Artwork
Untitled
Untitled is a photographic photography by Johannes Schiffner. It is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The work is a black‑and‑white photograph depicting a modest bronze figure of a nude child.
About this work
Overview
The work is a black‑and‑white photograph depicting a modest bronze figure of a nude child. The child stands upright on a flat stone plinth, its head smooth and rounded, arms gently bent, and its facial features rendered without expression. The image is mounted on a green backing card and forms part of a larger archival assemblage.
Subject & Meaning
The sculpture captured in the photograph presents a simplified, almost archetypal representation of childhood. Its unadorned surface and neutral visage invite contemplation of innocence and form rather than narrative detail, emphasizing the basic geometry of the human figure.
Technique & Style
The bronze statue is cast in a plain, unpolished finish that highlights its rounded contours and modest proportions. The photograph, taken in the 1920s, records the work in stark monochrome, preserving the texture and patina of the metal while rendering the stone base as a flat, matte plane.
History & Provenance
The image entered the collection through a series of questionnaires sent to sculptors in the 1920s, a project organized by William Kineton Parkes, a novelist and art historian. Parkes bequeathed the resulting archive to the Archive of Art and Design in 1938, where the photograph remains.
Context
Parkes’ questionnaire initiative aimed to document contemporary sculptural practice, gathering visual records directly from artists. The photograph therefore reflects both the aesthetic tendencies of early‑20th‑century sculpture and the archival impulse to catalogue artistic production.
Artist & collection
Artist
Johannes Schiffner lived in Berlin in the 1920s, where he walked everywhere with a Rolleiflex around his neck and shot whatever caught his eye—cobblestones, a puddle’s reflection, a woman’s shadow on a wall.
