Herbert List was fascinated with the ‘exoticism and eroticism’ of life-size ‘artificial humans’ sculpted in wax at the Panoptikum (wax museum) in Vienna’s amusement park called Prater. Their richness of detail and use of accessories made them seem real enough to touch. In 1944, he proposed his project to Tele — a cultural magazine published in Sweden as a secret project of the Berlin Foreign Office — and shot this work before the wax museum was completely destroyed during an air raid in 1945.
The same year, List went on to arrange his photos of the fairy-tale scenes, historical tableaus and medical subjects together with a poignant text into a fully executed mock-up intended for publication. List’s extensive darkroom work, cropping, and retouching give the wax ensembles a deceptive liveliness, thereby exposing the ‘plush and untrue pathos’ as an illusion in a surreal manner. Through the joint efforts of the Herbert List Archive, Hamburg and the Photoinstitut Bonartes, a book of this work is finally appearing in a bibliophile edition based on his original design in German, as well as in English.
The exhibition at Photoinstitut Bonartes, Vienna, features the original photographs by List, further materials intended for the book, and one of the very few surviving wax figures on loan from the Wien Museum. Co-curated by Monika Faber (Photoinstitut Bonartes) and Peer-Olaf Richter (Herbert List Archive) the show is designed by Austrian artist Markus Schinwald and evokes the musty, eerie atmosphere of the original wax museum, recreates some of the installations through life-size, one-dimensional mock-ups, and features additional exhibits, which complement the images on show.
