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Jan

Exhibition: ‘Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals’ at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, book, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, painting, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, street photography, surrealism, time, video and works on paper
Tags: A Letter from My Father, American art, american artist, American conceptual photography, american photographer, American photographic sequences, American photography, American storyteller, art and philosophy, being-in-itself, Carnegie Museum of Art, Cavafy Cheats Playing Strip Poker, Chance Meeting, Constantine Cavafy, dreams, Duane Michals, Duane Michals A Letter from My Father, Duane Michals Cavafy Cheats Playing Strip Poker, Duane Michals Chance Meeting, Duane Michals Grandpa Goes to Heaven, Duane Michals Magritte with Hat, Duane Michals photography, Duane Michals Rigamarole, Duane Michals sequences, Duane Michals The Human Condition, Duane Michals The Spirit Leaves The Body, Duane Michals The Young Girl's Dream, Duane Michals Things are Queer, Duane Michals This Photograph Is My Proof, Duane Michals Young Soldiers Dream, Exposing your/self, Grandpa Goes to Heaven, Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Paul Sartre being-in-itself, Kant noumenal world, Magritte with Hat, Marcus Bunyan Exposing your/self, Martin Heidegger, McKeesport Pennsylvania, noumenal world, painted tintype, photographic sequences, Pittsburgh, Releasement towards things, René Magritte, Salute Walt Whitman, Sartre, Storyteller, Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals, subconscious, The Human Condition, the mystery, The Photographs of Duane Michals, The Spirit Leaves The Body, The Young Girl's Dream, Thing Itself, Things are Queer, This Photograph Is My Proof, Two 7-Year-Old Nashville Newsies, Young Soldiers Dream, Young Soldiers Dream in the Garden of the Dead

Exhibition dates: 1st November 2014 – 16th February 2015

Duane Michals
A Letter from My Father
1960/1975
Gelatin silver print with hand-applied text
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery

Exposing your/self

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Viva Michals! Viva Michals!

Magician, poet, storyteller, philosopher and dreamer.

Not for him the overblown statement (huge prints the size of billboards) but small, dark, rough prints assembled in photo-sequences, often incorporating text, that examine the human condition in every aspect. This is emotional work and Michals has a unique style and voice as an artist. You always know that you are looking at a sequence by Michals, for his signature is that distinctive.

As he says, his work goes beyond description, beyond surfaces, to reveal the subject – not as it looks but as it feels. In his sequences he usually achieves this by posing a question that has no answer, a question that is like a Zen koan…. what is the sound of one hand clapping? The grandfather ascends smilingly to heaven with little wings on his back as the child waves goodbye (if youth knew, if age could); the man as human condition turns into a galaxy; and the spirit leaves the body as it was left before.

Various Michals sequences, such as The Spirit Leaves The Body (1968, below), have a circular construction. Another sequence, Things are Queer (1973, below) is also a circular spatio-temporal enigma where instead of moving forward, the camera and the viewer are pulled backwards in a space-time continuum… where Michals forces you to question what reality really is. These two sequences are my personal favourites, and I had to scour the internet to find images for them as you rarely see them online.

His most famous sequence, the one that you see most often, is Chance Meeting (1970, below) – again an open-ended, intimate but puzzling encounter with a reflection of the self. Michals sequences are full of ghosts, uncommon intimacies, nubile females and delicious males (Michals is gay and has just celebrated his 54th anniversary with his partner). Dealing “with topics such as death, desire, and the passage of time” his work peers inward to examine “his own thoughts and dreams, to blur the lines between photography and philosophy.”

All is not sunshine and light, and I feel that there is a nebulous, obsidian energy hovering not too far below the surface. The photographs have high contrast and the subjects are very closely framed, giving the sequences an almost claustrophobic quality, as though you are having the life, the energy gently yet forcibly manipulated around you. The photographs rarely breathe freely and you feel as though you are almost trapped within their spaces.

Then there is the text. Never used to excess in the sequences (the title does that job alone), the singular images are extended into a longer narrative by biting, poignant words – sentences that utter harsh truths and tell it how it really is. I can’t look at the image and read that text from A Letter from My Father (1960 / 1975, above) without thinking of my abusive father and wondering what happened to his love – whether he hadn’t hidden it, he just didn’t have any to start with. For any child inside an adult who has been abused, the image cuts to the bone.

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Michals staged, narrative scenes take us on a journey into his reality, one which “has entered a realm beyond observation.” He poses difficult questions that force us to examine ideas beyond the world of phenomena, beyond the world of surfaces. He challenges our repressed inner lives and our idealised image of ourselves, disturbing the boundaries of personality, ego, and identity.1 He wrestles with Sartre’s noumenal world (the world of the subconscious, dreams), the “being-in-itself” or sometimes simply “the in-itself,” as Sartre calls it (what Kant called the noumenal world), where Sartre does not see man comfortably installed in the world.

“All of us, says Sartre, have a “pre-ontological comprehension” of being-in-itself, that is to say, an opaque, inarticulate, but very real sense of its presence and nature. The world is but a “varnish” on the surface of the being-in-itself; or, changing the metaphor, the world is but a “thin crust” of meaning which we impose upon being-in-itself. Ordinarily this thin crust of meaning conceals the in-itself and obscures our awareness of it, but the anguish of being is always there just below the surface of daily consciousness, and from time to time it breaks through to the surface, presenting being-in-itself without disguise.”2

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This is what Michals attunes himself to, an examination of the in-itself, one that impacts on our internal poetic understandings of space and time. In his malleable daydreams Michals proffers a ‘releasement toward things’, the glimpsing of a coexistence between a conscious and unconscious way of perceiving which enables the seeing of the ‘Thing Itself’. As Heidegger observes,

“We stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery… Releasement towards things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way…”3

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It is Michals great skill as an artist and a human being that enables us the possibility of accessing some aspect of the mystery of our existence.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Footnotes

As discussed in Magee, Bryan. Confessions of a Philosopher. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997, p. 405-406
Olsen, Robert. An Introduction to Existentialism. Dover Publications, New York, 1962, p. 39
Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper & Row, 1966, pp. 55-56 quoted in Baracco, Mauro. “Completed Yet Unconcluded: The Poetic Resistance of Some Melbourne Architecture,” in van Schaik, Leon (ed.,). Architectural Design Vol. 72, No. 2 (‘Poetics in Architecture’). London: John Wiley and Sons, 2002, p. 74. Footnote 6.

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Many thankx to the Carnegie Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Who gives a fuck about what he had for breakfast? These are stylistic ticks. The digital has changed the paradigms of photography. I had an opening in Boston and this woman had a little camera with her and kept exclaiming, ‘Everything is a photograph!’ That’s the problem. The bar has been lowered so much in photography now…”

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“Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel?”

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“I don’t trust reality. So all of the writing on and painting on the photographs is born out of the frustration to express what you do not see.”

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Duane Michals

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Cavafy Cheats Playing Strip Poker
2004
12 Gelatin silver prints with hand applied text
5″ x 7″ each

This series of photographs was inspired by the poem The Windows by Constantine Cavafy:

In these dark rooms where I live out empty days,
 I wander round and round trying to find the windows. 
But the windows are not to be found –
or at least I can’t find them.
And perhaps it is better that way. 
Perhaps the light will prove another tyranny. 
Who knows what new things it will expose?

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Chance Meeting
1970
Six gelatin silver prints
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Things are Queer
1973
Nine gelatin silver prints
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Grandpa Goes to Heaven
1989
Five gelatin silver prints with hand applied text
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Courtesy of the Artist and DC

“The best part of us is not what we see, it’s what we feel. We are what we feel. We are not what we look at… We’re not our eyeballs, we’re our mind. People believe their eyeballs and they’re totally wrong… That’s why I consider most photographs extremely boring – just like Muzak, inoffensive, charming, another waterfall, another sunset. This time, colours have been added to protect the innocent. It’s just boring. But that whole arena of one’s experience – grief, loneliness – how do you photograph lust? I mean, how do you deal with these things? This is what you are, not what you see. It’s all sitting up here. I could do all my work sitting in my room. I don’t have to go anywhere.”

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Duane Michals

Opening November 1, 2014, at Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA), Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals is the definitive retrospective and the largest-ever presentation of this innovative artist’s work. Drawing from select loans and the museum’s holdings, which constitute the largest single collection of Michals’s output, and spanning six decades, the works in Storyteller include classic sequences from the early 1970s as well as rarely seen images from later in his career.

Born in 1932 and raised in a steelworker family in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Michals broke away from established traditions of documentary and fine art photography in the 1960s when he added handwritten messages and poems to prints, produced multi-image narrative sequences, and experimented with double- and triple-exposures. His work was poignant and unabashedly sentimental, flying in the face of the dominant photographic aesthetics of the time.

Storyteller unfolds in thematic groupings that range from portraiture to meditations on the mind’s interior world; from childhood and imagination to desire and death. Michals’s love of two very different cities, Pittsburgh and Paris, is evident in sections exploring the beauty, quirks, and particularities of these places. He has riffed on, critiqued, and crossed paths with countless artists, including René Magritte, Cindy Sherman, Joseph Cornell, Robert Frank, Andreas Gursky, Andy Warhol, and others, and a section of the exhibition brings to light the admiration and acerbic wit in Michals’s engagements with other creative minds.

“The exhibition is designed to acquaint the visitor with the many themes that Michals explored over more than half a century,” says curator of photography Linda Benedict-Jones. “Well known sequences such as Paradise Regained and Chance Meeting greet the viewer first, followed by engaging and sometimes surprising Children’s Stories. A section called The Mind’s Eye shows Michals’s absorption with photographing things that cannot actually be seen, such as A Man Going to Heaven or The Human Condition. We could not present Storyteller chronologically, because Michals revisits themes often. One theme, Painted Expression, shows how, in two distinct periods of his life – in the early 1980s and again in 2012 – Michals has picked up a brush to apply oil paint to both black-and-white photographic prints as well as most recently to 19th century tintypes, resulting in unique, one-of-a-kind photographic works. His creative energy is boundless and readily apparent when seen in a large retrospective display.”

“I’m a storyteller,” he often states as he begins a talk in public – equally interested in the moments before and after the “decisive moment” (a term coined by famed photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson). “When I began to do sequences, it wasn’t because I thought it was cool and the latest thing. I did it out of frustration with the still photograph.” He has observed that his practice aims to transcend mere appearances: “I’m not interested in what something looks like, I want to know what it feels like… My reality has entered a realm beyond observation.” This approach can be seen throughout his career, from early, carefully staged sequences, to hand-painted gelatin silver prints and tintypes, revealing the artist’s hand at work long after the image is captured.

According to curator of photography Linda Benedict-Jones, who organised Storyteller, “Duane Michals is a sensitive and provocative artist who has followed his own unique path. His way of staging narrative scenes, then recording them with a 35mm camera, represented a fresh approach to the medium. This, combined with an uncommon intimacy when dealing with topics such as death, desire, and the passage of time, set him apart as an image-maker.”

Storyteller also touches upon Michals’s extensive portfolio of commercial photography and portraiture, which spans several decades, and includes assignments for Neiman Marcus, Esquire, Vogue, and Gap, as well as commissioned portraits of such figures as Nancy Reagan, Sting, and Willem de Kooning.

CMOA, a fixture in Michals’s artistic upbringing, has acquired 139 of his works, ranging from his earliest images made in Russia in 1958 to hand-painted tintypes that he began creating in 2012. Michals, in turn, has always felt an attachment to Pittsburgh, a subject of many of his photographs, and of two books, the sequence The House I Once Called Home (2003) and poetry collection A Pittsburgh Poem (2013). Lending institutions to Storyteller include Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), Musée des Beaux Arts (Montreal), High Museum of Art (Atlanta), and Museum of Modern Art (New York). Even longtime admirers of the artist may be unfamiliar with several of his bodies of work, and an examination of this full range is long overdue: while Michals has been championed in several solo exhibitions throughout Europe in the past decade, this is his first major museum exhibition in North America since 1998.

Presented alongside Storyteller will be the exhibition Duane Michals: Collector, which highlights works from Michals’s private art collection that are promised gifts to the museum. The eclectic array of objects, ranging from 1799 to 1999, and from Francisco de Goya to André Kertész to Mark Tansey, will be united by Michals’s unique take on the artists, the artworks, and their influence on his own practice. Organised by associate curator of fine arts Amanda Zehnder, Duane Michals: Collector will further contextualise his work from an unusually personal perspective.

Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals represents a refreshing, much-needed reexamination of a historically significant photographer. Michals’s pioneering photography infused the medium with a personal, critical approach that translates universally. In an art world that feels at times jaded and detached, his images retain the same moving, affecting impact that they commanded decades ago.

Press release from the Carnegie Museum of Art

Internationally-renowned photographer Duane Michals discusses his eight-decade life and career as a self-described “expressionist.” His work is known for its innovative narrative sequencing and iconic use of text and image. During a period when photography looked out to the world around us, Michals redefined the medium by peering inward to his own thoughts and dreams to blur the lines between photography and philosophy.

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
The Spirit Leaves The Body
1968
Seven gelatin silver prints with hand applied text
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
The Young Girl’s Dream
1969
Five gelatin silver prints with hand applied text
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Magritte with Hat
1965
Gelatin silver print with hand applied text
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Magritte with Hat (detail)
1965
Gelatin silver print with hand applied text
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
This Photograph Is My Proof
1967
Gelatin silver print with hand-applied text
The Henry L. Hillman Fund, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Young Soldiers Dream in the Garden of the Dead with Flowers Growing from Their Heads
1995
From the series Salute, Walt Whitman
Gelatin silver print
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
The Human Condition
1969
Six gelatin silver prints with hand applied text
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Rigamarole
2012
Tintype with oil paint
The William T. Hillman Fund for Photography
Carnegie Museum of Art,Pittsburgh
Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery

Carnegie Museum of Art
4400 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Opening hours:
Monday: 10am – 5pm
Tuesday: Closed
Wednesday: 10am – 5pm
Thursday: 10am – 8pm
Friday: 10am – 5pm
Saturday: 10am – 5pm
Sunday: noon – 5pm

Carnegie Museum of Art website

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Jan

Exhibition: ‘Bruce Davidson/Paul Caponigro: Two American Photographers in Britain and Ireland’ at The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, light, London, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography, time and works on paper
Tags: Albert Hall, American art, American artists, American photographers, American photography, American photography of Britain and Ireland, Avebury stones, Britain and Ireland, Bruce Davidson, Bruce Davidson Albert Hall, Bruce Davidson Blackpool, Bruce Davidson Brighton, Bruce Davidson London, Bruce Davidson The Duke of Argyll, Bruce Davidson Trafalgar Square, Bruce Davidson Wales, Bruce Davidson/Paul Caponigro, Bruce Davidson/Paul Caponigro: Two American Photographers in Britain and Ireland, Callanish Stone Circle, Church St. MacDara's Island, Connemara County Galway, Cornwall, County Kerry, County Wicklow, Dead Calf in the Sand, Ireland, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Paul Caponigro, Paul Caponigro Avebury, Paul Caponigro Callanish Stone Circle, Paul Caponigro Church St. MacDara’s Island, Paul Caponigro Connemara County Galway, Paul Caponigro Dead Calf in the Sand, Paul Caponigro Reefert Church, Paul Caponigro Running White Deer, Paul Caponigro Stonehenge, Paul Caponigro Tralee Bay, Paul Caponigro Trethevy Quoit, Reefert Church Glendalough, Running White Deer, Scotland, Still Looking, Stonehenge, The Duke of Argyll, The Huntington Library, Trafalgar Square, Tralee Bay County Kerry, Trethevy Quoit Cornwall, Two American Photographers in Britain and Ireland

Exhibition dates: 8th November 2014 – 9th February 2015

Curators: Scott Wilcox and Jennifer A. Watts

Paul Caponigro (American, b. 1932)
Avebury, Wiltshire, England
1967
Gelatin silver print
9 3/8 × 13 1/8
© Paul Caponigro

Individually, the work of these two photographers is outstanding, but together?

The premise for the exhibition (two American photographers in Britain and Ireland) seems weak, tenuous at best. The exhibition focuses on the contrasting styles of the two photographers – Davidson is a photojournalist and Caponigro practices a pure, formalist approach to landscape photography – “as they trained American eyes on enduring landscapes and changing cultural scenes… “Britain and Ireland are the countries to which each man embarked on significant creative journeys in the course of refining his art.” (Jennifer A. Watts)”

But is this enough? For example, the ground breaking exhibition Caravaggio – Bacon at Gallery Borghese, Rome in 2009-2010 offered the viewer something that they had never thought about before: “Instinctively, intellectually we know how the paintings of a Baroque artist of the early 17th century affect how we look at the paintings of Bacon. This exhibition offers the reverse, in fact it rewrites how we look at Caravaggio – through the benediction of Bacon.”

Here no such revelation occurs. You could argue that the connection lies outside photography in a concern for what is present in the landscape, what is present in a community, what is present beyond bricks and mortar, leaves and rocks – what is our place in the world, full stop. But the work of the artists is so different, one from the other, that this diffident relationship is strained at best. No wonder these humans had never met before the opening of the exhibition, for they seem artistically to have little in common.

I have tried to sequence the photographs in the posting, so that they might have some reflection, some conversation one to the other: the presence of The Duke of Argyll, fag in hand kitted out in traditional Scottish attire, and the grandness of his residence playing off the darkness, isolation and simplicity of the house in Caponigro’s Connemara, County Galway, Ireland; the luminous stones in Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England becoming the dark edged reflections in Davidson’s London (1960); and the church in Caponigro’s Church, St. MacDara’s Island, County Galway, Ireland morphing into the temple of the British sun, the beach holiday, in Davidson’s Blackpool (1965) – but it is hard work.

Best to just enjoy the photographs individually, especially Caponigro’s glorious paen to ancient forces Avebury, Wiltshire, England (1967, above). The life force of the tree, the life force of the stone – the communion of those two things with the landscape – with sheep in the background. A friend of mine who knows Caponigro told me that he said he never travelled anywhere without a blow up sheep in the back of the car.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to the The Huntington Library for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Brighton
1960
Gelatin silver print
8 3/4 ×12 7/8 in.,
Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Ralph and Nancy Segall
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Paul Caponigro (American, b. 1932)
Callanish Stone Circle, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland
1972
Gelatin silver print
17 1/4 × 23 3/4 in
© Paul Caponigro

Paul Caponigro (American, b. 1932)
Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England
1967
Gelatin silver print
17 × 23 3/8 in
© Paul Caponigro

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
The Duke of Argyll, Inverary, Scotland
1960
Gelatin silver print
9 × 13 1/4 in.
Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Ralph and Nancy Segall
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Paul Caponigro (American, b. 1932)
Connemara, County Galway, Ireland
1970
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 × 12 1/8 in
© Paul Caponigro

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Wales
1965
Gelatin silver print
8 1/4 × 12 1/2 in.
Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Henry S. Hacker, Yale BA 1965
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Wales
1965
Gelatin silver print
8 3/8 × 12 5/8 in.
Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Henry S. Hacker, Yale BA 1965
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Paul Caponigro (American, b. 1932)
Running White Deer, Wicklow, Ireland
1967
Gelatin silver print
7 1/2 × 19 1/8 in
© Paul Caponigro

Paul Caponigro (American, b. 1932)
Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England
1977
Gelatin silver print
13 5/8 × 19 in
© Paul Caponigro

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
London
1960
Gelatin silver print
8 5/8 × 12 7/8 in.
Yale Center for British Art, Friends of British Art Fund
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Wales
1965
Gelatin silver print
8 3/8 × 12 1/2 in
Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Henry S. Hacker, Yale BA 1965
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Wales
1965
Gelatin silver print
8 1/4 × 12 1/2 in.
Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Henry S. Hacker, Yale BA 1965
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Paul Caponigro (American, b. 1932)
Tralee Bay, County Kerry, Ireland
1977
Gelatin silver print
9 5/8 × 13 1/4 in
© Paul Caponigro

Bruce Davidson/Paul Caponigro: Two American Photographers in Britain and Ireland is set to open at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens on Nov. 8 after a successful run at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven over the summer. Focusing on the contrasting styles of two of the greatest American photographers of their generation, the exhibition of 128 works by Paul Caponigro (b. 1932) and Bruce Davidson (b. 1933) showcases their photography of Britain and Ireland beginning in 1960. It will be presented in a newly designed installation in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery through March 9, 2015.

Davidson traveled to England and Scotland in 1960, where he brought the same gritty street sensibility that had made his photography a sensation in the United States. Caponigro went to Ireland and Britain in 1966 on a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship. Those countries became sites of creative energy to which he returned repeatedly in the 1960s and beyond. The exhibition examines the work of the two virtuosic photographers as they trained American eyes on enduring landscapes and changing cultural scenes.

“This is the first exhibition to pair these influential contemporaries who followed overlapping yet distinct creative paths,” said Jennifer A. Watts, the exhibition’s co-curator and curator of photographs at The Huntington. “Britain and Ireland are the countries to which each man embarked on significant creative journeys in the course of refining his art. How fitting, then, to bring these works to The Huntington, where we have one of the strongest collections of British art and historical materials in the country.”

The exhibition is also curated by Scott Wilcox, chief curator of art collections and senior curator of prints and drawings at the Yale Center for British Art. Watts and Wilcox also coauthored a richly illustrated catalog of the exhibition, published by Yale University Press.

The Artists and Their Work in Britain and Ireland

While Caponigro and Davidson were acquainted with each other’s work, the two had never met until the opening of the exhibition in New Haven.

Davidson is a photojournalist and member of the prestigious Magnum Agency; Caponigro practices a pure, formalist approach to landscape photography. Both are devoted to black-and-white film and continue to make prints by hand. And both of them produced important bodies of work in Britain and Ireland beginning in 1960.

In trips to Britain in 1960 and 1965, Davidson created an evocative and sometimes tongue-in-cheek portrait of the British people at work and play. During numerous visits starting in 1967, Caponigro focused on the ancient stone circles, dolmens, and early churches in the British and Celtic landscape. “There’s a force in the land and it’s intelligent” became Caponigro’s mantra and guide. He returned repeatedly to the United Kingdom and Ireland (his latest photographs in the exhibition are from 1993).

Paul Caponigro was born in Boston, a shy child in a boisterous Italian-American family. Drafted into the Army in 1953, he was sent to San Francisco and eventually fell under the influence of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and other luminaries of the Bay Area school, a loose affiliation of photographers who took the natural landscape as their subject and used razor-sharp focus and superb printing techniques as expressive tools. In 1966, he went to Ireland and Britain on a Guggenheim grant. He had intended to travel to Egypt, but unrest in the Middle East interrupted his plans. “Ireland became my Egypt,” he said, “and the stones my temples.”

That year marked the beginning of a sustained relationship with places that significantly shaped his career. He returned a dozen times over the next decade.

Bruce Davidson grew up in suburban Chicago and purchased his first camera as a young boy. In 1952, he enrolled in the Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York, encountering there the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. The spontaneity and emotional depth of their pictures proved a revelation.

In the late 1950s, Davidson was invited to join Magnum, the elite organisation of photojournalists founded by Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and several others. He received wide acclaim with the publication in 1960 of Brooklyn Gang, a series featuring a notorious group of streetwise teens. He left the United States shortly thereafter for England and Scotland on a two-month assignment for British magazine The Queen.

He would return to the United Kingdom periodically thereafter, producing photography documenting a range of people in diverse settings, including Blackpool, the mining districts of southern Wales, and a traveling circus in rural Ireland.

Still Looking (excerpt)

Installation

The installation will divide the gallery into two separate but equal sections devoted to each artist’s work. Davidson’s photographs are organised according to the four trips he made on assignment between 1960 and 1967. Caponigro’s work will be seen in geographic sections that account for the numerous trips he made to the British Isles over more than two decades. The Huntington’s presentation of the show will incorporate two recently acquired Caponigro prints. (The institution also holds a substantial collection of Caponigro’s work that focuses on California and the West.)

Still Looking, a film featuring both photographers and produced exclusively for the exhibition, is installed in a separate room of the exhibition and is also posted online. Created in early 2014 by Huntington filmmaker Kate Lain, the 16-minute film is a series of evocative moments with Davidson and Caponigro on location in their respective homes in New York City and Maine.”

Press release from The Huntington Library website

Still Looking

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Trafalgar Square, London
1960
Gelatin silver print
13 1/4 × 8 7/8 in.
Yale Center for British Art, Friends of British Art Fund
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Paul Caponigro (b. 1932)
Trethevy Quoit, Cornwall, England
1977
Gelatin silver print
19 × 13 1/2 in
© Paul Caponigro

Paul Caponigro (American, b. 1932)
Church, St. MacDara’s Island, County Galway, Ireland
1989
Gelatin silver print
19 1/8 × 14 in
© Paul Caponigro

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Blackpool
1965
Gelatin silver print
12 7/8 × 8 3/4 in.
Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Henry S. Hacker, Yale BA 1965
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Brighton
1960
Gelatin silver print
13 1/4 × 8 7/8 in
Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Ralph and Nancy Segall
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
London
1960
Gelatin silver print
13 1/4 × 9 in.
Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Richard S. and Jeanne Press
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Paul Caponigro (American, b. 1932)
Dead Calf in the Sand, County Kerry, Ireland
1993
Gelatin silver print
18 1/8 × 13 in
© Paul Caponigro

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Albert Hall, London
1960
Gelatin silver print
13 × 8 7/8 in
Yale Center for British Art, Friends of British Art Fund
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Paul Caponigro (American, b. 1932)
Reefert Church, Glendalough, County Wicklow, Ireland
1988
Gelatin silver print
19 × 13 1/4 in
© Paul Caponigro

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
1151 Oxford Road San Marino, CA 91108

Opening hours:
Wed – Mon 10am – 5pm
Closed Tuesdays

The Huntington Library website

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Jan

Exhibition: ‘Marc Chagall – A Retrospective 1908-1985’ at the Palazzo Reale, Milan

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: beauty, drawing, exhibition, existence, gallery website, illustration, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, painting, Paris, portrait, printmaking, psychological, quotation, reality, space, surrealism, time and works on paper
Tags: Angelo cadente, Beauty with a book and a vase of flowers, Bella con un libro e un vaso di fiori, Bella in Mourillon, Big Sun, Blue Lovers, Bride with fan, Composition with circles and goat, Composizione con cerchi e capra, Cow with Parasol, Daphnis and Cloe, Figura davanti alla volta blu, I and the Village, Il compleanno, Il poeta giacente, Il trionfo della musica, il vecchio ebreo, Jewish culture, Jewish Theatre Art, L'aquila e lo scarabeo, La mucca con l'ombrello, La nascita, La passeggiata, Lincoln Art Center, Lovers over Saint-Paul, Marc Chagall - A Retrospective, Marc Chagall - A Retrospective 1908-1985, Marc Chagall Al Cavalletto, Marc Chagall Angelo cadente, Marc Chagall Autoritratto, Marc Chagall Beauty with a book and a vase of flowers, Marc Chagall Bella con un libro e un vaso di fiori, Marc Chagall Bella in Mourillon, Marc Chagall Big Sun, Marc Chagall Birthday, Marc Chagall Blue Lovers, Marc Chagall Bride with fan, Marc Chagall Composition with circles and goat, Marc Chagall Composizione con cerchi e capra, Marc Chagall Cow with Parasol, Marc Chagall Daphnis and Cloe, Marc Chagall Figura davanti alla volta blu, Marc Chagall Guerra, Marc Chagall I and the Village, Marc Chagall i giocatori, Marc Chagall Il compleanno, Marc Chagall Il poeta giacente, Marc Chagall Il trionfo della musica, Marc Chagall il vecchio ebreo, Marc Chagall in his studio of Saint-Paul de Vence, Marc Chagall L'aquila e lo scarabeo, Marc Chagall La mucca con l'ombrello, Marc Chagall La nascita, Marc Chagall La passeggiata, Marc Chagall Lovers over Saint-Paul, Marc Chagall Matrimonio, Marc Chagall Model of great scene for "Mazeltov", Marc Chagall Modello di grande scena per "Mazeltov", Marc Chagall Mondo rosso e nero o Sole rosso, Marc Chagall Nuda con pettine, Marc Chagall Nude above Vitebsk, Marc Chagall Nude with comb, Marc Chagall Red and black world, Marc Chagall Red Jew, Marc Chagall Retrospective, Marc Chagall Self-portrait, Marc Chagall Self-portrait in profile, Marc Chagall Soldato che beve, Marc Chagall Soldiers, Marc Chagall Sposa con ventaglio, Marc Chagall studio violinista verde, Marc Chagall Study for The green violinist, Marc Chagall The birth, Marc Chagall The Blue House, Marc Chagall The Falling Angel, Marc Chagall The Fiddler, Marc Chagall The Grand Parade, Marc Chagall The Madonna of the Village, Marc Chagall The Old Jew, Marc Chagall The Players, Marc Chagall The Poet Reclining, Marc Chagall The Red Circus, Marc Chagall The Soldier Drinks, Marc Chagall The triumph of music, Marc Chagall The walk, Marc Chagall Two pigeons, Marc Chagall War, Marc Chagall Wedding, metissage, Metropolitan Opera, Milan, Model of great scene for "Mazeltov", Modello di grande scena per "Mazeltov", modernism, Mondo rosso e nero o Sole rosso, Nuda con pettine, Nude above Vitebsk, Nude with comb, Palazzo Reale, Palazzo Reale Milan, poetic language, Red and black world, Red Jew, religious images, Russian art, Russian artist, Russian country life, Russian culture, Russian folk images, Russian folk law in art, Russian folk stories, Russian Jewish life, Russian painting, Saint-Paul de Vence, Self-portrait in profile, Soldato che beve, Sposa con ventaglio, studio violinista verde, Study for The green violinist, Teatro d'arte ebraica, The birth, The Blue House, The Falling Angel, The Fiddler, The Grand Parade, The Madonna of the Village, The Old Jew, The Players, The Poet Reclining, The Red Circus, The Soldier Drinks, The triumph of music, The walk

Exhibition dates: 17th September 2014 – 1st February 2015

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Figura davanti alla volta blu
1911
Gouache on paper

A bumper posting on this glorious artist – another who, too late, realised the threat of Nazi Germany and only survived deportation and death by the skin of his teeth. It would have been a sad loss, for he possesses an unbridled passion for life. Social conscience, mythology, iconography, place, identity, race, religion, beauty, war and tragedy. And the exemplary use of colour in his metaphysical, fantastical scenes. But above all…. MAGIC!

Marcus

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Many thankx to the Palazzo Reale for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.”

.
Marc Chagall

“Chagall a pioneer of modern art and one of its greatest figurative painters… [who] invented a visual language that recorded the thrill and terror of the twentieth century…

On his canvases we read the triumph of modernism, the breakthrough in art to an expression of inner life that … is one of the last century’s signal legacies. At the same time Chagall was personally swept up in the horrors of European history between 1914 and 1945: world wars, revolution, ethnic persecution, the murder and exile of millions. In an age when many major artists fled reality for abstraction, he distilled his experiences of suffering and tragedy into images at once immediate, simple, and symbolic to which everyone could respond.”

.
Wullschlager, Jackie. Chagall: A Biography. Knopf, 2008. p. 4

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Daphnis and Cloe
1911
Watercolour
16.5 x 21cm
Private collection

Marc Chagall
Il compleanno (Birthday)
1915
Oil on cardboard
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, 1949
© 2014. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Firenze © Chagall ® by SIAE 2014

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
The Blue House
1917
Oil on canvas
66 x 96.8cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Liège, France

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Matrimonio (Wedding)
1918
Oil on canvas
100 x 119cm
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Modello di grande scena per “Mazeltov” di Scholem Aleichem (Model of great scene for “Mazeltov” Scholem Aleichem)
1919
Oil and black pencil on paper pasted on cardboard
Private Collection

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Composizione con cerchi e capra (Teatro d’arte ebraica) (Composition with circles and goat (Jewish Theatre Art))
1920
Oil on cardboard laid on wood agglomerate
Private Collection

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Angelo cadente (The Falling Angel)
1923
Oil on canvas
148 x 189cm
Private collection

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Bella con un libro e un vaso di fiori (o Bella a Mourillon) (Beauty with a book and a vase of flowers (or Bella in Mourillon))
1926
Oil on canvas
Credits: Collezione Privata
© Chagall ® by SIAE 2014

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Nude above Vitebsk
1933
Oil on canvas
Private collection
© Chagall ® by SIAE 2014

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
La mucca con l’ombrello (Cow with Parasol)
1946
Oil on canvas
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Richard S. Zeisler, 2007
© Chagall ®, by SIAE 2014

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
The Red Circus
1956-1960
Oil on canvas

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Big Sun
1958
Oil on canvas

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
War (Guerra)
1964
Oil on canvas
163 x 231cm
Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
The Players (i giocatori)
1968
Oil no canvas
150 x 160cm
Private collection

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
The Grand Parade
1979
Oil on canvas
119 x 132cm
Private collection

“Will the hurried men of today be able to penetrate her work, her world?” is the question asked by Marc Chagall in 1947 in the postface to the memoirs of his wife Bella, who left him “in the shadows” following her sudden death three years earlier. However, this question could also be asked about his own work, the work of an artist who speaks such a universal language that he is loved by everyone alike, both young and old, men and women, scholars and men on the street. Chagall is an artist who is known and recognised by everyone and, out of all the 20th-century artists, was one of the few to remain faithful to himself despite living through a century of wars, catastrophes, political and technological upheavals.

The exhibition narrative has arisen from a question and a need: on the one hand, the attempt to understand the strength that an enabled an artist who experimented with the styles of all the avant-garde movements, to remain so consistent to himself, always curious about the world around him, developing a style that can be recognised immediately by people of any age and any social status; on the other, the need to study Chagall’s work in order to identify the secret behind the poetry of this fragile man who was yet able to keep faith with his traditions and with his humanity, despite living in a world shaken to the core by indescribable and until then unimaginable catastrophes.

The exhibition opened on 17 September at the Palazzo Reale in Milan and is the biggest retrospective ever devoted to Marc Chagall in the last 50 years in Italy, with over two hundred and twenty works – mainly paintings from 1908 onwards, when Chagall painted his first work Le Petit Salon, right up to his final, monumental works of the 1980s – which guide visitors through the artistic career of Marc Chagall. Works from the collections of his heirs, some of which have not been exhibited to the public before, feature alongside masterpieces from the world’s most important museums, including the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg, the Centre Pompidou, and over fifty public and private collections that have so generously collaborated. The exhibition theme therefore focuses on a new interpretation of the language of Chagall, whose poetic vein developed throughout the 20th century out of a blend of the best western European traditions: from his original Jewish culture to the Russian culture and his encounter with French avant-garde painting.

“The exhibition features a comprehensive chronological narrative, which is divided into sections, starting with his earliest works painted in Russia; his first visit to France and his subsequent return to Russia where he stayed until 1921; the second period of his exile, opened by the autobiography written by Chagall when he left Russia forever, living firstly in France and then, in the 1940s running away from Nazism, in America where he endured the tragedy of the death of his beloved wife Bella; his return to France and his decision to settle permanently on the Cote d’Azur, where Chagall rediscovered his most relaxed poetic language, calmed by the colours and atmosphere of the south.

The exhibition provides visitors with an understanding of how, despite living in perennial exile, Chagall never lost hold of the thread that kept the child he used to be in his heart; how, over the years and throughout the terrible events that marred his existence, he succeeded in preserving his sense of amazement, joy and wonder inspired by nature and humanity, as well as his strong faith that led him to believe in the possibility of a better world and seek to build it in all possible ways. Visitors will also discover his highly original poetic language, born out of the assimilation of the three cultures to which he belonged: Jewish culture (the visual tradition of its ornate manuscripts inspired the expressive, non-perspectival and sometimes mystic elements of his work); Russian culture (evident both in the folk images of the luboks and the religious images of the icons); western culture (in which he assimilates the great artists of tradition, from Rembrandt to the avant-garde artists whom he frequented so assiduously). They will also observe his sense of wonder at nature and the amazement inspired by living creatures that places him closer to mediaeval sources than 20th-century ones.

Flowers and animals are a constant presence in his paintings, enabling him on the one hand to overcome the Jewish interdiction of human depiction, while on the other becoming metaphors for a possible world in which all living beings can live in peace as in Russian mediaeval culture. In the words of Giovanni Arpino: “The soul of Chagall is a bleating soul, as mild as it is invincible because it escapes the horrors, the snares, the outrages … His paradise is an earthly Otherworld that encompasses the simulacra of life, a physical place that becomes metaphysical precisely because we have all killed it during daily life.” His art constitutes a sort of metissage [mix] between cultures and traditions. The fundamental key to his modernity lies in his desire to transform contamination into a value, a work of art into a language able to ask questions that have as yet been left unanswered by mankind.

After Milan the exhibition will travel to the prestigious Musees royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique/Koninklike Musea voor Schone Kunsten van Belgie, Bruxelles.

Press release from the Palazzo Reale website

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
La nascita (The birth)
1911
Oil on canvas original pasted on wood (plywood)
Private collection
© Chagall ® by SIAE 2014

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
The Soldier Drinks (Soldato che beve)
1911
Oil on canvas
109.8 x 94.7cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Bride with fan (Sposa con ventaglio)
1911
Oil on canvas
Private Collection

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
I and the Village
1911
Oil on canvas
192.1 x 151.4cm
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Nude with comb (Nuda con pettine)
1911-1912
Black ink and gouache on paper

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
The Fiddler
1912
Oil on canvas
188 x 158cm
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Soldiers
1912
Private collection
38.1 x 32.4cm

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
The Old Jew (il vecchio ebreo)
1912
Oil on canvas

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Self-portrait in profile
1914
Oil on cardboard
34 x 27.9cm
Private collection

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Blue Lovers
1914
Tempera on paper pasted on cardboard
49 x 44cm
Private collection

Marc Chagall in his studio of Saint-Paul de Vence
Nd

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Red Jew
1915
Oil on cardboard
Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
The Poet Reclining (Il poeta giacente)
1915
Oil on board
Support: 772 x 775mm Frame: 953 x 960 x 91mm
© Tate, London 2014 © Chagall ® by SIAE 2014

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
La passeggiata (The walk)
1917-1918
Oil on canvas
Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg
© Chagall ® by SIAE 2014

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Al Cavalletto (tavola 18 di “Ma Vie”)
1922
Etching and drypoint on Japanese paper
Private collection
© Chagall ® by SIAE 2014

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Autoritratto (tavola 17 di “Ma Vie”) (Self-portrait)
1922
Etching and drypoint on Japanese paper
Private collection
© Chagall ® by SIAE 2014

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Study for The green violinist (studio violinista verde)
1917

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Two pigeons
1925
Gouache, ink and blue ink on coloured paper
Private collection

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
L’aquila e lo scarabeo
1926
Gouache on paper pasted on wooden panel
Private collection
© Chagall ® by SIAE 2014

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
The Madonna of the Village
1938-1942
Oil on canvas
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid
© Chagall ® by SIAE 2014

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Mondo rosso e nero o Sole rosso (Red and black world)
1951
Gouache, watercolour, pastel on paper pasted on canvas
Private collection

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Il trionfo della musica – Maquette per il murale Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Art Center, New York (The triumph of music – Maquette for the mural Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Art Center, New York)
1966
Tempera, gouache and collage on paper
Private collection

Marc Chagall (Russian-French, 1887-1985)
Lovers over Saint-Paul
1968
Oil, tempera and sawdust on canvas
145 x 130cm
Private collection
© Chagall ® by SIAE 2014

Palazzo Reale
Piazza del Duomo 12
Milan, Italy

Opening times:
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Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday 9.30am – 7.30pm
Thursday and Saturday 9.30am – 10.30pm

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Jan

Exhibition: ‘Goya: Order and Disorder’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: beauty, curator, drawing, exhibition, existence, gallery website, illustration, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, painting, portrait, printmaking, psychological, reality, space, time and works on paper
Tags: A heroic feat! With dead men!, Art of Bullfighting, Attack on a Military Camp, Boston, Desgracias acaecidas en el tendido de la plaza de Madrid, Disasters of War, Disparate femenino, Disparates, Duchess of Alba, Duke of Alba, El sueño de la razon produce monstruos, Feminine Absurdity, Francisco Goya, Francisco Goya A heroic feat! With dead men!, Francisco Goya Art of Bullfighting, Francisco Goya Attack on a Military Camp, Francisco Goya Desgracias acaecidas en el tendido de la plaza de Madrid, Francisco Goya Disparate femenino, Francisco Goya Duchess of Alba, Francisco Goya Duke of Alba, Francisco Goya Feminine Absurdity, Francisco Goya Grande hazaña! Con muertos!, Francisco Goya Hasta la muerte, Francisco Goya Last Communion of Saint Joseph of Calasanz, Francisco Goya Ligereza y atrevimiento de Juanito Apiñani en la de Madrid, Francisco Goya Loco furioso, Francisco Goya Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga, Francisco Goya Nightmare, Francisco Goya No se puede mirar, Francisco Goya Old Man on a Swing, Francisco Goya One Can't Look, Francisco Goya Pesadilla, Francisco Goya Raging Lunatic, Francisco Goya Seated Giant, Francisco Goya Self-Portrait While Painting, Francisco Goya Self-Portrait with Doctor Arrieta, Francisco Goya Straw Mannequin, Francisco Goya Tauromaquia, Francisco Goya The Agility and Audacity of Juanito Apiñani in the Ring at Madrid, Francisco Goya The Family of the Infante Don Luis, Francisco Goya The Parasol, Francisco Goya The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Francisco Goya Time (Old Women), Francisco Goya Two Men Fighting, Francisco Goya Unfortunate events in the front seats of the ring of Madrid, Francisco Goya Until Death, Francisco Goya Witches' Sabbath, Goya, Goya Disasters of War, Goya Disparates, Goya Looks at Himself, Goya: Order and Disorder, Grande hazaña! Con muertos!, Hasta la muerte, Last Communion of Saint Joseph of Calasanz, Ligereza y atrevimiento de Juanito Apiñani en la de Madrid, Loco furioso, Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga, María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva Álvarez de Toledo y Silva, Museum of Fine Arts, Nightmare, No se puede mirar, Old Man on a Swing, One Can't Look, Order and Disorder, Pesadilla, Raging Lunatic, Seated Giant, Self-Portrait While Painting, Self-Portrait with Doctor Arrieta, spain, Spanish art, Spanish artist, Spanish painting, Straw Mannequin, Tauromaquia, The Agility and Audacity of Juanito Apiñani in the Ring at Madrid, The Family of the Infante Don Luis, The Parasol, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Time (Old Women), Two Men Fighting, Unfortunate events in the front seats of the ring of Madrid, Until Death, Witches' Sabbath

Exhibition dates: 12th October 2014 – 19th January 2015

Curators: Stephanie Loeb Stepanek, Curator of Prints and Drawings; Frederick Ilchman, Chair, Art of Europe; and Mrs. Russell W. Baker Curator of Paintings.

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
The Parasol
1777
Oil on canvas, tapestry cartoon
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, España
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

This one is for me, this man of darkness.

Marcus

.
Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the images for a larger version of the art.

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
The Family of the Infante Don Luis
1784
Oil on canvas
630 x 838cm
Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Parma, Italy

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Attack on a Military Camp
c. 1808-10
Oil on canvas
Colección Marqués de la Romana
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
One Can’t Look (No se puede mirar), Disasters of War 26
c. 1811-12
Etching, direct etching, and drypoint (working proof)
1951 Purchase Fund
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
A heroic feat! With dead men! (Grande hazaña! Con muertos!), Disasters of War 39
c. 1810-1813
Etching, direct etching, and drypoint

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Unfortunate events in the front seats of the ring of Madrid, and the death of the Mayor of Torrejón (Desgracias acaecidas en el tendido de la plaza de Madrid, y muerte del alcalde de Torrejón)
1815-1816
From the 35 etchings making up the Tauromaquia (“Art of Bullfighting”) series
Etching with burnished aquatint, drypoint and burin on paper

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
The Agility and Audacity of Juanito Apiñani in the Ring at Madrid (Ligereza y atrevimiento de Juanito Apiñani en la de Madrid) (Tauromaquia 20)
1815-16
Etching with burnished aquatint, drypoint and burin on paper
© Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Feminine Absurdity (Disparate femenino) Disparates 1
1815-17
Fundación Lázaro Galdiano

This fall, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), presents Goya: Order and Disorder, a landmark exhibition dedicated to Spanish master Francisco Goya (1746-1828). The largest retrospective of the artist to take place in America in 25 years features 170 paintings, prints and drawings – offering the rare opportunity to examine Goya’s powers of observation and invention across the full range of his work. The MFA welcomes many loans from Europe and the US, including 21 works from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, along with loans from the Musée du Louvre, the Galleria degli Uffizi, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington) and private collections. Goya: Order and Disorder includes some 60 works from the MFA’s collection of Goya’s works on paper, one of the most important in the world. Many of these prints and drawings have not been on view in Boston in 25 years. Employed as a court painter by four successive rulers of Spain, Goya managed to explore an extraordinarily wide range of subjects, genres and formats. From the striking portrait Duchess of Alba (1797) from the Hispanic Society of America, to the tour de force of Goya’s Seated Giant (by 1818) in the MFA’s collection, to his drawings of lunacy, the works on view demonstrate the artist’s fluency across media. On view in the Museum’s Ann and Graham Gund Gallery from October 12, 2014 – January 19, 2015, the MFA is the only venue for the exhibition, which is accompanied by a publication revealing fresh insights on the artist.

“This exhibition offers a once-in-a-generation look at one of the greatest, most imaginative artists of all time,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director at the MFA. “Goya: Order and Disorder reflects the Museum’s close collaboration with the Prado, and builds on our proud tradition of Goya scholarship.”

As 18th-century culture gave way to the modern world, little escaped Goya’s penetrating gaze. Working with equal prowess in painting, drawing and printmaking, he was the portraitist of choice for the royal family as well as aristocrats, statesmen and intellectuals – counting many as acquaintances or friends. Living in a time of revolution and radical social and political transformations, Goya witnessed drastic shifts between “order” and “disorder,” from relative prosperity to wartime chaos, famine, crime and retribution. Among the works he created – some 1,800 oil paintings, frescoes, miniatures, etchings, lithographs and drawings – many are not easy to look at, or even to understand. With a keen sensitivity to human nature, Goya could portray the childhood innocence of Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga (about 1788, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) – his most famous portrait of a child – or the deviance of the Witches’ Sabbath (1797-98, Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid).

The full arc of Goya’s creativity is on display in the exhibition, from the elegant full-length portraits of Spanish aristocrats that first brought the artist fame, to caustic drawings of beggars and grotesque witches, to his series of satirical etchings targeting ignorance and superstition, known as the Caprichos. Rather than a chronological arrangement, exhibition curators Stephanie Loeb Stepanek, Curator of Prints and Drawings, and Frederick Ilchman, Chair, Art of Europe and Mrs. Russell W. Baker Curator of Paintings, grouped the works in Goya: Order and Disorder, and its accompanying publication, into eight categories highlighting the significant themes that captured Goya’s attention and imagination. From tranquil to precarious, Goya’s art made the diversity of life, and the conflicting emotions of the human mind, comprehensible to the viewer – and to himself.

“We decided to juxtapose similar subjects or compositions in different media in order to allow visitors to examine how Goya’s choice of technique informed and transformed his ideas, since the characteristics of each medium – and the intended audience – influenced the final appearance of the work,” said Stepanek.

Noted for his satirical eye, Goya reserved his closest scrutiny for himself. The first section of the exhibition, Goya Looks at Himself, is a sweeping group of self-portraits. In the MFA’s etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos), Caprichos 43 (1797-99), Goya offers himself as a universal artist sleeping at a desk, while the creatures of his dreams swirl about his head. This print is grouped with two loans from Madrid, The Artist Dreaming (about 1797), a drawing from the Prado that preceded the famous print, and Self-Portrait while Painting (about 1795), from the Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. Together, these works reflect Goya’s tendency to insert his persona into allegories and fantasies. At the entrance of this section is an imposing group portrait of The Family of the Infante Don Luis (1784, Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Parma, Italy) – the brother of King Charles III – which features 14 figures, including Goya, who depicts himself working on a sizeable canvas on an easel.

“Just as Goya’s imagery is determined by whether he painted, drew or made a print, he also reconsidered certain favored subjects, reviving them from his memory and returning to them again and again during his long career,” said Ilchman. “Examining his compositional preoccupations across decades – often in the same room of the exhibition – reveals the continuity of Goya’s imagination.”

Through his art, Goya sought to describe, catalogue and satirise the breadth of human experience – embracing both its pleasures and discomforts. The artist tackled the nurturing of children, the pride and infirmity of old age, the risks of romantic love, and all types of women – from young beauties to old women. In the section dedicated to Goya’s depictions of the stages of life, Life Studies, the exhibition explores how the artist transformed observations of human frailty, creating allegories of vanity and the passage of time. A wizened woman, who is unsuccessfully attempting to adopt youthful styles in Until Death (Hasta la muerte), Caprichos 55 (1797-99, The Boston Athenaeum), is revived in one of Goya’s most haunting monumental paintings – Time (Old Women) (about 1810-12, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille). The aged woman is now decayed and diseased, but still clings to her outdated fashions, and is soon to be swept away by the broom of Time. Goya’s tapestry designs frequently depict young people, with relationships between men and women marked by affection, disaffection and tension. The Parasol (1777, Museo Nacional del Prado) presents a young woman who poses under a parasol with her docile lapdog – she seems to ignore her male companion in favour of engaging viewers who would look up at this tapestry, which was meant to hang over a door.

In the Play and Prey section, Goya’s creative process is revealed through representations of a popular game in which young women toss a well-dressed mannequin in a blanket. In Straw Mannequin, this carnivalesque reversal of class and gender roles is seen in a tapestry (1792-93, Patrimonio Nacional, Spain), as well as two preparatory paintings (1791, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and Museo Nacional del Prado). A late print, Feminine Absurdity (Disparate femenino) Disparates 1 (1815-17, Fundación Lázaro Galdiano), imparts new meaning to the previously simple image of young women at play, as the women now strain to lift several figures, including a peasant and donkey. This more sinister vein is reflected in many of the subjects the artist returned to later in life, following the devastation of the Peninsular War and its political reversals. “Play and Prey” also explores Goya’s famous images of men engaging in hunting (his own favourite pastime) and the bullfight. In these works, including examples from the series of prints, the Tauromaquia and the Bulls of Bordeaux, Goya celebrates both activities while also subtly portraying their darker sides.

The precarious relationship between order and discord, balance and imbalance, is fundamental to Goya’s work, and the subject of the section In the Balance. The theme appears vividly in images of the punishing forces of nature, figures losing their balance and others fighting. This topic is particularly noteworthy given the tumultuous social and political change during Goya’s lifetime, as well as the artist’s own struggles with illness, dizzy spells and deafness. The MFA’s print, The Agility and Audacity of Juanito Apiñani in the Ring at Madrid (Ligereza y atrevimiento de Juanito Apiñani en la de Madrid (Tauromaquia 20) (1815-16) depicts a precarious matador, who is poised midair as he vaults over a charging bull, anchored only by his upright pole.

Goya earned widespread fame through grand portraits executed in the 1780s and 1790s, and the exhibition displays some of these masterpieces alongside more intimate likenesses of his artistic and family circle. Focusing on the painter’s approach to portraiture – from relations with sitters to his handling of paint – Portraits explores the discipline that remained central to his reputation as Spain’s leading painter and helped sustain him financially throughout his career. Paintings of the Duke of Alba (1795, Museo Nacional del Prado) and Duchess of Alba (1797, Hispanic Society of America), shown together for the first time since the early 19th century, are superb examples of his aristocratic portraits and illustrate two of his most important patrons. In the Duchess of Alba, the darkly clothed sitter points a finger to the ground, where the words “Solo Goya” are written in the sand. The assertion that only Goya was worthy of this commission and that only he could have pulled off such a dramatic likeness, changes the painting’s focus from the aristocrat to the artist.

Other Worlds, Other States features two facets of Goya’s spiritual explorations – Christian religious belief and its opposite, superstition. While Goya frequently focused on clerical abuses, religious commissions helped pay the bills throughout his life, and there is no evidence that he lacked personal piety. One of Goya’s greatest legacies is his ability to represent mental and psychological conditions. His depictions of illusions and inner reality are also on view in this section, and include visions, nightmares and the deluded mind of the insane. An imaginative rendering of a particular Spanish nightmare – a witch riding a bull through the air – is depicted in the drawing Pesadilla (Nightmare) (1816-1820).

Many of Goya’s deranged characters highlight the fragile boundary between lunacy and sanity. A luminous painting on copper from the Meadows Museum in Dallas, Yard with Madmen of 1794 – which shows distressed and helpless lunatics – anticipates a sequence of black crayon drawings made three decades later. In these later works, the individuals, whom Goya labeled as “locos,” are in even more desperate condition, restrained in straitjackets or trapped behind bars. Also in this gallery, a “learning space” offers additional educational materials and a timeline that provides context and insight into the mind of the Spanish Master.

A keen awareness of the weight of historical events pervades Goya’s work. Although he belongs in the ranks of great history painters who narrated courageous acts, he is not preoccupied with generals, patriots and battles. Instead, he focuses attention on the anonymous victims of the horrors of war or the Spanish Inquisition, and rarely fails to raise moral questions in these works. In Capturing History, works that blend the epic and mundane include a painting of an imagined scene, Attack on a Military Camp (about 1808-10, Colección Marqués de la Romana), in which a woman holds a screaming infant as she runs from assailants who have already wounded several people. In One Can’t Look (No se puede mirar), Disasters of War 26 (1810-14), the viewer is only a step or two away from the victims and the advancing bayonets of the print’s aggressors. The work is part of the wrenching print series, Disasters of War, which depict the artist’s thoughts on violence during the Peninsular War that ripped Spain apart from 1808 to 1814.

The final section of the exhibition, Solo Goya, summarises the characteristics that establish the artist’s greatness – exploring themes such as Goya’s imagery of swarms of human figures as well as his periodic reflection on the concept of redemption. The same artist who took on the abuses of war could also evoke the most sympathetic and poignant moments of human experience, such as the Last Communion of Saint Joseph of Calasanz (1819, Collection of the Padres Escolapios). The altarpiece depicts Joseph of Calasanz, from Goya’s home region of Aragón, who founded the order of the Padres Escolapios (Piarists) to educate poor children. Goya may have attended one of the order’s schools, known as the Escuelas Pías, and might have felt a personal connection to the protagonist of the painting – his final major religious work – which comes to the US for the first time in this exhibition.

One of Goya’s most resonant themes addresses the problem with power, embodied by a central character: the giant. Conditioned by the events of his day, particularly the sudden rise and fall of military and institutional fortunes, Goya explores how power is not necessarily inherent, but comes with a cost. Goya’s Seated Giant (by 1818), from the MFA’s renowned collection of Goya prints and drawings, is among the most enigmatic and compelling of the artist’s graphic works, depicting a looming figure immobilised by the burden of power. While no single work can epitomise an artist’s achievement, this figure embodies the grandest of Goya’s great themes.

The MFA’s Goya collection owes a great debt to former MFA Curator of Prints and Drawings, and esteemed Goya scholar, Eleanor A. Sayre, who worked on the exhibitions The Changing Image: Prints by Francisco Goya (1974) and Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment (1989) at the MFA. Many of the works on view in Goya: Order and Disorder were acquired by the Museum during her tenure, including the Seated Giant; Woman Reading to Two Children (about 1819); Resignation (La resignacion) (1816-1820); Merry Absurdity (Disparate alegre) (1816-1819); and the oil sketch on canvas of the Annunciation (1785). The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos), Caprichos 43 (1797-99) and the drawing of Two Men Fighting (1812-20) were part of Sayre’s bequest to the MFA after she passed away in 2001.

Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Duke of Alba
1795
Oil on canvas
195 x 126 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva Álvarez de Toledo y Silva, Thirteenth Duchess of Alba
1797
Oil on canvas
On loan from The Hispanic Society of America, New York, NY
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Self-Portrait While Painting
c. 1795
Oil on canvas
Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The most inquiring self-portraits often display a cool detachment almost to the point of impersonality. These are the real backstage revelations, where the painter’s high seriousness and insight are as palpable as the flaws exposed by these virtues.

Goya in his studio is dressed like a matador or majo, a wideboy, a mistake as he himself owns: his jacket is too tight and the trousers are straining around his bulging thighs. At nearly fifty he is too old and too stout for such clothes, as he very well knows, for in letters to his boyhood friend, Martin Zapater, Goya periodically laments his snub nose, and increasing girth. Yet he chose to paint himself in the least flattering position – side on – and the worst possible light, silhouetted against a whiteness so shattering that every contour is emphasised. He might as well have stood there naked.

It is high noon in the studio. The light is so bright that nothing is visible beyond the window as reflected in the mirror, and you need to squint to see this man of darkness. The brim of his hat is ringed with candleholders; according to his son Javier, Goya preferred to paint in the clear morning light but give ‘the final touches at night in artificial light’. He may not have been the only painter to get a close glow by turning his hat into a lamp stand but he is the only artist to paint himself wearing one of the candle-hats and thus revealing a trick of the trade. Presumably it is acting as an eye-shade at this moment, though he could have taken it off in the final painting for the sake of vanity, this cumbersome pot that’s too tall for his head. But size is a running gag here. Look at the tiny brush he is using to prod away at a painting so big it makes the artist look even smaller beneath his outsize headgear (matador and bull), a painting that is too large to correspond to this one for the self-portrait is surprisingly small – not quite two feet tall.

So small and yet strong enough to carry the full force of the scene, the stark light and the stark disenchantment of a man who turns upon himself very suddenly out of a spell of protracted thought. Just as in his portraits of the Spanish royal family – like the corner barker and his wife, as the French writer Théophile Gautier once described them – Goya doesn’t lay a gloss upon the facts. He is a fat man, quite probably a small fat man, tousled, unshaven, unsuitably dressed and able to see the truth quite clearly. That is what his look declares: I see how I look, I know what I am doing and who I am in this world.

Goya is probably stone-deaf by the time he painted himself in his studio at number 1 calle del Desengano, Madrid, the final cruelty of a long and mysterious illness. And the world is shut out of this picture, the window a white-out, the artist all alone in the little kingdom of his studio. The solo studio – as opposed to the buzzing workshop or atelier – was still quite a recent luxury in Goya’s day, only just becoming a place of withdrawal. It plays its part in the history of self-portraiture not just as a room of one’s own, or a refuge from society; but as the cell that throws you back on yourself and your misfortunes.

Laura Cummings. A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits. London: Harper Press, 2009, pp. 110-111.

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga
c. 1788
Oil on canvas
Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Jules Bache Collection, 1949
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga (detail)
c. 1788
Oil on canvas
Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Jules Bache Collection, 1949
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Witches’ Sabbath
1797-98
Oil on canvas
Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid, España
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Last Communion of Saint Joseph of Calasanz
1819
Oil on canvas
Collection of the Padres Escolapios, Madrid, España
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Self-Portrait with Doctor Arrieta
1820
Oil on canvas
Lent by The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Seated Giant
by 1818
Burnished aquatint (first state)
Katherine E. Bullard Fund in memory of Francis Bullard
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Pesadilla (Nightmare)
1816-1820

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Raging Lunatic (Loco furioso), Bordeaux Album I, G, 3[4?]
1824-28
Black crayon on laid paper
Collection Andrea Woodner
Photographer: Jim Strong. Courtesy of The Frick Collection.
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Two Men Fighting, Album F, 73
1812-20
Brush and brown ink, with scraping
Bequest of Eleanor A. Sayre
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Old Man on a Swing, Bordeaux Album II, H, 58
1824-28
Black crayon on laid paper
On loan from The Hispanic Society of America, New York, NY
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos), Caprichos 43
1797-99
Etching and burnished aquatint (first edition)
Bequest of Eleanor A. Sayre
Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Until Death (Hasta la muerte), Caprichos 55
1797-99
Burnished aquatint etching with drypoint
The Boston Athenaeum

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Time (Old Women)
c. 1810-12
Oil on canvas
Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Straw Mannequin
1791
Oil on canvas

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Avenue of the Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts

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Jan

Exhibition: ‘Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor’ at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 4th October 2014 – 18th January 2015

Contemporary Galleries and The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, second floor

Many thankx to MoMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
X Playpen
1987
Wood and enamel paint
27 x 37 x 37″ (68.6 x 94 x 94cm)
Batsheva and Ronald Ostrow
Image credit: D. James Dee, courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery
© 2014 Robert Gober

“Begun in 1984, the sink series appeared during the darkest period of the AIDS epidemic. Gober, who is gay, responded to the tragedy with poetic indirection: the sinks’ cold air of clinical hygiene. The Times critic John Russell nailed the artistic effect: “Minimal forms with maximum content.” The fact that the content must be intuited by the viewer, who is free to regard the sinks as just cleverly manufactured found objects, typifies Gober’s circumspection. His works are enigmatic but not coy, morally driven but not aggrieved. They radiate a quality that is as rare in life as it is in art: character. …

The heart is an excitable physical organ that registers sensations of fight or flight and of love or aversion: the first and last unimpeachable witness to what can’t help but matter, for good and for ill, in every life.”

.
Peter Schjeldahl. “Found Meanings: A Robert Gober Retrospective,” October 6, 2014 in ‘The Art World’ October 13, 2014 Issue on ‘The New Yorker’ website [Online] Cited 09/07/2021.

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
The Ascending Sink
1985
Plaster, wood, steel, wire lath, and semi-gloss enamel paint
Two components, each: 30 x 33 x 27″ (76.2 x 83.8 x 68.6 cm); floor to top: 92″ (233.7cm)
Installed in the artist’s studio on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, Manhattan
Collection of Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, New York
Promised gift to the Whitney Museum of American Art
Image credit: John Kramer, courtesy the artist
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Untitled Closet
1989
Wood, plaster, enamel paint
84 x 52 x 28″ (213.4 x 132.1 x 71.1cm)
Private collection
Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Untitled
1991
Wood, beeswax, human hair, fabric, paint, shoes
9 x 16 1/2 x 45″ (22.9 x 41.9 x 114.3cm)
Collection the artist
Image credit: Andrew Moore, courtesy the artist
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Untitled
1994-1995
Wood, beeswax, brick, plaster, plastic, leather, iron, charcoal, cotton socks, electric light and motor
47 3/8 × 47 × 34″ (120.3 × 119.4 × 86.4cm)
Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, on permanent loan to the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel
Image credit: D. James Dee, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery
© 2014 Robert Gober

Chronicling a 40-year career, Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor is the first large-scale survey of Robert Gober’s (American, b. 1954) work to take place in the United States. The exhibition is on view from October 4, 2014 to January 18, 2015, and features approximately 130 works across several mediums, including individual sculptures, immersive sculptural environments, and a distinctive selection of drawings and prints. Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor is organised by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator, and Paulina Pobocha, Assistant Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, working in close collaboration with the artist.

Early on, Gober’s sculptures declared themselves an indispensable part of the landscape of late-twentieth century art; since then they have continued to evolve while remaining tightly bound to the principles outlined by the artist almost four decades ago. Gober places narrative at the centre of his endeavour, embedding themes of sexuality, religion, and politics into work drawn from everyday life. Spare in its use of images and motifs while protean in its capacity to generate meaning, Gober’s work is an art of contradictions: intimate yet assertive, straightforward yet enigmatic. Taking imagery familiar to anyone – doors, sinks, legs – Gober dislocates, alters, and estranges what we think we know. Although a first glance might suggest otherwise, all of Gober’s objects are entirely handmade, by the artist and by collaborators with the necessary expertise.

The earliest works in the exhibition date from the mid-to-late 1970s when Gober was largely working in two dimensions. A painting of the house he grew up in Connecticut hangs at the entrance to the galleries. The first room of the exhibition offers an introduction to Gober’s career, as told through five works: a sculpture of a paint can, a man’s leg, and a closet, as well as a drawing and a small print.

Between 1983 and 1986, Gober created more than 50 sculptures of sinks and scores of related drawings. Based on real sinks, including one in the artist’s childhood home, Gober built them from wood, plaster, and wire lath, and finished them with multiple coats of paint to mimic the appearance of enamel. But, crucially, they lack faucets and plumbing. The sinks’ appearance coincided with the early years of the AIDS epidemic, and their uselessness spoke to the impossibility of cleansing oneself. The sculptures on view in the second gallery of the exhibition were featured in Gober’s first show of sinks, held at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1985.

Gober’s early and straightforward sink sculptures gave way in 1985 to a group of distorted sinks whose bodies are variably stretched, bent, multiplied, and divided. The evolution of form registers in the works’ titles: self-evident descriptions become increasingly expressive (eg. The Sink Inside of Me). By the mid-1980s, the artist’s preoccupation with domestic objects expanded to include sculptures of furniture such as beds and playpens, as well as an armchair, on view in the third gallery. Between 1986 and 1987, Gober created Two-Partially Buried Sinks, among the last sink sculptures of the decade. This work is positioned outside the walls of the Museum on a scaffold, and can be viewed through the gallery’s window.

In 1989 at the Paula Cooper Gallery, Gober exhibited his first room-sized installations. Each is framed by wallpapers: a pattern pairing a sleeping white man and a lynched black man in one, and line drawings of male and female genitalia in the other, both of which are on view in the following galleries. These backdrops powerfully inflect the sculptures contained within: a freestanding bridal gown and hand-painted plaster cat litter bags in the first room and a bag of donuts with cast-pewter drains inset into the walls in the second. With characteristic concision, Gober sets off a complex swirl of questions about the unease surrounding issues to everyday life in America.

Gober made Slides of a Changing Painting between 1982 and 1983. During this year, he painted on a small Masonite board and photographed the imagery as it changed over time. Eventually, he had accumulated more than 1,000 slides, which he edited down and organised into a slide projection that he showed in 1984. After the exhibition, Gober put the slides away. When he revisited the project around 1990, he realised that he had unknowingly employed many of the same images in his subsequent sculptures. Slides of a Changing Painting has continued to be generative; it provides a nearly complete index of Gober’s visual themes and vocabulary. The work is on view in a gallery centrally located within the exhibition.

The human figure was absent from Gober’s sculptural repertoire until 1989, when he made his first sculpture of a man’s leg, a breakthrough that ushered in many related works. Single legs wearing trousers and shoes and truncated at mid-shin were followed by pairs of legs that Gober left whole to the waist. He showed these surreal sculptures in a 1991 exhibition in Paris, recreated in the following gallery. Three pairs of legs, augmented by candles, drains, and a musical score, are positioned around the perimeter of a room wallpapered with a kaleidoscopic landscape of a beech forest in autumn. In the centre of the gallery sits a human-sized cigar composed of tobacco sheafs purchased from a Pennsylvania supplier. To learn how to preserve this organic material as it aged, Gober consulted an expert at the American Museum of Natural History. Seeking out specialists’ advice on complicated projects is a hallmark of the artist’s craft based practice.

The works on view in the following gallery were made by artists Anni Albers, Robert Beck, Cady Noland, and Joan Semmel; photographs by Nancy Shaver hang in the adjoining space. Gober brought these objects together for the first time in an exhibition he organised at the Matthew Marks Gallery, New York in 1999. Gober has been curating exhibitions since the mid-1980s, most recently focusing on monographic presentations of the works by American artists Charles Burchfield and Forrest Bess. The contemporary artists included in this gallery share with Gober daring approaches to the representation of sexuality, violence, and American culture.

The immersive installation Gober conceived for a 1992 exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York is on view nearby. All three rooms of that original presentation are reconstructed: an antechamber, a central gallery, and a dark cul-de-sac. The main space features a hand-painted mural, executed in a paint-by-number method by scenic painters, depicting a forest inspired by the landscape of Long Island’s North Fork. Barred prison windows, through which a blue sky is visible, interrupt the verdant panorama. Placed throughout the gallery are hand-painted plaster sculptures of boxes of rat bait and bundles of newspapers – actually photolithographic facsimiles of newspapers featuring real and invented content. After a six-year absence from Gober’s work, sinks reappeared in the installation at Dia, water now running freely from their faucets.

Following the introduction of mens’ legs into his sculptural vocabulary, Gober cast the leg of a young boy and used that mould as the basis for several subsequent works, including a fireplace where legs take the place of firewood, a vision invoking childhood nightmares and uncensored fairy tales. Also on view is a sculpture of a suitcase that occupies space below ground as well as above. Its lid opens to reveal a sewer grate and a brick shaft that leads to a subterranean tidal pool complete with seaweed, mussel shells, and starfish. Visible through the depths of the water, amid the marine life, are the legs of a man and baby, one holding the other in a manner suggestive of baptism. While primarily a sculptor, Gober has worked across a range of media throughout his career including drawing and printmaking. Drawings sit the closest to his work in three dimensions; most of his sculptures and installations are preceded by preparatory drawings. A selection of Gober’s works on paper is also on view in this gallery.

The final installation included in the exhibition was made in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and results from Gober’s desire to create a space of refuge and reflection. The overall structure evokes the interior of a church: a central aisle separating rows of pews leads to an altar-like area flanked by two chapels. From the nipples of a headless Christ, regenerative “living water” flows into a large hole jackhammered into the floor. In the pastel drawings hanging on the side walls, the power of human embrace confronts the harrowing news contained within the photo-lithographed pages of the September 12, 2001, issue of The New York Times. In this installation, the overt references to Catholicism explore the vitality of such symbolism in the wake of contemporary tragedy.

Over the past decade, Gober’s sculptures have become increasingly complex, both technically and iconographically. The artist sometimes uses casts of existing sculptures and combines them to create hybrid objects, as in the conjunction of a chest, a stool, and a twisted network of children’s legs. Elsewhere, Gober pushes recognisable imagery into unpredictable terrain: a sink’s backsplash morphs into gnarled planks of wood interwoven with casts of fragmented arms. New motifs, such as a surrealistically melting rifle, also have entered the artist’s visual universe. The strangeness of these new sculptures is presaged by Prayers Are Answered (1980-81), an early work loosely based on a Catholic church on 7th Street and Avenue B in the East Village. Rather than the traditional religious scenes to be found in paintings lining the walls, Gober has furnished the church with murals depicting the harshness of daily life in the city.

The exhibition’s final gallery presents works made as early as 1979 and as recently as this past spring. Images of domestic objects and architecture and themes of childhood and the body reverberates across the decades. The dollhouse placed on the floor is one of several that Gober designed and built during his first years in New York City, as one way of earning a living. The sculpture and installations that would follow may be considered life-size realisations of the imaginative potential contained within these small structures.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition and prepared in close collaboration with the artist, Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor traces the development of his work, highlighting themes and motifs to which he has returned throughout the decades. The book features an essay by Hilton Als – a text both wide-ranging and personal – and an in-depth narrative of Gober’s life. The rich selection of images illustrates every phase of the artist’s career, and includes previously unpublished photographs from his own archive. Hardcover. 6.5″w x 9.75″h; 272 pages; 169 illustrations. ISBN: 978-0-87070-946-3. $45.

Ann Temkin

The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture
The Museum of Modern Art

Ms. Temkin assumed the role of Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture in 2008, after joining The Museum of Modern Art in 2003 as Curator. During her tenure, Ms. Temkin has worked extensively with her colleagues on reimagining the Painting and Sculpture collection galleries at the Museum. Along with Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not A Metaphor, her exhibitions at MoMA include Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New (2013); Abstract Expressionist New York (2010); Gabriel Orozco (2009); and Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today (2008). Prior to MoMA, Ms. Temkin was the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1990 to 2003, where she organised such exhibitions as Barnett Newman (2002), Constantin Brancusi (1995), and Thinking is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (1994).

Paulina Pobocha

Assistant Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture
The Museum of Modern Art

Ms. Pobocha is an assistant curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art. She joined the Museum in 2008 and has worked on the exhibitions Gabriel Orozco (2009) and Abstract Expressionist New York (2010). In 2013 she co-organised Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store. She has also worked extensively with the Museum’s collection. Prior to MoMA, Ms. Pobocha was a Joan Tisch Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she lectured on a broad range of subjects in contemporary and modern art. In 2011, she was appointed Critic at the Yale University School of Art.

Press release from the MoMA website

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
X Pipe Playpen
2013-14
Wood and bronze
26 1/8 x 55 x 55″ (66.4 x 139.7 x 139.7cm)
Collection the artist

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Untitled
1989-1996
Silk satin, muslin, linen, tulle, welded steel, hand-printed silkscreen on paper, cast hydrostone plaster, vinyl acrylic paint, ink, and graphite
Dimensions variable, approximately 800 square feet installed
The Art Institute of Chicago, restricted gift of Stefan T. Edlis and H. Gael Neeson Foundation; through prior gifts of Mr. and Mrs. Joel Starrels and Fowler McCormick
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Bag of Donuts
1989
paper, dough and rhoplex (12 donuts)
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Cigar
1991
Wood, paint, paper, tobacco
15 3/4 x 15 3/4 x 70 7/8″ (40 x 40 x 180cm)
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchased with funds provided by the Collectors Committee in honour of Marcia Simon Weisman
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Forest
1991
Hand-printed silkscreen on paper
180″ x 124″ (457.2 x 315cm)
Courtesy the artist
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Untitled
1992
Paper, twine, metal, light bulbs, cast plaster with casein and silkscreen ink, stainless steel, painted cast bronze and water, plywood, forged iron, plaster, latex paint and lights, photolithography on archival (Mohawk Superfine) paper, twine, hand-painted forest mural
511 3/4 × 363 3/16 × 177 3/16″ (1300 × 922.5 × 450.1cm)
Glenstone
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Untitled (detail)
2003-05
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Untitled Door and Door Frame
1987-88
Wood, enamel paint
Door: 84 x 34 x 1 1/2″ (213.4 x 86.4 x 3.8cm); doorframe: 90 x 43 x 5 1/2″ (228.6 x 109.2 x 14cm)
Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Gift of the John and Mary Pappajohn Art Foundation, 2004
© 2014 Robert Gober

Installation views of Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor, The Museum of Modern Art, October 4, 2014 – January 18, 2015
All works by Robert Gober © 2014 Robert Gober © 2014 The Museum of Modern Art
Photos: Jonathan Muzikar

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Untitled Leg
1989-1990
Beeswax, cotton, wood, leather, human hair
11 3/8 x 7 3/4 x 20″ (28.9 x 19.7 x 50.8 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Dannheisser Foundation
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Untitled
2008
Cast gypsum polymer
14 ½ x 10 ¾ x 6″ (36.8 x 27.3 x 15.2cm)
Edition of 4, with 1 AP
Collection the artist
Image credit: Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Untitled
2005-2006
Aluminum-leaf, oil and enamel paint on cast lead crystal
4 3/4″ high × 4 1/4″ diameter (12.1 × 10.8cm)
Collection the artist
Image credit: Bill Orcutt, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Slip Covered Armchair
1986-87
Plaster, wood, linen, and fabric paint
31 ½ x 30 ½ x 29″ (80 x 77.5 x 73.7cm)
Collection the artist
Image credit: D. James Dee, courtesy the artist
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Untitled
1980-81
Oil on wood panel
8 x 5 ¾” (20.3 x 14.6cm)
Collection the artist
Image credit: Ron Amstutz, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Untitled
1991
Wood, beeswax, leather, fabric, and human hair
13 1/4 x 16 1/2 x 46 1/8″ (33.6 x 41.9 x 117.2cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Werner and Elaine Dannheisser
Background: Forest, 1991
Hand-painted silkscreen on paper
Image credit: K. Ignatiadis, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Untitled
2003-05
Courtesy MoMA and Matthew Marks Gallery
Image credit: Russel Kaye
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Leg with Anchor
2008
Forged iron and steel, beeswax, cotton, leather, and human hair
28 × 18 × 20″ (71.1 × 45.7 × 50.8cm)
Glenstone
Image credit: Bill Orcutt, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Untitled
1984
Plaster, wood, wire lath, aluminium, watercolour, semi-gloss enamel paint
28 x 33 x 22 1/2″ (71.1 x 83.8 x 57.2cm)
Rubell Family Collection
Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery
© 2014 Robert Gober

Robert Gober (American, born 1954)
Two Partially Buried Sinks
1986-87
Cast iron and enamel paint
Right: 39 x 25 ½ x 2 ½” (99.1 x 64.8 x 6.4cm)
Left: 39 x 24 ½ x 2 3/4″ (99.1 x 62.2 x 7cm)
Private collection
Image credit: Andrew Moore, courtesy the artist
© 2014 Robert Gober

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Jan

Text/Exhibition: ‘Wynn Bullock: Revelations’ at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, artist website, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, time and works on paper
Tags: Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein the mysterious, American abstract photography, american artist, American humanist photography, American landscape photography, American photography, Atlanta, Barbara through Window, Child in Forest, Child on Forest Road, Color Light Abstraction, Color Light Abstraction 1075, Del Monte Forest, Early Solarization, Edward Steichen The Family of Man, Fallen Tree Trunk, Family of Man, High Museum of Art, humanism, humanity, Let There Be Light, Lynne Point Lobos, Navigation without Numbers, Nude by Sandy's Window, Nude Torso in Forest, Old Typewriter, philosophical exploration, Point Lobos, Point Lobos Tide Pool, Portrait of Edna Cannery Row, Stark Tree, The Family of Man, The Shore, Wynn Bullock, Wynn Bullock Barbara through Window, Wynn Bullock Child in Forest, Wynn Bullock Color Light Abstraction, Wynn Bullock Color Light Abstraction 1075, Wynn Bullock Color Light Abstraction 1076, Wynn Bullock Del Monte Forest, Wynn Bullock Driftwood, Wynn Bullock Early Solarization, Wynn Bullock Edna, Wynn Bullock Erosion, Wynn Bullock Fallen Tree Trunk, Wynn Bullock Family of Man, Wynn Bullock Let There Be Light, Wynn Bullock Lynne Point Lobos, Wynn Bullock Navigation without Numbers, Wynn Bullock Nude by Sandy's Window, Wynn Bullock Nude Torso in Forest, Wynn Bullock Old Typewriter, Wynn Bullock Photogram, Wynn Bullock Point Lobos Tide Pool, Wynn Bullock Portrait of Edna, Wynn Bullock Rock 1973, Wynn Bullock Sea Palms, Wynn Bullock Stark Tree, Wynn Bullock The Shore, Wynn Bullock Tree Trunk, Wynn Bullock: Revelations

Exhibition dates: 14th June 2014 – 18th January 2015

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Del Monte Forest
1969
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Being and Becoming in the work of Wynn Bullock

.
It’s strange how some artists become famous while others wane in relative obscurity. For 50 years after his death, J. S. Bach’s reputation as a composer declined, his work regarded as old-fashioned compared to the new style of the day. Just look at him now.

Wynn Bullock, contemporary of Edward Weston, Minor White, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Imogen Cunningham, Frederick Sommer and Ansel Adams, is not yet as well known as any of them. He should be. As the press release states, “Despite early acclaim, the true breadth and depth of Bullock’s career has remained largely in the shadows.” This first retrospective of his work in 40 years will hopefully start to change that perception. In my estimation he is up there in the pantheon of photographic stars. There are photographers… and there are master photographers. Bullock is one of the latter, in my top ten classical black and white analogue photographers of all time.

Bullock began pursuing “straight” photography after meeting Edward Weston in 1948. Work from the early 1950s has an essential, humanist flavour as can be seen in photographs such as Child in Forest (1951) and Let There Be Light (1951), both images appearing in Edward Steichen’s seminal exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, printed at large scale. By the mid-50s Bullock was really hitting his straps and the work starts to become less didactic and more open to multiple interpretations and possibilities.

As Bullock says, the mysteries lie all around us waiting only to be perceived. But it’s more than that… it’s more than “what if”. Bullock claims the existence of these things while at the same time acknowledging that they are not generally accessible within the Western canon. That he expresses their existence is his gift to the world.

Take, for example, that most complex of images, Point Lobos Tide Pool (1957). Once seen, never forgotten. I remember seeing this image in my first year studying photography at university and it being seared into my brain. How could you get such an image! It encompasses every feeling and emotion about our place in the cosmos that I could ever think of. And then you hear the story (one that I recently confirmed with his daughter Barbara), which I recount here and which appeared in the book Darkroom edited by Eleanor Lewis, published in 1976 by Lustrum Press, and dedicated to Bullock’s memory.

Bullock was only able to make ONE exposure.

“The first photograph I want to discuss is the POINT LOBOS TIDE POOL. This is a contact print from an 8 x 10 negative. The picture was taken at sunset and the light was dim. The sun was striking only the edges of the rocks in the upper-left-hand corner. The tide pool itself was especially dull, and the light was disappearing so fast I had to make a quick exposure. The negative is very soft because in my hurry to capture the picture, I forgot to underexpose the film so that I could expand the contrast by overdeveloping. The tide pool, a critical part of the image, is especially soft.

“For the final print, I used Brovira No. 5 paper, Amidol developer, and developed it for three minutes to keep the dull parts from going flat. As soon as you use high contrast papers, everything gets more critical. A second or two variation in exposure in high contrast areas can mean the difference between seeing what I want to see, and not seeing anything but black or white paper.

“I could think of the negative-making process as one in which I would make a technically perfect negative. But the technically perfect negative doesn’t always give me what I want… By not always reaching for the easily printed negative, I get luminosity I wouldn’t otherwise have.

In the tide pool print, it’s always been a touchy problem to get the brilliance in the pool itself, where the negative is soft. Unless carefully controlled, that part goes muddy. The rest of the photograph is secondary, but requires some burning and dodging to get tonal balance.

“These are problems I’ve been living with. In doing so, I’ve developed printing skills. It’s a way of life with me. In printing, I don’t want to distort the reality of the image, but I don’t want to distort the reality of my feelings for it either. The two go hand in hand. I have no qualms about altering the image by burning and dodging. I’m not a purist in that way. I am a purist in that I don’t want the manipulation to show. As soon as it does, the magic is destroyed.”

.
As his daughter Barbara notes, “Point Lobos Tide Pool, 1957 is another serendipitous image that took place on the [Point Lobos State] Reserve. The day this photograph was made, Dad was hauling his heavy field camera along the South Shore Trail when he happened upon a tide pool with a galaxy in its midst. He set up his equipment as quickly as he could and made his first exposure. Normally, he liked to bracket his exposures, but before he could make a second one, a gust of wind swept across the pool and the complex pattern of microscopic organisms vanished.

Fortunately, one exposure was good enough. Whenever he told the story, Dad would laugh and say, “I was just damn lucky that day!” What he often left unexpressed was the lasting impression of the experience that exemplified for him the continual being-and-becoming nature of the universe as well as the kinship of its microcosmic and macrocosmic dimensions. The image remained a personal favourite for the rest of his life.” (Barbara Bullock-Wilson. “Point Lobos Tide Pool, 1957” Commentary © 2013/2015 Barbara Bullock-Wilson. All rights reserved.)

.
It is as if the universe stood still for the length of time that it took Bullock to expose his plate, as though the universe was giving him permission for his previsualisation … … … before it moved on, in a gust of wind. But that is not the end of it, no! Because of the thin negative Bullock had to print on grade 5 paper, the most contrasty paper that you can get. And because the area of the tide pool was especially thin, the exposure time is absolutely critical for this print, to get the luminosity in the pool that the artist required. In the whole scheme of things there is a tiny window of opportunity with the exposure of this negative to get a glorious print. This is far from a straight print, and what makes the story even more remarkable is that Bullock had to delve into his scientific knowledge, had to experiment with his feelings (his exposure time), with the magic of the analogue print, to make this apparition appear!

The whole story is quite thrilling really. As my mentor observes, “Point Lobos is several km of coast if you measured into every bay – but there aren’t that many spots where you can photograph the actual tide zone – probably 7 or 8 inlets – some smaller than a basketball court. The spot that Minor White talks about as Weston cove is about basketball court size from memory. You can walk around above it a few metres in the air and see it all. Only someone with a specific aim would scramble down to be amongst what could already be clearly seen. There are just as many spots where you can’t get down like Weston’s sparkle on the sea shot. Weston cove feels amazing; full of ghosts. Bullock would have been very familiar with what would be likely to come around again and what would not.”

Close your eyes and just imagine dragging an 8 x 10 camera down there and finding that image.

.
Readers, you know that I am a passionate person, that I am passionate about photography. As I relatively young man what these great artists seemed to me to be doing were noble artistic things; I still feel that. You cannot talk about photography like other mediums that define themselves – not in a modernist sense of materials – Rothko can only be talked about by referring to Rothko, Beethoven, Mozart, etc… Much as Bullock says that light “permits the same freedom of expression as paint for the painter, words for the writer, numbers for the mathematician, or sound for the composer,” photography is of a different order. You are comparing a system of making using the hand with a system using a photo-mechanical eye. Making great images is of necessity much more difficult within this process (as can be see in the millions of meaningless images that flood the world today).

I believe that inherent to any photograph is the ability to transcend the medium – whether that is in vernacular photography (by chance) or through astute observation and meditation (MW and WB). Whether the person then recognises these images as such is another matter, but it only happens on limited occasions. But when you get something, the magic just works. In his Point Lobos Tide Pool (1957), Navigation without Numbers (1957), Under Monterey Wharf (1969) and Erosion (1959), Bullock is like a mystical time traveller – of both the body and the landscape. You only have to look at the timbre of the prints and the layering of tones. These images can’t be judged on any terms other than the terms the image itself lays down. They are beyond serious: and it shows how difficult photography really is – and how rare the good photograph is – that most photographers don’t really have a count that gets into double figures for a decade’s work. It doesn’t add up to much of a crop for a lifetimes work but does Bullock care… hell no!

As he says, “You really have to give of yourself to make good pictures… The fact that good pictures are rare, however, has never slowed me down. Just going out and looking at things and using a camera is therapeutic. I deeply love the whole process.”

.
A deep love of the whole process, a deep love of being and becoming.

.
The ability of the photographer is that they can massage the medium – through imagination, surrealism, reality, space / time etc… that ENACTS a difference that painters, musicians can only dream of – through a manipulation of reality, through a form of hyper-reality. In Bullock’s case it is the recognition of the mysteries that lie all around us in which the images take on a symbiotic relationship with an observation of the human mind THROUGH photography.

Openly talking in a clear language from a lifetime of meditation.

A clear language where words don’t quite equal the meanings normally attached to them.

From another dimension.

“In streams of light I clearly saw
The dust you seldom see,
Out of which the Nameless makes
A Name for one like me.

I’ll try to say a little more:
Love went on and on
Until it reached an open door –
Then Love Itself
Love Itself was gone.

All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance,
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance.

I’ll try to say a little more:
Love went on and on
Until it reached an open door –
Then Love Itself
Love Itself was gone.”

(from “Love Itself” lyrics by Leonard Cohen)

Dr Marcus Bunyan

.
Many thankx to the High Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs and text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar of things, waiting only to be perceived.”

.
“Light to me is perhaps the most profound truth in the universe… [It] permits the same freedom of expression as paint for the painter, words for the writer, numbers for the mathematician, or sound for the composer.”

.
“You really have to give of yourself to make good pictures. Well, that giving takes a lot out of you, and you simply can’t operate at that intense level all the time. Neither can you predetermine what happens outside you.

The fact that good pictures are rare, however, has never slowed me down. Just going out and looking at things and using a camera is therapeutic. I deeply love the whole process.”

.
Wynn Bullock

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Point Lobos Tide Pool
1957
Gelatin silver print
7 9/16 x 9 ½ in.
Collection Center for Creative Photography
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Point Lobos Tide Pool appears simultaneously to resemble both a galaxy and a bacterial growth across a petri dish, when in fact it is neither so large nor so small a subject, but rather a pool arrayed with microorganisms along the Carmel coast, transformed into a picture of astounding beauty.

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Erosion
1959
Gelatin silver print
Collection Center for Creative Photography
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Bullock found this scene along a California roadway and was drawn to the insight it provides into what goes on in spaces that normally lie beyond our perception. The eroded embankment reveals the slow evolution of the world across centuries, with organic and inorganic elements coexisting together at different stages of growth and decay. Stripped of its skin and flayed by the corrosive power of water, the hill in Bullock’s picture reveals a powerfully foreign world as real and as beautiful as anything on the surface of the earth. Bullock’s efforts were decidedly pointed toward making the ordinary profound and in revealing a complexity beyond the surface of things.

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Under Monterey Wharf
1969
Gelatin silver print
Collection Center for Creative Photography
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Navigation without Numbers
1957
Gelatin silver print
6 13/16 x 8 15/16 in.,
Collection Center for Creative Photography
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Nude by Sandy’s Window
1956
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

In this picture, a brightly lit window occupies the bulk of Bullock’s composition, hovering over a woman who appears to be asleep; light shines in through the glass with a blinding intensity that obscures a clear view of the exterior while alluding to the existence of a world of indefinite proportions beyond.

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Lynne, Point Lobos
1956
Gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 7/16 in.
Collection Center for Creative Photography
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

.
Albert Einstein, quoted by Wynn Bullock

In June 2014, the High Museum of Art will become the first major museum in nearly 40 years to mount a retrospective of work by Wynn Bullock (1902-1975) with the exhibition Wynn Bullock: Revelations, organised by the High in collaboration with the Center for Creative Photography.

One of the most significant photographers of the mid-20th century, Bullock worked in the American modernist tradition alongside Edward Weston, Harry Callahan and Ansel Adams. More than 100 black-and-white and colour works by Bullock will come together for the exhibition, which will coincide with a major gift to the High from the Bullock Estate of a large collection of vintage photographs, making the Museum one of the most significant repositories of Bullock’s work in the U.S.

The High is home to the most robust photography program in the American Southeast with particularly distinct holdings in the classic modernist tradition. Wynn Bullock: Revelations offers an unprecedentedly holistic look at Bullock’s innovative career, beginning with his early light abstractions and moving through his landscapes, figure studies, colour work, negative images and late abstractions. The exhibition will be on view June 14, 2014 through Jan. 18, 2015.

A close friend of influential West Coast artists Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, and a contemporary of Minor White, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Imogen Cunningham and Frederick Sommer, Bullock created a body of work marked by a distinct interest in experimentation, abstraction and philosophical exploration. His images Let There Be Light and Child in Forest (both of which will be included in the High’s exhibition) became icons in the history of photography following their prominent inclusion in Edward Steichen’s landmark 1955 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, The Family of Man.

Bullock’s photography received early recognition in 1941, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art staged his first solo exhibition. His mature work appeared in one-man shows at the Bibliotèque Nationale, Paris; the Royal Photographic Society, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago; among other prestigious venues. His archive was a foundational collection for the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Ariz., which is recognised as one of the most important photographic resources in the world.

Despite early acclaim, the true breadth and depth of Bullock’s career has remained largely in the shadows. Wynn Bullock: Revelations offers the most comprehensive assessment of the photographer’s extraordinary career in nearly 40 years. This retrospective traces Bullock’s evolution from his early experimental work of the 1940s, through the mysterious black-and-white imagery of the 1950s and colour light abstractions of the 1960s, to his late metaphysical photographs of the 1970s.

“Bullock’s arresting work was integral to codifying what we now think of as quintessential mid-century style, which in turn paved the way for every stage of photography that has followed,” said Brett Abbott, curator of photography and head of collections at the High. “Presenting this exhibition and acquiring this generous body of work from Bullock’s estate will allow us to play a role in bringing him back into the popular consciousness. Our photography department has expanded greatly over the last few years, in terms of the work we own and the exhibitions we mount, giving us the ability to position this pivotal body of work as part of the nearly two-century-long story of the development of photography.”

Wynn Bullock: Revelations will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue to be produced by the High in collaboration with the University of Texas Press. The book presents 110 images, including some from the Bullock Estate that have never been published before. An essay by Abbott explores the nuances of Bullock’s approach to photography and its fascinating relationship to the history of science and philosophy. The volume also includes an illustrated chronology, bibliography, selected collections, exhibitions history, plate list and notes.

About Wynn Bullock

Wynn Bullock was born on April 18, 1902, in Chicago, Ill. After graduating from high school, Bullock worked as a professional singer in New York City and across Europe. In 1938 he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a law degree but soon dropped out of school to become a photography student at Art Center School, where he became deeply involved in exploring alternative processes such as solarisation and bas relief and began building a career in commercial photography. Bullock went on to serve in the military and then to build a successful private photography business, where he developed a way to control the line effect of solarisation, a discovery for which he was awarded patents. Bullock began pursuing “straight” photography after meeting Edward Weston in 1948. Throughout the 1950s he explored the natural world from his own unique perspective in photography and came into the public spotlight through exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. In the 1960s he created an innovative body of abstract colour images. He later returned to experimental black and white, on which he continued to focus until his death in 1975. Bullock’s work is part of the collections of more than 90 major institutions throughout the world.

Press release from the High Museum of Art website

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Color Light Abstraction 1076
1963
Inkjet print
14 x 21 in.
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Color Light Abstraction 1075
1963
Inkjet print
14 x 21 in.
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock: Revelations installation at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Entrance mural with glimpses of Galleries 1 and 3 (top), Galleries 1, 2 and 3 (bottom)

“Love Itself”

The light came through the window,
Straight from the sun above,
And so inside my little room
There plunged the rays of Love.

In streams of light I clearly saw
The dust you seldom see,
Out of which the Nameless makes
A Name for one like me.

I’ll try to say a little more:
Love went on and on
Until it reached an open door –
Then Love Itself
Love Itself was gone.

All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance,
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance.

I’ll try to say a little more:
Love went on and on
Until it reached an open door –
Then Love Itself
Love Itself was gone.

Then I came back from where I’d been.
My room, it looked the same –
But there was nothing left between
The Nameless and the Name.

All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance,
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance.

I’ll try to say a little more:
Love went on and on
Until it reached an open door –
Then Love itself,
Love Itself was gone.
Love Itself was gone.

Lyrics by Leonard Cohen

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Child in Forest
1951
Gelatin silver print
7 7/16 x 9 3/8 in.
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Stark Tree
1956
Gelatin silver print
7 5/8 x 9 1/16 in.
Collection Center for Creative Photography
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Let There Be Light
1954
Gelatin silver print
7 3/8 x 9 7/16 in.
Collection Center for Creative Photography
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Old Typewriter
1951
Gelatin silver print
7 1/16 × 9 7/16 in.
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
The Shore
1966
Gelatin silver print
9 1/4 x 13 5/8 in.
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Sea Palms
1968
Gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 ¼ in.
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Driftwood
1951
Gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 ½ in.
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Point Lobos Tide Pools
1972
Gelatin silver print
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Early Solarization
1940
Gelatin silver print
6 1/4 x 8 in.
Collection of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Edna
1956
Gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 7 ½ in.
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Portrait of Edna, Cannery Row
1955
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 7 ½ in.
Collection of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Barbara through Window
1956
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 7 ½ in.
Collection Center for Creative Photography
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Nude Torso in Forest
1958
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 6 1/4in.
Collection of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Child on Forest Road
1958
Gelatin silver print
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Fallen Tree Trunk
1972
Gelatin silver print
8 5/8 x 7 ½ in.
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, promised gift of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Tree Trunk
1971
Gelatin silver print
Promised Gift of Lynne Harrington-Bullock
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

To create this image, Bullock reversed the positive and negative values of his rendering of a tree trunk, and then turned the composition upside down. In so doing, he disrupts a habitual reading of the natural world, creates an experience of disorientation, and allows the forms pictured to engage the eye in freshly invigorating ways.

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Photogram
1970
Gelatin silver print
9 1/8 x 7 3/8 in.
Collection of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

Wynn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Rock
1973
Gelatin silver print
8 5/8 x 6 ¾ in.
Collection of Barbara and Gene Bullock-Wilson
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

High Museum of Art
1280 Peachtree Street,
N.E. Atlanta, GA 30309

Opening hours:
Monday Closed
Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 5pm
Sunday 12 noon to 5pm

High Museum of Art website

Wynn Bullock Photography website
Wynn Bullock Photography web page dedicated to the exhibition

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Jan

Exhibition: ‘Joel Meyerowitz Retrospective’ at NRW-Forum Düsseldorf

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, book, colour photography, cultural commentator, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography, time and works on paper
Tags: american artist, American cities, American colour photography, American New Colour Photography, american photographer, American photography, Ballston Beach Truro, Bay Sky Provincetown, Cape Light, Contemporary Photography, Dairyland Provincetown, Düsseldorf, Dusk New Jersey, From a moving car, Gold corner New York City, Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Meyerowitz Ballston Beach Truro, Joel Meyerowitz Bay Sky Provincetown, Joel Meyerowitz Cape Cod, Joel Meyerowitz Cape Light, Joel Meyerowitz Dairyland Provincetown, Joel Meyerowitz Dusk New Jersey, Joel Meyerowitz Five more found, Joel Meyerowitz Florida, Joel Meyerowitz Gold corner, Joel Meyerowitz JFK Airport, Joel Meyerowitz London England, Joel Meyerowitz Los Angeles Airport, Joel Meyerowitz Madison Avenue, Joel Meyerowitz New York City, Joel Meyerowitz New York City 42nd and Fifth Ave, Joel Meyerowitz Paris France, Joel Meyerowitz Pool Dusk Sun in Window, Joel Meyerowitz Provincetown, Joel Meyerowitz Red Interior Provincetown, Joel Meyerowitz Roseville Cottages Truro, Joel Meyerowitz Taking my Time, Joel Meyerowitz The World Trade Center, Joel Meyerowitz Truro, John Szarkowski, Los Angeles Airport, New York City 42nd and Fifth Ave, NRW-Forum, NRW-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft, Pool Dusk Sun in Window, Red Interior Provincetown, Roseville Cottages Truro, street photography, Taking my Time, The World Trade Center, Time is what Photography is About, treet scenes of American cities, Twin Towers destruction, Watching Life is all about Timing

Exhibition dates: 27th September 2014 – 11th January 2015

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
New York City
1963

Meyerowitz really comes into his own in the ’70s. Luscious colours and lascivious compositions in which the attention of the photographer is directed towards the relationship between object, light and time. The image becomes an object of fetishistic desire.

The hyperreal colours and placement of figures are crucial to this ocular obsession. Look at the image Gold corner, New York City (1974) and observe the precise, choreographed placement of the figures and how the colours flow, from orange/brown to green/blue and onto turquoise/red and polka dot, the central figure’s eyes shielded under a wide-brimmed hat, hand to head, model style. This is colour porn for the eyes. And Meyerowitz does it so well… the stretch of thigh and shadow in Los Angeles Airport, California (1976), the classic red of Truro (1976) or the bare midriff and raised yellow heel in New York City, 42nd and Fifth Ave (1974).

The best of these photos give you a zing of excitement and a surge of recognition – like a superlative Stephen Shore or an outstanding William Eggelston. At his best Meyerowitz is mesmerising.

Marcus

.
Many thankx to the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Ballston Beach, Truro, Cape Cod
1976

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Los Angeles Airport, California
1976

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Dairyland, Provincetown
1976

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Truro
1976

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Red Interior, Provincetown, Massachusetts
1977

Joel Meyerowitz is a “street photographer” in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, who influenced him greatly at the beginning of his career. Since the mid-seventies he has photographed exclusively in colour.

The artist was born in 1938 in the Bronx. He initially studied art, history of art and medical illustration at the Ohio State University. Back in New York City he began his career in 1959 as an Art Director and Designer. Particularly impressed by an encounter with the photographer Robert Frank, he started taking photographs in 1962 and in the same year he left the agency, devoting himself from this point on, exclusively to photography. He travelled through New York City and capturing the mood of the streets. He soon developed his distinctive sensitivity and his candid, people-focussed style, a very unique visual language. In 1966, he embarked on an 18 month trip through Europe, which both profoundly affected and also influenced him and can be described as an artistic turning point. Meyerowitz photographed many of his works from a moving car. These works were displayed in 1968 in his first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: Photographs from a moving car, curated by the photography legend John Szarkowski. From the late seventies onward, Joel Meyerowitz concentrated exclusively on colour photography. In the first half of the seventies, he created numerous unique works of “street photography”. In order to further improve the image quality, the artist took another crucial step: in the mid 1970s he changed from the 35mm format to the 8 x 10″ plate camera.

In 1979, his first book Cape Light was published by Phaidon Verlag. The picture book sold over 100,000 copies and is to this day regarded as a milestone in colour photography. 17 further publications followed, most recently in 2012 with a comprehensive two-volume edition Taking my Time, a retrospective of 50 years of his photography, also published by Phaidon Verlag.

A few days after the attack on the World Trade Center, Meyerowitz began to document its destruction and reconstruction. As the only photographer, he received unrestricted access to the site of the incident. It resulted in over 8000 photographs for the The World Trade Center exhibition, which was displayed in the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City.

Joel Meyerowitz’ works have been and will be shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world; several times in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. On 27 September, the NRW Forum in Düsseldorf opens the most comprehensive retrospective of the artist. In addition, the works are represented in many international collections, including in the Museum of Modern Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Art.

Text from the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf website

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
New York City
1965

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
London, England
1966

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
JFK Airport, New York City
1968

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Paris, France
1967

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
New York City, 42nd and Fifth Ave
1974

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Dusk, New Jersey
1978

Joel Meyerowitz (born 1938 in New York) is, along with William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, one of the most important representatives of American New Colour Photography of the 1960s / 70s. After a first encounter with Robert Frank 1962, Meyerowitz decided to give up his job as art director in New York and to devote himself to photography. In particular, his photographs of street scenes of American cities, which he takes with his 35mm camera as fleeting moments, make him a precursor of street photography and his works icons of contemporary photography.

“Watching Life is all about Timing”

A first turning point in his photography was his annual trip to Europe in 1966/67, a trip which allowed him to critically question his colour photography. As early as 1968, he had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of works created in Europe under the title From a moving car. His first book, Cape Light (1978), in which he examines achromatic variations of light at Cape Cod, is now regarded as a milestone in photography. In addition to his film camera, which he always carries with him, Meyerowitz has been working since the late 1970s with the 8 x 10 plate camera, which allows him to capture the relationship between object, light and time in a new and more accurate way for him.

“Time is what Photography is About”

The exhibition at the NRW-Forum presents the entire photographic spectrum of 50 years of his photography for the first time in Germany. In addition to the early black / white and colour photographs of the 1960s / there will be years works from all business groups such as Cape Light, Portraits, Between the Dog and the Wolf and Ground Zero series, presented to allow the visitor a photographic and cultural image-comparison between Europe and the USA. In addition, the first documentary about the life and work of the photographer, created over a period of three years in France, Italy and the United States, will have its world premiere.”

Text from the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf website

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Gold corner, New York City
1974

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Madison Avenue, New York City
1975

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
New York City
1975

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Provincetown
1977

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Roseville Cottages, Truro, Massachusetts
1976

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
New York City
1963

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Cape Cod
1963

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Pool, Dusk, Sun in Window, Florida
1978

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Bay Sky, Provincetown, Massachusetts
1985

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Five more found, New York City
2001

NRW-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft
Ehrenhof 2, 40479 Düsseldorf
Phone: +49 (0)211 – 89 266 90

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 11.00 – 18.00
Thursday until 21.00

NRW-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft website

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Jan

Exhibition: ‘Eyes Wide Open: 100 Years of Leica Photography’ at Deichtorhallen Hamburg

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, fashion photography, gallery website, landscape, light, London, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography, surrealism, time, video and works on paper
Tags: 100 years of Leica Photography, Alain Capeilières, Alexander Rodchenko, Alexander Rodchenko Girl with Leica, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Alfred Eisenstaedt VJ Day, American photography, Anton Stankowski, Anton Stankowski Greeting Zurich, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Bruce Gilden, Bruce Gilden GO, Christer Strömholm, Christer Strömholm Nana Place Blanche, Claude Dityvon, Claude Dityvon L'homme à la chaise, Claude Dityvon The man in the chair, Death of a Loyalist Soldier, Eliott Erwitt, Eliott-Erwitt Felix Gladys and Rover, Ernst Leitz, Ernst Leitz II, Ernst Leitz New York II, European photography, Evgeny Khaldey, Evgeny Khaldey The Flag of Victory, Eyes Wide Open, f. c. gundlach, F.C. Gundlach Fashion reportage for Nino, fashion photography, Fashion reportage for Nino, Felix Gladys and Rover, Flood in Wetzlar, Frank Horvat, Frank Horvat Givenchy Hat For Jardin des Modes, Franz Hubmann, Franz Hubmann Regular at the Café Hawelka, Fred Herzog, Fred Herzog Man with Bandage, Geschwebe, Girl with Leica, Givenchy Hat For Jardin des Modes, Guardia Civil, Guardia Civil Spain, Hans Silvester, Hans Silvester Steel frame assembly, Heinrich Heidersberger, Heinrich Heidersberger Laederstraede Copenhagen, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Henri Cartier-Bresson Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Ilse Bing, Ilse Bing Self-portrait in Spiegeln, Jeff Mermelstein Sidewalk, Jewgenija Lemberg, Julia Baier, Julia Baier Geschwebe, L'homme à la chaise, Laederstraede Copenhagen, Lee Friedlander, Lee Friedlander Mount Rushmore, Leica, Leica camera, Leica photography, Leica street photography, Man with Bandage, Martine Franck, Martine Franck Swimming pool designed by Alain Capeilières, Max Berek, Michael von Graffenried, Michael von Graffenried Night in Paradise, Mount Rushmore, Nana Place Blanche, Napalm attack in Vietnam, Nick Út, Nick Út Napalm attack in Vietnam, Night in Paradise, Oskar Barnack, Oskar Barnack Flood in Wetzlar, Oskar Barnack Wetzlar Eisenmarkt, photojournalism, Regular at the Café Hawelka, René Burri San-Cristobál, Rene Burri, Robert Capa, Robert Capa Death of a Loyalist Soldier, Robert Lebeck, Robert Lebeck The stolen sword, Rudi Meisel, Rudi Meisel Leningrad, Steel frame assembly, street photography, Swimming pool designed by Alain Capeilières, The Flag of Victory, The man in the chair, The stolen sword, Ulrich Mack, Ulrich Mack Wild horses in Kenya, Ur-Leica, Ur-Leica 1914, VJ Day Times Square, W. Eugene Smith, W. Eugene Smith Guardia Civil, Wetzlar Eisenmarkt, Wild horses in Kenya, Wilfried Bauer, Wilfried Bauer Hong Kong

Exhibition dates: 24th October 2014 – 11th January 2015

Curator: Hans-Michael Koetzle

A photographic revolution. So much more than just photojournalism… and it has a nice sound as well.
“Indiscreet discretion” as the photographer F. C. Gundlach puts it. Some memorable photographs here.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the Deichtorhallen Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Just a few months before the outbreak of the First World War, Ernst Leitz II travelled to the USA. While there, he was able to capture photos, using a second model of the “Liliput” camera developed by Oskar Barnack, which most certainly would be found in a history of street photography.

From around the time of 1914, Oskar Barnack must have carried a prototype camera with him, particularly during his travels – the camera first received the name Leica in 1925. Perhaps his most famous sequence of images, because it has been shown continually since, is the striking series of the floods in Wetzlar, Germany, in 1920

Oskar Barnack invents the Ur-Leica

Designed by Oskar Barnack, the first functional prototype of a new camera for 35 mm perforated cinema film stock was completed in March 1914. The camera consisted of a metal housing, had a retractable lens and a focal plane shutter, which is not overlapped, however. A bolt-on lens cap that was swivelled during film transport, prevented incidental light. For the first time film advance and shutter cocking were connected to a camera – double exposures were excluded. The camera has gone down in the history of photography under the name Ur-Leica.

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris
1932

Alexander Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Girl with Leica
1934

Jewgenija Lemberg, shown here, was a lover of the photographer Alexander Rodchenko for quite some time. In 1992, a print of this photo brought in a tremendous 115,000 British pounds at a Christie’s auction in London. Alexander Rodchenko was continually capturing Jewgenija Lemberg in new, surprising and bold poses – until her death in a train accident.

Robert Capa (Hungarian-American, 1913-1954)
Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936
1936

At the age of 23 and equipped with his Leica, Robert Capa embedded himself in the Spanish Civil War while on assignment for the French press. On 5 September 1936, he managed to capture the perhaps most well-known war photo of the 20th century.

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Sunday on the banks of the River Marne
Juvisy, France 1938

This photo was taken two years after the large-scale strikes that ultimately led to a fundamental improvement in social conditions. Against this backdrop, the picnic in nature is also, above all, a political message – convincing in a formal, aesthetic way, and inherently consistent and suggestive at the same time.

Evgeny Khaldey (Russian, 1917-1997)
The Flag of Victory
1945
Gelatin silver print
© Collection Ernst Volland and Heinz Krimmer, Leica Camera AG

Although this scene was staged, it loses none of its impact as an image and in no way hampers the resounding global response that it has achieved. The Red Army prevailed – there’s nothing more to convey in such a harmonious picture.

Alfred Eisenstaedt (American, born Germany 1898-1995)
VJ Day, Times Square, NY, 14. August 1945
© Alfred Eisenstaedt, 2014

This photo appeared on the cover of Life magazine and grew to become one of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s most well-known images. “People tell me,” he once said, “that when I am in heaven they will remember this picture.”

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Guardia Civil, Spain
1950
Gelatin silver print
25.1 x 32.1 cm

W. Eugene Smith’s image of Guardia Civil is also a symbol of an imperious, backward Spain under the rule of Franco. For two months, W. Eugene Smith went scouting for a village and photographed it with the residents’ consent. What he shows us is a strange world: rural, archaic, as if on another planet.

Inge Morath (American, born Austria 1923-2002)
London
1950

Inge Morath’s photo titled “London” is well spotted, clearly composed and yet complicated in its arrangement. It also tells of a structure of domination, of hierarchies and traditions which certainly were more stable in England than in other European countries.

Franz Hubmann (Austrian, 1914-2007)
Regular guest at the Café Hawelka, Vienna
1956/57
© Franz Hubmann. Leica Camera AG

We shall never discover who the man is in this photo. Franz Hubmann, more or less while walking by the table, captured the guest gently balancing a cup with the tips of his fingers – viewed from above without the use of flash, without any hectic movement, and not at all staged.

Frank Horvat (French, 1928-2020)
Givenchy Hat For Jardin des Modes, Paris
1958
Abzug 1995 / Haus der Photographie / Sammlung F.C. Gundlach Hamburg

Hans Silvester (born Germany 1938)
Steel frame assembly
about the end of the 1950s
Silver gelatin, vintage print
© Hans Silvester / Leica AG

The exhibition EYES WIDE OPEN: 100 YEARS OF LEICA PHOTOGRAPHY illuminates across fourteen chapters various aspects of recent small-format photography, from journalistic strategies to documentary approaches and free artistic positions, spanning fourteen chapters. Among the artists whose work will be shown are Alexander Rodchenko, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Christer Strömholm, Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, William Klein, William Eggleston, René Burri, Thomas Hoepker and Bruce Gilden. Following its premiere in the House of Photography at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, the exhibition will travel to Frankfurt, Berlin, Vienna and Munich.

Some 500 photographs, supplemented by documentary material, including journals, magazines, books, advertisements, brochures, camera prototypes and films, will recount the history of small-format photography from its beginnings to the present day. The exhibition, which is curated by Hans-Michael Koetzle, follows the course of technological change and photographic history.

According to an entry in the workshop records, by March 1914 at the latest, Oskar Barnack, who worked as an industrial designer at Ernst Leitz in Wetzlar, completed the first functional model of a small-format camera for 35mm cinema film. The introduction of the Leica (a combination of “Leitz” and “Camera”) which was delayed until 1925 due to the war, was not merely the invention of a new camera; the small, reliable and always-ready Leica, equipped with a high-performance lens specially engineered by Max Berek, marked a paradigm shift in photography. Not only did it offer amateur photographers, newcomers and emancipated women greater access to photography; the Leica, which could be easily carried in a coat pocket, also became a ubiquitous part of everyday life. The comparatively affordable small-format camera stimulated photographic experimentation and opened up new perspectives. In general, visual strategies for representing the world became more innovative, bold and dynamic. Without question, the Leica developed by Oskar Barnack and introduced by Ernst Leitz II in 1924 was something like photography’s answer to the phenomenological needs of a new, high-speed era.

The exhibition EYES WIDE OPEN: 100 YEARS OF LEICA PHOTOGRAPHY will attempt for the first time to offer a comprehensive overview of the change in photography brought about by the invention and introduction of the Leica. Rather than isolating the history of the camera or considering it for its own sake, it will examine the visual revolution sparked by the technological innovation of the Leica. The exhibition will take an art- and cultural-historical perspective in pursuit of the question of how the photographic gaze changed as a result of the Leica and the small-format picture, and what effects the miniaturisation of photography had on the work of amateurs, artists and photojournalists. Not least, it will also seek to determine what new subjects the camera addressed with its wide range of interchangeable lenses, and how these subjects were seen in a new light: a new way of perceiving the world through the Leica viewfinder.

Among the featured photographers are those who are internationally known for their work with Leica cameras as well as amateurs and artists who have not yet been widely associated with small-format photography, including Ilja Ehrenburg, Alfons Walde, Ben Shahn and George Grosz. Important loans, some of which have never been shown before, come from the factory archives of Leica Camera AG in Wetzlar, international collections and museums, as well as private lenders (Sammlung F. C. Gundlach, Sammlung Skrein, Sammlung WestLicht).

Press release from the Deichtorhallen Hamburg website

Robert Lebeck (German, 1929-2014)
The stolen sword, Belgian Congo Leopoldville
1960
© Robert Lebeck/ Leica Camera AG

When a young Congolese man grabs the king’s sword from the backseat of an open-top car on 29 June 1960, Robert Lebeck manages to capture the image of his life. The photo became a metaphor for the end of the descending dominance by Europeans on the African continent.

Christer Strömholm (Swedish, 1918-2002)
Nana, Place Blanche, Paris
1961
© Christer Strömholm/Strömholm Estate, 2014

Ulrich Mack travelled to Africa to discover the continent as a reporter – a continent that had been battered by warmongers and massacres. But all this changed: as if in a state of ecstasy, Ulrich Mack photographed a herd of wild horses, virtually throwing himself down under the animals

Claude Dityvon (French, 1937-2008)
“L’homme à la chaise” [The man in the chair], Bd St. Michel, 21 May 1968
1968
© Chris Dityvon, Paris

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Mount Rushmore, South Dakota
1969
Haus der Photographie / Sammlung F.C. Gundlach Hamburg

Nick Út (Vietnamese-American, b. 1951) : The Associated Press
Napalm attack in Vietnam
1972
© Nick Út/AP/ Leica Camera AG

Eliott Erwitt (American, born France 1928)
Felix, Gladys and Rover
New York City, 1974

Elliott Erwitt’s passion focused on dogs – for him, they were the incarnation of human beings, with fur and a tail. His photo titled “New York City” was taken for a shoe manufacturer.

René Burri (Swiss, 1933-2014)
San-Cristobál
1976

Martine Franck (British-Belgian, 1938-2012)
Swimming pool designed by Alain Capeilières
1976

Wilfried Bauer (German, 1944-2005)
From the series Hong Kong
1985
Originally published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung # 307, 17.01.1986
© Nachlass Wilfried Bauer/Stiftung F.C. Gundlach

Rudi Meisel (German, b. 1949)
Leningrad
1987

Michael von Graffenried (Swiss, b. 1957)
From the series Night in Paradise, Thielle (Switzerland)
1998
© Michael von Graffenried

Bruce Gilden is an avid portrait photographer, without his photos ever appearing posed or staged. His image of humanity arises from the flow of life, the hectic everyday goings-on or – like in “Go” – the deep pit of violence, the Mafia and corruption.

François Fontaine (French, b. 1968)
Vertigo from the Silenzio! series
2012

Deichtorhallen Hamburg
House of Photography
Deichtorstr. 1-2
D – 20095 Hamburg

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 6pm
Every first Thursday of the month 11am – 9pm

Deichtorhallen Hamburg website

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Jan

Exhibition: ‘The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960-1980’ at the Art Institute of Chicago

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, architecture, Art Institute of Chicago, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, drawing, exhibition, film, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, reality, space, street photography, time and works on paper
Tags: 300 Block of Broadway, Alvin Boyarsky, Alvin Boyarsky Chicago à la Carte, American art, american artist, American cities, American city, American photography, American urban culture, American urban photography, Americurbana, Art Institute of Chicago, Art Sinsabaugh, Art Sinsabaugh Chicago Landscape, Art Sinsabaugh Chicago Landscape #117, Asco, Asco Decoy Gang War Victim, Bruce Davidson, Bruce Davidson East 100th Street, Bunker Hill Avenue Los Angeles, Bunker Hill to soon be developed, Chicago à la Carte, Chicago Circle Interchange, Chicago Landscape, collage, concept of the city as organism, Crosby Street New York, Decoy Gang War Victim, DeWitt Beall, East 100th Street, Evolving City, Harlem, Harlem East 100th Street, Harry Gamboa Jr, James Nares, James Nares Pendulum, John Humble, John Humble 300 Block of Broadway, julius shulman, Julius Shulman The Castle, Ken Josephson, Ken Josephson Chicago, Lord Thing, los angeles, Lower Manhattan, Lower Manhattan during the 1970s, Lower Manhattan Expressway, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Mierle Laderman Ukeles Touch Sanitation Performance, neighborhoods, New Forms of the Evolving City, No Movies, Paul Rudolph, Paul Rudolph Lower Manhattan Expressway, pedestrian life, Pendulum, photography and the city, Romare Bearden, Romare Bearden The Block II, seminal urban events, Sinsabaugh panoramas, Still from Lord Thing, streets, Streets of New York City, Thank you for keeping the city alive, The Block II, the city, The City as Energy System, the city as organism, The City Lost and Found, The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York Chicago and Los Angeles, Thomas Struth, Thomas Struth Crosby Street, Touch Sanitation Performance, urbanscape, William Reagh, William Reagh Bunker Hill to soon be developed

Exhibition dates: 26th October 2014 – 11th January 2015

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled, from East 100th Street
1966-68
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York and Magnum Photos

What looks to be another fascinating exhibition. They are coming thick and fast at the moment, it’s hard to keep up!

Marcus

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Many thankx to the Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

The American city of the 1960s and 1970s experienced seismic physical changes and social transformations, from urban decay and political protests to massive highways that threatened vibrant neighbourhoods. Nowhere was this sense of crisis more evident than in the country’s three largest cities: New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Yet in this climate of uncertainty and upheaval, the streets and neighbourhoods of these cities offered places where a host of different actors – photographers, artists, filmmakers, planners, and activists – could transform these conditions of crisis into opportunities for civic discourse and creative expression.

The City Lost and Found is the first exhibition to explore this seminal period through the emergence of new photographic and cinematic practices that reached from the art world to the pages of Life magazine. Instead of aerial views and sweeping panoramas, photographers and filmmakers turned to in-depth studies of streets, pedestrian life, neighbourhoods, and seminal urban events, like Bruce Davidson’s two-year study of a single block in Harlem, East 100th Street (1966-68). These new forms of photography offered the public a complex image of urban life and experience while also allowing architects, planners, and journalists to imagine and propose new futures for American cities.

Drawn from the Art Institute’s holdings, as well as from more than 30 collections across the United States, this exhibition brings together a large range of media, from slideshows and planning documents to photo collage and artist books. The City Lost and Found showcases important bodies of work by renowned photographers and photojournalists such as Thomas Struth, Martha Rosler, and Barton Silverman, along with artists known for their profound connections to place, such as Romare Bearden in New York and ASCO in Los Angeles. In addition, projects like artist Allan Kaprow’s Chicago happening, Moving, and architect Shadrach Wood’s hybrid plan for SoHo demonstrate how photography and film were used in unconventional ways to make critical statements about the stakes of urban change. Blurring traditional boundaries between artists, activists, planners, and journalists, The City Lost and Found offers an unprecedented opportunity to experience the deep interconnections between art practices and the political, social, and geographic realities of American cities in the 1960s and 1970s.

Organiser

The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960-1980 is organised by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Princeton University Art Museum.

Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website

James Nares (British, b. 1953)
Pendulum
1976
Courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York

James Nares’s film Pendulum illustrates the extraordinary status of Lower Manhattan during the 1970s, where disuse and decay created both the threat of demolition and the freedom to produce ambitious public art projects. The film shows a large pendulum swinging languidly in largely abandoned streets, suggesting the passage of time as well as the menace of the wrecking ball. Nares created this project by suspending a cast-concrete ball from an elevated pedestrian bridge on Staple Street on the Lower West Side adjacent to his loft. Unlike many neighbourhoods, urban renewal plans never came to fruition for this area, which still retains a connection to this precarious, yet liberating time in New York.

Romare Bearden (African-American, 1911-1988)
The Block II (detail)
1972
Collection of Walter O. and Linda J. Evans

This monumental collage depicts both a specific, identifiable block in Harlem and also the importance of everyday routines to the city. From the 1960s Romare Bearden used collage to convey the texture and dynamism of urban life, combining paint and pencil with found photographs and images from newspapers, magazines, product labels, and fabric and wallpaper samples. Here Bearden showed the diverse inhabitants of Harlem apartment buildings perched in windows and on fire escapes, sitting on front stoops and street benches. The scene highlights the innumerable ways city dwellers “make do” so that their environments are more functional and liveable, from transforming front steps into a living room to turning sidewalks into playgrounds. While Bearden’s work has strong connections to avant-garde art and American and African histories, his collage technique can also be seen as a form of making do, just like the practices of his neighbours in New York.

“The American city of the 1960s and ’70s witnessed seismic physical changes and social transformations, from shifting demographics and political protests to the aftermath of decades of urban renewal. In this climate of upheaval and uncertainty, a range of makers – including photographers, filmmakers, urban planners, architects, and performance artists – countered the image of the city in crisis by focusing on the potential and the complexity of urban places. Moving away from the representation of cities through aerial views, maps, and sweeping panoramas, new photographic and planning practices in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles explored real streets, neighbourhoods, and important urban events, from the Watts Rebellion to the protests surrounding the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. These ideas and images defined not only cities’ social and political stakes in the eyes of the American public, but they also led a new generation of architects, urban planners, and sociologists to challenge long-held attitudes about the future of inner-city neighbourhoods.

Works throughout the exhibition describe this new ideal of urban experience following three main lines of inquiry – preservation, demonstration, and renewal. The first reflects the widespread interest in preserving urban neighbourhoods and communities, including the rise of the historic preservation movement in the United States. The second captures the idea of demonstration in the broadest sense, encompassing political protests during the 1960s, as well as temporary appropriations of streets and urban neighbourhoods through performance art, film, and murals. The third, renewal, presents new and alternative visions for the future of American cities created by artists, filmmakers, architects, and planners. Together these works blur the lines between artists, activists, and journalists, and demonstrate the deep connections between art practices and the political, social, and geographic realities of American cities in a tumultuous era.”

New York

The election of Mayor John Lindsay in 1965 represented a watershed for New York, as the city moved away from administrator Robert Moses’s highly centralised push for new infrastructure and construction in previous decades. Lindsay’s efforts to create a more open and participatory city government were often in dialogue with ideas advanced by critic Jane Jacobs, who argued for the value of streets, neighbourhoods, and small-scale change. This new focus on local and self-directed interventions had a wide influence, leading to the development of pocket parks to replace vacant lots and the groundbreaking Plan for New York City’s use of photo essays and graphic design to express goals of diversity and community. In turn, many artists of the period, including Hans Haacke and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, created work that directly engaged with important social and political issues in the city, such as slum housing and labor strikes.

A multifaceted theme of preservation comes to the fore in work by the many artists and architects in New York who documented, staged, and inhabited areas where buildings were left vacant and in disrepair following postwar shifts in population and industry. The historic streets of Lower Manhattan became an integral part of projects by artist Gordon Matta-Clark and architect Paul Rudolph, for example, while low-income, yet vibrant neighbourhoods like Harlem gave rise to important bodies of work by Romare Bearden, Bruce Davidson, and Martha Rosler. James Nares’s elegiac film Pendulum and Danny Lyon’s remarkable photographs in The Destruction of Lower Manhattan are examples of a growing awareness of the struggle to preserve the existing urban fabric and cultures of New York during the 1960s and ’70s.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles (American, b. 1939)
Touch Sanitation Performance
1977-80
Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

In 1977 Mierle Laderman Ukeles embarked on the multiyear performance piece Touch Sanitation, in which she shook the hand of every one of the 8,500 sanitation workers, or “sanmen,” employed by the city of New York, in keeping with her practice’s focus on labor. After the vilification of sanitation workers during the strikes of 1968, Ukeles’s personal and political camaraderie with the workers took on particular importance; every handshake was accompanied by the words “Thank you for keeping the city alive.” She worked the same hours as the sanmen and followed their paths through the streets of New York. Touch Sanitation was also distinguished by the importance Ukeles placed on the participation of the workers, as she explained in the brochure for the project: “I’m creating a huge artwork called TOUCH SANITATION about and with you, the men of the Department. All of you.”

Paul Rudolph (American, 1918-1997)
Lower Manhattan Expressway, New York City, perspective section
c. 1970
The Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress

Known for high-tech buildings in concrete, architect Paul Rudolph began working on a project for Lower Manhattan Expressway in 1965, funded by the Ford Foundation as research and design exploring “New Forms of the Evolving City.” Rudolph diverged from Robert Moses’s strategy for infrastructural projects through a sensitive engagement with the scale and texture of the dense urban fabric of Lower Manhattan. He proposed a below-grade road surmounted by a large, continuous residential structure of varying heights that would protect the surrounding neighbourhood from the pollution and noise of the highway. In many places this terraced megastructure was precisely scaled to the height of the surrounding loft buildings, with entrances and gardens on existing streets, a contextual quality emphasised in his detailed drawings. Rudolph also designed the expressway complex to resonate with established functions and symbols of the city, with tall buildings flanking the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges like monumental gates to the city.

Thomas Struth’s 1978 photographs in the series Streets of New York City are remarkable representations of a city undergoing dramatic change, from the derelict streets of Lower Manhattan and public-housing buildings in Harlem to the dazzling, mirage-like towers of the newly built World Trade Center. Struth produced these photographs during a residency at the New York Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Inc. (now MoMA’s PS1) from December 1977 until September 1978. As he would later write, “I was interested in the possibility of the photographic image revealing the different character or the ‘sound’ of the place. I learned that certain areas of the city have an emblematic character; they express the city’s structure.” Although these photographs adopt the symmetrical framing and deadpan documentary style of his mentors Bernd and Hilla Becher, they led Struth to ask, “Who has the responsibility for the way a city is?”

Chicago

In the 1960s and ’70s Chicago emerged from its industrial past led by a powerful mayor, Richard J. Daley, who prioritised development in the downtown areas. His work to modernise the city resulted in the construction of massive highways, housing projects, and imposing skyscrapers – new architectural and infrastructural icons that were explored by many photographers of the era. The arts experienced a similar boom, with the foundation and expansion of museums and university programs. Growth came at a cost, however, and the art of this period highlights the disparate experiences of local communities in Chicago, including Jonas Dovydenas’s photographs of life in ethnic neighbourhoods and independent films exploring issues ranging from the work of African American community activists to the forced evictions caused by urban renewal projects.

Demonstrations loomed large in Chicago, where artists responded to two major uprisings in 1968, the first on the West Side, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the second downtown, during the Democratic National Convention. These violent confrontations between protestors and police drew national attention to issues of race relations and political corruption in Chicago and led to an outpouring of new art projects as forms of demonstration, including community murals like the West Wall and an exhibition at the Richard Feigen Gallery condemning Daley’s actions during the DNC. The image of Chicago that emerged in the mass media of this period was one of destruction and resilience, a duality highlighted by contemporary artists like Gordon-Matta Clark and Allan Kaprow, whose work existed in the fragile space of opportunity between the streets and the wrecking ball.

Ken Josephson (American, b. 1932)
Chicago
1969
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Still from Lord Thing, directed by DeWitt Beall, 1970. Courtesy Chicago Film Archives

Lord Thing documents the development of the Vice Lords from an informal club for young men on the streets of Chicago’s West Side, its emergence as a street gang, and its evolution into the Conservative Vice Lords, a splinter group that aspired to nonviolent community activism. The film uses a mix of black-and-white sequences to retrospectively analyse the group’s violent middle period and contrasts these with colour sequences that show the Conservative Vice Lords fostering unity and developing black-owned businesses and social programs during the late 1960s. Together, Lord Thing argues for the agency of African Americans in the face of decades of spatialised oppression in Chicago.

Art Sinsabaugh (American, 1924-1983)
Chicago Landscape #117
1966
Art Sinsabaugh Archive, Indiana University Art Museum
© 2004 Katherine Anne Sinsabaugh and Elisabeth Sinsabaugh de la Cova

Sinsabaugh’s panoramic photographs are among the most distinctive visual records of Chicago, capturing the built landscape with what Sinsabaugh called “special photographic seeing,” achieved with large-format negatives. The Department of City Planning used his photographs in a 1963 planning document to help describe the qualities of Chicago’s tall buildings “as vertical forms contrasting with these two great horizontal expanses [the flat prairie and the lakefront edge].” Sinsabaugh’s panoramas also flirt with abstraction when depicting such remarkable places as Chicago’s Circle Interchange, a monumental coil of highways completed in the early 1960s. Sinsabaugh recalled that for the photographer, like the motorist, freeways provided “an access, an opening, a swath cut right through the heart of the City in all directions.” However, his early thrill at the novelty of these developments soon gave way to an appreciation of their violence, in which entire “neighbourhoods were laid bare and their very bowels exposed.” (Please enlarge by clicking on the image)

Alvin Boyarsky (Polish-Canadian, 1928-1990)
Chicago à la Carte: The City as Energy System
1970
Special issue of Architectural Design, December 1970
Courtesy Alvin Boyarsky Archive, London

The concept of the city as organism emerged during the 1960s as a response to the increasingly complex interconnections of technology, communication, and history. One exceptional project in this vein was the British architect Alvin Boyarsky’s Chicago à la Carte. Boyarsky drew on an archive of historical postcards, newspaper clippings, and printed ephemera to trace a hidden history of Chicago’s built environment as an “energy system.” This idea was represented on the cover by a striking postcard image of a vivisection of State Street in the Loop, showing subway tunnels, sidewalks, El tracks, and skyscrapers in what Boyarsky described as “the tumultuous, active, mobile, and everywhere dynamic centre of a vast distribution system.” On other pages, Boyarsky showed images of Chicago’s newly built skyscrapers with newspaper clippings of recent political protests to juxtapose the city’s reaction to recent political protests against the disciplinary tradition of modern architecture in Chicago.

Los Angeles

Los Angeles has always been known for its exceptionalism, as a city of horizontal rather than vertical growth and a place where categories of private and public space prove complex and intertwined. During the 1960s and ’70s these qualities inspired visual responses by seminal artists like Ed Ruscha as well as critics like Reyner Banham, one of the most attentive observers of the city during this period. In many other respects, however, Los Angeles experienced events and issues similar to those of New York and Chicago, including problems of racial segregation, a sense of crisis about the decay of its historical downtown, and large-scale demonstrations, with responses ranging from photography and sculpture to provocative new forms of performance art by the collective Asco.

Concerns about the future forms of urbanism in Los Angeles and a renewal of the idea of the city were major preoccupations for artists, architects, and filmmakers. Many photographers focused on the everyday banality and auto-centric nature of the city, such as Robbert Flick’s Sequential Views project and Anthony Hernandez’s Public Transit Areas series. The historic downtown core continued to hold a special place in popular memory as many of these areas – including the former neighbourhood of Bunker Hill – were razed and rebuilt. Julius Shulman’s photographs of new development in the 1960s – including Bunker Hill and Century City – focus on the spectacular quality of recent buildings as well their physical and cultural vacancy. Architects played a strong role in creating new visions for the future city, including an unrealised, yet bold and influential plan for redeveloping Grand Avenue as a mixed-use district shaped by ideals of diversity and pedestrian-friendly New Urbanism.

Julius Shulman (American, 1910-2009)
The Castle, 325 S. Bunker Hill Avenue, Los Angeles, California, (Demolished 1969)
c. 1968
Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10)
© J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission

Asco
Decoy Gang War Victim
1974 (printed later)
Photograph by Harry Gamboa Jr.
Courtesy of Harry Gamboa Jr.

The Chicano art collective Asco was famous for their No Movies – works that appropriate certain stylistic qualities of the movies while maintaining a nonchalance that allows them to critique the media industry’s role in Los Angeles. Asco’s performances, therefore, function on different registers to engage with current events and issues facing the Chicano community as well as acknowledge the mainstream media’s distorted image of the city. For Decoy Gang War Victim, Asco’s members staged a fake gang shooting then circulated the images to local television stations, simultaneously feeding and deriding the media’s hunger for sensationalist imagery of urban neighbourhoods.

William Reagh
Bunker Hill to soon be developed
1971 (printed later)
Los Angeles Public Library

John Humble (American, b. 1944)
300 Block of Broadway, Los Angeles, October 3, 1980
1980
Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica

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Jan

Exhibition: ‘Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modernist Photography’ at the Cleveland Museum of Art

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, reality, space, surrealism, time and works on paper
Tags: American Dada, American photography, American surrealism, American surrealist photography, André Breton, Anton Stankowski, Anton Stankowski Foto-Auge, Anton Stankowski Photo Eye, Blind Beggar, Boxers over New York, Brassaï Young Couple Wearing a Two-in-One Suit, Brassai, dada, Dada in America, Dora Maar, Dora Maar Blind Beggar, Dora Maar Double Portrait with Hat, Dora Maar Forbidden Games, Dora Maar Jeux interdits, Dora Maar Mendiant aveugle, Double Portrait with Hat, Edward Quigley, Edward Quigley Photogram, Edward Quigley Photogram (Number 9), Emak Bakia, Erwin Blumenfeld, Erwin Blumenfeld Boxers over New York, European surrealism, Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, Forbidden Games, Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modernist Photography, François Kollar, François Kollar Wood-Milne, Georges Hugnet, Georges Hugnet The Architect of Magus, Hans Bellmer, Hans Bellmer La Poupée, Hans Bellmer The Doll, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Jacques-Henri Lartigue The Crystal Ball, Jeux interdits, l'oeil a l'état sauvage, La Boule de Verre, La Poupée, Lartigue La Boule de Verre, Lartigue The Crystal Ball, Le Combat des Penthésiliées, Man Ray, Man Ray Emak Bakia, Mannequin, Mannequin d'Andre Masson, Mendiant aveugle, modernism, Modernist Photography, New York Montage, photomontage, Raoul Ubac, Raoul Ubac Mannequin, Raoul Ubac Mannequin d'Andre Masson, Raoul Ubac Penthesilea, surrealism, Surrealist and Modernist Photography, surrealist photography, surrealist visual culture, The Architect of Magus, The Battle of the Penthesilea, The Crystal Ball, The Doll, the eye in its wild state, Thurman Rotan, Thurman Rotan New York Montage, Ubac Le Combat des Penthésiliées, Ubac The Battle of the Penthesilea, Wood-Milne, Young Couple Wearing a Two-in-One Suit

Exhibition dates: 19th October 2014 – 11th January 2015

The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall

Anton Stankowski (German, 1906-1998)
Photo Eye (Foto-Auge)
1927, printed 1938-40
Gelatin silver print, montage, from negatives with handwork
10.9 x 14.5cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund
© Stankowski-Stiftung

Love this period in photographic history and this type of work, love them all. Dora Maar your a star!

Marcus

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Many thankx to the Cleveland Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Often wild and recalcitrant, the images presented in Forbidden Games have been somewhat bridled by the curators who present them in broadly structured theme-based spaces. These categories include Advertising and the Picture Magazine, Collage, City, Natural World, Body, Mannequin, Night Life, and Abstraction. The curatorial rubrics guide the visitor through the exhibition and ease the appreciation of “the eye in its wild state” (l’oeil à l’état sauvage), the museum’s declared leitmotif for the show. Three additional spaces highlight the work of individual artists Marcel Lefranq (1916-1974), Georges Hugnet (1906-1974), and Dora Maar (1907-1997) …

It is not difficult to engage in a personal way with a number of photographs in this exhibition. In sharp contrast to the monumental scale of many late twentieth-century and millennial museum photographs, which often seem designed to engulf and visually overwhelm the viewer, these comparatively ‘small scale’ works radiate a quiet integrity often lacking in the former. The photographs on view are powerful, yet neither dominate the room nor repel the viewer. Instead, and refreshingly so, they are the whispered testimonial of artists who practiced unhurried looking and seeing. These images must be approached without haste; only then, do they yield their subtle beauty and secrets.”

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Julie Nero, from her excellent review “Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modern Photography” on the ArtHopper website [Online] Cited 02/01/2015. No longer available online

Jacques-Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
The Crystal Ball (La Boule de Verre)
1931
Gelatin silver print, toned
23.7 x 29.9cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund
© Ministère de la Culture – France / AAJHL

Raoul Ubac (Belgian, 1910-1985)
The Battle of the Penthesilea (Le Combat des Penthésiliées)
1937
Gelatin silver print
16.9 x 22.8cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Man Ray
Emak Bakia
1926

Photo of collector, David Raymond
Photo credit: Elena Dorfman

The Cleveland Museum of Art presents Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modernist Photography, a fascinatingly varied group of over 160 surrealist and modernist photographs from the 1920s through the 1940s. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue of the extraordinary vintage prints, acquired by the museum in 2007-2008 from the renowned collection of filmmaker David Raymond, represent the collection’s first appearance in print or at a museum. The exhibition will also include six short films and two books. Forbidden Games will be on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art from October 19, 2014, through January 11, 2015.

Through 167 photographs and illustrated books, the Raymond collection tells two stories: one of a radical moment in early twentieth-century art and the other of an impassioned collector whose adventurous spirit and vision harmonised perfectly with his subject. Beginning in the 1990s, art collector and filmmaker David Raymond judiciously sought out vintage prints from the 1920s through the 1940s that reflect “the eye in its wild state” (l’oeil a l’état sauvage), remaining true to the spirit of André Breton, a founder of surrealism. Raymond’s holdings of surrealist and modernist photography were distinguished by their quality, breadth, and rarity of subject matter. In 2007, the Cleveland Museum of Art made a major, transformative acquisition by procuring that collection, one of the most important holdings of twentieth-century surrealist photography that remained in private hands.

Vertiginous camera angles, odd croppings, and exaggerated tones and perspectives are hallmarks of the two principal photographic movements of the period, surrealism and modernism. As with surrealist efforts in other media, artists making photographs also aimed to explore the irrational and the chance encounter – magic and the mundane – filtered through the unconscious defined by Sigmund Freud. Eventually, photography became a preeminent tool of surrealist visual culture.

Artists from fourteen countries, representing diverse artistic pathways and divergent attitudes toward photography, come together in this collection. Many of the photographs reflect Parisian circles, with masterful works by Man Ray, Brassaï, Maurice Tabard, and Roger Parry. Soviet Russia is represented by Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky; Germany by László Moholy-Nagy and Erwin Blumenfeld, among others. In addition to these notable artists, the collection features many photographers whose work is not as well known in the United States, including Horacio Coppola of Argentina, Emiel van Moerkerken of Holland, and Marcel-G. Lefrancq of Belgium. A highlight of the collection is a grouping of 23 works by Dora Maar, a female photographer with a strong voice in surrealist Paris.

“We are proud to celebrate this important acquisition with the first in-depth examination of a segment of our increasingly important collection of photography,” said Dr. William M. Griswold, museum director. “David Raymond is a judicious and passionate collector who assembled his collection with astute judgment and connoisseurship, seeking out works that reflect l’oeil à l’état sauvage – the eye in its wild state, a tenet of surrealism supplied by André Breton, founder of the first surrealist group in Paris.”

“The Cleveland Museum of Art made a major, transformative acquisition by procuring the David Raymond collection, one of the most important holdings of twentieth-century surrealist photography that remained in private hands,” said Barbara Tannenbaum, the museum’s curator of photography. “Forbidden Games offers the public its first chance to view Raymond’s collection and through it, to vicariously experience an exhilarating, sometimes harrowing period of revolutionary social and cultural change.”

Forbidden Games is accompanied by a 240-page catalogue by Tom Hinson, curator emeritus, who tells the story of how the collection came to the museum and discusses the philosophy and the psychology behind Raymond’s collecting style; photo historian Ian Walker of the University of South Wales, who sets the photographs into historical and historiographic contexts; and independent curator Lisa Kurzner, who delves into topics of special interest ranging from examinations of techniques such as photograms and photo collage to explications of the symbolism of the mannequin and biographical studies of Maar and Hugnet. The catalogue, distributed by Yale University Press (Hard cover / $39.95, soft cover / $29.95.)

This exhibition is supported by a grant from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and was developed in part through the generosity of Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz. The Cleveland Museum of Art is generously funded by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. The Ohio Arts Council helped fund this exhibition with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, educational excellence, and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans.

Text from the Cleveland Museum of Art website

Raoul Ubac (French, 1910-1985)
Mannequin d’Andre Masson
1938

Photographed by Raoul Ubac, André Masson’s Mannequin (1938) was one of sixteen artist-decorated dress-shop dummies on view at the 1938 Paris Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. Probably the most well-known mannequin of the infamous installation, the head of Masson’s dummy is framed in a wicker bird-cage. Nearby, in the same area devoted to the “Mannequin,” a theme addressed ubiquitously in countless surrealist works, Hans Bellmer’s dismembered Poupée (1936) is on view. While both works symbolically objectify and victimise the female ‘body,’ Bellmer’s disturbing Poupée, unlike Masson’s somewhat playful Mannequin, darkly insinuates sexual torture and murder.

Text by Julie Nero

Erwin Blumenfeld (American, 1897-1969)
Boxers over New York
1920
Photomontage

A 1920 photo-collage of boxers fighting over New York, an aerial shot of the city overlaid with silver print cut-outs of Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries, the Great White Hope, duking it out like gods in the sky. It was made by Erwin Blumenfeld, who signed the work Blumenfeldada. (Many of these artists cut and pasted their names as readily as they cut and pasted images.)

Text by Sarah Boxer (NY Times)

François Kollar (Slovak, 1904-1979)
Wood-Milne
1930
Gelatin silver print, montage
37.5 x 28.1cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund
© Ministère de la Culture / Médiathèque du Patrimoine, Dist. RMN

Edward Quigley (American, 1898-1977)
Photogram (Number 9)
1931
Gelatin silver print, photogram
20.7 x 16.6cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund

Thurman Rotan (American, 1903-1991)
New York Montage
1928
Gelatin silver print, montage
11.5 x 8.2cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Double Portrait with Hat
c. 1936-37
Gelatin silver print, montage, from negatives with handwork
29.7 x 23.8cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of David Raymond
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP

In Double Portrait with Hat(1936-37), Dora Maar radically altered and reconfigured photographic materials to generate an image. In her quietly gripping self-portrait, Maar cut and scraped directly into two negatives to create a heavy and forbidding halo above a torn and divided self. Works such as these… explore the formal definition and limits of photographic ‘content’ and anticipate the experiments of non-narrative filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas of the 1960s and 1970s.

Text by Julie Nero

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Mendiant aveugle (Blind Beggar)
1934
Vintage gelatin silver print
30 x 23.9cm

The Second Spanish Republic fascinated many of the photographers active in the international context during the first half of the 20th century, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray and Dora Maar. The latter travelled to Barcelona in the summer of 1933; there, imbued with the spirit of the flâneur (Baudelaire’s stroller looking for chance encounters), she wandered through the city taking photographs of anonymous characters. In Mendiant aveugle (Blind Beggar), Dora Maar felt drawn to blindness, a motif that had been recurrent in photography from its very beginnings, because of the paradox of capturing the image of someone who cannot see. Dora Maar plays a game that is both conceptual and aesthetic, by combining elements that seek symbolic efficacy, in harmony with the interests of Surrealism: the subject’s open eyes, which preserve the gesture of seeing but not the sense of sight, the mysterious wrapped object the beggar is holding in his lap (probably a stringed instrument) and the lowered metallic blinds that serve as a backdrop to the character’s drama. This image is evidence of the affinity that Dora Maar felt with the surrealist group; in the opinion of its early theorists, André Breton and Paul Éluard, artists should “train one’s eyes by closing them” in order to shape their gaze and direct it towards the alternative reality associated with the unconscious mind.

Text by Almudena Cruz Yábar

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games)
1935
Photomontage

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Young Couple Wearing a Two-in-One Suit at the Bal de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève
1931
Gelatin silver print, ferrotyped
29.8 x 22cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund
© The Brassaï Estate – RMN

Georges Hugnet (French, 1906-1974)
The Architect of Magus
1935
Collage; photomechanical reproductions on drawing (graphite, watercolour, black pen, and ink)
31.3 x 22.7cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Hans Bellmer (German, 1902-1975)
The Doll (La Poupée)
1936
Gelatin silver print
11.7 x 7.8 cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Cleveland Museum of Art
11150 East Boulevard
Cleveland, Ohio 44106

Opening hours:
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Wednesdays, Fridays 10.00am – 9.00pm
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Cleveland Museum of Art website

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Archive for January, 2015

Exhibition dates: 1st November 2014 – 16th February 2015

Exposing your/self

Footnotes

Exhibition dates: 8th November 2014 – 9th February 2015

The Artists and Their Work in Britain and Ireland

Installation

Exhibition dates: 17th September 2014 – 1st February 2015

Exhibition dates: 12th October 2014 – 19th January 2015

Exhibition dates: 4th October 2014 – 18th January 2015

Contemporary Galleries and The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, second floor

Ann Temkin

Paulina Pobocha

Exhibition dates: 14th June 2014 – 18th January 2015

Being and Becoming in the work of Wynn Bullock

About Wynn Bullock

“Love Itself”

Exhibition dates: 27th September 2014 – 11th January 2015

“Watching Life is all about Timing”

“Time is what Photography is About”

Exhibition dates: 24th October 2014 – 11th January 2015

Oskar Barnack invents the Ur-Leica

Exhibition dates: 26th October 2014 – 11th January 2015

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Exhibition dates: 19th October 2014 – 11th January 2015

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