Exhibition dates: 14th September 2010 – 23rd January 2011
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Many thankx to The J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on some of the photographs for a larger version of the image.
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Armand-Pierre Séguier (French, 1803 – 1876)
‘Still Life with Plaster Casts’
1839 – 1842
Daguerreotype 8 x 6 in.
Accession No. 2002.41
Object Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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Baron Adolf De Meyer (American, 1868 – 1949)
‘Glass and Shadows’
1905
Photogravure
Image: 8 3/4 x 6 9/16 in.
Accession No. 84.XP.463.22
Object Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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Charles Aubry (French, 1811 – 1877)
[An Arrangement of Tobacco Leaves and Grass]
about 1864
Albumen silver print
Image: 47 x 37.3 cm (18 1/2 x 14 11/16 in.)
Accession No. 84.XP.394
Object Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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“The J. Paul Getty Museum presents In Focus: Still Life, a survey of some of the innovative ways photographers have explored and refreshed this traditional genre, on view at the Getty Center in the Center for Photographs from September 14, 2010 – January 23, 2011.
“Still life photography has served as both a conventional and an experimental form during periods of significant aesthetic and technological change,” said Paul Martineau, assistant curator, Department of Photographs, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and curator of the exhibition. “One of our goals for the exhibition was to show how still life photographs can be both traditional and surprising.”
With its roots in antiquity, the term “still life” is derived from the Dutch word stilleven, coined during the 17th century, when painted examples enjoyed immense popularity throughout Europe. The impetus for a new term came as artists created compositions of increasing complexity, bringing together a greater variety of objects to communicate allegorical meanings. Still life featured prominently in the early experiments of the pioneers of the photographic medium and, more than 170 years later, it continues to be a significant motif for contemporary photographers.
Drawn exclusively from the Museum’s collection, the exhibition includes photographs by Charles Aubry, Henry Bailey, Hans Bellmer, Jo Ann Callis, Sharon Core, Baron Adolf De Meyer, Walker Evans, Roger Fenton, Frederick H. Hollyer, Heinrich Kühn, Sigmar Polke, Man Ray, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Paul Outerbridge, Louis-Rémy Robert, Baron Armand-Pierre Séguier, Paul Strand, Josef Sudek, and Thomas R. Williams.
The exhibition is arranged chronologically and includes a broad range of photographic processes, from daguerreotypes and albumen silver prints made in the 19th century to gelatin silver prints, and cibachrome prints made in the 20th century, to digital prints from the 21st century.
Newly acquired works will be on display for the first time: Still Life with Triangle and Red Eraser (1985) by American Irving Penn, Lorikeet with Green Cloth (2006) by Australian Marian Drew, and Blow Up: Untitled 15 (2007) by Israeli Ori Gersht (Gersht loosely based his Blow Up series on traditional floral still life paintings. His arrangements of flowers are frozen and then detonated. The explosion is captured using synchronized digital cameras, with the fragmentary detritus caught in remarkable detail.
This diptych (pair) belies the notion of still life as something motionless as it explores the relationships among painting and photography, art and science, and creation and destruction.)
For Bowl with Sugar Cubes, photographer André Kertész created a still life out of a simple bowl, spoon, and sugar cubes, demonstrating the photographer’s interest in the compositional possibilities of layering basic geometric forms on top of one another – three rectangles in a circle (sugar cubes and bowl) and a circle in a square (bowl and the cropped printing paper). A visual sophistication is achieved through his adroit use of simple objects and dramatic lighting.
Other selections from In Focus: Still Life include Edward Weston’s Bananas and Orange, which depicts a symmetrical fan of bananas punctuated by one oddly shaped orange, and Frederick Sommer’s The Anatomy of a Chicken, which uses the discarded parts of a chicken to create a visual commentary. Influenced by Surrealism, Sommer embraced unexpected juxtapositions and literary allusions to express his intellectual and philosophical ideas. In Anatomy of a Chicken, a severed head, three sunken eyes, and eviscerated organs glisten on a white board. Evoking biblical imagery, medieval grotesques, and heraldic emblems, Sommer calls on the viewer to consider the endless cycle of birth and death, the cruel reality of the food chain, and man’s role in this violence.
In Focus: Still Life will be the seventh installation of the ongoing In Focus series of exhibitions, thematic presentations of photographs from the Getty’s permanent collection. Previous exhibitions focused on The Nude, The Landscape, The Portrait, Making a Scene (staged photographs), The Worker, and most recently, Tasteful Pictures.”
Press release from The J. Paul Getty Museum website
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Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890 – 1976)
‘Dead Leaf’
1942
Gelatin silver print
Image: 9 1/2 x 7 13/16 in.
Accession No. 84.XM.1000.55
© Man Ray Trust ARS-ADAGP
Object Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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Paul Strand (American, 1890 – 1976)
[Black Bottle]
negative about 1919; print 1923 – 1939
Gelatin silver, on Cykora paper print
Image (trimmed to mount): 32.7 x 24.8 cm (12 7/8 x 9 3/4 in.)
Sheet: 34.4 x 27.1 cm (13 9/16 x 10 11/16 in.)
Mount (irregular): 35.1 x 27.8 cm (13 13/16 x 10 15/16 in.)
Accession No. 86.XM.686.5.1
Copyright: © Aperture Foundation
Object Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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Irving Penn
‘Still Life with Triangle and Red Eraser, New York, 1985′
dye-bleach print
Image: 22¾ x 18 1/8in. (57.8 x 46cm.)
Object Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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Frederick Sommer (American, born Italy, 1905 – 1999)
‘The Anatomy of a Chicken’
1939
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.1 x 19.1 cm (9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.)
Accession No. 94.XM.37.96
© Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation
Object Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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“Still life derives from the Dutch word stilleven, coined in the 17th century when paintings of objects enjoyed immense popularity throughout Europe. The impetus for this term came as artists created compositions of greater complexity, bringing together a wider variety of objects to communicate allegorical meanings.
Still life has come to serve, like landscape or portraiture, as a category within art. Although it typically refers to depictions of inanimate things, because it incorporates a vast array of influences from different cultures and periods in history, it has always resisted precise definition.
This exhibition presents some of the innovative ways photographers have explored and refreshed this traditional genre. During the 19th century, still life photographs tended to resemble still life paintings, with similar subjects and arrangements. Beginning in the 20th century, still life photographs have mirrored the subjects and styles that have more broadly concerned photographers in their time.
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A New Medium
Still life featured prominently in the experiments of photography inventors Jacques-Louis-Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot. They did this in part, for practical reasons: the exceptionally long exposure times of their processes precluded the use of living models.
In the late 1830s, Baron Armand-Pierre Séguier, a close associate of Daguerre, created this elegant daguerreotype that features small-scale copies of famous sculptures in the Louvre and Uffizi museum collections.
In the mid-1800s, Charles Aubry was an accomplished practitioner of still-life photography who came to the medium by way of his professional interest in applied arts and industrial design. After working as a pattern designer for carpets, fabrics, and wallpapers, he formed a company to manufacture plaster casts and make photographs of plants and flowers.
Aubrey’s detailed prints of natural forms – like this close-up of plants on a lace-covered background – were intended to replace lithographs traditionally used by students of industrial design.
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Photography as Art
By the first decade of the 20th century, art photographers like Baron Adolf de Meyer employed soft-focus lenses and painterly darkroom techniques to make photographs that resembled drawings and prints. The vogue at the time was to produce images that reflected a handcrafted approach, while asserting photography as an art medium in its own right.
Here, De Meyer photographed an arrangement of objects through a scrim. The pattern of thin, woven fabric softens the backlit objects and helps replicate the subtle tonal effects prized in etchings and aquatints.
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Modernism
Several decades into the twentieth-century, the American artist Man Ray emerged as a pioneer of two European art movements, Dada and Surrealism, in which the element of surprise figured prominently. This image seems both unusual for Man Ray in its apparent straight-forward approach, but also typical in its somewhat dark emotional tone.
By selecting a dead leaf with a claw-like appearance and photographing it against a wood-grain board, Man Ray updated the concept of memento mori (“remember that you must die”), a motif popular in centuries-old still-life paintings.
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New Directions
In that same vein, the best contemporary still-life photographs recall past styles of art while containing a paradox relevant to today. Contemporary photographer Sharon Core became known for re-creations of painter Wayne Thiebaud’s pop-art dessert tableaux. Her series of still-life compositions, inspired by the 18th-century American painter Raphaelle Peale, followed.
For this series, entitled “Early American,” Core studied the compositional structure of his paintings, replicated the mood of the lighting, and when she couldn’t find the right vegetables and flowers, grew her own from heirloom seeds.
The stilled lives of objects have served so well as both experimental and conventional forms in the past, that still life may well be the anchor that allows photographers to explore new and yet unimagined depths.”
Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
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Ori Gersht (Israeli, 1967 – )
‘Blow Up: Untitled 15′
2007
Digital chromogenic prints
Accession No. 2009.46
© Ori Gersht
Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council of the J. Paul Getty Museum
Object Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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Edward Weston (American, 1886 – 1958)
‘Bananas and Orange’
April 1927
Gelatin silver print
Image: 18.9 x 23.7 cm (7 7/16 x 9 5/16 in.)
Accession No. 84.XM.860.4
© 1981 Arizona Board of Regents, Center for Creative Photography
Object Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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André Kertész (American, born Hungary, 1894 – 1985)
[Bowl with Sugar Cubes]
1928
Gelatin silver print
Image: 16.7 x 16.4 cm (6 9/16 x 6 1/2 in.)
Accession No. 84.XM.193.46
© Estate of André Kertész
Object Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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Sharon Core (American)
‘Early American – Still Life with Steak’
2008
Chromogenic print
Image: 17 3/16 x 23 7/16 in.
Accession No. 2009.78
© Sharon Core
Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council of the J. Paul Getty Museum
Object Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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Marian Drew (Australian, born 1960)
‘Lorikeet with Green Cloth’
2006
Digital pigment print
Image: 71.8 x 89.5 cm (28 1/4 x 35 1/4 in.)
Sheet: 73 x 90.2 cm (28 3/4 x 35 1/2 in.)
Accession No. 2009.44
Copyright: © Marian Drew
Object Credit: Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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