Experienced collectors and dealers will trawl auction house catalogues hoping to find sleepers, works that have been miscatalogued, like the advertising photograph by “unknown photographer” that is, in fact, by August Sander, or the album of images of Venice that contains Gustave Le Gray’s La Grande Vague. Both have happened in recent years. The Viennese collector Stefan Fiedler has a different story to tell, related here.
I recently flicked through the auction catalogue for the amazing collection of Jack Naylor (1919-2007), sold at Guernsey’s in New York on 18 October 2007. I came across a B&W photo that seemed familiar, a boy wearing a bathing cap with water running down his face. It was catalogued as a work by Margaret Bourke-White. Jack Naylor possessed all or at least a large part of her legacy. But something about it seemed wrong. The image rang a bell. I decided to visit Mila Palm in her gallery in Vienna, Milaneum. She quickly identified the photographer, the Austrian amateur photographer Michael Neumüller. Mila rediscovered him some time ago. Last year, on a melting hot summer day, I helped her retrieve a truckload of material by him, prints, negatives, glass plates, books, ephemera, handwritten notes, etc., from an attic on the sixth floor of a multi-storey apartment house, with no elevator. Mila produced a publication about Michael Neumüller, an early pioneer of colour photography amongst many other achievements in his long photographic career. It can be downloaded from milaneum.com
Mila and I have our theory as to why the print was miscatalogued. There are several prints of this image, entitled Unter der Brause (Under the Shower) and Neumüller also produced an exhibition that was shown at several salons around the world. We think that Margaret Bourke-White and Michael Neumüller might have been friends and swapped prints. Perhaps the auction house didn’t inspect all the versos of the prints that had been attributed to Bourke-White.
Finally, I first met the late Jack Naylor, who by coincidence was the next door neighbour of very good friends of mine who live outside Boston, and was lucky to see his incredible collection around 2002.