John Gutmann

John Gutmann (1905 – June 12, 1998) was a German-born American photographer and painter.

Early life and education Gutmann was born in 1905 in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland) to an upper-middle-class Jewish family. He earned a degree in art from Staatliche Akademie für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe Breslau and moved to Berlin in 1927, earning a post-graduate degree at Preussisches Shulkollegium for Hohere Erziehung.

Career quote|text=Berlin was the greatest city in the world when I lived there - in the late 1920s, early 1930s. It was the most sophisticated, the most decadent city, and it attracted the most powerful assembly of creative talents in the world. The greatest theater, movies, art. Everyone was there ... [San Francisco was] very refreshing to me. I had had enough of art with a capital A, culture with a capital K. It was liberating to come to a place so backward in art and aesthetics.|author=John Gutmann |source=1989 San Francisco Examiner profile

After arriving in San Francisco, one of the first news stories he documented was the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike. His work on other stories was later published in popular contemporary newsmagazines such as Time, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post. At the same time, he started teaching at San Francisco State College in 1936 and founded the photography department there in 1946. While working there, he founded the creative photography program using the Bauhaus model. After his retirement, he began printing images from his archives, and began exhibiting his work at the Fraenkel Gallery and Castelli Graphics in the late 1970s. His work was later packaged into a traveling exhibition, "Beyond the Document", which moved from SFMOMA to the Museum of Modern Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art starting in 1989. Kenneth Baker, art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in 1997 that Gutmann was "an emissary of European modernism" who "brought a distinct angle of vision to the American scene" and his images demonstrated his "excitement of his witness to the [Depression-era] times". David Bonetti, art critic for the San Francisco Examiner, called Gutmann's output from the 1930s "his best–when, a young Jewish refugee, he experienced America as a bemused stranger in a strange land. Gutmann fell in love with Depression-era America, which he traveled by Greyhound Bus Line. He saw its cars, its rites and festival, its athletes, its women, its vibrant African American communities and its dynamic street life with European eyes."

Awards Gutmann received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977.

In his obituary, SFGate remembered him as a "leading photojournalist of the Depression era, a painter and an art instructor at San Francisco State University." His wife Gerry, who was also a painter, died before he did. Guttmann requested at his death that no service be held and that instead memorial donations be collected to benefit the John Guttmann fund (which is managed by the San Francisco Foundation).

Collections (selected) Gutmann's work is held in the following permanent public collections: Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts Art Institute of Chicago Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Rijksmuseum Amsterdam San Diego Museum of Art San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Exhibitions (selected)

1941: Wondrous World, Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco. 1941: Image of Freedom, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1947: The Face of the Orient, Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco. 1974: John Gutmann, Light Gallery, New York. 1976: as i saw it, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 1985: Gutmann, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. 1990: Talking Pictures, 1934-1989, Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles. 1998: John Gutmann, Rastlosese Amerika der 30er Jahre, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. 2000: John Gutmann: Photographer/Collector, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. 2025: John Gutmann & Max Yavno: California Photographers, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego.

Monographs (selected)