Frederick Sommer

About

Frederick Sommer (1905-1999) was an Italian-born American artist renowned as a polymath whose work spanned photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, and musical compositions. Born in Angri, Italy, and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, by German-speaking parents, he earned a Master's degree in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University. Diagnosed with tuberculosis in the late 1920s, he traveled to Switzerland for treatment, where he developed interests in modern art, drawing, and painting. Settling in Arizona in 1931 for health reasons, Sommer embraced photography after encounters with Alfred Stieglitz in 1935 and Edward Weston in 1936, producing experimental works that blended surrealism, abstraction, and formal elegance with macabre subjects like animal entrails, desert landscapes, and found objects.

Surrealist experimental photography with formal elegance, abstraction, and shocking subject matter