[Robert Rauschenberg Holding Film for Metropolitan Museum's Centennial Certificate]

Hans Namuth was a German-born photographer and filmmaker whose work documented abstract expressionism and its key practitioners during the mid-twentieth century. His photographs of Jackson Pollock at work, captured in his studio between 1950 and 1951, became iconic documents of artistic process and remain among the most recognizable images of postwar American art. Namuth also produced films and worked across photography, printmaking, and mixed media, maintaining a practice rooted in the direct observation of artistic creation.