June 2015

Review: ‘Luminous World: Contemporary Art from the Wesfarmers Collection’ at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 31st March – 5th July 2015

Curator: Helen Carroll

Gretchen Albrecht (New Zealand, b. 1943)
Pink and orange sherbet sky
1975
Acrylic on canvas
166 x 177cm
© Gretchen Albrecht, reproduced courtesy of the artist and Wesfarmers Collection of Australia

Gorgeous catalogue with luscious plates, insightful text by Bill Henson (below) and evocative poetry by John Kinsella. Stars on the front cover and silver edged pages. No expense spared in production, with money literally thrown at the project, or so it would seem.

The curator, Helen Carroll, talks about ‘wonder’: “It is a capacity for wonder that makes us human”. Henson talking about ‘wonder’ and ‘love’ – about moments that change your life when looking at and breathing in great art. Then why does this exhibition feel so… well, needless? Despite some fascinating individual works of art, collectively there is little wonder on show here.

Perhaps it is because this exhibition looks to be a cut down version of the one first shown at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2012, with many works missing from what are listed in the catalogue. Or perhaps it is the hang which at the Ian Potter Museum of Art consists of two rooms on the ground floor of the museum, one housing lighter works, the other dark works. Too dichotomous for my tastes. Nothing is ever so cut and dried.

Perhaps it’s the fact that the concept of the exhibition – light in its many guises – seems to have been tagged onto a groups of art works which are anything but about light. Or are about light in a roundabout, merry-go-round kind of way. The wall text states, “Rather than a chronological or stylistically ordered presentation, the exhibition follows a loosely intuitive flow of ideas and imagery, moving through night to day. The artists in this exhibition explore light from the perspective of the optical experience, the connection between the starts and the cycles of life on earth; and from diverse cultural, mythic and spiritual points of departure.” Apparently the works are more about the phenomena of light than about light itself.

While the art works are interesting in their own right they don’t really work together cohesively as a group to investigate the theme of the exhibition. Trying to burden a collection of art bought for investment purposes with a concept not “natural” to the work, or just a curator’s idea of what seems implicit in the work but is just a cerebral construction, simply does not work in this case. As I looked around the exhibition, I felt the works were more about the physicality of time and space (of history and place), about links in the existential chain, than they were about light. For me, this evinced Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘chronotype’ – meaning ‘the connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed’ (in literature). Perhaps the intuitive flow of ideas and imagery and the multiple points of departure work against the very idea the exhibition seeks to investigate. This is so broadly thematic (the effects of light on the world) that it needed to be more focused in its conceptualisation.

It’s also a real worry when text panels in the exhibition quote Richard Goyder, Managing Director, Wesfarmers Limited, as saying that this is the first time that Wesfarmers has showcased the contemporary art of the collection, “and the works selected for Luminous World illustrate some of the ways in which the collection has grown in recent years. For instance, the inclusion of art from New Zealand, where Wesfarmers has a significant business presence, and the heightened emphasis on representing the great diversity of contemporary Indigenous art.”

The inclusion of New Zealand art because Wesfarmers has a significant business presence – not the quality or wonder of the art work – but a business presence. And only now are they collecting contemporary Indigenous art, after the collection has been in existence for more than three decades, 1977 being the first acquisition date. At least he is being refreshingly honest about why the art work has been added to the collection, but it does not give you confidence in the choice of the art work being displayed here. Goyder, Carroll and Kinsella also proselytize about the benefits of employee’s living with this art in their daily working lives and that may be the case. But for the casual visitor to the gallery this collection of art left me feeling cold and clammy – like a fish out of water.

As the add for Reflex copy paper says with more humour than any of this work can muster, I didn’t find “enwhitenment”, or wonder, within the gallery walls. Oh, the luminosity of it all.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to The Ian Potter Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan and The Ian Potter Museum of Art. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

What is the Night?

‘What is the night?’ Macbeth enquires in the banquet scene, once the ghost of Banquo has departed and his wide has dismissed their mystified guests. Deprived of sleep, and half-psychotic, he urgently needs to know the time. But this is also, implicitly, a philosophical question that hints at the ontological meaning of the night…

Macbeth, Shakespeare’s most elaborate meditation on the night, is a sustained, if not obsessive, exploration of the nocturnal as a realm of alternative values – ones that contradict and threaten to undermine those of the diurnal regime that is ostensibly the domain of politics in the early modern period. In this violent, vengeful tragedy, the language and culture of the medieval night, incarnated above all in the witches, irrupts into the more enlightened languages and culture of a purportedly post-medieval epoch. An apocalyptic night, in Macbeth’s barbaric court, is one of the forces that shape realpolitik. In the Renaissance, a period in which daily life encroaches more and more on the night, especially in public settings, in the form of elaborately lit masques at court, Macbeth thus stages the limits of enlightenment.

At a time when more systematic, socially centralized modes of illumination are increasingly disrupting older patterns of rest, including biphasic sleep – so that, for the early modern ruling class at least, night starts to feel like an extension of the day, its observe rather than its inverse – Shakespeare dramatises the tyrannical attraction, the absolutism, of darkness. Macbeth describes a process of nocturnalisation whereby the night irresistibly colonises the day, fatally infiltrating both the state and the protagonist’s consciousness. To use a word that has some currency in the seventeenth century, but has long since fallen out of use, Shakespeare’s drama is a study of ‘benightment’.”

Matthew Beaumont. “What is the Night?” in Matthew Beaumont. Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London, Chaucer to Dickens. London and New York: Verso, 2015, pp. 86-87.

Luminous World brings together a selection of contemporary paintings, objects and photographs from the Wesfarmers Collection in a conversation about light. Through works of scale and conceptual invention that chart the range and depth of the collection, this exhibition presents significant contemporary paintings, photographs and objects by leading Australian and New Zealand artists acquired by Wesfarmers over three decades and shared together for the first time with the Australian public.

The Potter is the fifth venue for this touring exhibition which to date has travelled to Charles Darwin University Art Gallery, Darwin; National Library of Australia, Canberra; Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide; and The Academy Gallery, University of Tasmania.

Brook Andrew (Australian, b. 1970)
Replicant series: Owl
2005
Ilfochrome print
130 x 195cm
© Brook Andrew, reproduced courtesy of the artist and Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art

Brook Andrew (1970- ) is a Sydney born/Melbourne based interdisciplinary artist of Wiradjuri and Scottish heritage. Andrew’s conceptual based practice incorporates, sculpture, photography, installation, video and performance. The Replicant 2006 series reflects (literally) upon the act of looking, and consequent interchanges between nature and culture, subject and object, real and represented. These dualities fit broadly within the artist’s addressing of Australian identity, polemics and the politics of difference.

For the Replicant 2006 series Andrew borrowed taxidermied specimens from the education department at the Australian Museum, Sydney. These included native species of indigenous significance such as an owl, possum, flying fox and parrot. He shot each animal – artificially propped in their natural poses – and digitally manipulated each image so as to appear duplicated, a process that evolved out of the Kalar midday 2004 series.

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled
2009-10
Archival inkjet pigment print
127 x 180cm
© Bill Henson, reproduced courtesy of the artist and Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art

” … And yet certain things – particular experiences that we have are exceptional. They stand apart from the rest of the general activity.

What causes this apprehension of significance – of something in face powerfully apprehended yet not always fully understood?

And why is it that all of us, at some time or other, with have this ‘epiphany’ – Christian or otherwise – in the presence of some work of art, in the experiencing of a performance piece or some unexpected encounter with the true magic of a particular piece of sculpture?

When it happens, I always think of it as being as if one’s life – and everything that it contains – had just been ever so slightly changed, forever. Nothing, if you will, is ever quite the same again.

What happens, I think, is simply that we fall in love – and it’s the apprehension of unexpected beauty that causes us to fall in love.

The sheer force of such beauty can affect us as if it were an act of nature – and of course it is, for despite the arrogance of some theoreticians, culture is never outside nature.

I think that it is this intense, if often quite subtle, love for the subject, and the resultant emotional and intellectual interdependence within that relationship – be it in musical form, something in the visual arts, theatre of dance – that is responsible for – and in fact makes possible at all – these great and fortunate encounters in the arts.

…

Stare back into time and all kinds of very ‘personal’ things return your gaze. This has always, to me, seemed to a large extent to be what art is about. Sure, it’s personal, but it’s also millennial.

…

The best art always heightens our sense of mortality. This is not morbidity that I am talking about – rather, we feel more alive in the presence of great art and this is because of a profound sense of continuity – our sense of being inside nature – is expanded.

If you like, art suggests the immortal in all of us.

When we listen to Michelangeli – or, say, Jörg Demus playing Kinderszenen – and we sense that simultaneously proximate and intimate yet utterly abstract presence (was that someone? Schumann perhaps?) and at the same time sense the unbridgeable gulf that exists between ourselves and that distant past – we know that we are in the presence of something magical.

In the end I think that it is love that fuels this activity – that animates the speculative capacity in all of us – and heightens this sense of wonder.

Excerpts from Bill Henson’s speech “Reflections,” in Luminous World catalogue. Perth: Wesfarmers Limited, 2012, pp. 23-24.

Installation views of the exhibition Luminous World: Contemporary Art from the Wesfarmers Collection at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

David Stephenson (Australian, b. 1955)
Star Drawing 1996/402
1996
40 x 40″
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1997
© Courtesy of the artist

While the subject of my photographs has shifted from the landscape of the American Southwest and Tasmania, and the minimal horizons of the Southern ocean, and the icy wastes of Antarctica, to sacred architecture and the sky at both day and night, my art has remained essentially spiritual – for more than two decades I have been exploring a contemporary expression of the sublime – a transcendental experience of awe with the vast space and time of existence.

David Stephenson, 1998

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 39/139
1990-91
Paris Opera Project
Type C photograph
127 × 127cm
Series of 50
Edition of 10 + 2 A/Ps

Stieg Persson (Australian, b. 1959)
Offret
1998
Oil on canvas
183 x 167cm
© Stieg Persson, reproduced courtesy of the artist and Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art

Works focusing on light and darkness, and how light creates and reveals our world, from one of Australia’s pre-eminent corporate art collections compiled by Wesfarmers over the past 30 years, will be exhibited at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at The University of Melbourne.

The exhibition, Luminous World: Contemporary art from the Wesfarmers Collection, presents a diverse selection of contemporary paintings, photography and works of sculpture. The works traverse a diversity of cultural, aesthetic and philosophical perspectives, with the curatorial premise of how contemporary artists explore the phenomenon of light in their work.

Some 50 artists from Australia and New Zealand are featured in the exhibition including: Susan Norrie, Rosemary Laing, Howard Taylor, Dale Frank, Paddy Bedford, Bill Henson, Fiona Pardington (NZ), Brian Blanchflower, Brook Andrew, Timothy Cook and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu. Included alongside the art is a major new body of poetry by John Kinsella, written in response to works in the exhibition. These are published for the first time under the imprint of Fremantle Press in the book Luminous World, with new writing by artist Bill Henson and composer Richard Mills.

Ian Potter Museum of Art Director, Ms Kelly Gellatly said, “Luminous World highlights the strengths of the Wesfarmers Collection, which has generously been shared, through the tour of the exhibition, with the wider community.

“In bringing together works across a range of media by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, Luminous World successfully showcases both the depth and continuing resonance of contemporary Australian practice in a rich, open-ended and exploratory conversation about light.

“To know and experience light and its effects however, one must equally understand its other – darkness. Together, these concerns create an exhibition experience that is at once intellectual, emotional and experiential,” Ms Gellatly said.

The Wesfarmers Collection was started in 1977, and is housed in the Wesfarmers offices around Australia and shared with the community through a loan and exhibition program. A Wesfarmers and Art Gallery of Western Australia touring exhibition.

Press release from The Ian Potter Museum of Art website

Installation views of the exhibition Luminous World: Contemporary Art from the Wesfarmers Collection at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

“For more than three decades Wesfarmers has been collecting Australian art. From General Manager John Bennison’s first acquisition in 1977 of a pastoral scene by the Australian impressionist Elioth Gruner, Wesfarmers’ purpose was to accentuate the value of art in the workplace and encourage and understanding of the importance to society of supporting creative thinking and artistic vision. The company has always been committed to sharing its collection with the community through exhibitions and loans and by opening our workplaces for groups to view the art in our offices.

This is the first time Wesfarmers has showcased the contemporary art in the collection, and the works selected for Luminous World illustrate some of the ways in which the collection has grown in recent years. For instance, the inclusion of art from New Zealand, where Wesfarmers now has a significant business presence, and the heightened emphasis on representing the great diversity of contemporary indigenous art.

We thank the artists whose resonant and timeless works form part of Australia’s rich cultural heritage and hope that the Australian public will enjoy these works and marvel at the ingenuity and artistic vision they represent, as Wesfarmers does, surround by inspirational art in our daily lives.”

Richard Goyder
Managing Director, Wesfarmers Limited

The visual world is defined by light; everything we see is processed by the eye as patterns of brightness and colour. Monumental formations in the landscape as well as the most subtle nuances of atmosphere are made real to us by the action of light, transmitted in wavelengths as an infinitely varied register of colour that combine within the eye to shape our sense of space and form.

It is the action of light reflecting off, refracting through and being absorbed by the substance of the world that enables the eye to perceive contours, hues, and textures and mark the passing of time from day to night and season to season.

Luminous World presents a diverse selection of contemporary paintings, photography and works of sculpture, acquired by the Wesfarmers Collection over thirty years and considered through the lens of how contemporary artists variously utilise the phenomenon of light in their work.

Rather than a chronological or stylistically ordered presentation, it follows a loosely intuitive flow of ideas and imagery moving through night to day. The artists in this exhibition explore light from the perspective of the optical experience, the connection between the stars and the cycles of life on earth; and from diverse cultural, mythic and spiritual point of departure.

Published for the first time in the Luminous World catalogue are recent poems by John Kinsella, written in response to selected works in the exhibition, together with new writing by artist Bill Henson and composer Richard Mills that extend an artistic dialogue in which all can share.

Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian, 1917-1999)
Hung fire
1995
Retro-reflective road-sign on wood
209 x 176cm
© Rosalie Gascoigne, licensed by Viscopy 2012 and Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art

Elizabeth Nyumi (Australian, born c. 1947)
Parwalla
2010
Acrylic on canvas
120 x 180cm
© Elizabeth Nyumi, licensed by Viscopy 2012 and Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art

About Parwalla

This painting depicts the country known as Parwalla, which is Nyumi’s father’s country. This country is far to the south of Balgo in the Great Sandy Desert, west of Kiwirrkurra, and is dominated by tali (sand hills). Parwalla is a large swampy area, which fills with water after the wet season rain and consequently produces an abundance of bush foods. The majority of Nyumi’s painting shows the different bush foods, including kantjilyi (bush raisin), pura (bush tomato) and minyili (seed). The whiteish colours, which dominate the painting, represent the spinifex that grows strong and seeds after the wet season rains. These seeds are white in colour, and grow so thickly they obscure the ground and other plants below.

Biography

When Nyumi was only a very young child her mother died at Kanari soakwater close to Jupiter Well. As a young girl, Nyumi lived with her family group in their country. As a teenager she walked along the Canning Stock Route into the old mission with her father and family group. There she was given clothes and taken to Billiluna Station to be trained as a domestic worker and to work for the wives of the station managers around the region.

Nyumi commenced painting in 1987 and emerged as a leading artist in the late 1990s. She is married to the artist Palmer Gordon and has four daughters, three of whom are still living and beginning to paint with strong encouragement from Nyumi. Her elder brothers Brandy Tjungurrayi and Patrick Olodoodi are both senior lawmen and recognised artists. Nyumi is a very strong culture woman and dancer and an enthusiastic teacher of culture to children, ensuring the traditional dances and songs are kept alive.

Nyumi’s paintings are mainly concerned with the abundant bush food in the country belonging to her family. Initially, she worked with a thick brush, covering the canvas with fluent lines in tones of yellow, green and red. She has now developed a strong personal style of thick impasto dotting, to build up fields of texture heavily laden with white, in which motifs of camp sites, coolamons, digging sticks and bush tucker stand out.

Rosemary Laing (Australian, b. 1959)
Brumby mound #5 from the series One dozen unnatural disasters in the landscape
2003
C Type photograph
110 x 222cm
© Rosemary Laing, reproduced courtesy of the artist and Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art

Brumby mound #5 2003 is one of a series of photographs by Rosemary Laing that explores the way European culture has often been uncomfortably imposed on an ancient land. Laing chooses a desert-scape that many identify as quintessentially Australian as the setting for her interventions. The location is the Wirrimanu community lands around Balgo in north-east Western Australia. Onto these traditional lands Laing has incongruously placed items of mass-produced furniture painted to mimic the surroundings.

The words ‘brumby mound’ in her title are a reference to the introduced horses (or brumbies) that are feral and roam uncontrolled, much like the spread of furniture. The seductive beauty of these panoramic images shows the vast spectacle of the Australian bush and makes the disjunction of the natural and the unnatural all the more apparent.

Text from the NGV website

Howard Taylor (Australian, 1918-2001)
Bushfire sun
1996
Oil on canvas
122 x 152cm
© Howard Taylor, courtesy of the artist’s estate and Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art

Michael Riley (Australian, 1960-2004)
Untitled from the series Cloud [Feather]
2000
Inkjet print on banner paper
86 x 120 cm
© Michael Riley Foundation, licensed by Viscopy 2012 and Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art

“Feathers float – so do clouds – and dreams.

Feather – a Wiradjuri word for feather and wing are the same, Gawuurra. Probably Cowra, the name of a town to the south, comes from this. In contemporary Aboriginal practices of other groups, feather-appendage is extended in meaning to string tassel, sacred string marking a journey, connecting landscapes, people, family lineages, and, importantly, the embryo cord linking child and mother.

A wing of the eagle hawk, Malyan, a skin name, a scary dream-being overhead. Is it guardian angel or assassin? In the south-east, a feather left behind is often evidence of such a spiritual visit.

At the funeral of actor and activist Bob Maza in 2000, his son held his father’s Bible and recollected his words, ‘to dare to dream your dreams’. It’s interesting that Michael Riley chose to avoid the word ‘dream’ in naming his final photographic work cloud (2000), avoiding glib connections to ‘Dreamtime’. What rolls past our eyes and through our senses is the culmination of self-examination. In a series of poetic photographic texts made increasingly poignant through events in his personal life, these are dreams of childhood memories in Dubbo, New South Wales: dreams of floating, of release…

cloud appears as more personal and free. A floating feather; a sweeping wing; a vigilant angel; the cows from ‘the mission’ farm; a single Australian Plague Locust in flight, referring to the cyclical swarms of locusts; a comforting Bible; and a graceful emblematic returning boomerang. The boomerang is really the only overtly Aboriginal image in the series and the locust is one of the few native species left that is visible and cannot be swept aside. It persists…

Through the large, simply superimposed images of cloud, Michael was trying to minimalise things, to distil his ideas about physical reality and spirit. All are dichotomously connected to Dubbo and Riley and are also universal. They are not about a place but a state, the surrealistic cow with mud and manure on its hoofs floating by. In contrast to Empire’s scenes of a decayed, overworked and desolated landscape, there is no physical land in the cloud imagery.

Aboriginal creation stories begin with a sunrise and follow the journeys of an original being across a physical, seasonal and emotional landscape – seeing, experiencing, and naming this and that plant, animal, climatic occurrence and emotional feelings. Religious song cycles follow this progression. Michael’s set of large, single-subject memories can almost be thought of as a Wiradjuri song cycle of his land and his life.”

Extract from Djon Mundine. “Wungguli – Shadow: Photographing the spirit and Michael Riley” on the “Michael Riley: sights unseen” National Gallery of Australia website Nd [Online] Cited 10/08/2021. No longer available online

Paddy Bedford (Australian, b. 1922)
Merrmerrji-Queensland creek
2005
Ochre and synthetic binder on composition board
80 x 100cm
© Paddy Bedford, reproduced courtesy of the artist’s estate and Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art

“Paddy Bedford was a senior Gija lawman born at Bedford Downs Station in the East Kimberly region. Like many indigenous artists, he lived a long life as a stockman before he looked upon the Turkey Creek elders – Rover Thomas and Paddy Jiminji – to begin painting. Bedford’s first works were made with the inception of the Jirrawun Aboriginal Art Cooperative in 1997.

The distinctive minimalist style of his work is but a mask to the multifarious layers of meaning. Bedford’s paintings are inspired by the distinctive landscape and stories of his country in the East Kimberly region of Western Australia, as he depicts from an aerial perspective the traditional dreamings of the Cockatoo, Emu and Turkey; the massacres of local Aboriginal people during the colonial period; as well as episodes from his own life as a stockman and as a senior elder of his community.

Merrmerrji-Queensland Creek, 2005 is characteristically sparse in composition with bold forms, a rhythmic application of dotted fluid lines and a powerfully imposing colour palate, which is gained from a wet-on-wet mixture of white and ochre pigments suspended in a fast drying acrylic medium. The effect is a pearly radiant luminosity, an ambience of the sacred.”

Text from the Annette Larkin Fine Art website. No longer available online.

The Ian Potter Museum of Art
The University of Melbourne,
Swanston Street (between Elgin and Faraday Streets)
Parkville, Melbourne, Victoria
Phone: +61 3 8344 5148

Opening hours:
The museum is closed for renovations

The Ian Potter Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Fabergé: Jeweler to the Tsars’ at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City

Exhibition dates: 20th June – 27th September 2015

Russian
Imperial Diamond Brooch
1890-1910
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Travis Fullerton
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Even after nearly six years of making this website, I still get a thrill bringing you the next posting.

And what a posting it is.

Even as their countrymen lay starving in the cities and dying on the fields of battle in World War One, the Romanov’s still kept spending. Oh how the once mighty fell in a heap of their own making. But sometimes you just need a bit of dynastic, debauched (and beautiful) bling to brighten your capitalist day … and to remind you that nothing lasts forever and karma will always have its way.

As a t-shirt in an op-shop that I saw today said, “Workers … possess the power.” And that is why governments, tyrants and despotic royalty will always be afraid of them.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the Oklahoma City 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.

Pavel Ovchinnikov (Russian, 1830-1888)
The Holy Virgin of Kazan, Saint Prince Aleksandr Nevskii, Saint Mary Magdalene
1891
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt.
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Pavel Ovchinnikov (1830-1888), Russian jeweller, silversmith, goldsmith, enameller, merchant, industrialist. Hallmark: П.О. or П.Овчинниковъ in a rectangle. Trained in his brother’s workshop and opened a factory in Moscow, where he revived the art of enamelling and worked in the Neo-Russian style. Official purveyor to Tsar Alexander III, Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich, King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy and King Christian IX of Denmark. Awarded the Légion d’honneur and the Order of the Iron Crown. Member of the Moscow City Duma.

Alexander Yaroslavich Nevsky (Russian: Алекса́ндр Яросла́вич Не́вский; pronounced [ɐlʲɪˈksandr jɪrɐˈslavʲɪtɕ ˈnʲɛfskʲɪj] Ukrainian: Олександр Ярославович Не́вський); 13 May 1221 – 14 November 1263) served as Prince of Novgorod, Grand Prince of Kiev and Grand Prince of Vladimir during some of the most difficult times in Kievan Rus’ history.

Commonly regarded as a key figure of medieval Rus’, Alexander – the grandson of Vsevolod the Big Nest – rose to legendary status on account of his military victories over German and Swedish invaders while agreeing to pay tribute to the powerful Golden Horde. He was proclaimed as a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church by Metropolite Macarius in 1547. Popular polls rank Alexander Nevsky as the greatest Russian hero in history.

Russian
Crown Brooch
1890-1910
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Travis Fullerton
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Elephant Box
before 1899
Nephrite, ivory, gold, rubies, diamonds
3.75 x 4 (diameter) in. (9.53 x 10.16cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Travis Fullerton
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)

Upon the death of Hiskias Pendin in 1882, Carl Fabergé took sole responsibility for running the company. Carl was awarded the title Master Goldsmith, which permitted him to use his own hallmark in addition to that of the firm. Carl Fabergé’s reputation was so high that the normal three-day examination was waived. For several years, Carl Faberge’s main assistant in the designing of jewellery was his younger brother, Agathon Faberge (1862-1895), who had also trained in Dresden.

Carl and Agathon were a sensation at the Pan-Russian Exhibition held in Moscow in 1882. Carl was awarded a gold medal and the St. Stanisias Medal. One of the Fabergé pieces displayed was a replica of a 4th-century BC gold bangle from the Scythian Treasure in the Hermitage. The Tsar declared that he could not distinguish the Fabergé’s work from the original and ordered that objects by the House of Fabergé should be displayed in the Hermitage as examples of superb contemporary Russian craftsmanship. The House of Fabergé with its range of jewels was now within the focus of Russia’s Imperial Court.

When Peter Carl took over the House, there was a move from producing jewellery in the then fashionable French 18th century style, to becoming artist-jewellers. Having acquired the title of Supplier to the Court from Tsar Alexander III on May 1, 1885, Fabergé had full access to the important Hermitage Collection, where he was able not only to study but also to find inspiration for developing his unique style. Influenced by the jewelled bouquets created by the eighteenth century goldsmiths, Jean-Jacques Duval and Jérémie Pauzié, Fabergé re-worked their ideas, combining them with his accurate observations and fascination for Japanese art. This resulted in reviving the lost art of enamelling and concentrating on setting every single stone in a piece to its best advantage. Indeed, it was not unusual for Agathon to make ten or more wax models so that all possibilities could be exhausted before deciding on a final design. Shortly after Agathon joined the firm, the House introduced objects deluxe: gold bejewelled items embellished with enamel ranging from electric bell pushes to cigarette cases, including objects de fantaisie.

In 1885, Tsar Alexander III gave the House of Fabergé the title; ‘Goldsmith by special appointment to the Imperial Crown’.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Elephant Box (detail)
before 1899
Nephrite, ivory, gold, rubies, diamonds
3.75 x 4 (diameter) in. (9.53 x 10.16cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Travis Fullerton
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Monumental Kovsh
1899-1908
Silver, chrysoprase, amethyst
15 x 27.5 x 12.25 in. (38.10 x 69.85 x 31.12cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Jerome and Rita Gans Collection of Silver
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Monumental Kovsh (detail)
1899-1908
Silver, chrysoprase, amethyst
15 x 27.5 x 12.25 in. (38.10 x 69.85 x 31.12cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Jerome and Rita Gans Collection of Silver
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

The Kovsh is a traditional drinking vessel or ladle from Russia. It was oval-shaped like a boat with a single handle and may be shaped like a water bird or a norse longship. Originally the Kovsh made from wood and used to serve and drink mead, with specimens excavated from as early as the tenth century. Metal Kovsh began to appear around the 14th century, although it also continued to be carved out of wood and was frequently brightly painted in peasant motifs. By the 17th century, the Kovsh was often an ornament rather than a practical vessel, and in the 19th century it was elaborately cast in precious metals for presentation as an official gift of the tsarist government.

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Star Frame
before 1899
Gold, enamel, pearls, glass, ivory
3 x 2.625 x 3.5625 (diameter) in (7.62 x 6.67 x 9.05cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Star Frame (detail)
before 1899
Gold, enamel, pearls, glass, ivory
3 x 2.625 x 3.5625 (diameter) in (7.62 x 6.67 x 9.05cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Fedor Rückert (Russian, 1840-1917)
Plate
1899-1908
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Jerome and Rita Gans Collection of Silver
Photo: Travis Fullerton
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Feodor Ivanovich Rückert, Russian silver- and goldsmith of German origin, Fabergé workmaster. Born in Moscow in 1840. Worked with Carl Fabergé from 1887. His mark Ф.Р. (F.R. in Russian Cyrillic) can be found on cloisonné enamel objects made in Moscow, sold independently or by Fabergé.

Fedor Rückert (Russian, 1840-1917)
Plate (detail)
1899-1908
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Jerome and Rita Gans Collection of Silver
Photo: Travis Fullerton
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

More than 230 rare and storied treasures created by the House of Fabergé will be celebrated in a new exhibition at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Fabergé: Jeweler to the Tsars will be on view from June 20 through September 27, 2015. The exhibition, drawn from the Collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, will showcase Karl Fabergé’s fine craftsmanship in pieces of jewellery and adornments once belonging to the Russian Imperial family.

“This exhibition represents a double honour for the Oklahoma City Museum of Art – the opportunity to collaborate with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and to showcase the largest Fabergé collection outside of Russia,” said E. Michael Whittington, OKCMOA President and CEO. “The technical and artistic virtuosity of the Fabergé workshop is without parallel. Individually, these objects are breathtaking. Collectively, they represent a unique window into an empire and subsequent revolution that dramatically altered 20th century history. We are proud to present such an extraordinary collection of treasures to our community.”

From dazzling Imperial Easter eggs to delicate flower ornaments and from enchanting animal sculptures to cigarette cases, photograph frames and desk clocks, Fabergé often turned the most mundane objects into miniature works of art. The vast majority of his designs were never repeated, and most pieces were made entirely by hand. The success of his business was inextricably linked to the patronage of the Romanov dynasty and the close ties among the British, Danish and Russian royal families, who often exchanged works by Fabergé as personal gifts.

The Imperial Tsesarevich Easter Egg of 1912, which will be on view at OKCMOA, was a gift to Empress Alexandra from her husband, Emperor Nicholas II. The egg commemorates their son, Alexsei, who nearly died the previous year of haemophilia. For the shell, craftsmen joined six wedges of highly prized lapis lazuli and hid the seams with an elaborate gold filigree encasement. Inside the egg, a diamond encrusted Romanov family crest frames a two-sided portrait of the young child.

These objects were associated with refinement and luxury because the House of Fabergé was known for accepting nothing less than perfection as well as for being business savvy. Beyond the elegant showrooms in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, hundreds of the country’s finest goldsmiths, enamellers, stone carvers, gem cutters and jewellers were at work creating innovative and complex designs that could not be readily imitated.

The presence of the Romanov family – Emperor Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra and their five children – is most intimately felt in the exhibition through the display of more than 40 family photographs held in enamelled Fabergé frames. These family photographs and jewels were some of the only possessions the Romanovs took with them when they were forced out of St. Petersburg during the Revolution. In an effort to preserve their wealth, the Romanov daughters are said to have sewn Fabergé jewels into their undergarments. In the end, their diamond-lined corsets managed to prolong their execution and sealed the fate for the inevitable fall of the dynasty.

Press release from the Oklahoma City Museum of Art

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Christ Pantocrator
1914-17
Oil on panel, silver gilt, filigree silver, precious and semiprecious stones, seed pearls
11.875 x 10.125 in. (30.16 x 25.72cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

In Christian iconography, Christ Pantocrator refers to a specific depiction of Christ. Pantocrator or Pantokrator (Greek: Παντοκράτωρ) is, used in this context, a translation of one of many names of God in Judaism. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek as the Septuagint, Pantokrator was used both for YHWH Sabaoth “Lord of Hosts” and for El Shaddai “God Almighty”. In the New Testament, Pantokrator is used once by Paul (2 Cor 6:18). Aside from that one occurrence, the author of the Book of Revelation is the only New Testament author to use the word Pantokrator. The author of Revelation uses the word nine times, and while the references to God and Christ in Revelation are at times interchangeable, Pantokrator appears to be reserved for God alone.

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Mikhail Perkhin, Workmaster Russian, 1860-1903
Vasilii Zuiev, Painter of miniatures Russian, 1870-unknown
Imperial Peter the Great Easter Egg
1903
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Peter, the Great Egg, is a jewelled Easter egg made under the supervision of the Russian jeweller Peter Carl Fabergé in 1903, for the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II. Tsar Nicholas presented the egg to his wife, the Czarina Alexandra Fyodorovna. Made in the Rococo style, the Peter the Great Egg celebrated the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703.

Executed in gold, the curves are set with diamonds and rubies. The body of the egg is covered in laurel leaves and bulrushes that are chased in 14-carat green gold. These symbolise the source of the “living waters”. The spikyheads are set with square rubies. White enamel ribbons inscribed with historical details encircle the egg. On the top of the egg is an enamelled wreath which encircles Nicholas II’s monogram. The bottom of the egg is adorned with the double-headed imperial eagle, made of black enamel and crowned with two diamonds.

The paintings representing the “before” and “after” of St. Petersburg in 1703 and 1903. The front painting features the extravagant Winter Palace, the official residence of Nicholas II two hundred years after the founding of St. Petersburg. Opposite this, on the back of the egg, is a painting of the log cabin believed to be built by Peter the Great himself, representative of the founding of St. Petersburg on the banks of the Neva River. On the sides of the egg are portraits of Peter the Great in 1703 and Nicholas II in 1903. Each of the miniatures is covered by rock crystal. The dates 1703 and 1903, worked in diamonds, appear on either side of the lid above the paintings of the log cabin and Winter Palace, respectively.

Below each painting are fluttering enamel ribbons with inscriptions in black Cyrillic letters. The inscriptions include: “The Emperor Peter the Great, born in 1672, founding St. Petersburg in 1703”, “The first little house of the Emperor Peter the Great in 1703”, “The Emperor Nicholas II born in the 1868 ascended the throne in 1894” and “The Winter Palace of His Imperial Majesty in 1903.”

The surprise is that when the egg is opened, a mechanism within raises a miniature gold model of Peter the Great’s monument on the Neva, resting on a base of sapphire. The model was made by Gerogii Malychevin. The reason for this choice of surprise is the story of a legend from the 19th century that says enemy forces will never take St. Petersburg while the “Bronze Horseman” stands in the middle of the city.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Mikhail Perkhin, Workmaster Russian, 1860-1903
Vasilii Zuiev, Painter of miniatures Russian, 1870-unknown
Imperial Peter the Great Easter Egg (detail)
1903
Gold, platinum, diamonds, rubies, enamel, bronze, sapphire, watercolour on ivory, rock crystal
4.25 x 3.125 (diameter) in. (10.80 x 7.94cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Henrik Wigström Russian, 1862-1923
Imperial Tsesarevich Easter Egg
1912
Lapis lazuli, gold, diamonds, platinum or silver
5.75 x 4 (diameter) in. (on stand) (14.61 x 10.16cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

The Imperial Tsesarevich Easter Egg, created by workmaster Henrik Wigström, has six lapis lazuli segments with double-headed eagles, winged caryatids, hanging canopies, scrolls, flower baskets, and sprays that conceal the joints. It is set with a large solitaire diamond at the base, and a table diamond (a thin, flat diamond) on top over the Cyrillic monogram AF (for Alexandra Feodorovna) and the date 1912. The surprise found inside is a portrait painted on ivory, front and back, of the tsesarevich in a diamond-set, double-headed eagle standing on a lapis lazuli pedestal. In addition to assisting Perkhin with 26 imperial eggs, Henrik Wigström produced 20 to 21 additional eggs between 1906 and 1916, including this masterpiece.

Henrik Immanuel Wigström (1862-1923) was one of the most important Fabergé workmasters along with Michael Perchin. Perchin was the head workmaster from 1886 until his death in 1903, when he was succeeded by his chief assistant Henrik Wigstrom. These two workmasters were responsible for almost all the imperial Easter eggs.

Once in Madsén’s employment, his master’s trade with Russia, as well as his numerous business contacts here, brought him to work in St. Petersburg. It is unknown who employed Wigström on his arrival in the capital, but Wigström became assistant in 1884, at the age of 22, to Perchin, whose shop at that time was already working exclusively for Fabergé. Wigström became head workmaster at Fabergé after Perchin’s death in 1903. The number of craftsmen in Wigström’s workshop diminished drastically with the outbreak of World War I. By 1918, the Revolution forced the complete closing of the House of Fabergé. Aged 56, Wigström retreated almost empty-handed to his summer house, on Finnish territory, and died there in 1923.

His art is similar to Perchin’s but tends to be in the Louis XVI, Empire, or neo-classical style. Nearly all the Fabergé hardstone animals, figures and flowers from that time period were produced under his supervision.

Imperial Tsesarevich Easter Egg

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Mikhail Perkhin, Workmaster Russian, 1860-1903
Johannes Zehngraf, Painter of miniatures Russian, 1857-1908
Imperial Pelican Easter Egg
1897
Gold, diamonds, enamel, pearls, watercolour on ivory
4 x 2.125 (diameter) in. (10.16 x 5.40cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Michael Evlampievich Perchin (Russian: Михаил Евлампьевич Перхин) (1860-1903) was born in Okulovskaya in Olonets Governorate (now Republic of Karelia) and died in St. Petersburg. He was one of the most important Fabergé workmasters along with Henrik Wigström. Perchin became the leading workmaster in the House of Fabergé in 1886 and supervised production of the eggs until his death in 1903. The eggs he was responsible for were marked with his initials.

He worked initially as a journeyman in the workshop of Erik August Kollin. In 1884 he qualified as a master craftsman and his artistic potential must have been obvious to Fabergé who appointed him head workmaster in 1886. His workshop produced all types of objets de fantasie in gold, enamel and hard stones. All the important commissions of the time, including some of the Imperial Easter Eggs, the renowned “Fabergé eggs”, were made in his workshop. His period as head Fabergé workmaster is generally acknowledged to be the most artistically innovative, with a huge range of styles from neo-Rococo to Renaissance.

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Mikhail Perkhin, Workmaster Russian , 1860-1903
Johannes Zehngraf, Painter of miniatures Russian, 1857-1908
Imperial Pelican Easter Egg (detail)
1897
Gold, diamonds, enamel, pearls, watercolour on ivory
4 x 2.125 (diameter) in. (10.16 x 5.40 cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Johannes Zehngraf (born April 18, 1857 in Nykøbing Falster, Denmark; † February 7, 1908 in Berlin) was a Danish painter of miniatures and chief miniaturist in the house of Carl Peter Fabergé in St. Petersburg. He was the son of painter and photographer Christian Antoni Zehngraf and Rebecca de Lemos and married on January 27, 1880 in Aalborg Caroline Ludovica Lund (* June 30, 1856; † after 1908), the daughter of Carl Ludvig Lund and Pouline Elisabeth Poulsen.

Zehngraf learned in Aalborg with his father the art of photography and worked at first as a photographer, later in Aarhus, Odense and Malmö (1886-1889). The small-scale retouching his photographs led him then to miniature painting. As a miniaturist he settled down in 1889 in Berlin and counted the European royal houses to its customers. He led the photographic realism with their richness of detail in his painting. Portraits of the Russian Emperor Alexander III., His wife, the Empress Maria Feodorovna, the Danish Princess Thyra and a series of portraits of eleven miniature effigies of the Danish King Christian IX family testify to his skill. He painted, among others, the thumbnails on the Lily of the Valley Faberge Egg (1898)

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Henrik Wigström, Workmaster Russian, 1862-1923
Imperial Red Cross Easter Egg with Portraits
1915
Silver, enamel, gold, mother-of-pearl, watercolour on ivory, velvet lining
3 x 2.375 (diameter) in. (7.62 x 6.03cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Henrik Wigström, Workmaster Russian, 1862-1923
Imperial Red Cross Easter Egg with Portraits (detail)
1915
Silver, enamel, gold, mother-of-pearl, watercolour on ivory, velvet lining
3 x 2.375 (diameter) in. (7.62 x 6.03cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Ring Box
before 1899
Gold, ruby, silk
1 (height) in. (2.54cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Rooster
c. 1900
Carnelian, diamonds, gold
1.5 x 0.5 x 1.25 in. (3.81 x 1.27 x 3.18cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Rooster (detail)
c. 1900
Carnelian, diamonds, gold
1.5 x 0.5 x 1.25 in. (3.81 x 1.27 x 3.18cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Katherine Wetzel
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Miniature Easter Egg Pendant
c. 1900
Gold, enamel, diamonds, sapphires
0.75 (height) x 0.5 (diameter) in. (1.91 x 1.27cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Travis Fullerton
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Miniature Easter Egg Pendant
c. 1900
Chalcedony, gold, diamonds
1.35 x 0.875 (diameter) in. (3.18 x 2.22cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Travis Fullerton
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Parasol Handle
before 1899
Bowenite, gold, diamonds, pearls, enamel
3¼ H x 1½ W (8.26 cm x 3.81cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Travis Fullerton
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Parasol Handle (detail)
before 1899
Bowenite, gold, diamonds, pearls, enamel
3¼ H x 1½ W (8.26 cm x 3.81cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Travis Fullerton
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

The tapering, pentagonal parasol handle has panels of pink guilloché enamel painted with dendritic motifs within opaque-white enamel borders. A diamond is centered on each panel and Louis XVI-style floral decorations are set between the panels. Atop the handle is a brilliant-cut diamond finial in a rose-cut diamond surround with diamond-set fillets.

Marks: Early initials of workmaster Mikhail Perkhin, assay mark of St. Petersburg before 1899, 56 zolotnik

Peter Karl Fabergé (Russian, 1846-1920)
Statuette of a Sailor
c. 1900
Agate, obsidian, aventurine quartz, lapis lazuli, sapphire
4.625 x 2.5 in. (11.75 x 6.35cm)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt
Photo: Travis Fullerton
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Fedor Rückert (Russian, 1840-1917)
Loving Cup
1899-1908
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Jerome and Rita Gans Collection of Silver
Photo: Travis Fullerton
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Fedor Rückert (Russian, 1840-1917)
Loving Cup (detail)
1899-1908
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Jerome and Rita Gans Collection of Silver
Photo: Travis Fullerton
© Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Oklahoma City Museum of Art
415 Couch Drive
Oklahoma City, OK 73102

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Saturday: 10am – 5pm
Friday: 10am – 8pm
Sunday: noon – 5pm
Closed: Monday, Tuesday and Major Holidays

Oklahoma City Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Modernités. Photographie brésilienne (1940-1964)’ at the Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris

Exhibition dates: 6th May – 26th July 2015

Curators: Antonio Pinto Ribeiro, Ludger Derenthal and Samuel Titan Jr.

Thomaz Farkas (Hungarian-Brazilian, 1924-2011)
Monumental steps of the gallery Prestes Maia, São Paulo
Escalier monumental de la Galerie Prestes Maia, São Paulo
1946
Gelatin Silver photograph
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

Another exhibition on an unusual subject that this website likes supporting: this time Brazilian photography, of which I know very little.

The feeling I get from the photographs in this posting is of an overwhelming interest in avant-garde, urban photography and humanist photography. The standout is the work of José Medeiros (1921-1990), especially the two photographs of an initiation ritual in Salvador. Their force majeure, their irresistible compulsion (presence, ritual), composition and complexity stand them head and shoulders above any of the other works in the posting.

Marcus

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

Thomaz Farkas (Hungarian-Brazilian, 1924-2011)
Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro
Plage de Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro
1947
Gelatin Silver photograph
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

Thomaz Farkas (Hungarian-Brazilian, 1924-2011)
Tiles, São Paulo
Tuiles, São Paulo
1945
Gelatin Silver photograph
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

Thomaz Farkas (Hungarian-Brazilian, 1924-2011)
Interior façade of the building São Borja, Rio de Janeiro
Façade intérieure du bâtiment São Borja, Rio de Janeiro
c. 1945
Gelatin Silver photograph
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

Thomaz Farkas (Hungarian-Brazilian, 1924-2011)
Construction Site, Brasília
Chantier de construction, Brasília
c. 1958
Gelatin Silver photograph
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

Hans Gunter Flieg (Brazilian, b. 1923)
Construction engines in Villares plant, São Caetano do Sul, São Paulo
Construction de moteurs à l’usine Villares, São Caetano do Sul, São Paulo
1960
Contemporary digital print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

Hans Gunter Flieg (Brazilian, b. 1923)
Brown Boveri Electric Industry S / A Osasco, São Paulo
Industrie Electrique Brown Boveri S/A Osasco, São Paulo
c. 1960
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

Hans Gunter Flieg (Brazilian, b. 1923)
Mercedes Benz booth at the International Exhibition of Industry and Commerce São Cristóvão (project Henri Maluf), Rio de Janeiro
Stand de Mercedes Benz lors de l’Exposition internationale d’industrie et de commerce de São Cristovão (projet de Henri Maluf), Rio de Janeiro
1960
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

Hans Gunter Flieg (Brazilian, b. 1923)
Eletroradiobras Store (architectural project Majer Botkowski), São Paulo
Magasin Eletroradiobras (projet architectural de Majer Botkowski), São Paulo
c. 1956
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

History has taught us that cosmopolitism, people’s mobility and globalised artistic movements are not necessarily recent phenomenons. The exhibition titled Modernités. Photographie brésilienne (1940-1964) aims to demonstrate how contemporaneity does not emerge from a void but is built via continuities and ruptures. At the beginning of the 1940s, during the Second World War, Brazil was a destination of choice for thousands of emigrants. The country went through a unique modernisation process affecting all sectors of Brazilian society.

The exhibition explores this extraordinary transformation through the eyes of four photographers with very different styles and sensibilities. Marcel Gautherot (1910-1996) was a Parisian from a working class background who greatly admired Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe’s work; he had access to Brasília as early as 1958, thanks to his friendship with Oscar Niemeyer. Hans Gunter Flieg (1923) fled nazism as a German Jew and came to Brazil in 1939 where he specialised in photographing industries. Thomas Farkas (1924-2011), a Hungarian who emigrated to Brazil, is probably the most well-known of these four photographers, and the most avant-garde of this group since he was interested in photography as a work of art from a very young age. Finally, José Medeiros (1921-1990), a photojournalist who was born in a poor State with very little cultural tradition, had learnt photography by working with the Carioca newspapers. He was attentive to the changes and ruptures in all the social classes.

This exhibition allows the perception of a moment in history: the untouched Amazonia, the beaches and daily life in Rio de Janeiro, as well as the carnival, football, African religions and their initiation rituals, river ports and the Northern fishermen, industries and factories, baroque churches, Indian tribes, mechanical machinery, popular festivals, modernist buildings and Brasília, the new capital. These wide ranging themes sketch a portrait of Brazil during a particular era that ended with the beginning of the military dictatorship in 1964. Through the lens of these four artists whose practices and origins were so diverse, we can also anticipate notions of alterity and cosmopolitism that define our world today.”

Press release from the Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian website

Modernités. Photographie brésilienne (1940-1964)

Marcel Gautherot (Brazilian born France, 1910-1996)
Maracanã Stadium, Rio de Janeiro
Stade du Maracanã, Rio de Janeiro
c. 1967
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

“Photographs by Marcel Gautherot present with pungent and sharp clarity the contrast between the apparent purity of geometric shapes and the modes of rustic and manual labour… ”

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Luiz Renato Martina

Marcel Gautherot (1910-96) was a great master of twentieth-century photography, best known for his documentation in some three-thousand images of the construction of the Brazilian capital city Brasilia from 1958 to 1960. Nevertheless, his work remains relatively little known. Even those who are familiar with his beautiful photographs of the construction of Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia may be surprised to learn that he produced such a large and strikingly diverse body of work.

The first book to look back on Gautherot’s entire career, Marcel Gautherot: The Monograph takes readers through the architect and photographer’s time as an apprentice in Paris, where he attended evening classes and took an ardent interest in Esprit Nouveau and the Bauhaus, as well as their proponents, including Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. In the 1930s, Gautherot abandoned his studies in architecture to follow his passion for photography. This led him to travel extensively, and he eventually came to live and work in the city of Rio de Janeiro, where he was welcomed by a circle of artists and intellectuals who became important figures in Brazilian culture, including the architects Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx.

Text from the Amazon website

Marcel Gautherot (Brazilian born France, 1910-1996)
Palace of the National Congress, Brasília
Palais du Congrès National, Brasília
1960
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

Marcel Gautherot (Brazilian born France, 1910-1996)
Jangadeiro, Aquiraz Ceará
Jangadeiro, Aquiraz Etat du Ceará
1950
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

Marcel Gautherot (Brazilian born France, 1910-1996)
Indian
México, 1936-1937
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

Marcel Gautherot (Brazilian born France, 1910-1996)
Fishermen at Ilha Mexiana, Chaves, PA. Brazil
c. 1943
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

Marcel Gautherot (Brazilian born France, 1910-1996)
Festivities in the Ribeira district, Salvador
c. 1958
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

José Medeiros (Brazilian, 1921-1990)
Man sitting in a cafe, probably in Northeast Brazil
Homme assis dans un café, probablement dans le Nordeste
Nd
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

José Medeiros (Brazilian, 1921-1990)

José Medeiros was a Brazilian reporter-photographer and director of photography, born in 1921 in Teresina, in the Sertão of Northeastern Brazil, and died in 1990 in L’Aquila, Italy. He is considered a master of photojournalism in his country.

He was born in 1921, and was the oldest of five children. He had a brother and three sisters. He was twelve years old when his father, an art enthusiast and amateur photographer, taught him photographic development and printing. He began to photograph family friends using a Fox Kodak donated by his godfather. With the money he earned, he bought a German camera in 9 x 12 format from his father. His first commission was to photograph a local politician, but the mission was cut short.

His family moved to Rio in 1939. He was eighteen and enrolled in a preparatory course to enter university and study architecture. He was not received at the university, so he continued to do photography and set up a shooting studio in his apartment in parallel with a job in the postal service and then in the national coffee department. He began to make portraits of important artists of the time and became known for this work. He was quickly offered contracts for the reviews Tabu, Rio and Sombra. He resigned from public service and married in 1948.

He is one of the first photographers to have met, in 1949, the populations of Xavantes Indians, most of whom had never been in contact with the rest of Brazil. In 1956, he met the French photographer Jean Manzon who integrated him into the team of the illustrated newspaper O Cruzeiro for which he would collaborate for fifteen years. This magazine is innovative in the place given to photography, like its colleagues Life and Paris Match.

His work reflects the many facets and transformations of Brazilian society in the 1940s and 1950s.

In 1962, he left O Cruzeiro to found a photographic agency with photographer Flávio Damm. From the 1960s, José Medeiros also had an important cinematographic career as director of photography and worked for the most prestigious filmmakers of the Brazilian Cinema Novo. Director Glauber Rocha considers that “he is the only one who has known how to translate Brazilian light.”

While participating in a 1990 Brazilian culture festival in the Italian city of L’Aquila, José Medeiros died of a heart attack at the age of 69.

The photographic work of José Medeiros, which has more than 20,000 photos, is kept at the Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio de Janeiro.

Text translated from the French Wikipedia website

José Medeiros (Brazilian, 1921-1990)
Carnival in the nightclub Au Bon Gourmet, Rio de Janeiro
Carnaval dans la boîte Au Bon Gourmet, Rio de Janeiro
1952
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

José Medeiros (Brazilian, 1921-1990)
Novice during the initiation ritual of the holy daughters, Salvador
Novice pendant le rituel d’initiation des filles-de-saint, Salvador
1951
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

José Medeiros (Brazilian, 1921-1990)
Oscar Niemeyer, Vinicius de Moraes, his wife Lila and Tom Jobim Bôscoli (background), behind the scenes of the first performance of Orfeu da Conceição, Rio de Janeiro
Oscar Niemeyer, Vinicius de Moraes, son épouse Lila Bôscoli et Tom Jobim (au fond), dans les coulisses de la première représentation de Orfeu da Conceição , Rio de Janeiro
1956
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

José Medeiros (Brazilian, 1921-1990)
Novice painted with white dots that allude to Oxalá, the god of creation, and with red feathers (ekodidé), the initiation ritual, Salvador
Novice peinte de points blancs qui font référence à Oxalá, dieu de la création, elle porte la plume rouge (ekodidé) du rituel d’initiation, Salavador
1951
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

José Medeiros (Brazilian, 1921-1990)
Pedra da Gávea, Morro dos Dois Irmãos and the beaches of Ipanema and of Leblon, Rio de Janeiro
c. 1955
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

José Medeiros (Brazilian, 1921-1990)
Woman on a bicycle crossing the railroad tracks, Rio de Janeiro
Femme à vélo traversant les rails du tramway, Rio de Janeiro
1942
Contemporary silver gelatin print
Courtesy of the artist and the Instituto Moreira Salles

Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian – Délégation en France
54, Bd Raspail
75006 Paris

Opening hours:
Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 9am – 6pm
Saturday and Sunday from 11am – 6pm
Closed Tuesday

Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian website

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Postcards: This is a real photograph

Léon & Lévy (French)
Paris – Le Palais de Justice – La Façade
c. 1901-1920
LL 802 of the theme France
Levy Fils & Cie, Paris to verso
Carte Postale

A selection of black and white postcards that I recently purchased in a secondhand shop. It was fun investigating the publishers and places, especially as three of them contain my surname (and probably ancestor), John Bunyan. I particularly like the series by Raphael Tuck & Sons of the Guards Chapel at the bottom of the posting… that and the fact that some of them state and guarantee: ‘This is a real photograph’.

Marcus

.
Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.

Léon & Lévy (French)
Dunkerque – L’Eglise Saint-Eloi
c. 1901-1920
LL 10 of the theme France
Carte Postale

Léon & Lévy was a French printer and a photograph editing company located in Paris. It was founded in 1864 and specialized in stereoscopic views and picture postcards of locations in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. The trade mark of the enterprise was “L.L.” (“LL”). The firm was one of the most important postcard editors in France… Léon & Lévy was founded in 1864 by Isaac and his son-in-law Moyse Léon. Isaac was also known as “Georges Lévy” at that time (to increase profits, he is known as J. Lévy, 1833-1913) .

With Levy sons, Abraham Lucien and Gaspard Ernest, the company will resolutely move towards the market of the postcard: the brand “LL” is filed in 1901 – we often confuse it with the signature “L & L” studio Lehnert & Landrock which was created three years later in Tunis: Lévy publishes numerous clichés and uses the same recipes and the same patterns as Lehnert. But Levy became the second largest publisher of postcards in France, producing 40 to 50,000 snapshots.

Léon & Lévy (French)
Amiens – Le Cathédrale – Vie de Saint-Jean-Baptiste
c. 1901-1920
LL 194 of the theme France
Levy Fils & Cie, Paris to verso
Carte Postale

J. Valentine & Co. Ltd (British, 1825-1963)
Inveraray Castle and Duniquaich
Nd
Valentine Series
Lithograph post card

J. Salmon Ltd, Sevenoaks (British, 1880 -)
The Moot Hall, Elstow, Nr. Bedford
After 1912
Salmon Series
Real Photo. Printed in England
Post card

Unknown maker (Danish)
Horsens. Caroline Amelie Lund
Nd
Lithograph post card

Caroline Amalie park is in everyday speech called “The Grove”. The park beautifully connects Horsens Museum and Horsens Art Museum. In the park, you can find the old water tower, designed by the known architect Viggo Norn. In the spring, a colour symphony of crocus sprouts through the grass, and later you can enjoy yourself in the shades of the beeches.

James Valentine, photographer (Scottish, 12 June 1815 – 19 June 1879)
Rosslyn Castle and Chapel
Nd
Lithograph post card

H. Coates, Wisbech (British)
The Derwent and Heights of Abraham, Matlock Bath
Nd
Lithograph post card

The Heights of Abraham, based in Matlock Bath, Peak District, offers stunning views of the surrounding landscape as well as providing a wonderful location for a family day out. The park first opened its gates in 1780 and boasts having the country’s first ‘Alpine Style’ cable car system, which was installed in 1984… The Heights of Abraham was named after the area of Quebec where Major General James P. Wolfe met his end during the Seven Years War, the British victory of which paved the way for the further expansion of the British Empire in Canada.

Originally designed as a Regency style ‘Savage Garden’ the park reflects the thoughts of the day from such as Shelley and Wordsworth, who extolled the virtues of promoting the wonderment of nature and the beauty of the environment. Even 200 years after opening the gates for the first time, many of the routes around the gardens remain as originally intended.

Unknown maker (British)
Bedford. The Bunyan Meeting
Nd
This is a real photograph
Post card

Dallaporte (Portugal)
Batalha – Mosteiro, Fachada das Capelas Imperfeitas [Monastery of Batalha, façade of the Imperfect Chapels]
Nd
Colecçâo passaporte “LOTY”
Photograph, post card

The Monastery of Batalha (Portuguese: Mosteiro da Batalha), literally the Monastery of the Battle, is a Dominican convent in the civil parish of Batalha, in the district of Leiria, in the Centro Region region of Portugal. Originally, and officially known, as the Monastery of Saint Mary of the Victory (Portuguese: Mosteiro de Santa Maria da Vitória), it was erected in commemoration of the 1385 Battle of Aljubarrota, and would serve as the burial church of the 15th-Century Aviz dynasty of Portuguese royals. It is one of the best and original examples of Late Gothic architecture in Portugal, intermingled with the Manueline style.

F. Frith & Co. Ltd., Reigate (British, 1959 – 1970)
Old Sarum, Chapel Of St Nicholas at angle of Wall, Castle well in foreground
1913
Frith’s series, Negative 65298
Lithograph postcard

Francis Frith (British, 1822-1898)

Francis Frith (also spelled Frances Frith, 7 October 1822 – 25 February 1898) was an English photographer of the Middle East and many towns in the United Kingdom. Frith was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, attending Quaker schools at Ackworth and Quaker Camp Hill in Birmingham (c. 1828-1838), before he started in the cutlery business. Leaving in 1850 to start a photographic studio in Liverpool, known as Frith & Hayward. A successful grocer, and later, printer, Frith fostered an interest in photography, becoming a founding member of the Liverpool Photographic Society in 1853. Frith sold his companies in 1855 in order to dedicate himself entirely to photography. He journeyed to the Middle East on three occasions, the first of which was a trip to Egypt in 1856 with very large cameras (16″ x 20″). He used the collodion process, a major technical achievement in hot and dusty conditions…

When he had finished his travels in the Middle East in 1859, he opened the firm of Francis Frith & Co. in Reigate, Surrey, as the world’s first specialist photographic publisher. In 1860, he married Mary Ann Rosling (sister of Alfred Rosling, the first treasurer of the Photographic Society) and embarked upon a colossal project – to photograph every town and village in the United Kingdom; in particular, notable historical or interesting sights. Initially he took the photographs himself, but as success came, he hired people to help him and set about establishing his postcard company, a firm that became one of the largest photographic studios in the world. Within a few years, over two thousand shops throughout the United Kingdom were selling his postcards.

His family continued the firm, which was finally sold in 1968 and closed in 1970. Following closure of the business, Bill Jay, one of Britain’s first photography historians, identified the archive as being nationally important, and “at risk”. Jay managed to persuade Rothmans, the tobacco company, to purchase the archive to ensure its safety. Frith was re-launched in 1976 as The Francis Frith Collection by John Buck, a Rothmans executive, with the intention of making the Frith photographs available to as wide an audience as possible. In 1977, John Buck bought the archive from Rothmans and has continued to run it as an independent business since that time – trading as The Francis Frith Collection. The company website enables visitors to browse free of charge over 125,000 Frith photographs depicting some 7,000 cities, towns and villages.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Photochrom Co. Ltd., Tunbridge Wells, Kent (British)
Ely Cathedral, Choir, East
Nd
Photograph, postcard 3826

Photochrom Co. Ltd., Tunbridge Wells, Kent (British)
Ely Cathedral, Choir, East (verso)
Nd
Photograph, postcard 3826

Léon & Lévy (French)
Carisbrooke Castle – King Charles I Window
c. 1901-1920
LL 18 of the theme Britain
Printed in France
Lithograph post card

Léon & Lévy (French)
Armentières – L’Eglise Saint Roch
c. 1883-1916
LL 13 of the theme France
Levy Fils & Cie, Paris to verso
Carte Postale

According to a brochure published for the centenary of the Saint-Roch church, it was built in the heart of a working-class neighbourhood in 1883 and 1884, at the initiative of the Dean Berteloot, who also built the churches of the Sacred Heart (1879) and St. Joseph (1884), in other districts of Armentières workers; the land is given free by the contractor César Debosque-Donte; the construction of the church is financed by a family of textile industrialists, the Cardon; the building is due to the architect Paul Destombes Roubaix, who is also the author of the churches of St. Joseph and the Sacred Heart; Simple originally emergency church, it was erected in parish church from 1886. Devastated in 1916 by the bombings of World War II, it was rebuilt in 1930 on the same plane as that of the original church and within a similar style.

Luigi Grassi, Milano (Italian)
Milano, Facciata della Cattedrale [Facade of Milan Cathedral]
Nd
Cartolina Postale, 07 19042
Lithograph post card

Unknown maker (F.W.H.) (British)
Roof of Chancel, Rosslyn Chapel
Nd
Lithograph post card

L. Roisin, Barcelona (Lucien Édouard Roisin Besnard, Paris, 1876 – Paris or Barcelona, 1943)
Gibraltar – Southport Gate
Nd
Lithograph post card, 53. 425

Edward Lucien Roisin Besnard (L. Roisin) (French, 1876-1943)

Edward Lucien Roisin Besnard (L. Roisin) (Paris, 1876 – Paris or Barcelona, 1943) French photographer and editor, based in Barcelona at the end of the First World War. Known in Spain for his trade postcards: La casa de la postal. Thanks to the high production work Roisin, it is possible to see the evolution of Spanish landscapes over thirty years. Most of his work is preserved with historical photographic archives of the Institute of Photographic Study of Catalonia.

His first Spanish postcards date from 1918. Roisin was not only in Barcelona, as in World War II, much of his family perished and our photographer was accompanied by two of his nephews, who held an important role in the family business and in the fate of the archives. His contract with Toldra finished he chose to remain on Spanish soil, and he acquires a local business in the Rambla de Santa Monica where he founded his magazine “the postal casa.” He specialises in postcards of a geographical nature. Accompanied by his nephew, they will make many trips by sharing tasks. Throughout the Spanish peninsula, Edward Lucien Roisin Besnard, with his urban experience, is responsible for photographing cities, shooting of the smallest villages and countryside and delegates to his nephew the task to photograph the inhabitants. The niece meanwhile will sell the cards in the family trade.

The beginning of the second war contributes to damage the health of Lucien Roisin Besnard who returns to France where he dies in 1943. At his death, his family continues to hold his stock until the year 1962. Roisin’s work then almost disappears even going for a short stay on the shelves of a secondhand store, to finally find refuge in the Institute’s archives Photographic Studies of Catalonia (it is not let less than 30,000 negatives, 77,000 photos or 40,000 postcards). The remaining shots are preserved in the National Archives of the Generalitat of Catalonia.

La casa de la postal

“The house of the postcard” was an eminently famous place whose reputation was well established and which featured prominently in all tourist guides. Roisin sold hundreds of thousands of postcards drawn from the photographs taken during his long wanderings through all Spain (Catalonia, Pontemeude, Andalusia, Malaga) over a period of more than twenty years. Roisin boasted to offer the public a comprehensive view, a complete inventory of sites and places of interest in all the Spanish provinces. The business was a success and at certain times over 10 vendors were recruited to deal with the request of a customer as well as local tourism. In the 1930s, “The postal casa”, always at the cutting edge, inaugurated the sale of completely innovative products such as postcard accordions which associated a choice of a dozen postcards and gathering views of the same subject taken from different angles. The counterfeiting phenomenon is not new, and to preserve [his copyright], Roisin was soon appear on its productions, a stamp that guaranteed its customers the authenticity of the products they were acquiring. The fame of Roisin was such that when a publication was published concerning Spain in the world, it was almost certain that the photographic credit the photo was derived from “the postal casa”.

Text Google translated from the French Wikipedia

Lilywhite Ltd., (British)
Bunyan’s Door. Elstow Church. Bedford
Nd
Guaranteed Real Photo and British Manufacture
Post card 28A

Unknown maker (British)
Bunyan’s Chair and Prison Door
Nd
Photograph, post card

Unknown maker (Italian)
Milano – Arco della Pace
Nd
Lithograph post card

Porta Sempione (“Simplon Gate”) is a city gate of Milan, Italy. The name “Porta Sempione” is used both to refer to the gate proper and to the surrounding district (“quartiere”), a part of the Zone 1 division (the historic city centre), including the major avenue of Corso Sempione. The gate is marked by a landmark triumphal arch called Arco della Pace (“Arch of Peace”), dating back to the 19th century, but its origins can be traced back to a gate of the Roman walls of Milan.

The Arch of Peace is a monument neoclassical Milan, located in the centre of the large area of Piazza Sempione. It was started in 1807 by Luigi Cagnola under the pressure of the town of Milan and of Napoleon. It was completed in 1838. The bronze chariot of Peace is by Abbondio Sangiorgio (1798-1879), the four wins equestrian bronze were made on the model of John Putti (1771-1847) while the marble sculptures are works of most representative neoclassical sculptors present in Milan in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, many of whom trained at the school of Camillo Pacetti (1758-1826); among these, we note the statues of History and Poetry of Louis Purchasing.

F. Frith & Co. Ltd., Reigate (British, 1959-1970)
Windsor Castle, Long Walk, Copper Horse
Nd
Frith’s series
Lithograph postcard

The R. A. (Postcards) Ltd., (British)
The Guildhall, Worcester
Nd
The Seal of Excellence Series
This is a Real Photograph
Photograph, post card

Nels (Belgium, 1898 – )
S. A. des Grottes de Han-sur-Lesse et de Rochefort – Le Trophée
[Caves of Han-sur-Lesse and Rochefort – The Trophy]
Nd
Lithograph post card

This publishing house was founded by Edward Nels in 1898. Their goal was to spread geographic knowledge while producing maps, guide books, and photographic and printed souvenirs. They soon became the largest producer of postcards in Belgium, and they also published many cards of the Congo and of Luxembourg. Though they produced a variety of card types, most were as collotypes, many of which were hand coloured in a dull pallet. Ernest Thill, who had ben the manager of the firm took over from Nels in 1913 and added his name to the company. In the 1960’s to 1975 they were purchased by a French firm, but they are now publishing postcards under their own name again, though for the most part they are now printed in Italy.

L. Caron (French, editor)
B & G, Lyon (Publisher)
Amiens – Cathedral
Amiens et les environs – Cathédrale dans sous ses détails – Eglises et Châteaux de Picardie
[Amiens and surrounding area – Cathedral detail – Churches and castles of Picardie]
Nd
3000 Vues éditées par L. Caron, photo, a Amiens
3000 views edited by L. Caron, photo, in Amiens
Lithograph post card

The Cairo Postcard Trust (Joseph Max Lichtenstern, Egypt)
Heliopolis – Monument of the first Aviateur (Oseri)
c. 1910
Serie 634
Lithograph post card

Joseph Max Lichtenstern moved to Egypt from Vienna in 1893 and took up permanent residence there in 1897. In 1899 he began publishing postcards under the name, Cairo Postcard Trust, but also issued black & white postcards under his own name. Two years later he teamed up with David Harari to form an importing business. They would also take up the publishing of postcards. Between 1904 and 1908 they seem to have taken on another partner, changing their name to Lichtenstern, Harari & Co., but they continued to use their original name, Lichtenstern & Harari on postcards. After Harari left in 1912 the firm was sold to Max H. Rudman, who had been a publisher from at least 1905. Lichtenstern continued to have some business dealings with Rudman, but after he returned to Vienna in 1914 for a visit, he ended up serving in the Austrian Army for the duration of World War One. There was a continuing relationship between this firm and the Cairo Postcard Trust but the specifics are uncertain.

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, West End (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series A
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons was a business started by Raphael Tuck and his wife in Bishopsgate in the City of London on October 1866, selling pictures and greeting cards, and eventually selling postcards, the latter being the most successful. Their business was one of the most well known in the ‘postcard boom’ of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Their contributions left a lasting effect on most of the artistic world. During The Blitz, the company headquarters, Raphael House, was destroyed including the originals for most of their series. The company never fully recovered.

Raphael was married to the former Ernestine Lissner in March 1848. She gave birth to seven children, four boys and three girls, all born in Prussia prior to their migration to England. As the family of seven children grew, the children provided more help to the business. Raphael sent out his sons, Herman, Adolph and Gustave to bring in more business. Herman and Adolph also went on selling trips, and at the end of the day they would check the results of the day’s work. The one with the higher sales would have the bigger egg next morning for breakfast. Three of the four sons participated in the firm established by their father. Their second son, Adolph, was chairman and managing director of Raphael Tuck and Sons, Ltd. until his death on 3 July 1926…

Raphael had received training in graphic arts in his home country; and, although he was not an artist himself, he had a flair for commercial art that prompted his interest in this new field. Upon coming to England, he caught the imagination of the public in such a way that he was able to create a new graphic arts business. He was so successful at it that, according to the The Times, he “opened up a new field of labor for artists, lithographers, engravers, printers, ink and paste board makers, and several other trade classes.”

Tuck’s continued to run very successful postcard competitions through the early 1900s with the focus changing to collectors of Tuck postcards rather than the artists whose work was depicted. The top part of the 1903 Tuck Exchange Register pictured above announces the second of Tuck’s prize competitions which began in 1900. The prize competitions aroused much interest. The first contest winner turned in a collection of 20, 364 cards over the 18-month duration of the contest. The second prize competition winner submitted 25, 239 cards. In 1914 the fourth prize competition was announced. The competitions were a novel and effective marketing technique.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, The Font (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series B
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, South East corner of Nave (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series B
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, The Pulpit (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series A
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, Roberts & Kitchener Memorials (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series B, South West Corner
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, Nave Mosaics (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series A
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, Credence Table and Pissina (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series A
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, S. E. Wall of Sanctuary (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series A
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, The East End (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series A
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

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Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: Segregation Story’ at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Exhibition dates: 15th November 2014 – 21st June 2015

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Airline Terminal, Atlanta, Georgia
1956
Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation

The more I see of this man’s work, the more I admire it.

A sense of history, truth and injustice; a sense of beauty, colour and disenfranchisement; above all, a sense of composition and knowing the right time to take a photograph to tell the story. It’s all there, right in front of us, in almost every photograph. Photographs of institutionalised racism and the American apartheid, “the state of being apart”, laid bare for all to see.

From the languid curl and mass of the red sofa on which Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton, Mobile, Alabama (1956) sit, which makes them seem very small and which forms the horizontal plane, intersected by the three generations of family photos from top to bottom – youth, age, family … to the blank stare of the nanny holding the white child while the mother looks on in Airline Terminal, Atlanta, Georgia (1956). I love the amorphous mass of black at the right hand side of the this image. From the neon delightful, downward pointing arrow of ‘Colored Entrance’ in Department Store, Mobile, Alabama (1956) to the ‘WHITE ONLY’ obelisk in At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama (1956). And so the story flows on like some great river, unstoppable, unquenchable…

But then we have two of the most intimate moments of beauty that brings me to tears as I write this, the two photographs at the bottom of the posting Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama (1956). Just look at the light that Parks uses, this drawing with light. And then the use of depth of field, colour, composition (horizontal, vertical and diagonal elements) that leads the eye into these images and the utter, what can you say, engagement – no – quiescent knowingness on the children’s faces (like an old soul in a young body). This is a wondrous thing.

Notice how the photographer has pre-exposed the sheet of film so that the highlights in both images do not blow out. Pre-exposing the film lessens the contrast range allowing shadow detail and highlight areas to be held in balance. Also notice how in both images the photographer lets the eye settle in the centre of the image – in the photograph of the boy, the out of focus stairs in the distance; in the photograph of the three girls, the bonnet of the red car – before he then pulls our gaze back and to the right of the image to let the viewer focus on the faces of his subjects. In both photographs we have vertical elements (a door jam and a telegraph post) coming out of the red colours in the images and this vertically is reinforced in the image of the three girls by the rising ladder of the back of the chair. Masterful image making, this push and pull, this bravura art of creation.

Surely, Gordon Parks ranks up there with the greatest photographers of the 20th century.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

.
Many thankx to the High 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. Many thanx also to Carlos Eguiguren for sending me his portrait of Gordon Parks taken in New York in 1985, which reveals a wonderful vulnerability within the artist.

Carlos Eguiguren (Chile, b. 1955)
Gordon Parks, New York
1985
4 x 5″ transparency film
© Carlos Eguiguren

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton, Mobile, Alabama
1956
Promised gift of The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation

This portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton Sr., aged 82 and 70, served as the opening image of Parks’s photo essay. The well-dressed couple stares directly into the camera, asserting their status as patriarch and matriarch of their extensive Southern family. Photography is featured prominently within the image: a framed portrait, made shortly after the couple was married in 1906, hangs on the wall behind them, while family snapshots, including some of the Thorntons’ nine children and nineteen grandchildren, are proudly displayed on the coffee table in the foreground.

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Department Store, Mobile, Alabama
1956
Promised gift of The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation

Joanne Wilson, one of the Thorntons’ daughters, is shown standing with her niece in front of a department store in downtown Mobile. The pair is impeccably dressed in light, summery frocks. The jarring neon of the “Colored Entrance” sign looming above them clashes with the two young women’s elegant appearance, transforming a casual afternoon outing into an example of overt discrimination. Notice the fallen strap of Wilson’s slip. Though this detail might appear discordant with the rest of the picture, its inclusion may have been strategic: it allowed Parks to emphasise the humanity of his subjects.

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama
1956
Promised gift of The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation

A group of children peers across a chain-link fence into a whites-only playground with a Ferris wheel. Although they had access to a “separate but equal” recreational area in their own neighbourhood, this photograph captures the allure of this other, inaccessible space. The children, likely innocent to the cruel implications of their exclusion, longingly reach their hands out to the mysterious and forbidden arena beyond. The pristinely manicured lawn on the other side of the fence contrasts with the overgrowth of weeds in the foreground, suggesting the persistent reality of racial inequality.

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama
1956
Promised gift of The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation

The Jim Crow laws established in the South ensured that public amenities remained racially segregated. These laws applied to schools, public transportation, restaurants, recreational facilities, and even drinking fountains, as shown here. The photograph documents the prevalence of such prejudice, while at the same time capturing a scene of compassion. Here, a gentleman helps one of the young girls reach the fountain to have a refreshing drink of water.

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-Shopping, Mobile, Alabama
1956
Promised gift of The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation

RARE PHOTOS BY GORDON PARKS PREMIERE AT HIGH MUSEUM OF ART

Featuring works created for Parks’ powerful 1956 Life magazine photo essay that have never been publicly exhibited.

The High Museum of Art presents rarely seen photographs by trailblazing African American artist and filmmaker Gordon Parks in Gordon Parks: Segregation Story on view November 15, 2014 through June 21, 2015.

The exhibition, presented in collaboration with The Gordon Parks Foundation, features more than 40 of Parks’ colour prints – most on view for the first time – created for a powerful and influential 1950s Life magazine article documenting the lives of an extended African-American family in segregated Alabama. The series represents one of Parks’ earliest social documentary studies on colour film. The High will acquire 12 of the colour prints featured in the exhibition, supplementing the two Parks works – both gelatin silver prints – already owned by the High. These works augment the Museum’s extensive collection of Civil Rights era photography, one of the most significant in the nation.

Following the publication of the Life article, many of the photos Parks shot for the essay were stored away and presumed lost for more than 50 years until they were rediscovered in 2012 (six years after Parks’ death). Though a small selection of these images has been previously exhibited, the High’s presentation brings to light a significant number that have never before been displayed publicly. As the first African-American photographer for Life magazine, Parks published some of the 20th century’s most iconic social justice-themed photo essays and became widely celebrated for his black-and-white photography, the dominant medium of his era. The photographs that Parks created for Life’s 1956 photo essay The Restraints: Open and Hidden are remarkable for their vibrant colour and their intimate exploration of shared human experience.

The images provide a unique perspective on one of America’s most controversial periods. Rather than capturing momentous scenes of the struggle for civil rights, Parks portrayed a family going about daily life in unjust circumstances. Parks believed empathy to be vital to the undoing of racial prejudice. His corresponding approach to the Life project eschewed the journalistic norms of the day and represented an important chapter in Parks’ career-long endeavour to use the camera as his “weapon of choice” for social change. The Restraints: Open and Hidden gave Parks his first national platform to challenge segregation. The images he created offered a deeper look at life in the Jim Crow South, transcending stereotypes to reveal a common humanity.

“Parks’ images brought the segregated South to the public consciousness in a very poignant way – not only in colour, but also through the eyes of one of the century’s most influential documentarians,” said Brett Abbott, exhibition curator and Keough Family curator of photography and head of collections at the High. “To present these works in Atlanta, one of the centres of the Civil Rights Movement, is a rare and exciting opportunity for the High. It is also a privilege to add Parks’ images to our collection, which will allow the High to share his unique perspective with generations of visitors to come.

A Day in the Life

For The Restraints: Open and Hidden, Parks focused on the everyday activities of the related Thornton, Causey and Tanner families in and near Mobile, Ala. The images present scenes of Sunday church services, family gatherings, farm work, domestic duties, child’s play, window shopping and at-home haircuts – all in the context of the restraints of the Jim Crow South.

Key images in the exhibition include:

Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton, Mobile Alabama (1956)
Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama (1956)
Department Store, Mobile Alabama (1956)
Airline Terminal, Atlanta, Georgia (1956)
Willie Causey, Jr., with Gun During Violence in Alabama, Shady Grove, Alabama (1956)

About Gordon Parks

Gordon Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas. He grew up poor and faced racial discrimination. Parks was initially drawn to photography as a young man after seeing images of migrant workers published in a magazine, which made him realise photography’s potential to alter perspective. Parks became a self-taught photographer after purchasing his first camera at a pawnshop, and he honed his skills during a stint as a society and fashion photographer in Chicago. After earning a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for his gritty photographs of that city’s South Side, the Farm Security Administration hired Parks in the early 1940s to document the current social conditions of the nation.

By 1944, Parks was the only black photographer working for Vogue, and he joined Life magazine in 1948 as the first African-American staff photographer. In 1970, Parks co-founded Essence magazine and served as the editorial director for the first three years of its publication. Parks later became Hollywood’s first major black director when he released the film adaptation of his autobiographical novel The Learning Tree, for which he also composed the musical score, however he is best known as the director of the 1971 hit movie Shaft. Parks received the National Medal of Arts in 1988 and received more than 50 honorary doctorates over the course of his career. He died in 2006

About The Gordon Parks Foundation

The Gordon Parks Foundation permanently preserves the work of Gordon Parks, makes it available to the public through exhibitions, books, and electronic media and supports artistic and educational activities that advance what Gordon described as “the common search for a better life and a better world.” The Foundation is a division of The Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation.

Press release from the High Museum of Art

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled, Alabama
1956
Collection of The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama
1956
Collection of The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Store Front, Mobile Alabama
1956
Collection of The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama
1956
Collection of The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Willie Causey, Jr., with Gun During Violence in Alabama, Shady Grove, Alabama
1956
Collection of The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama
1956
Collection of The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Black Classroom, Shady Grove, Alabama
1956
Promised gift of The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation

Although this photograph was taken in the 1950s, the wood-panelled interior, with a wood-burning stove at its centre, is reminiscent of an earlier time. Parks’s photograph of the segregated schoolhouse, here emptied of its students, evokes both the poetic and prosaic: springtime sunlight streams through the missing slats on the doors, while scraps of paper, rope, and other detritus litter the uneven floorboards. One of the Thorntons’ daughters, Allie Lee Causey, taught elementary-grade students in this dilapidated, four-room structure. After Parks’s article was published in Life, Mrs. Causey, who was quoted speaking out against segregation, was suspended from her job. She never held a teaching position again.

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

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

High Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals’ at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), Salem MA

Exhibition dates: 7th March – 21st June 2015

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
From the series I Remember Pittsburgh
1982
Nine gelatin silver prints
Greenwald Photograph Fund and Fine Arts Discretionary Fund
Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

I couldn’t resist. Another posting on the work of this extraordinary artist. I particularly like The Bewitched Bee (1986) and Who is Sidney Sherman?, replete with blond wig and fag hanging out of the mouth accompanied by very funny and perceptive text.

There is also a very interesting piece of writing on life and photography included in the posting, Real Dreams, from 1976.

Marcus

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Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“I’m not interested in what something looks like, I want to know what it feels like.”

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Duane Michals

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
The Bewitched Bee
1986
Thirteen gelatin silver prints with hand-applied text
5 x 7 in. (12.7 x 17.8 cm)

Michals uses photography to spin what amount to Ovidian legends, as in The Bewitched Bee, a sequence of thirteen images in which a young man stung by a bee grows antlers, wanders through the woods, and finally drowns in a sea of leaves.

The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) presents Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals, the first major U.S. retrospective of the artist’s work in 20 years. Through image sequences, multiple exposures and the overlay of handwritten messages and pigment, Duane Michals (b. 1932) pioneered distinctly new ways of creating and considering photographs. The last half-century of this artist’s prolific, trailblazing career is explored in a carefully selected presentation of more than 65 works. Organised by the Carnegie Museum of Art, Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals is on view at PEM from March 7 through June 21, 2015.

Michals’ career has been fuelled by his enduring curiosity about the human experience and has been defined by its continual creative exploration and reinvention. A self-taught practitioner, he emerged on the photographic scene in the 1960s, at a time when Ansel Adams’ austere mountain ranges and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s iconic street scenes ruled the day. Rather than journey outward to depict nature or patiently wait to capture a decisive moment, Michals sought a new method of expression for his psychological and imaginative vision. He worked with friends and acquaintances to stage sequences of photographs that sought to express things that cannot be seen directly, such as metaphysical reflections on the passage from life to death. Later, he added handwritten text to the images’ margins, further challenging the prevailing sanctity of the single pure photograph.

“For Michals, the need to authentically express himself trumped any interest in being accepted into the mainstream art world. His work charts fresh territory, creatively mixing philosophical rigour, surreal witticism and childlike playfulness with an unabashed sentimentality and nostalgic longing,” says Trevor Smith, PEM’s Curator of the Present Tense. “In Michals’ photographs we encounter an uncommon vulnerability as well as a resolute search for meaning and human connection.”

Raised in a steelworking family outside of Pittsburgh, Michals has explored familial and personal identity as a recurring theme. In a rarely exhibited 30-photograph sequence titled The House I Once Called Home (2003), the artist explores the abandoned three-story brick house where he spent his childhood. Each image is paired with poetic verse of remembrance and reflection to create an intimate photographic memoir and metaphysical scrapbook. Recent photographs are superimposed on historic images as the series toggles through time, space and memory. The home’s current dilapidated state contrasts with reveries of a formerly bustling family home and a rumination on the passage of time and the inevitable succession of generations.

Michals’ lifelong adventure with photography began on a trip to Russia in 1958. Borrowing a camera from a friend, he discovered a way to interact with people and tell stories. Shortly thereafter, Michals moved to New York City where he supported himself through work as a commercial photographer for Vogue, Esquire and Life magazines and took portraits of notable artists including Meryl Streep, Sting and Willem de Kooning. In the 1960s, Michals began his earliest experimental narrative sequences that were exhibited in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The curator of the show, William Burback, noted that “the mysterious situations Michals invents are posed and theatrical. Yet, they are so common to the urban condition that we have the illusion of remembering scenes and events experienced for the first time.” Later he began adding text to his photographs such as This Photograph Is My Proof (from 1974), which allowed him to tell stories and address feelings that could not be fully explored by photography alone.

Rather than take cues from his photographic contemporaries, Michals considers surrealist painters such as René Magritte, Balthus and Giorgio de Chirico to be his artistic heroes. Scratching out universal truths from the mystery of human experience, Michals has explained that his works are, “about questions, they are not about answers.” Over the decades, he has been at the forefront of exploring sexual identity and the struggles for gay rights. In his 1976 work, The Unfortunate Man, a model arches his back in anguish while the accompanying text reads: The unfortunate man could not touch the one he loved. It was declared illegal by the law. Slowly his fingers became his toes and his hands gradually became feet. He wore shoes on his hands to disguise his pain. It never occurs to him to break the law.

One of the constants of Michals’ career – from his classic narrative sequences to his more recent series of hand-painted tintypes – has been his preference for intimately scaled images with tactile surface treatments. These works, with their universal themes of memory, dreams, desire and mortality, draw the viewer closer and insist on their full engagement at an emotional level. Commenting on why Michals includes handwritten text on his images, he has said: “I love the intimacy of the hand. It’s like listening to someone speaking.”

Press release from the PEM website

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Andy Warhol
1972
© Duane Michals; The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Sting
1982
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery and the artist

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
The Great Photographers of My Time #2
1991
Gelatin silver print
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
The Unfortunate Man
1976
Gelatin silver print with hand-applied text
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Magritte at His Easel
1965
Gelatin silver print with hand-applied text

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Georgette and Rene Magritte
1965
Gelatin silver print with hand-applied text

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Self Portrait as a Devil on the Occasion of My Fortieth Birthday
1972
© Duane Michals
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Primavera
1984
© Duane Michals
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
From the series The House I Once Called Home
2002
Thirty gelatin silver prints with hand-applied text
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Randy Duchaine
Duane Michals, portrait with red nose
2015
Photo courtesy of Randy Duchaine

Real Dreams

by Duane Michals

Nothing is what I once thought it was. You are not what you think you are. You are nothing you can imagine.
I am a short story writer. Most often photographers are reporters. I am an orange.
They are apples.
One of the biggest cliches in photography is to say that he is a personal photographer.
We must touch each other to stay human. Touch is the only thing that can save us.
I use photography to help me explain my experiences to myself.
Some photographers literally shoot everything that moves, hoping somehow, in all that confusion to discover a photograph. The difference between the artist and the amateur is a sense of control. There is a great power in knowing exactly what you are doing, even when you don’t know.
We are all stars. We just don’t know it.
I practice being Duane Michals everyday – that’s all I know.
Most portraits are lies. People are rarely what they appear to be, especially in front of a camera. You might know me your entire lifetime and never reveal yourself to me. To interpret wrinkles as character is insult not insight.
Was there ever a 1956? What did I do in June 1971? What happened in 1956? I think that there was 1932.
The history of photography has not been written. You will write it. No one has photographed a nude until you have. No one has photographed a sequence or green pepper till you have. Nothing has been done until you do it.
There are no answers anymore.
Get (Edward) Weston off your back, forget (Diane) Arbus, (Robert) Frank, (Ansel) Adams, (Clarence) White, don’t look at photographs. Kill the Buddha.
I am my own hero.
Photography books have titles like “The Photographer’s Eye” or “The Vision of So and So” or “Seeing Photographers” – as if photographers didn’t have minds, only eyes.
Everything is going; yes, even you must go. Right now you are going. Right now!
I find myself talking to photographs. I see a photograph of a women and I ask, “Is that all you’re going to tell me?” I can see the long hair and costume. Is she a witch, a mother, kind, consuming? Does she believe anything? I want more.
As I write this, at this moment, thousands of people are dying, thousands are being born, the earth is totally alive with Spring lust, stars are exploding – my God!
It is the great unknowing that we all live in, that we call life, that I find overwhelming. And I think that I will never know, never.
I am the limits of my work. You are the limits of yours. This is a journey. We do not live here. When I say “I,” I mean We.
As soon as I say “now,” it becomes “then.”
It is very easy for photographers to fake. Just go out and photograph twenty Pizza Huts.
That’s all there is, change.
Some influences open doors and liberate, other influences close doors and suffocate.
Photography, particularly, is suffocating.
I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.

Photographers tell me what I already know. The recognition of the beautiful, bizarre, or boring (the three photographic B’s) is not the problem. You would have to be a refrigerator not to be moved by the beauty of Yosemite. The problem is to deal with one’s total experience, emotionally as well as visually. Photographers should tell me what I don’t know.
I find the limitations of still photography enormous. One must redefine photography, as it is necessary to redefine one’s life in terms of one’s own needs. Each generation should redefine the language and all its experiences in terms of itself.
The key word is expression – not photography, not painting, not writing. You are the event, not your parents, friends, gurus. Only you can teach yourself.
Everything we experience is in our mind. It is all mind. What you are reading now, hearing now, feeling now…
We’re all afraid of dying. We’ve already died. Look at your high school graduation picture, she’s dead! Just now, you died.
It is essential for me to be silly. If one is serious, one must also be foolish, to survive.
Trying to communicate one true feeling on my own terms is a constant problem.
I am compulsive in my preoccupation with death. In some way I am preparing myself for my own death. Yet if someone would put a gun to my stomach, I would pee my pants. All my metaphysical speculations would get wet.
When you look at my photographs, you are looking at my thoughts.
I am very attracted to the person of Stefan Mihal. He is the man I never became. We are complete opposites, although we were born at the same moment. If we should meet, we would explode. We are like matter and anti-matter. He is my shadow. I saved myself from him.
I only photograph what I know about, my life, I do not presume to know who blacks are or what they feel or bored suburban families or transvestites. And I never believe photographs of them staring into a camera.
I take nothing for granted. I can count on nothing. I am not sure where I once was certain. I don’t know what will be left by the time I’m fifty. That’s ok.
The sight of these words on a page pleases me. It’s like some sort of trail I’ve left behind, clues, strange marks made, that prove I was once here.
When I was about 9 ( the year my brother Tim was born), I would sit on the edge of my bed and be very still, long after the family had gone to sleep. I would try to find the “I” of “me.” I thought that if I would be very quiet, I might find that place inside that was “I.” I am still looking.
We are all a mental construction. Change our chemistry, our point of reference and reality changes.
I am a professional photographer and a spiritual dilettante: I would prefer to be a professional mystic and a dilettante photographer.
I remember the first time I sensed being lonely. I was about five at the time, living with my grandmother, and my best friend Art went away with his family. The afternoon loomed long and empty. I missed someone, I was empty. There was a lacking.
Only I am my enemy. My fear can stop me.
Never try to be an artist. Just do your work and if the work is true, it will become art.
“We must pay attention so as not to be deceived by the familiar.”
Things are what we will them to become.
It is important to stay vulnerable. To permit pain, to make mistakes, not to be intimidated by touching. Mistakes are very important, if we’re alert.
None of my photographs would have existed without my inventing them. These are not accidental encounters, witnessed on the street. I am responsible whether (Henri Cartier-) Bresson was there or not, those people would have had their picnic along the Seine. They were historical events.

There is not one photography. There is no photography. The only value judgment is the work itself. Does it move, touch, fill me?
Any one who defines photography frightens me. They are photo-fascists, the limiters.
They know! We must struggle to free ourselves constantly, not only from ourselves but especially from those who know.
It seems I am waiting for something to happen: and when it does, it will be difficult for me to imagine that I had ever been the person who is writing this. I will be someone else.
I am not interested in the perfect print. I am interested in a perfect idea. Perfect ideas survive bad prints and cheap reproductions. They can change our lives.
(If Duane wants to take pictures, he should do a study of laborers and farm workers and unwed mothers and make some social changes. Do something else – something noble. That’s what I’d do. – Stefan Mihal)
We have a way of making the most extraordinary experiences ordinary. We actually work at destroying miracles.
The best artists give themselves in their work. (Rene) Magritte was a gift, (Eugene) Atget, (Thomas) Eakins, (Odilon) Redon, (Bill) Brandt, (August) Sander(s), Balthus, (Giorgio) De Chirico, (Walt) Whitman, Cavafy. That’s all that there is to give. I am my gift to you, and you are your gift to me.
Most photographers photograph other people’s lives, seldom their own.
We must free ourselves to become what we are.
Photography describes to well.
Our parents protect us from death. But when they die, there is no one to stand between us and death.
I once thought that time was horizontal, and if I looked straight ahead, I could see next Thursday. Now I think it is vertical and diagonal and perpendicular. It’s all very confusing.
People believe in the reality of photographs, but not in the reality of paintings. That gives photographers an enormous advantage. Unfortunately, photographers also believe in the reality of photographs.
The most important sentences usually contain two words: I want, I love, I’m sorry, please forgive, please touch, I need, I care, thank you.
Everything is subject for photography, especially the difficult things of our lives: anxiety, childhood hurts, lust, nightmares. The things that cannot be seen are the most significant. They cannot be photographed, only suggested.
I would like to talk to William Blake and Thomas Eakins.

Duane Michals June 20, 1976 September 1, 1976

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Madame Schrödinger’s Cat
1998
From the series Quantum
© Duane Michals
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Paradise Regained
1968
Courtesy of the artis
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Carnegie Museum of Art

“Everything I did grew out of my frustration with the medium, the silence of the still picture,” he says, so he found the “wiggle room.” With sequences, he could add drama before and after the decisive moment. Having his subjects move created ethereal images and an awareness of time’s passage. Layering negatives challenged preconceptions.

Language, Michals says, has always been associated with photographs. A newspaper caption might tell you that 20 inches of snow fell on Boston or Vladimir Putin arrived by plane at the Olympics. “I write about what cannot be seen,” he says. “My text picks up where the photograph fails. This Photograph is my Proof, a “nice picture” of his cousin and new bride at Michals’ grandmother’s house, is metaphorically “out of focus” until Michals adds the text.

Michals uses a pen nib and ink to enhance his visual stories, writing in cursive or all capitals depending on his mood. “I like the handwriting, the texture.” He also collects original manuscripts. He describes himself as an intimist, a lover of diaries, books (he has three libraries at home in New York City), small pictures and intimacy. “My photographs whisper into the viewers’ eyes rather than shout. They say, ‘Come closer. I’ll tell you a secret.'”

Michals says he’s taken many professional risks, especially when presenting issues born of the gay community like isolation and illegal behaviour. “Remember, 20 or 30 years ago, marriage wasn’t even on the table,” he says. (Michals and Fred Gorrée, his partner of nearly 56 years, married in 2011, just days after same-sex marriage was legalised in New York.)

Unlike Robert Mapplethorpe, whom he says is more hardcore, Michals tends toward sentimentality and the legitimacy of the love between people of the same gender. “I’m not a typical gay person any more than I’m a typical person or photographer.”

That disdain for following established paths might explain why Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson are not among his heroes. “My sources for inspiration were anybody who contradicted my mind and opened my imagination,” Michals says, like Lewis Carroll, Magritte, Joseph Cornell and surrealists in general. “Ansel Adams did not open my imagination. He dealt with Yosemite and sunsets. I was interested in metaphysical ideas, what happens when you die.”

Extract from Lisa Kosan. “Meet Duane Michals,”on the PEM website 2nd March 2015 [Online] Cited 08/06/2015. No longer available online.

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Who is Sidney Sherman?
2000
© Duane Michals
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Peabody Essex Museum
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161 Essex Street
Salem, MA 01970-3783 USA
Phone: 978-745-9500, 866-745-1876

Opening hours:
Open Thursday – Monday, 10am – 5pm
Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays

Peabody Essex Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Nature/Revelation’ at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 31st March 2015 – 5th July 2015

Curator: Joanna Bosse

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Clearing winter storm, Yosemite National Park, California
1935
Gelatin silver photograph
56 x 71cm framed
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1980
© 2015 The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

This is a fascinating exhibition at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, one of the best exhibitions I have seen this year in Melbourne. Unlike the disappointing exhibition Earth Matters: contemporary photographers in the landscape at the Monash Gallery of Art this exhibition, which addresses roughly the same subject matter (climate change and its devastating impact on the earth’s many ecosystems; contemporary notions of nature and the sublime) is nuanced and fresh, celebrating “the unique capacity art has to cut through prevailing rhetoric to stimulate individuals both intellectually and emotionally in the face of current environmental issues.”

Every piece of art in this exhibition is emotionally, intellectually and aesthetically challenging. There is no “dead wood” here. As the press release states, “Nature/Revelation features international and Australian artists who are engaged with poetic and philosophical concerns, and whose work offers potentially enlightening experiences that energise our relationship to the natural world.” And it is true!

I spent over two hours on a couple of visits to this exhibition and came away feeling en/lightened in mind and body. From the formal beauty of Ansel Adams classical black and white photographs to the mesmerising, eternal video Boulder Hand (2012) by Gabriel Orozco; from the delightful misdirection of Mel O’Callaghan’s Moons to the liminal habitats of Jamie North; and from the constructed clouds of Berndnaut Smilde to the best piece in the exhibition, Jonathan Delafield Cook’s Sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) (2013, below) – every piece deserved its place in this exhibition. I would go as far as to say that Delafield Cook’s Sperm whale is the best piece of art that I have seen since Mark Hilton’s dontworry (2013) which featured in the Melbourne Now exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. The sheer scale and beauty of the work (with its graphite on canvas attention to detail) and that doleful eye staring out at the viewer, is both empowering and unnerving. It deserves to be in an important collection.

While nature and the world we live in offers moments of revelation, so did the art in this exhibition. The art possesses moments of wonder for the viewer. Kudos to curator Joanna Bosse and The Ian Potter Museum of Art for putting on a top notch show.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to the The Ian Potter Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan and The Ian Potter Museum of Art. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation photograph of the exhibition Nature/Revelation at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne showing work by Ansel Adams
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation photograph of the exhibition Nature/Revelation at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne showing work by Ansel Adams (right) and detail of Jonathan Delafield Cook’s Sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) (left)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation photograph of the exhibition Nature/Revelation at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne showing work Jonathan Delafield Cook’s Sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus), 2013
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Jonathan Delafield Cook (British, b. 1965)
Sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) (detail)
2013
Graphite on canvas
6 panels: 245 x 1200 cm overall
Courtesy the artist and Olsen/Irwin Gallery, Sydney
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jonathan Delafield Cook’s life size drawing of a Sperm Whale specimen possesses a haunting melancholy… [He] creates an encounter that recalls those between Ahab and Moby Dick immortalised in Hermann Melville’s famous novel. Being face-to-face, eye-to-eye with this majestic sentient being – distinguished for having the largest brain of any creature known to have lived on the Earth – is an awe-inspiring experience. The overwhelming enormity of scale and the panorama-like expanse of the whale’s skin rouse an acute awareness of our own small presence in the room (in the world).

Delafield Cook’s work belongs to the naturalist tradition, and his detailed charcoal drawing intensifies the physical qualities of the subject in a way that renders it both a forensic study and an otherworldly fantasy. The personal history of this sleek leviathan is writ large, like graffiti, on its skin: the abrasions, the exfoliations, scars and its ragged tail tell of unknown adventures in an environment that lies beyond our own experience, but one not exempt from degradation or environmental change.

Installation photograph of the exhibition Nature/Revelation at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne showing work by Ansel Adams (right)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Gabriel Orozco (Mexican, b. 1962)
Boulder Hand
2012
Video 54 seconds
Courtesy of the artist

Installation photograph of the exhibition Nature/Revelation at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne showing Mel O’Callaghan’s Moons (left) and the video Boulder Hand (2012) by Gabriel Orozco (right)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation photographs of the exhibition Nature/Revelation at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne showing Mel O’Callaghan’s Moons
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Mel O’Callaghan (Australian, b. 1975)
Moons (II)
2014
pigmented inkjet print
100 x 100 cm
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris, and Galeria Belo Galsterer, Lisbon

Climate change and its devastating impact on the earth’s many ecosystems is arguably today’s most critical global issue. Nature/Revelation celebrates the unique capacity art has to cut through prevailing rhetoric to stimulate individuals both intellectually and emotionally in the face of current environmental issues. Focusing on contemporary notions of nature and the sublime, the exhibition affirms that the world we live in offers moments of revelation, and that nature can provoke a range of associations – both fantastical and grounded – that profoundly affect us.

Nature/Revelation features international and Australian artists who are engaged with poetic and philosophical concerns, and whose work offers potentially enlightening experiences that energise our relationship to the natural world. Artists include Ansel Adams, Jonathan Delafield Cook, David Haines, Andrew Hazewinkel and Susan Jacobs, Jamie North, Mel O’Callaghan, Gabriel Orozco and Berndnaut Smilde. The exhibition also raises questions about concepts of nature and culture following the arguments of philosopher Timothy Morton.

This exhibition forms a key component of the ‘Art+climate=change’ festival presented by Climarte: arts for a safer climate. This festival of climate change related arts and ideas includes curated exhibitions at a number of museums and galleries alongside a series of keynote lectures and forums featuring local and international speakers.

The University of Melbourne, with the Potter as project leader, is the Principal Knowledge Partner of the Climarte program.

Text from The Ian Potter Museum of Art website

Installation photographs of the exhibition Nature/Revelation at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne showing David Haines’ Day & Night (right) and Jamie North’s Portal II and Slag bowl I & II (left)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

David Haines (Australian born England, 1966)
Day & Night
2005-2015
Two channel video projection
Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Cotter Gallery, Sydney

Throughout his practice – which comprises investigations into the elemental in carious media – David Haines explores sensation in both seen and unseen forms. He has a particular interest in latent energies, such as aromas, sound waves and electromagnetic currents.

Haines revisits the classic language of the sublime in his 2004 two-channel video installation Day & night. He presents dual images of the sublime: one an immense cliff face with a sea surging against its rocky base; the other a brooding cloudscape, its form gradually unfolding with a mesmeric momentum. The work is simultaneously serene and disturbing, and awakens that range of complex emotions that Kant named the ‘supersensible’ – beyond the range of what is normally perceptible by the senses. The over-riding emotional rush – the presentiment of danger – associated with this experience is a trademark of the sublime.

The abstract sense of danger shifts however when we notice the tiny figure clinging to the cliff face. The scene is abruptly divested of its fantastical quality (its symbolic power is suddenly made real), as we can’t help but identify with the solitary figure. No longer merely observers, we become participants in the scene before us. The perilous figure in Haines’ work provides a touchstone in terms of the overwhelming grandeur of nature. In the context of the exhibition, s/he could represent each of us as we confront the seemingly insurmountable environmental and humanitarian challenges resulting from the increasingly catastrophic effects of global warming.

Jamie North (Australian, b. 1971)
Portal II
2014
Cement, marble waste, limestone, steel slag, coal ash, plastic fibre, tree fern slab, various Australian native plants and Spanish moss
2 components: 107.0 x 26.0 x 26.0cm each
Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney

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Jamie North (Australian, b. 1971)
Slag bowl I & II
2013
Concrete, coal ash, steel slag, Australian native plants and moss
15 x 37 x 37cm each
Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Viewers often mistake Jamie North’s sculptures for actual relics. The sculptures are in fact carefully crafted to emulate liminal habitats where hardy plant species grow in inhospitable conditions. More than mere simulation, each work is itself a miniature ecosystem and has to be tended accordingly.

The sculptures are cast from materials that are commonly found in industrial settings (steel slag, coal ash, marble dust, and concrete) and include local native flora. The specifics of locality are important to North, and his work is a subtle investigation of local environmental systems and the character of place as well as the adaptability of nature in urban settings…

North has an interest in terraforming – the theoretical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of a planet to be similar to the biosphere of Earth. Here, he creates his own terraforms as a reflection on the environmental manipulations that taking place in the everyday.

Installation photographs of the exhibition Nature/Revelation at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne showing Berndnaut Smilde’s Nimbus – Probe  and Nimbus D’Aspremont (left) and Jamie North’s Portal II and Slag bowl I & II (right)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Berndnaut Smilde (Dutch, b. 1978)
Nimbus D’Aspremont
2012
Digital C-type print mounted on diabond
75 x 110cm
Courtesy the artist and Ronchini Gallery, London

Berndnaut Smilde (Dutch, b. 1978)
Nimbus – Probe
2010
Digital C-type print mounted on diabond
75 x 112cm
Courtesy the artist and Ronchini Gallery, London

The Ian Potter Museum of Art
The University of Melbourne,
Swanston Street (between Elgin and Faraday Streets)
Parkville, Melbourne, Victoria
Phone: +61 3 8344 5148

Opening hours:
The museum is closed for renovation

The Ian Potter Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860’ at Tate Britain, London

Exhibition dates: 25th February – 7th June 2015

Curators: Carol Jacobi, Curator, British Art 1850-1915, Tate Britain, Simon Baker, Curator, Photography and International Art, Tate, and Hannah Lyons, Assistant Curator, 1850-1915, Tate

“Salt prints are the very first photographs on paper that still exist today. Made in the first twenty years of photography, they are the results of esoteric knowledge and skill. Individual, sometimes unpredictable, and ultimately magical, the chemical capacity to ‘fix a shadow’ on light sensitive paper, coated in silver salts, was believed to be a kind of alchemy, where nature drew its own picture.”

These salted paper prints, one of the earliest forms of photography, are astonishing. The delicacy and nuance of shade and feeling; possessing a soft, luxurious aesthetic that is astounding today… but just imagine looking at these images at the time they were taken. The shock, the recognition, the delight and the romance of seeing aspects of your life and the world around you, near and far, drawn in light – having a physical presence in the photographs before your eyes. The aura of the original, the photograph AS referent – unlike contemporary media saturated society where the image IS reality, endlessly repeated, divorced from the world in which we live.

The posting has taken a long time to put together, from researching the birth and death dates of the artists (not supplied), to finding illustrative texts and biographies of each artist (some translated from the French). But the real joy in assembling this posting is when I sequence the images. How much pleasure does it give to be able to sequence Auguste Salzmann’s Terra Cotta Statuettes from Camiros, Rhodes followed by three Newhaven fishermen rogues (you wouldn’t want to meet them on a dark night!), and then the totally different feel of Fenton’s Group of Croat Chiefs. Follow this up with one of the most stunning photographs of the posting, Roger Fenton’s portrait Captain Mottram Andrews, 28th Regiment (1st Staffordshire) Regiment of Foot of 1855 and you have a magnificent, almost revelatory, quaternity/eternity.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Calvert Jones (Welsh, December 4, 1804 – November 7, 1877)
The Fruit Sellers
c. 1843
Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative

David Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Five Newhaven fisherwomen
c. 1844
Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative

David Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
The Gowan [Margaret and Mary Cavendish]
c. 1843-1844
Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative

Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860 is the first major exhibition in Britain devoted to salt prints, the earliest form of paper photography. The exhibition features some of the rarest and best early photographs in the world, depicting daily activities and historic moments of the mid 19th century. The ninety photographs on display are among the few fragile salt prints that survive and are seldom shown in public. Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860 opens at Tate Britain on 25 February 2015.

In the 1840s and 50s, the salt print technique introduced a revolutionary new way of creating photographs on paper. It was invented in Britain and spread across the globe through the work of British and international photographers – artists, scientists, adventurers and entrepreneurs of their day. They captured historic moments and places with an immediacy not previously seen, from William Henry Fox Talbot’s images of a modern Paris street and Nelson’s Column under construction, to Linnaeus Tripe’s dramatic views of Puthu Mundapum, India and Auguste Salzmann’s uncanny studies of statues in Greece.

In portraiture, the faces of beloved children, celebrities, rich and poor were recorded as photographers sought to catch the human presence. Highlights include Fox Talbot’s shy and haunting photograph of his daughter Ela in 1842 to Nadar’s images of sophisticated Parisians and Roger Fenton’s shell-shocked soldiers in the Crimean war.

William Henry Fox Talbot unveiled this ground-breaking new process in 1839. He made the world’s first photographic prints by soaking paper in silver iodide salts to register a negative image which, when photographed again, created permanent paper positives. These hand-made photographs ranged in colour from sepia to violet, mulberry, terracotta, silver-grey, and charcoal-black and often had details drawn on like the swishing tail of a horse. Still lifes, portraits, landscapes and scenes of modern life were transformed into luxurious, soft, chiaroscuro images. The bold contrasts between light and dark in the images turned sooty shadows into solid shapes. Bold contrasts between light and dark turned shadows into abstract shapes and movement was often captured as a misty blur. The camera drew attention to previously overlooked details, such as the personal outline of trees and expressive textures of fabric.

In the exciting Victorian age of modern invention and innovation, the phenomenon of salt prints was quickly replaced by new photographic processes. The exhibition shows how, for a short but significant time, the British invention of salt prints swept the world and created a new visual experience.

Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840 – 1860 is organised in collaboration with the Wilson Centre for photography. It is curated by Carol Jacobi, Curator, British Art 1850-1915, Tate Britain, Simon Baker, Curator, Photography and International Art, Tate, and Hannah Lyons, Assistant Curator, 1850-1915, Tate. ‘Salt and Silver’ – Early Photography 1840-1860 is published by Mack to coincide with the exhibition and will be accompanied by a programme of talks and events in the gallery.

Press release from the Tate website

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877)
Scene in a Paris Street
1843
Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative

By 1841, Talbot had dramatically reduced, from many minutes to just seconds, the exposure time needed to produce a negative, and on a trip to Paris to publicise his new calotype process he took a picture from his hotel room window, an instinctive piece of photojournalism. The buildings opposite are rendered in precise and exquisite detail, the black and white stripes of the shutters neat alternations of light and shade. In contrast to the solidity of the buildings are the carriages waiting on the street below; the wheels, immobile, are seen in perfect clarity, while the skittish horses are no more than ghostly blurs.

Florence Hallett. “Salt and Silver, Tate Britain: Early photographs that brim with the spirit of experimentation,” on The Arts Desk website, Wednesday, 25 February 2015 [Online] Cited 03/06/2015.

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877)
Nelson’s Column Under Construction, Trafalgar Square
1844
Salted paper print from a glass plate negative

This is the first exhibition in Britain devoted to salted paper prints, one of the earliest forms of photography. A uniquely British invention, unveiled by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839, salt prints spread across the globe, creating a new visual language of the modern moment. This revolutionary technique transformed subjects from still lifes, portraits, landscapes and scenes of daily life into images with their own specific aesthetic: a soft, luxurious effect particular to this photographic process. The few salt prints that survive are seldom seen due to their fragility, and so this exhibition, a collaboration with the Wilson Centre for Photography, is a singular opportunity to see the rarest and best early photographs of this type in the world.

“The technique went as follows: coat paper with a silver nitrate solution and expose it to light, thus producing a faint silver image. He later realised if you apply salt to the paper first and then spread on the silver nitrate solution the resulting image is much sharper. His resulting photos, ranging in colour from sepia to violet, mulberry, terracotta, silver-grey, and charcoal-black, were shadowy and soft, yet able to pick up on details that previously went overlooked – details like the texture of a horse’s fur, or the delicate silhouette of a tree.”

Priscilla Frank. “The First Paper Photographs Were Made With Salt, And They Look Like This,” on the Huffington Post website 03/06/2015 [Online] Cited 03/06/2015.

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877)
Cloisters, Lacock Abbey
1843

William Henry Fox Talbot (11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877)

William Henry Fox Talbot (11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877) was a British scientist, inventor and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuries. Talbot was also a noted photographer who made major contributions to the development of photography as an artistic medium. He published The Pencil of Nature (1844), which was illustrated with original prints from some of his calotype negatives. His work in the 1840s on photo-mechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. Talbot is also remembered as the holder of a patent which, some say, affected the early development of commercial photography in Britain. Additionally, he made some important early photographs of Oxford, Paris, Reading, and York.

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877)
Study of China
1844
© Wilson Centre for Photography

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877)
Plaster Bust of Patroclus
before February 1846
© Wilson Centre for Photography

John Beasly Greene (French-American, 1832-1856)
El Assasif, Porte de Granit Rose, No 2, Thébes
1854
Salted paper print from a waxed plate negative

John Beasly Greene (French-American, 1832-1856)

A French-born archeologist based in Paris and a student of photographer Gustave Le Gray, John Beasly Greene became a founding member of the Société Française de Photographie and belonged to two societies devoted to Eastern studies. Greene became the first practicing archaeologist to use photography, although he was careful to keep separate files for his documentary images and his more artistic landscapes.

In 1853 at the age of nineteen, Greene embarked on an expedition to Egypt and Nubia to photograph the land and document the monuments and their inscriptions. Upon his return, Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard published an album of ninety-four of these photographs. Greene returned to Egypt the following year to photograph and to excavate at Medinet-Habu in Upper Egypt, the site of the mortuary temple built by Ramses III. In 1855 he published his photographs of the excavation there. The following year, Greene died in Egypt, perhaps of tuberculosis, and his negatives were given to his friend, fellow Egyptologist and photographer Théodule Devéria.

Text from the Getty Museum website

James Robertson (British, 1813-1888) and Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832 – 29 January 1909)
Pyramids at Giza
1857
Photograph, salted paper print from a glass plate negative

James Robertson (British, 1813-1888)

James Robertson (1813-1888) was an English photographer and gem and coin engraver who worked in the Mediterranean region, the Crimea and possibly India. He was one of the first war photographers.

Robertson was born in Middlesex in 1813. He trained as an engraver under Wyon (probably William Wyon) and in 1843 he began work as an “engraver and die-stamper” at the Imperial Ottoman Mint in Constantinople. It is believed that Robertson became interested in photography while in the Ottoman Empire in the 1840s.

In 1853 he began photographing with British photographer Felice Beato and the two formed a partnership called Robertson & Beato either in that year or in 1854 when Robertson opened a photographic studio in Pera, Constantinople. Robertson and Beato were joined by Beato’s brother, Antonio on photographic expeditions to Malta in 1854 or 1856 and to Greece and Jerusalem in 1857. A number of the firm’s photographs produced in the 1850s are signed Robertson, Beato and Co. and it is believed that “and Co.” refers to Antonio.

In late 1854 or early 1855 Robertson married the Beato brothers’ sister, Leonilda Maria Matilda Beato. They had three daughters, Catherine Grace (born in 1856), Edith Marcon Vergence (born in 1859) and Helen Beatruc (born in 1861). In 1855 Robertson and Felice Beato travelled to Balaklava, Crimea where they took over reportage of the Crimean War from Roger Fenton. They photographed the fall of Sevastopol in September 1855. Some sources have suggested that in 1857 both Robertson and Felice Beato went to India to photograph the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion, but it is more probable that Beato travelled there alone. Around this time Robertson did photograph in Palestine, Syria, Malta, and Cairo with either or both of the Beato brothers.

In 1860, after Felice Beato left for China to photograph the Second Opium War and Antonio Beato went to Egypt, Robertson briefly teamed up with Charles Shepherd back in Constantinople. The firm of Robertson & Beato was dissolved in 1867, having produced images – including remarkable multiple-print panoramas – of Malta, Greece, Turkey, Damascus, Jerusalem, Egypt, the Crimea and India. Robertson possibly gave up photography in the 1860s; he returned to work as an engraver at the Imperial Ottoman Mint until his retirement in 1881. In that year he left for Yokohama, Japan, arriving in January 1882. He died there in April 1888.

Text from the Wikipedia website

James Robertson (British, 1813-1888)
Base of the Obelisk of Theodosius, Constantinople
1855
Salted paper print from a glass plate negative

Exhibition of intriguing images that charts the birth of photography

Another week, another photography show about death. It’s not officially about death, mind you; it’s officially about the years 1840 to 1860, when photographers made their images on paper sensitised with silver salts. The process was quickly superseded, but the pictures created this way have a beautiful artistic softness and subtlety of tone, quite apart from the fact that every single new photograph that succeeded represented a huge leap forward in the development of the medium. You see these early practitioners start to grasp the scope of what might be possible. Their subjects change, from ivy-covered walls and carefully posed family groups to more exotic landscapes and subjects: Egypt, India, the poor, war.

By the time you get to Roger Fenton’s portrait Captain Lord Balgonie, Grenadier Guards of 1855 you have an inkling of how photography is changing how we understand life, for ever. Balgonie is 23. He looks 50. His face is harrowed by his service in the Crimean War, his eyes bagged with fatigue, fear and what the future may hold. He survived the conflict, but was broken by it, dying at home two years after this picture was taken. That is yet to come: for now, he is alive.

This sense of destiny bound within a picture created in a moment is what is new about photography, and you start to see it everywhere, not just in the images of war. It’s in William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Great Elm at Lacock: a huge tree against a mottled sky, battered by storms. It’s in John Beasly Greene’s near-abstract images of Egyptian statuary, chipped, cracked, alien. And it’s in the portraits of Newhaven fisherwomen by DO Hill and Robert Adamson (their cry was ‘It’s not fish, it’s men’s lives’). In a world where death is always imminent, photography arrives as the perfect way to preserve life, and the perfect way to leave your mark, however fleeting.

Chris Waywell. “Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860,” on the Time Out London website 22 July 2015 [Online] Cited 18/12/2022

Eugene Piot (French, 1812-1890)
Le Parthénon de l’Acropole d’Athens
1852
Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative
© Wilson Centre for Photography

Eugène Piot was a French journalist, art critic, art collector and photographer. His pen name was Nemo. Piot was born in Paris.

Paul Marés (French)
Ox cart in Brittany
c. 1857
Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative

One of the most beautiful photographs in this exhibition is Paul Marès Ox Cart, Brittany, c. 1857. At first it seems a picturesque scene of bucolic tranquillity, the abandoned cart an exquisite study in light and tone. But on the cottage wall are painted two white crosses, a warning – apparently even as recently as the 19th century – to passers-by that the household was afflicted by some deadly disease. Photography’s ability to indiscriminately aestheticise is a dilemma that has continued to present itself ever since, especially in the fields of reportage and war photography.

Jean-Baptiste Frénet (French – Lyon, 31 January 1814 – Charly, 12 August 1889)
Horse and Groom
1855
Salted paper print from a glass plate negative
© Wilson Centre for Photography

Around 1850 Frénet meets in Lyon personalities involved in the nascent photography, and he has to discover this technique to reproduce the frescoes he painted in Ainay. Curious, he is passionate about this new medium that offers him a respite space in the setbacks he suffers with his painting.

Frénet applies the stereotyped views taken of the time involving heavy stagings and is one of the first to practice the instant, the familiar and intimate subject. Five years before Nadar he produces psychological portraits and engages in close-up. He sees photography as an art, the opinion which has emerged in the first issue of the magazine La Lumière (The Light), text of the young and ephemeral gravure company founded in 1851. Frénet open a professional practice photography in 1866 and 1867 in Lyon. Unknown to the general public, his photographic work was discovered in 2000 at the sale of his photographic collection, many parts were purchased by the Musée d’Orsay.

Translated from the French Wikipedia website

Edouard Denis Baldus (French, 1813-1889)
The Floods of 1856, Brotteaux Quarter of Lyon
1856
Photograph, salted paper print from a waxed paper negative
© Wilson Centre for Photography

In June 1856, in the midst of his work at the Louvre, Baldus set out on a brief assignment, equally without precedent in photography, that was in many ways its opposite: to photograph the destruction caused by torrential rains and overflowing rivers in Lyon, Avignon, and Tarascon. From a world of magnificent man-made construction, he set out for territory devastated by natural disaster; from the task of re-creating the whole of a building in a catalogue of its thousand parts, he turned to the challenge of evoking a thousand individual stories in a handful of transcendent images. Baldus created a moving record of the flood without explicitly depicting the human suffering left in its wake. The “poor people, tears in their eyes, scavenging to find the objects most indispensable to their daily needs,” described by the local Courier de Lyon, are all but absent from his photographs of the hard-hit Brotteaux quarter of Lyon, as if the destruction had been of biblical proportions, leaving behind only remnants of a destroyed civilization.

Daniel, Malcolm. “Édouard Baldus (1813-1889),” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000 [Online] Cited 16/12/2022

Auguste Salzmann (French, born April 14, 1824 in Ribeauvillé (Alsace) and died February 24, 1872 in Paris)
Terra Cotta Statuettes from Camiros, Rhodes
1863
© Wilson Centre for Photography

Auguste Salzmann (French, 1824-1872) painter, photographer and archaeologist who pioneered the use of photography in the recording of historic sites. He excavated archaeological material in Rhodes in collaboration with Alfred Biliotti.

David Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Newhaven fishermen
c. 1845
Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative
© Wilson Centre for Photography

Roger Fenton (British, 28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869)
Cossack Bay, Balaclava
1855

It is likely that in autumn 1854, as the Crimean War grabbed the attention of the British public, that some powerful friends and patrons – among them Prince Albert and Duke of Newcastle, secretary of state for war – urged Fenton to go the Crimea to record the happenings. He set off aboard HMS Hecla in February, landed at Balaklava on 8 March and remained there until 22 June. The resulting photographs may have been intended to offset the general unpopularity of the war among the British people, and to counteract the occasionally critical reporting of correspondent William Howard Russell of The Times. The photographs were to be converted into woodblocks and published in the less critical Illustrated London News. Fenton took Marcus Sparling as his photographic assistant, a servant known as William and a large horse-drawn van of equipment…

Despite summer high temperatures, breaking several ribs in a fall, suffering from cholera and also becoming depressed at the carnage he witnessed at Sebastopol, in all Fenton managed to make over 350 usable large format negatives. An exhibition of 312 prints was soon on show in London and at various places across the nation in the months that followed. Fenton also showed them to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and also to Emperor Napoleon III in Paris. Nevertheless, sales were not as good as expected.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Roger Fenton (British, 28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869)
Group of Croat Chiefs
1855
Salted paper print from a glass plate negative

Roger Fenton (British, 28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869)
Captain Mottram Andrews, 28th Regiment (1st Staffordshire) Regiment of Foot
1855
Salted paper print from a glass plate negative
© Wilson Centre for Photography

Roger Fenton (British, 28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869)
Cantiniére
1855
Salted paper print from a glass plate negative
© Wilson Centre for Photography

A woman who carries a canteen for soldiers; a vivandière.

Roger Fenton (British, 28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869)
Captain Lord Balgonie, Grenadier Guards
1855
Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative

If I had to choose a figure it would be the Franco-American, archaeological photographer John Beasly Greene. His career was short and dangerous, he died at 24, but he challenged the trend towards clarity that dominated his field. Instead, he used the limits of the medium – burn-out, shadow, halation and the beautiful grainy texture of the print itself – to explore the poetic ambiguity of Egyptian sites.

This revolutionary photographic process transformed subjects, still lifes, portraits, landscapes and scenes of daily life into images. It brings it’s own luxurious aesthetic, soft textures, matt appearance and deep rich red tones, the variations seen throughout this exhibition is fascinating to observe. It’s also an incredible opportunity to view the original prints in an exhibition format, which has never been done before on a scale like this before.

The process starts with dipping writing paper in a solution of common salt, then partly drying it, coating it with silver nitrate, then drying it again, before applying further coats of silver nitrate, William Henry Fox Talbot pioneered what became known as the salt print and the world’s first photographic print! The specifically soft and luxurious aesthetic became an icon of modern visual language.

The few salt prints that survive are rarely seen due to their fragility. This exhibition is extremely important to recognise this historical process as well as a fantastic opportunity to see the rarest and best up close of early photographs of this type in the world.

Anon. “Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860,” on the Films not dead website [Online] Cited 03/06/2015. No longer available online.

Félix Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon) (French, 6 April 1820 – 23 March 1910)
Mariette
c. 1855
Photograph, salted paper print from a glass plate negative
© Wilson Centre for Photography

Tournachon’s nickname, Nadar, derived from youthful slang, but became his professional signature and the name by which he is best known today. Poor but talented, Nadar began by scratching out a living as a freelance writer and caricaturist. His writings and illustrations made him famous before he began to photograph. His keenly honed camera eye came from his successful career as a satirical cartoonist, in which the identifying characteristic of a subject was reduced to a single distinct facet; that skill proved effective in capturing the personality of his photographic subjects.

Nadar opened his first photography studio in 1854, but he only practiced for six years. He focused on the psychological elements of photography, aiming to reveal the moral personalities of his sitters rather than make attractive portraits. Bust- or half-length poses, solid backdrops, dramatic lighting, fine sculpturing, and concentration on the face were trademarks of his studio. His use of eight-by-ten-inch glass-plate negatives, which were significantly larger than the popular sizes of daguerreotypes, accentuated those effects.

At one point, a commentator said, “[a]ll the outstanding figures of [the] era – literary, artistic, dramatic, political, intellectual – have filed through his studio.” In most instances these subjects were Nadar’s friends and acquaintances. His curiosity led him beyond the studio into such uncharted locales as the catacombs, which he was one of the first persons to photograph using artificial light.

Text from the Getty Museum website. For more information on this artist please see the MoMA website.

Lodoisch Crette Romet (1823-1872)
A Lesson of Gustave Le Gray in His Studio [Antoine-Emile Plassan]
1850-1853
24.2 x 17.7cm
Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative

Jean-Baptiste Frénet (French – Lyon, 31 January 1814 – Charly, 12 August 1889)
Women and girls with a doll
c. 1855
© Wilson Centre for Photography

John S. Johnston (American, c. 1839 – December 17, 1899)
One of Dr Kane’s Men [possibly William Morton]
c. 1857

John S. Johnston was a late 19th-century maritime and landscape photographer. He is known for his photographs of racing yachts and New York City landmarks and cityscapes. Very little is known about his life. He was evidently born in Britain in the late 1830s, and was active in the New York City area in the late 1880s and 1890s. He died in 1899.

William Morton

“Belief in the Open Polar Sea theory subsided until the mid-1800s, when Elisha Kent Kane set forth on a number of expeditions north with hopes of finding this theorised body of water. On an 1850s expedition organised by Kane, explorer William Morton, believing he discovered the Open Polar Sea, described a body of water containing…

“Not a speck of ice… As far as I could discern, the sea was open… The wind was due N(orth) – enough to make white caps, and the surf broke in on the rocks in regular breakers.”

Morton, however, did not find the Open Polar Sea – he found a small oasis of water. Morton’s quote is likely tinged with a desire to raise the spirits of his boss, Kane, who saw the Polar Sea as a possible utopia, an area brimming with life amidst a harsh arctic world.”

Keith Veronese. “The Open Polar Sea, a balmy aquatic Eden at the North Pole?” on the Gizmodo website 4/20/12 [Online] Cited 03/06/2015.

David Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Thought to be Elizabeth Rigby
c. 1844
Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative

Jean-Baptiste Frénet (French – Lyon, 31 January 1814 – Charly, 12 August 1889)
Thought to be a Mother and Son
c. 1855
Photograph, salted paper print from a collodion negative transferred from glass to paper support

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877)
The Photographer’s Daughter, Ela Theresa Talbot
1843-1844

Roger Fenton (British, 28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869)
Portrait of a Woman
c. 1854
Photograph, salted paper print from a glass plate negative

John Wheeley Gough (British, 1809-1862)

John Wheeley Gough Gutch (1809-1862) was a British surgeon and editor. He was also a keen amateur naturalist and geologist, and a pioneer photographer.

In 1851, Dr. Gutch gave up his medical practice to become a messenger for Queen Victoria, and he began photographing the many cities he visited on his diplomatic missions. During a trip to Constantinople, he became seriously ill, resulting in permanent partial paralysis that ended his public service career. While undergoing experimental treatments in Malvern, England, Dr. Gutch again turned to photography as a cure for his melancholy. His works were exhibited throughout London and Edinburgh from 1856-1861, and he became a frequent contributor to the Photographic Notes publication. Dr. Gutch’s camera of choice was Frederick Scott Archer’s wet-plate camera because he liked the convenience of developing glass negatives within the camera, which eliminated the need for a darkroom. However, the camera proved too cumbersome for him to handle, and had to be manipulated by one of his photographic assistants. His photographs were printed on salt-treated paper and were placed into albums he painstakingly decorated with photographic collages.

Dr. Gutch’s “picturesque” photographic style was influenced by artist William Gilpin. Unlike his mid-nineteenth century British contemporaries who recorded urban expansion, he preferred focusing on ancient buildings, rock formations, archaeological ruins, and tree-lined streams. In 1857, an assignment for Photographic Notes took him to Scotland, northern Wales, and the English Lake District, where he photographed the lush settings, but not always to his satisfaction. Two years’ later, he aspired to photograph and document the more than 500 churches in Gloucestershire, a daunting and quite expensive task. He fitted his camera with a Ross Petzval wide-angle lens and managed to photograph more than 200 churches before illness forced him to abandon the ambitious project. Fifty-three-year-old John Wheeley Gough Gutch died in London on April 30, 1862.

Anonymous text. “John Wheeley Gough Gutch,” on the Historic Camera website Nd [Online] Cited 03/06/2015.

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877)
The Great Elm at Lacock
1843-1845
Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative
© Wilson Centre for Photography

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United Kingdom
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