About the author and art historian Herbert Molderings (*1948 in Witterschlick near Bonn).

Herbert Molderings is Professor Emeritus of Medieval and Modern Art History at the Ruhr University Bochum. His research focuses on classical modern and contemporary art, the history and theory of photography, the art of Dadaism and Surrealism, the works of Marcel Duchamp, Man RAY UMBO and László MOHOLY-NAGY, and the Kurt Kirchbach International Photo Collection. Herbert Molderings studied art history, philosophy, archaeology and German language and literature at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn from 1967 to 1969 and art history, philosophy and sociology at the Ruhr-Universität in Bochum from 1969 to 1973. There he received his doctorate in art history in 1973 with a study of the work of Marcel Duchamp by Max Imdahl. From 1975 to 1978 he was director of the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, where he organized exhibitions on modern photography (August SANDER, Florence HENRI), among others. In 1978 he curated the section 'Photography' in the exhibition 'Paris-Berlin. 1900-1933. Correspondences and Contrasts France-Germany' at the Centre Pompidou. In 1995 he was awarded a doctorate at the Faculty of History at the University of Bochum with the study 'Umbo. From Bauhaus to photojournalism'. Subsequently, from 1995 to 1997, in seven German and foreign museums, he organized the retrospective 'Umbo. From the Bauhaus to photojournalism'. In 1997/1998, in a series of articles in the F.A.Z. and Le Monde, he proved that the provenance of the collection of international avant-garde photographs of the 1920s and 1930s auctioned on May 2, 1997 at Sotheby's in London under the name 'Helene Anderson Collection' was forged. The collection actually belonged to the Dresden industrialist Kurt Kirchbach.

Publications on photography

  • 'Contributions to the History and Aesthetics of Photography' (1977, with Ulrich Keller and Winfried Ranke); 'Umbo: Otto Umbehr 1902-1980' (1996); 'Umbo' (1996); 'László Moholy-Nagy' (1998); 'Paul Citroen 1896-1983' (1998); 'Die Moderne der Fotografie. Aufsätze und Essays' (The Modernity of Photography, 2007, 2008); 'Atelier Man Ray' (2009); 'L'évidence du possible. Photographie moderne et surréalisme' (2009); 'L'évidence photographique. La conception positiviste de la photographie en question' (2009, with Gregor Wedekind); 'Marcel Duchamp at the age of 85. An Incunabulum of Conceptual Photography' (2013); 'Lens Based Sculpture. The Transformation of Sculpture through Photography' (2014, together with Bogomir Ecker, Raimund Kummer, Friedemann Malsch); 'Albert Renger-Patzsch' (2017); 'Die Neue Sachlichkei The New Objectivity). Deutschland - 1920er Jahre - August Sander' (2022)

read more


The catalog volume for the exhibition 'Die Neue Sachlichkeit' at Centre Pompidou shows 32 photographs by August SANDER, surrounded by artists and subjects from painting & sculpture, design & architecture, photography, film & graphics, theater & literature
78,00 € *
In the volume 'Atelier Man Ray', Herbert Molderings captures the artistic environment as well as those objects that the latter collected and produced himself in order to compose lifelike arrangements from them - an impressive view of an imaginative cosmos
28,00 € * Weight 0.3 kg
Awards
  • 1973: Award from the Chancellor of the Ruhr University Bochum for the dissertation 'Marcel Duchamp. Problem and Reception''
    1998: Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award for the monograph 'UMBO. Otto Umbehr 1902-1980'
    2014: Justus Bier Prize for Curators for exhibition and catalog on 'Lens Based Sculpture. The Transformation of Sculpture through Photography' (together with Bogomir Ecker, Raimund Kummer, Friedemann Malsch).