and industry!10 This goal was not that hard—the formal design and pattern, sentiment, mood, and associative storytelling of Pictorialism could be easily transposed to the needs of product advertising. While these modern design trends were evident worldwide11, White's school curriculum went further. He employed varied and challenging teachers, including painter-theorist Max Weber, who taught design fundamentals that could be applied equally to a range of styles. White actively encouraged students to solve problems they would face as illustrators and to seek employment in commercial art and studio portraiture. Successful alumni and top professional photographers, such as Edward Steichen, appeared regularly in the school program as guest speakers. Some White School graduates—such as Laura Gilpin, Doris Ulmann and Karl Struss—followed the older impressionistic style that their teacher had excelled in at the turn of the century. Their images favoured low tone, soft focus, and simplified forms and spaces. By the early 1920s, other White School alumni – such as Margaret Watkins, Ira Martin, Margaret Bourke White, Paul Outerbridge and Ralph Steiner—had taken their design fundamentals in a modernist or realist documentary direction, making powerful images in sharp focus, using dynamic angles, contrasts of light and shade, and ambiguous spatial planes for both abstract and documentary images. They sought subjects that engaged with modern society and forms, which generated an emotional response rather than lofty sentiments and poetic reveries. Margaret Watkins and Paul Outerbridge in particular had attracted wider public attention. Watkins's still life of a kitchen sink, titled Domestic symphony, was published in Vanity Fair in October 1921 as part of a series profiling modern photography and Outerbridge's still life of a starched collar was used in an advertisement for Ide collars in Vanity Fair in November 1922.12 To support himself while studying at the Clarence H White School of Photography, Bruehl gained a part-time position in the studio of Jessie Tarbox Beals, at 333 Fourth Avenue. By 1923 he was also being employed to teach the photogravure process at the White School, and to and assist with White's annual summer and winter residential workshops in Canaan, Connecticut. Bruehl's status as an outstanding pupil is also shown by his inclusion as a speaker at the Friday night lectures, alongside more established graduates that included Outerbridge and visiting luminaries like Steichen, who argued strongly for modern, sharp focus and commercial applications of the medium. In his personal archive, Bruehl preserved a number of low-toned platinum prints in which he, like most of the students at White's residential workshops, had sought out rustic subjects in Connecticut. His first published work was a study of old barrels, which appeared in 1924 in Camera Pictures, an occasional publication by alumni of the White School. By 1925, Bruehl was exhibiting in the local salons and was selected by White for inclusion in the second International Salon of Pictorial Photographers of America, held at the Art Center, and was possibly doing some professional portrait work.13 White was by all accounts a charismatic figure but it appears that he and Bruehl were genuinely close. The two spent many weekends together at White's cottage in Falls Village, Connecticut. In 1960, Bruehl recalled White as 'A wonderful great man. I owe everything to him – from these trips we would take. We would talk on the weekends of living and of photography ... The teaching at the school was not worth a damn, each of us learned from him as a man and as a photographe.'14 Indeed, the relationship between the two was also noted by Dr Siegwart Bruehl, in a letter to White in June 1923: I now want to thank you most fervently for the splendid way, in which you have led my boy to the right road of his life-work. I have now no more any anxiety in my heart about his future and I must especially thank you that you have always taught him to put his art above everything else! White replied that Anton had 'shown the most aptitude of any new student... I do believe with his ability & enthusiasm he ought to make a name for himself in photography'.15 Given their close relationship, Clarence White's death, at the age of fifty-four while on a photography trip with students in Mexico in July 1925, must have been shocking for Bruehl. He may have hoped to assume a senior role at the White School, but in mid 1926 – citing the need to do more of his own work – Bruehl left the faculty. He remained on the advisory board until the school closed in 1942. New lights As he told the story in late life, Bruehl's advertising career began in 1926 by showing a still life of biscuits to one of the newest agencies, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, and a radio image to one of the oldest, J Walter Thompson. To his surprise, Bruehl sold a picture for $75, for which he would have accepted $10. Advertising photography became his vocation.16  Bruehl revered the pure photographic art ideals and exquisite printing quality in Stieglitz's Camera Work, but had already discovered that 'People would pay $1000 for an ad but wouldn't pay for a photographic print even if it were better. So I did a lot of advertising'.17 Bruehl's first 'signature' modernist work is his very accomplished still life Pears of 1926, which has strong geometric form but also the lingering, sombre mood and soft inner glow of Pictorialism. One of his earliest published advertising images was a jaunty, geometric shoe advertisement for Manhattan menswear chain Weber and Heilbroner, which appeared in the Pictorial Photography in America annual in 1926, opposite a geometric abstract by Outerbridge. In such company, Bruehl must have felt he had truly arrived as a photographer. In his first year as a professional, Bruehl worked in collaboration with Ralph Steiner, operating out of darkrooms where they both lived in row housing at 145 and 147 East Forty-Seventh Street. About this time, Steiner made a delightful smiling portrait of his associate, suggesting their personal friendship (p XX). Their joint 'Steiner-Bruehl' credit appeared on advertisements in the Hearst fashion magazine Delineator in 1926, in Vogue in 192718, and on an advertisement for socks from Weber and Heilbroner in the The New Yorker on 1 January 1927. Kitchenware and everyday objects, such as hats and shoes, were popular motifs in early twentieth-century modern art and these geometric objects similarly appeared in modernist graphic and photographic advertising in the 1920s.19  Despite this trend, it was brave of Weber and Heilbroner's art director to entrust Steiner and Bruehl with a new campaign for readymade suits 'In the New York Manner) in which the actual suits were never shown. Advertisements in the Fabric Group campaign first appeared in The New Yorker on 29 January 1927. Thereafter, each week a trio of paper cut-out dandies in tuxedo-like black suits and homburg hats were shown against a succession of photographic and graphic backdrops, out and about in the city. The droll captions told how every situation they faced was helped by their having the right clothes. Silas Spitzer provided the captions but Bruehl was almost certainly responsible for the miniature sets, photographic backgrounds and lighting effects that give the series such a playful tension between graphic and photographic effect. After the fourth advertisement, of 19 February 1927, Steiner's name dropped off the Fabric Group images, a departure that probably prompted Bruehl to recruit his brother Martin to join him in the business.20 The Anton Bruehl Studio then sustained the popular Fabric Group advertisements, taking their adventures and detail to new heights. From August 1927 the trio of dandies was shown abroad in Europe and Asia, as well as in outback Australia, before sailing for New York and a ticker-tape welcome home. Without explanation, on 22 December 1928 the Fabric Group campaign came to an end and Weber and Heilbroner switched to using Bruehl's modernist and surreal montage images until October 1929, after which Martin Bruehl's photographs for Gimbel's Old World Shop Antiques appear for some months. The Fabric Group campaign was a marker of the rise of photographic illustration in the 1920s, and in the eighty or so years since its publication, its wit and charm is undimmed. For the newly established Anton Bruehl Studio, the exposure to the readers of The New Yorker over such a long period was a dream run, and the campaign revealed Bruehl's particular design strengths, visual wit and ingenuity that continued into much of his later work. (The Fabric Group is discussed further in the essay 'Magic in Manhattan!) From the late 1920s, advertising industry awards were launched and quickly became the yardstick of professional standing.21 Spitzer and Bruehi won an ADC gold medal award in 1928 for their Weber and Heilbroner campaign, and another in 1929 for their advertisements featuring a chorus line of top hats, for which Bruehi also received a Harvard Business School Advertising Award. Bruehi won another Harvard Business School award in 1930, for a purely photographic advertisement for Weber and Heilbroner, which showed the smokestack of a Clyde-Mallory line ship. Also in 1930, Bruehl's series of quiet and gracious images for Steinway pianos earned a Harvard Business School Bok Award for the advertising agency NW Ayer.22 Bruehl's new stream of narrative figure studies for advertising drew on his earlier White School art photography and perhaps also on the storytelling he used in the Fabric group campaign; it would reappear in later bodies of commercial work, including in his theatre studies. Trade journals were soon showcasing the Anton Bruehi Studio work as a new era of commercial photography, praising especially his use of bird's-eye and worm's-eye views. One enthusiastic commenter acclaimed how,'Some spools, a board, and winding threads – trivial, commonplace things, until, through the magic of the Bruehi genius and the Bruehi camera they become symbols of a great merchandising house'.23 In September 1929, Collier's Weekly gave Bruehi his hrst wider public profile as an artist-photographer when they ran a double-page spread of his dramatic close-ups of engineering forms under the heading 'Beauty at a glance! Bruehl's work was also included that year in the Film undfoto exhibition of European and American modern photography in Stuttgart.24 He was rapidly being seen as an industrial photographer able to glamorise industrial products, and in 1929 General Motors commissioned him to make a'camera portrait'of their massive 1930 Cadillac V-16 engine.25 Bruehl's style became confident and quite majestic. For his own pleasure, he photographed the ribs of his custom-designed ketch Yarra while it was under construction, and his later colour photographs of machine parts built further on these early 1930s studies. With his industrial subject skills, Bruehi might have been expected to have his work in the deluxe business magazine Fortune, launched by Henry Luce in 1930, however, this magazine came to be dominated by the work of another White School graduate, Margaret Bourke-White. Nevertheless, Bruehl's striking images for advertising agency Young & Rubicam's house advertisements did appear in 1930.26 The depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929 had most likely caused the demise of further Weber and Heilbroner advertisements, but high-end advertising clients like General Motors, Bonwit Teller and Bergdorf Goodman still flourished and helped the Bruehi Studio to weather the downturn. Bruehi had joined the ranks of photographers whose'name'was an endorsement of the products they were employed to advertise. His images also began appearing as cross-promotions in limited-edition deluxe booklets promoting high-quality printing paper companies, which blended the Pictorialists' love of craft and refinement with modernist, dynamic design that was better suited to the pace of modern life and technology.27 Bruehl's work in the early to mid 1930s also reflected the fashionable interest in surrealist art. His 1932 Bonwit Teller knitwear advertisement showed a nude female seemingly bound in yarn, inspired perhaps by the Classical Greek legend of Ariadne of Crete, whose red wool guided Theseus out of the labyrinth. The nude looks lifelike, but it was a three-foot high wooden figure. This curious advertisement generated comment and a lot of orders.28 Its surreal quality was not accidental. Bruehi had assisted Spanish artist Salvador Dah with his 1932 window displays for Bonwit Teller's Fifth Avenue store. The experience perhaps influenced Bruehl's emerging signature style, which was increasingly one of images that were dense with objects, complex angles and elevations, and shallow spaces that have a surreal quality. In the few years since opening in 1926, the Anton Bruehl Studio had gone to the top of the advertising profession, and yet Anton was also able to maintain his profile as an artist-photographer in private dealer galleries. He had his first one-person show in New York, exhibiting his more naturalistic-style work at arts entrepreneur Alma Reed's Delphic Studios in 1931. He later exhibited at Julien Levy Gallery in 1932, alongside now leading figures in modern photography Margaret Bourke-White, Berenice Abbott and Paul Strand. In 1932 Bruehi took a vacation in Mexico, probably his first away from New York since his arrival.29 Sunny climates and peasant cultures were in vogue in the 1920s and 1930s, and Mexican painter Diego Rivera had a big show in New York in 1931. Just as his hobby had emigrated with him, the camera went with Bruehi on holidays—although in his case this was a camera using 4x5-inch glass plates, which had to be used with a tripod. In 1933, accompanied by an exhibition of Bruehl's photos from this trip, Delphic Studios published a tightly edited selection of twenty-five images in a smart, black-edged and linen-covered large-format folio, titled Photographs of Mexico. The simple and spare design of the photobook matched the peasant culture of Mexico. Given that his large-format camera required his subjects to pose for some time, this considered approach and tight, close-up framing imparted a strong, individual presence. Photographs of Mexico received the American Institute of Graphic Art Best Book award for 1934 and remains one of the finest photobooks of the twentieth century. It marked an endpoint, however, as Bruehi did no further personal books until 1974, after his retirement. (Bruehl's work in Mexico is discussed further in the essay 'Exciting with a strange beauty'.) Colour and light By the early 1930s, colour was being introduced to more and more products in a bid to attract consumers and increase turnover as new ranges were introduced each season. The need for improved colour reproduction in magazines was fuelled by the lucrative opportunities for advertising revenue. The catalyst for Bruehl's shift to colour was his appointment in early 1932 as chief colour photographer to Conde Nast's magazines. Bruehl was contracted specifically to work with American photoengraver, photographer and colour specialist Fernand A Bourges and the Conde Nast engraving plant in Connecticut to perfect a process for making high-quality colour transparencies to guide photo-engravers to produce ultra-faithful colour plates. Nast's choice is surprising, as Bruehl does not appear to have done any previous colour work and was less prominent than more established figures in the United States, including Lejaren Hiller, Edward Steichen, Nikolas Muray, Paul Outerbridge and others who had had been producing colour photographs in various processes for magazine illustration since the mid 1920s.30   Bruehl's appeal, however, was that he combined 'genius for artistic composition with a thorough knowledge of stage-craft and sure mastery of lighting'.31 The method of working that was developed by the three parties was a contractual agreement called the Bruehl-Bourges process. To overcome the problem of generating enough light for the long exposures needed for the very slow speed of colour film, Bruehl – the former electrical engineer – assembled a powerful lighting system in his studio.32 The Bruehl-Bourges photographs were taken using a Devlin one-shot camera to make separate gel transparencies in the three primary colours, which were registered as overlays to produce natural colour tones. These transparencies provided an exact guide for the engravers. The high cost and superb quality of Conde Nast's colour engravings gave Bruehl and Bourges a virtual monopoly on the finest quality colour photography for magazine advertising until 1935, when the Kodak Company released Kodachrome, a colour transparency film of fabulous colour fidelity. While the partnership images carried the Bruehl-Bourges credit line, Bruehl retained artistic authorship of the images. Conde Nast's launch into colour photography came in Vogue, in May 1932. This issue had the first colour photographic cover and showed a girl in a red swimsuit. The photo was taken by Steichen, whom the editors would have feared offending had they not included him in the first colour issue. The first Bruehl-Bourges colour photograph of a still life appeared inside.33 The detail and density of colour achieved was a professional triumph; other landmarks followed. The first cover image that bled right out to the edges of the page, a picture of a 'supper of stars' appeared in July 1934 (illustration #34) , and in December of the same year the first colour double-page photo spread, of Billy Rose's Music Hall, appeared in Vanity Fair. Between May 1932 and the end of December 1934, 195 Bruehl-Bourges colour photographs – some costing up to US$1500 – appeared in Vanity Fair, Vogue and House & Garden, as well as Colliers Weekly and other magazines. The House & Garden images varied from architectural shots to studies of vegetables, fruit, flowers and even parrots. The quality and variety of images is astonishing and the schedule of production must have been exhausting, but it was lucrative as well as prestigious, generating income for the Nast photoengravers. With this level of mass circulation, Bruehl's work was being seen by millions of readers. Conde Nast's extravagant use of colour must have acted as an antidote to the Depression and been the envy of the many publishers forced to make cutbacks due to lost advertising revenue.34 Most early Bruehl-Bourges images commissioned by Conde Nast were demonstrations of what could be done in colour, but real advertising commissions soon appeared. Bruehl, Bourges and the Conde Nast engravers were able to take on the jobs. Companies sought Bruehi out; one of the first was Kenwood Mills, who in 1933 commissioned five images from Bruehi for their woollen blankets – this association would last until the 1950s. Bruehi also won an ADC gold medal in 1933 for an advertisement for Carter's Ink Company, showcasing an ensemble of decorative colour pens and inks for fashion-conscious ladies. The Bruehi-Bourges process also proved appealing for Hollywood star portraits and images of Broadway stage shows. Bruehi and Bourges seem to have independently made an exploratory trip to Hollywood to make celebrity portraits in 1935, out of which came Bruehl's smoldering portrait of Marlene Dietrich. The apogee of the Bruehi-Bourges colour work came in June 1935 when Conde Nast Press published a lavish, large-format book called Color sells. With sixty-four pages of Bruehi-Bourges images, it was designed to encourage advertisers to use colour and the Conde Nast engravers. The cover of the publication showed a portrait of the Bruehi brothers and Bourges making a Cannon Towel advertisement (illustration #7). The editorial told how 'Conde Nast magazines had launched 'the new art of color photography' and stressed that the superb quality of Bruehi-Bourges images also came from the combined expertise of the team of photographers, engravers and printers, warning that 'Color is like dynamite—dangerous, unless you know how to use it'.35 Bruehl's close association with Conde Nast publications Vanity Fair (until its merge with Vogue in 1936), Vogue and House & Garden would remain central to his career, although the relationship had difficulties. Nast formed a view that Bruehl's portraiture and life subjects were not strong, and that after the partnership with Bourges ended in 1935, his colour work was not as good. Bruehi was being paid among the highest rates in the industry and generating so much business for the engravers that they dared not antagonise him, but the volume of work he was allocated dropped considerably and became rare after 1942. He was directed towards doing theatrical studies in 1934, and a new genre opened up in which he excelled. Bruehi turned to other magazines, such as Pictorial Review, for whom he did covers and he began to focus on lucrative advertising campaigns for Four Roses whiskey, Matson Line cruises, Dole pineapple products and other elite customers. (Bruehl's advertising campaigns are discussed further in the essay 'Magic in Manhattan') Life studies and theatricals Nast's view of Bruehl's figure work and portraiture seems harsh. Bruehi had started making soft, dreamy, art Pictorial style portrait studies in the 1920s, and from the early 1930s, he made a large number of celebrity portraits in a modern style, in moody black and white and in colour. His colour studies of Russian ballet star Tamara Toumanova and clarinettist Artie Shaw, show he was highly skilled in this genre. While outdoor shots are rare in Bruehl's oeuvre, his twilight image of a blonde woman (possibly swimmer Eleanor Holm) on a rock and glowing image of Dana Jenney, who became one of the top models of the 1950s, are elegant and sensuous. Bruehi rarely essayed semi-nude advertising studies, such as that Steichen pioneered for Cannon towels.36 Bruehl's discrete, semi-nude shot of Ruth Curlett modeling a red hat was intended for a cover of Vogue in 1936 and was perhaps meant to show he that could match Steichen. However, it was considered too risque for the postal service and was moved to an inside page. The model, Ruth Curlett, defended its tastefulness, saying "I was adequately clad in Bruehl's best shadows'.37 Bruehl's photography for Vanity Fair and other magazines also generated a steady stream of very beautiful fashion studies. His May 1936 cover for Vogue, of a model in a black swimsuit on a pool ladder against a pink backdrop, combined fashion and sensuous figure work. That issue also contained Bruehl's remarkable and complex panoramic shot of a rehearsal scene from the 1936 musical 0n your toes. The show featured a jazz ballet sequence, Shunter on Tenth Avenue, and in Bruehl's image it is not clear whether we are seeing the real performance of this sequence, or Bruehl's re-creation of a scene backstage. Bruehl became known for these theatre tableaux – called 'theatricals' by the editors at Conde Nast— which first appeared in the Bruehl-Bourges commissions in the mid 1930s. His repeated use of dense and black-toned primary colours, and certain costume features like blue-and-white striped fabrics, strongly suggests that costumes were designed and made on site to achieve a particular colour harmony and design balance, just for Bruehl's shoots. Furthermore, Bruehl rarely went to the theatre, preferring to assemble the performers or models in his studio, mimicking the props and settings of the real production. Indeed, in Color sells the editorial mentions how his studio was 'the last word in advance lighting and technical equipment; the stage-sets make possible the photographing of whole theatrical casts on an unprecedented scale'.38  These theatricals are among Bruehl's most distinctive productions in which figures characteristically twist and counterpoint each other, often rising upwards, or are shown partly entering or leaving the frame from the side. Compositions required elaborate planning and construction, as well as some athletic pose holding by the performers. A number displayed the newly popular musicals featuring jazz scores, such as On your toes of 1936, and those with African-American casts, which were putting an end to the dominance of'blackface' minstrels. Bruehl, however, was not an aficionado of swing—he played Beethoven in the studio. The high number of African-American performers who featured as subjects in his images came from commissions by Vanity Fair, which had taken a lead in showcasing these performers and playwrights. A later suite of colour works was made of the cast of the Porgy and Bess musical in 1942 and a very popular, long-running series called The Esquire Canteen, made for Esquire men's magazine in 1943-45, were inspired by the shows put on for the troops in the field. This was an ideal scenario, whereby Bruehl could create cabaret scenes that were not tied to particular performances. Bruehl also regularly supplied work for other magazines, including covers for the women's magazine Pictorial Review from 1933 through to the demise of the magazine in 1939. One series, which featured in the magazine's twelve issues in 1938, had a narrative that showed young children participating in seasonal activities, all of course shot in the studio. They have a curious self-contained seriousness, rather than the cliched sentimentality of much child photography. The covers were meant for framing as wall pictures and were very popular with the magazine's millions of readers. Advertising campaigns Somewhat similar to his theatricals was Bruehl's work on advertising campaigns that were narrative in character. Bringing his model-making skills to the fore, from the mid 1930s to the mid 1950s, Bruehl created an advertising campaign for Four Roses whiskey in which readers of a range of magazines watched to see in what amazing situation four fresh roses—almost presented as 'characters' like the Fabric Group trio – would next appear. The only straightforward documentary project he worked on around this time was a commission to illustrate broadcaster and author Lowell Thomas's 1939 book Magic dials: the story of radio and television. This involved shooting on location at laboratories and studios, but also Bruehl's familiar tableaux and still-life studies. By as early as 1936 other approaches to modern photography, seeking more naturalistic and individualistic imagery, came to the fore and many commercial advertising photographers adopted smaller format cameras that were being used by photojournalists. These cameras were lighter and made it easier to capture moving images on location. Bruehl argued that 35 mm miniature cameras could not provide magazine-quality reproductions, and in his role as an editor (along with Steichen and others) of the new US Camera magazine, in 1939 he criticised the standard of work and printing in the magazine.  In the postwar years, a new generation of magazine photographers, led by art director led Alexey Brodovitch at Harper's Bazaar, favoured dynamic, off-beat images and scenarios rather than perfectly exposed, planned and sharp images. Yet significant figures among this new generation, including Richard Avedon, considered Bruehl a master and acknowledged that his superb work had influenced their own.39 Interviewed in the 1970s, Bruehl's contemporary Ansel Adams expressed the paradox of Bruehl's work, saying 'It was entirely contrived, and yet absolutely sincere'.40 Bruehl's association with Conde Nast magazines lessened after 1942 and his income came from a wide range of advertising work. Throughout the 1950s, Bruehl was as busy as ever making the elaborately staged figure studies he was now renowned for, as well as taking on food advertisements for Birds Eye Foods and other product commissions. For The Hawaiian Pineapple Company, Bruehl make five trips to Hawaii for location shots, which were then projected as backdrops for still-life arrangements for their Dole tinned pineapple products in the studio. Pineapples, it seems, had topped and tailed Anton Bruehl's career. In 1958, Bruehl held a retrospective at the Fexington Avenue studio but by 1966, with the Grand Central Palace due for demolition, it was time to close. Anton and wife Sara relocated to Boca Raton in Florida. Anton continued to give photographic talks and in 1974 published Tropic patterns, a large folio of close-up colour photographs of local flora taken in locations around his home. At all times Anton Bruehl was the studio founder and creative 'star' but the brothers were a strong team. Martin Bruehl was an elegant photographer in his own right, who had his own clients in the studio and exhibited under his own name but also under a joint by-line with Anton. Martin remained a sounding board, supporter, and artistic and business partner to his brother for thirty-nine years until closure of the Fexington Avenue studio.41  Martin Bruehl also took a number of stylish portraits of Anton in the 1930s, with his beloved cameras and spotlights. A number of dealer gallery shows were held in the brothers' retirement years and in 1998 Howard Greenberg Gallery of New York put on a major show of Anton Bruehl's work, accompanied by a substantial catalogue with a major essay by Bonnie Yochelson, which placed Bruehl's career in historical perspective. While quite a large archive of several hundred prints was retained by Martin and Anton from their individual and collective work, all but one of the original Bruehl-Bourges transparencies are gone. The various surviving colour prints – made using processes such as carbro and chromatone, which Bruehl used to print his work for display at the ADC exhibitions, for example, and his own invention, a colour toning system known as develochrome – have been dispersed to museum and private collections. The loss and dispersal of so much of the Anton Bruehl Studio's production reflects the low value placed on advertising as an art and as popular culture artifact. Ultimately, Anton Bruehl's real exhibition space was the magazine page, which reached a daily audience of millions of readers. It was the interest and appreciation of these readers – not the awards of the ADC – that was the real daily barometer of his outstanding success over the decades since his arrival in the United States in 1919. Postscript Throughout their lives in the United States, Charlotte, Martin and Anton Bruehl retained their Australian accents, along with their affection for their birthplace. Martin sang 'Waltzing Matilda' and other Australian folksongs, recited poems, and talked of Collins Street and the Yarra River in Melbourne; Charlotte published a book for young people on the early discovery and exploration of Australia.42  For recreation, the brothers excelled at woodwork and were continually making things. Martin also did landscape painting and photography for pleasure, and Anton was a skilled yachtsman. When they could, the brothers and their families sailed off Connecticut and escaped together to hot climates like the Bahamas for holidays. Dr Bruehl and Minna passed away in 1936 and 1938 respectively, and were spared the horrors of the Second World War.   The plates for this essay are presented separately on the Illustration Page   Notes The Bruehl brothers''diminutive' height [around five feet, four inches) is commented on in several articles in the National Gallery of Australia Research Library's Anton Bruehl Papers [NGARL-MS36]. Anton entered America as Anthony—the name he used in Melbourne. See N Klaassen.'Dr Siegwart Bruehl,' Flinders Ranges Research, September 2010, southaustralianhistory.com.au/bruehl.htm; and 'S Bruehl' file. National Archives of Australia, Canberra, papers D1915 SA77 and Al 1920/22642. On entering the Bahamas in 1937, Minna Bruehl stated that she had been an American resident since 1919. In 1926, Martin Bruehl married New Yorker Marie Garrett (1900-1957). He died in New York in 1980. The couple's only child, Anton Martin Jr, was born in New York in 1930. A Bruehl [as told to M Stagg), in M Stagg'I was an amateur'. Popular Photography, January 1958, pp 108, 109. Stagg, pp 108,109; A Bruehl, unpublished interview with PC Bunnell, 7 July 1960, typescript copy 2010 courtesy Dr P Bunnell; National Gallery of Australia Research Library, Anton Bruehl Papers [NGARL-MS36]. See G Newton, The salons 1900-1920s: John Kauffmann, Harold Cazneaux and the salons) in G Newton (ed). Shades of light: photography and Australia 1839-1988, Collins Australia in association with the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1988, pp 84-95. R Marchand, Advertising the American dream: making way for modernity, 1920-1940, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1986, P6. By 1940, the revolution would be complete and photographic covers had proved the greater vehicle for sales. Survey of returns for 108 Vogue covers 1935-39, office memorandum to Mr Nast from Dr Agha, 14 December 1939, Conde Nast Archive, New York, Conde Montrose Nast Papers, 1873-1942, MC 001, Box 1, Folder 13, Bruehl, Anton—1932-June 1942. RS Mann,'Anton Bruehl sees advance in photography) The Commercial Photographer (supplement),July 1937, p 267. The interview was cited as being reprinted from an earlier issue of Editor & Publisher magazine. Stagg pp 108-109,126-127. B Yochelson,'Clarence H White: peaceful warrior) in M Fulton (ed), Pictorial'ism into modernism: the Clarence H White School of Photography, Rizzoli. New York, 1996. n 14 p 12. Harold Cazneaux, the most prominent art photographer in Sydney, turned professional in 1919 and in 1920 was appointed official photographer to The Home, a chic new lifestyle magazine. The article page for'Photography comes into the kitchen: a group of photographs by Margaret Watkins showing modernist or cubist patterns of composition' (from p 60 of Vanity Fair, October 1921) and Outerbridge's Ide collar advertisement [from p 5 of Vanity Fair, November 1922) are both reproduced in Fulton, pp 90,98. Bruehl was probably a member of the Pictorial Photographers of America. A lantern slide  of Bruehl's Full house image in the second International Salon of Pictorial Photographers of America, exhibition is held by the Library of Congress Washington, Washington DC, LC-C33-03 [P&P]. A Bruehl, unpublished interview with P Bunnell. Dr S Bruehl, Corona 11 June, 16-39th Sts, White Family Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, DLCIPP 2004:027-3.03 (316a). White's draft reply is on the verso in pencil. Unknown author/The Brothers Bruehl) US Camera, no 3, March-April 1939, p 70; National Gallery of Australia Research Library, Anton Bruehl Papers [NGARL-MS36]. As reported in 1977 to authors LD Witkin and B London. L D Witkin & B London, The photograph collectors guide. New York Graphic Society, New York, 1979, p 99. Delineator and Vogue images not sighted by the author. Personal communication, 5 July 2010, from Dr C Payne from her doctoral research on Ralph Steiner. Margaret Watkins reported that,'With Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso came a new approach ... The comprehending photographer, saw, paused, and seized his camera) M Watkins, Advertising and photography) Pictorial Photography in America, vol 4, 1926, np. See also M H Bogart, Artists, advertising and the borders of art. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995, p 190. Neither Steiner nor Bruehl make any reference to their period of collaboration. See M Banta. The high art of photographic advertising: the 1934 National Alliance of Art and Industry exhibition, Harvard Business School, viewed September 2010. Iibrary.hbs.edu/hc/ naai.'An exhibit of applied photography) Commercial Photographer, December 1932, pp 80-4. Unknown author.'Steinway wins Harvard Prize) Presto-Times, March 15*31, p 9; National Gallery of Australia Research Library, Anton Bruehl Papers [NGARL-MS36]. Unknown author, Anton and Martin Bruehl) Modern photography in advertising no 4, an insert, possibly for Printers'Ink, c 1933; National Gallery of Australia Research Library, Anton Bruehl Papers [NGARL-MS36]. Bruehl's ten works were not illustrated in the original German catalogue and cannot be identified with certainty. Sixteen studies were published in a booklet for the New York International Automobile Show on 4 January 1930. Disc copy courtesy Yann Saunders; National Gallery of Australia Research Library, Anton Bruehl Papers [NGARL-MS36] Bruehl gained awards at the 1931 and 1933 ADC exhibitions for his Young & Rubicam and Cadillac photographs. Bruehl's (uncredited) dramatic image of a boxer receiving a punch to the jaw was used by Young Sc Rubicam for their house advertisement called 'Impact) in the October 1930 issue of Fortune, p 80. See alsoj L Watkins, The 100 greatest advertisements: who wrote them and what they did, Dover, New York, 1959, p 97. (First published in 1949 by The Moore Publishing.) A Kliegl Bros stage-light advertisement by Bruehl was included in a deluxe edition of Advertising Arts in 1931, and his Cadillac motor image appeared as an advertisement for Aquatone papers on the back cover of Advertising Arts in January 1933. Bruehl had an image in each of the limited edition booklets by the Linweave Association, Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1931 and 1934. 'A new approach to fashion photography) unidentified publication, p 14; National Gallery of Australia Research Library, Anton Bruehl Papers [NGARL-MS36]. Two photographs titled Italian farmer and Italian vineyard 1930 suggest Bruehl may have gone to Europe but there are no shipping records. He visited France in 1934. Conde Nast had set up a similar arrangement with New York photographer Victor Keppler as artistic photographer and Bourges as technical expert. For background, see WA Ewing & T Brandow (eds), Edward Steichen: in high fashion: the Conde Nasi years, 1923-1937, Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography and WW Norton & Co, Minneapolis and New York, 2008; and J Steichen, Steichen in color: portraits, fashion and experiments by Edward Steichen, Sterling Publishing Co Inc, United States, 2010. 'The launching of a new art! Conde Nast editors. Color sells: showing examples of color photography by Bruehl-Bourges, Conde Nast Publications, Greenwich, CT, 1935, np. A Adams,'Commercial photography! in A Adams & MS Alinder, Ansel Adams: an autobiography. New York Graphic Society, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1985, p 163. It was later reproduced in Color sells, np. Some US$28000 of work had been delivered by the Bruehl-Bourges partnership between July and December 1932. Tally provided in December 1932 by art Director Dr Agha to Conde Nast, Conde Nast archive, New York, Conde Montrose Nast Papers, 1913-1978 Papers, 1933-1942 MC 001, Box 1, Folder 13, Bruehl, Anton—1932 -June 1942. 'The launching of a new art! Color sells, np. In 1936, Bruehl and Steichen both worked on campaigns for Cannon Towels, one of the first domestic products to have been marketed in a fashionable range of colours and designs instead of the standard white. See P Johnston, Real fantasies: Edward Steichen's advertising photography, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997, pp 206-14. 'Tidings' page from unknown magazine, possibly Tide, August 1936, p 9; National Gallery of Australia Research Library, Anton Bruehi Papers [NGRL-MS36]. 'The launching of a new art! in Color sells, np. Reference by Karl-Peter Gottschalk of a c 1997 interview with Richard Avedon. KP Gottschalk,'Richard Avedon: flower in the desert! 1994, viewed September 2010, http:// easyweb.easynet.co.uk/-karlpeter/zeugma/ inters/avedon.htm. (this link no longer functions) 'Conversations with Ansel Adams: oral history transcript/1972-75! Internet Archive, viewed September 2010, www.archuve. org/stream/convanseladamsOOadamrich/ convanseladams00adamrich_djvu.txt. (this link no longer functions) A posthumous exhibition of Martin and Anton BruehTs prints was held at Light Gallery, New York, in December 1986, but Martin's print archive is dispersed. The Conde Nast New York website presents a number of images of his distinctive, clean and geometric still-life product advertisements from the company-archive. Published under her married name of Charlotte Lohse. C Lohse, The mysterious continent: story of the adventurous sailors who discovered the South Pacific Islands, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1944.    In The Spotlight contents page  |    Illustrations - photographs essays:   Gael Newton  |   Belinda Hungerford  |  Anne O'Hehir   |  Caroline McGregor main Bruehl page