where he was a master pupil of Otto Mu ̈ller, the
Expressionist painter, who had been a member of
die Bru ̈cke. Gutmann graduated with a B.A. in
1927, and also studied philosophy and the history
of art at Silesian Friedrich Wilhelms University,
Breslau. He then moved to Berlin and completed
an M.A. in art from the State Institute for Higher
Education and continued to study at the Ale-
xander von Humboldt University and the Berlin
Academy of Arts. As he was establishing a repu-
tation as a painter, the oppressive power of Naz-
ism dramatically increased. In 1932, he lost a
teaching position because he was a Jew, then
decided to emigrate.
Upon the advice of a friend, Gutmann decided
he would settle in San Francisco. Thinking that it
would be impossible to earn a living as a painter
there, he bought a Rolleiflex camera and, with the
aid of a manual, taught himself the bare essentials
of photography. After convincing the Berlin news
agency Presse-Foto that he was a professional
photographer, he signed a contract. He then set
sail on a Norwegian freighter and arrived in San
Francisco on New Year’s Day, 1933. For several
years, Gutmann supported himself as a photo-
journalist for Presse-Foto, and did not yet view
himself as an artist.
The work of the California-based Group f/64
photographers and the federally-funded Farm
Security Administration photographers prevailed
during the 1930s, but Gutmann distinguished him-
self through particularly well-composed and enig-
matic images. He was simultaneously taken aback
and invigorated by American popular culture, and
unlike his contemporaries, he approached his sub-
jects not to reveal their social contexts or anthro-
pological realities, but to satisfy his outsider’s
curiosity and delight himself.
His illustrations for magazines through which he
supported himself were far more than documents.
With his artistic training Gutmann approached his
subjects thoughtfully and imbued his photographs
with multiple levels of meaning. Although familiar
to Americans, the subjects that fascinated him—the
street, automobile culture, signs, ethnic minorities,
women, graffiti, and the American people during
the Great Depression—were viewed through the
eyes of a newcomer. Yet his work has proven to
be a valuable source of information for cultural
anthropologists in that he documented that which
no other captured—not the downtrodden strug-
gling to survive, but the masses of Americans who
were participating in life and enjoying themselves
despite the hard times.
On a cross-country trip in 1936–1937 for Pix, Inc., a
New York photo agency, Gutmann discovered a
treasure trove of surrealistic images at the New
Orleans Mardi Gras.The Game, showing a stylish,
riding-habit-clad threesome strolling down a littered
street acknowledging the camera through their Mardi
Gras masks, and Jitterbug, showing a dancing
masked couple, are simultaneously real and unreal.
He also captured what might seem to be ordinary
sights, such as a vertical car park in Chicago, but
photographed them at an angle and exposure that
turns the scene into a Surrealistic wonderment. Gut-
mann was struck by the plethora of signs and graffiti
which was nonexistent in Germany. This aspect of
American culture so fascinated him throughout most
of his life that he resumed this interest as late as 1987
in his series,Signals, where letters, numbers, and
fragments of words were photographed against a
black background.
In 1936, Gutmann began a position teaching
painting, drawing, and art history at San Francisco
State College (SFSC; now San Francisco State Uni-
versity), which he held until his retirement in 1973.
World War II interrupted his teaching while he
served with the Army Signal Corps and the Office
of War Information in the China-Burma-India thea-
tre as a still and motion picture cameraman. After
the war, Gutmann resumed his teaching position,
and in 1946 he founded the creative photography
program at SFSC, one of the first of its kind in
America. He designed the facilities and taught begin-
ning and advanced photography. He also exposed
Bay Area audiences to experimental films, documen-
taries, and classical short filmsthrough his filmseries,
Art Movies, held at the college. He continued to work
on assignments for Pix, Inc., and his photographs
were published inTime, Life, Look, and numerous
other national and international magazines.
During his decades of teaching, however, Gut-
mann’s photographs were largely unknown to the
faculty and students at SFSC. Yet Gutmann’s
legacy to photography on the West Coast is mea-
sured by more than just his extraordinary body of
work from the 1930s. His contact with European
Modernism had brought a sophistication to his
various activities which has had lasting implica-
tions for the San Francisco artistic community. In
1959, Gutmann hired Jack Welpott to teach photo-
graphy on a full-time basis at SFSC, and Welpott
went on to expand the department into one of the
few successful university-level photography pro-
grams in America in the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1972, the year before Gutmann retired from
teaching, he began a review of his thousands ofGUTMANN, JOHN