September 2015Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Exhibition: ‘Colour my world: handcoloured Australian photography’ at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Exhibition dates: 3rd April – 30th September 2015

Micky Allan (Australian, b. 1944)
The prime of life no.3 (blond woman wearing sun glasses)
1979
From a series of 12 hand coloured photographs Mountain Lagoon, Sydney Blue Mountains, New South Wales 1979
Gelatin silver photograph, hand-coloured in pencil and watercolour
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1981
© Micky Allan

There has always been a history of hand colouring in photography since its very early days – from daguerreotypes, through ambrotypes, cartes de visite, cabinet cards and on to commercial portrait photography from the 1920s-1960s. But I don’t believe there has ever been, in the history of photography, such a concentration of artists (mainly female) hand colouring photographs as in Australia in the 1970s-80s. If I know my history of photography, I would say that this phenomena is unique in its history. It did not occur in Japan, Europe or America at the same time.

The reasons for this explosion of hand colouring in Australia are many and varied. Most of the artist’s knew each other, or knew of each other’s work on the East coast of Australia, and it was a small, tight circle of artists that produced these beautiful photographs. Not many artists were “doing” traditional colour photography, basically because of the instability of the materials (you only have to look at the faded colour photographs of John Cato in the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection) and the cost of the process. Of course feminism was a big influence in Australia at this time but these photographs, represented in this posting by the work of Micky Allan and Ruth Maddison, are so much more than photographs about female emancipation.

Photography in Australia was moving away from commercial studios such as that of Athol Shmith and into art schools and university courses, where there was a cross-over between different disciplines. Most artists had darkrooms in their bathroom or outhouses, or darkrooms were in basements of university buildings. Speaking to artist Micky Allan, she said that these were exciting times. Allan had trained as a painter and brought these skills to the processes of photography. She observes, “There was an affinity to what you were doing, an immediacy of engagement. Taking photographs, the physicality of the print, their magnificent tonal range – which painting could not match – and then hand colouring the resultant prints, a hands on process that turned the images into something else, something different.” There was a cavalier approach to the process but also a learning atmosphere as well. So it was about doing anything that you wanted, you just had to do it.

Sue Ford was a big influence, in that she started working in series of work, not just the monolithic, singular fine art print. Perhaps as a reaction against the Americanisation of photography, these artists used vernacular photographs of people and places to investigate ways of being in the world. As Micky Allan observes, “My photography of babies and old people were more than being about domesticity, they were about what babies know when they arrive in the world, and how people react to ageing.” (For examples of Allan’s babies and old people photographs please see the exhibition Photography meets Feminism: Australian Women Photographer 1970s-80s). There was a connection to the print through the physicality of the process of printing and then hand colouring – a double dealing if you like – that emphasised the ordinary can be extraordinary, a process that changed one representation into another. And the results could be subtle (as in the delicate work of Janina Green) or they could be surreal, such as Allan’s The prime of life no.7 (man wearing sun glasses) (1979, below), or they could be both. But they were always stunningly beautiful.

This was a very hands on process, an observation confirmed by artist Ruth Maddison. “The process was like hand watering your garden, an intense exchange and engagement with the object. When I started I was completely untrained, but I loved the process. I just experimented in order to understand what medium does what on what paper surface. There was the beauty of its object and its physicality. I just loved the object.” Her series Christmas holiday with Bob’s family, Mermaid Beach, Queensland (1977/78, below), photographed over Christmas Day and several days afterwards, evidences this magical transformation. Vernacular photographs of a typical Australia Christmas holiday become something else, transformed into beautiful, atypical representations of family, friendship, celebration and life.

So there we have it: domesticity, family, friends, place, being in the world, feminism, craft, experimentation, surrealism, physicality of the object, beauty, representation, series of work and difference… a communion (is that the right word?) of intimate thoughts and feelings, especially on a spiritual level (although the artists probably would not say it) that changed how the they saw, and we see the world. Can you imagine how fresh and alive these images would have been in 1970s Australia? That they still retain that wonder is testament to the sensitivity of the artists, the tactility of the process and our responsiveness to that sense of touch.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Micky Allan (Australian, b. 1944)
The prime of life no.7 (man wearing sun glasses)
1979
From a series of 12 hand coloured photographs Mountain Lagoon, Sydney Blue Mountains, New South Wales 1979
Gelatin silver photograph, hand-coloured in pencil, colour pencils, watercolour and gouache
32.0 x 42.7cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1981
© Micky Allan

Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945)
Christmas holiday with Bob’s family, Mermaid Beach, Queensland
1977-1978
Gelatin silver photographs, colour dyes, hand-coloured
10.6 x 16.2cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1988

Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945)
Christmas holiday with Bob’s family, Mermaid Beach, Queensland
1977-1978
Gelatin silver photograph, colour pencils, fibre-tipped pen
10.6 x 16.2cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1988

Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945)
Jesse and Roger
1983
From the series Some men
Gelatin silver photograph, colour pigments, hand-coloured
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1983

Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945)
Jim and Gerry
1983
From the series Some men
Gelatin silver photograph, colour pigments, hand-coloured
39.6 x 26.5cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1983

Colour my world

Introduction

This is the first exhibition dedicated to a significant aspect of recent Australian art: the handcoloured photograph. It draws together new acquisitions and rarely seen works from the collection by Micky Allan, Ruth Maddison, Warren Breninger, Julie Rrap, Janina Green, Christine Barry, Fiona Hall, Miriam Stannage, Robyn Stacey, Nici Cumpston, Lyndell Brown, Charles Green and Jon Cattapan.

The handcolouring of images has a long history in photography. During the infancy of the medium in the mid nineteenth century, the practice of applying paint, dye or other media to a photograph added both lifelike colour to black-and-white pictures and longevity to images that faded quickly. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, handcolouring added economic value and artistic sensibility or corrected photographic mistakes. But, by the middle of the twentieth century, the practice had gone into decline, as photographers sought to maintain and fortify the virtuosity and technical purity of the modernist photographic print.

The 1970s saw a revival of handcolouring among a number of Australian photographers and it remains a significant aspect of contemporary practice. The artists included in this exhibition seek to create a direct connection between their experience and that of the viewer. They challenge the medium’s technical sameness by personalising the print and imbuing it with individuality and uniqueness as well as an intimacy, warmth and fallibility.

Challenging conventions

During much of the twentieth century, photography tended to engage with the medium’s technical integrity. Rhetoric about black-and-white photography’s very particular, direct relationship to the world, its technological origins and its highly idiosyncratic capacity to see the world in new ways positioned it in a conceptual space distinct from other kinds of pictures. With notable exceptions, those who dominated the scene worked in black and white. Colour photography (which was expensive) tended to belong to and be associated with the commercial realms of advertising and fashion.

In this climate, to bring colour into the image through handcolouring was an act of resistance. Anyone who took to their prints with colour pencils and brushes, in effect, disputed the so-called authority of black-and-white photography. And many did just this. For feminist photographers, handcolouring acknowledged the under-recognised history of women’s photographic work by remembering the women who were historically employed by studios as handcolourists.

Colouring by hand personalised the print, itself the product of technological processes, arcane knowledge and chemistry. The handcoloured photograph also created community: it engaged a direct connection between the photographer and his or her subjects, the sensual surface of the print and the viewer, a set of relationships staged and made manifest in the experience of the work itself.

Handcoloured photography as an aesthetic

While the disrupted surface of the handcoloured photograph may well have challenged the conventions of ‘classic’ photography during the 1970s, it became one of a set of tools used by artists during the 1980s to explore the medium as a studio practice and to interrogate the conventions of authorship and photographic transparency that had supported modernist photographic practice.

Artists such as Julie Rrap, Fiona Hall and Robyn Stacey created handmade work that presented highly personalised responses to some of the grand themes of Western art and culture. Hall tackled one of Western mythology’s points of origin, the Garden of Eden, in a series of hand-toned pictures that replaced pathos and grand narrative with irony and, through daubs of sepia, the patina of historical significance. Rrap took on art history’s archetypes of femininity and made them her own, while Stacey handcoloured photographs to modify many of the myths of popular culture and Australian history. Rrap’s and Stacey’s handcoloured originals were then rephotographed and printed in colour. By doing so, the works shifted from being unique prints – with references to the handmade, the artist’s studio and the careful rendering of places and times – to being images that resembled those found in the mass media.

Reconnecting with history and objects

Associated with the rapidly expanding use of digital photography in the 1990s and perhaps in response to the immateriality of photography today (images are now mostly taken, stored and shared electronically), we have seen a reconnection with the medium’s history and a return to the photographic object in contemporary practice. Handcolouring draws our attention to materiality and re-introduces tactility to the photographic experience. It also engages community in a very particular way, establishing social ties between makers and between artists and viewers. Handcolouring demonstrates that even though digitisation has impacted significantly on the accessibility and scale of contemporary practice, many of photography’s rituals, motivations and pleasures remain the same.

For the artists included in this exhibition, handcolouring connects them to the history of photography in strategic ways. Nici Cumpston handcolours large-scale landscapes of the Murray-Darling river system as a way of documenting traces of Indigenous occupation and use and of bringing to our attention the decline of the area’s delicately balanced ecosystems. The handcoloured works of collaborators Charles Green, Lyndell Brown and Jon Cattapan remind us that an essential part of the experience of photography has always been the embodied, social experience of it. For Janina Green, the act of handcolouring prints allows her to engage with and remember the medium’s history of cross-cultural innovation.

Wall text (same text on the website)

Julie Rrap (born Lismore, New South Wales 1950; lives and works Sydney)
Puberty
1984
From the series Persona and shadow
Direct positive colour photograph
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Kodak (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund 1984

This photograph is from the series of nine works titled Persona and shadow. Julie Rrap produced this series after visiting a major survey of contemporary art in Berlin (Zeitgeist, 1982) which only included one woman among the 45 artists participating in the exhibition. Rrap responded to this curatorial sexism with a series of self-portraits in which she mimics stereotypical images of women painted by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Each pose refers to a female stereotype employed by Munch: the innocent girl, the mother, the whore, the Madonna, the sister, and so on.

Appropriating the work of other artists is one of the strategies that characterises the work of so-called ‘postmodern’ artists active during the 1980s. The practice of borrowing, quoting and mimicking famous artworks was employed as a way of questioning notions of authenticity. Feminist artists tended to use appropriation to specifically question the authenticity of male representations of females. In more straightforward terms, Rrap reclaims Munch’s clichéd images of women and makes them her own. Rrap ultimately becomes an imposter, stealing her way into these masterpieces of art history, but the remarkable thing about these works is the way that the artist foregrounds the process of reappropriation itself. The procedure of restaging, collage, overpainting, and rephotographing becomes part of the final image, testifying to a do-it-herself politic.

Miriam Stannage (Australian, 1939-2016)
The flood from the series News from the street
1984
Gelatin silver photograph, colour dye
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1990
© Miriam Stannage

Miriam Stannage (Australian, 1939-2016)
War from the series News from the street
1984
Gelatin silver photograph, colour dye
40.6 x 50.8cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1990
© Miriam Stannage

Miriam Stannage (1939-2016) was an Australian conceptual artist. She was known for her work in painting, printmaking and photography, and participated in many group and solo exhibitions, receiving several awards over her career. Her work was also featured in two Biennales and two major retrospective exhibitions. …

Throughout her almost 50-year career, Stannage produced a varied and eclectic body of work, encompassing collage, photography, print-making, and text-based works. Stannage first rose to prominence through the 1982 Sydney Biennale and the 1992 Adelaide Biennale, as well as her solo shows at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Curtin University, as well as being declared a ‘State Living Treasure’ in Western Australia. Over the course of her career, Stannage received several awards including the Albany Art Prize, the Georges Invitation Art Prize for drawing and the Power Institute residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Seven of Stannage’s works have been featured in the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art.

Stannage favoured simple structure and minimal use of form in her works, opting instead for text and collaged tableaux. She has been described as having ‘minimalist sensibilities.’

Her subject matter was engaged with contemporary events and news reportage, often utilising and subverting the visual language of newspapers and magazines. While her body of work is extensive, Stannage’s works always maintained their collage aesthetic, and were always founded upon her ongoing exploration of existential themes such as mortality, the spiritual and a quest for the meaning of life. Her work often centres the uncomfortable and emotive, in particular the heightened emotional impacts of conflict, destruction and disasters.

In 2001, following the September 11 attacks, Stannage shifted her focus strictly to the event, making works which spoke to the random nature of terrorist attacks and the interplay of monotony and death. In response to the attacks, she produced a collection of postage stamps which centred on concepts of stilled time, such as a clock face frozen at the moment of impact.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Janina Green (Essen, Germany born 1944; Australia from 1949)
Untitled [Washing in basket]
1988
Gelatin silver photograph, photo oils
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1989

Janina Green (Essen, Germany born 1944; Australia from 1949)
Untitled [White cup on tray]
1988
Gelatin silver photograph, photo oils
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1989

Nici Cumpston (Australian, b. 1963)
Barkindji/Paakintji peoples
Scar tree, Fowler’s Creek
2011
From the series having-been-there
Archival inkjet print hand coloured with synthetic polymer paint
98 x 177cm
Collection of the artist/Courtesy of the artist

Nici Cumpston (Australian, b. 1963)
Barkindji/Paakintji peoples
Campsite V, Nookamka Lake
2008
Inkjet print on canvas, hand-coloured with pencil and watercolour
77 x 206cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2011

The once rich and thriving environment of the Murray and Darling River system with its clear waterways, lush flora and abundant fauna was home to the Barkindji, Muthi Muthi and Nyampa peoples.

The shallow Nookamka Lake (Lake Bonney), which connects to the Murray River in South Australia, is the subject of Nici Cumpston’s recent photographic series. However, the series is not of a lush utopia but of the degradation and erosion that has consumed the lake since the forced irrigation flooding of the waterways in the early 1900s.

When damming ceased in 2007, the water began to subside, slowly revealing the original landscape and the history of human occupation. Cumpston beautifully documents this stark landscape and the demise that salinisation and destructive water management practices have wrought on the people and their lands. Today, the landscape is desolate, scattered with twisted and broken trees stripped of their foliage like majestic sentinels in deathly poses. The trees still bare the scars – although obscured by dark tidelines – where canoes, containers and shields were cut from their trunks.

Cumpston highlights these clues to the area’s original inhabitants through the delicate and precise hand-watercolouring of the printed black-and-white photographs on canvas. She does not aim to replicate the original colours of the landscape, as a colour photograph would, but to interpret it, re-introducing the Aboriginal presence within the landscape – a subtle reconnection to Country and reminder of past cultural practices and knowledge. As the artist says, “I am finding ways to talk about connections to country and to allow people to understand the ongoing connections that Aboriginal people maintain with their traditional lands.”

Tina Baum
Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art
Art Gallery of New South Wales

Warren Breninger (Australian, b. 1948)
Expulsion of Eve [No.3]
1978
Gelatin silver photograph, chinagraph, decal lettering gelatin silver photograph
49.7 x 36.7cm
Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant 1982

Warren Breninger (Australian, b. 1948)
Expulsion of Eve [No.12]
1978
Type C colour photograph, ink, crayon
49.8 x 37cm
Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant 1982

Warren Breninger (Australian, b. 1948)
Expulsion of Eve [No.15]
1978
Photograph, gum arabic print, acrylic paint, crayon, pencil
49.8 x 37cm
Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant 1982

The Expulsion of Eve series is in essence a single work which the artist returns to continually to develop and re-work the same image. ‘Number 16’, highly indicative of the series, is a photographic image of a young woman, the print having undergone many transformative processes including being cut out, reapplied, incised, worn back, applied with colour, stripped of colour and re-drawn. Interrogating notions of reality, Breninger expresses his personal and artistic concerns relating to ‘the rift between appearances and what is real’; ideas informed by his deep Christian faith.1

His subject, Eve, is not chosen symbolically as a female archetype; rather, the artist reasons, “because I believe in her historically and all humanity is her descendents”.2 Breninger’s Eve, in her features and expression, suggests a presence caught between the worlds of childhood and adulthood, innocence and intent, the temporal and corporeal. While there is a Christ-like surrender in the pose, Breninger’s Eve also has a strong correlation with Edvard Munch’s ‘Madonna’, both visually and in terms of the obsessive process by which the artist revisits the image.

The artist’s belief that ‘cameras create an appetite for ghosts, for vapour, for beings of steam that we can never embrace, that will elude us like every photo does’,3 explains his intrigue with photography’s abilities and limitations in recording the subjective. He continued to develop the work with series III produced in 1990, followed in 1993-94 by series IV, comprising male and female faces.

1/ Breninger W 1983, ‘Art & fulfilment’, self-published artist’s essay p. 1
2/ Warren Breninger in correspondence with Sue Smith, 24 Feb 1984, collection files, Warren Breninger, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
3/ Breninger W 1983, op cit p. 3

Christine Barry (Australian, b. 1954)
Packaged Deal
1986/1996
From the series Displaced Objects
Direct positive colour photograph/Type C photographic print
50cm x 50cm/127cm x 127cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Christine Barry (Australian, b. 1954)
Untitled (Patricia Marczak)
1986-1987
From the series Displaced Objects
Direct positive colour photograph/Type C photographic print
51.1 x 50.7cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Christine Barry (Australian, b. 1954)
Untitled (Self portrait)
1986
From the series Displaced Objects
Direct positive colour photograph/Type C photographic print
50.8 x 50.7cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Janina Green (Essen, Germany born 1944; Australia from 1949)
Maid in Hong Kong #11
2008
From the series Maid in Hong Kong
Gelatin silver photograph, colour dyes gelatin silver photograph
Image and sheet 76 x 60cm
Gift of Wilbow Group PTY LTD Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Robyn Stacey (Australian, b. 1952)
Untitled
1985-1987
Gelatin silver photograph, colour dye
Collection of the artist
Courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

National Gallery of Australia
Parkes Place, Canberra
Australian Capital Territory 2600
Phone: (02) 6240 6411

Opening hours:
Open daily 10.00am – 5.00pm
(closed Christmas day)

National Gallery of Australia website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust’ at the Royal Academy of Arts, London

Exhibition dates: 4th July – 27th September 2015

The Sackler Wing of Galleries

Hans Namuth (American born Germany, 1915-1990)
Joseph Cornell
1969
Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
© 1991 Hans Namuth Estate

Now, Voyager

“The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,
Now, voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.”

Walt Whitman (1819-1892). “Untold Want,” from Leaves of Grass. 1900

Joseph Cornell is my favourite artist who has ever lived on this Earth. I do not make this observation lightly, but after much consideration, thought and reflection.

I have always loved his work, from the very first time I saw it in a book. To then see a recreation of one of his 1950s exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001 was one of those seminal moments where you are lifted out of yourself, where your life becomes forever changed. For me that transcendent experience is up there with being alone with the Rembrandt portraits in the Louvre for 10 precious minutes. Both were among the most exquisite, poignant and beautiful spiritual experiences I have had in my life.

I am not an expert on Cornell, although I have read many books on his work and on his spirituality. He saw himself as an “armchair voyager”, a bit like a latter day Baudelaire, a man who has romantic notions of travel but never actually goes anywhere, who has romantic notions of love but never finds it, except in his imagination. Cornell never left his native New York. Cornell expressed his self through a passion for the artefacts he collected, through his assemblage of those artefacts into magical boxes that addressed unrequited love and faith – for Hollywood and movie stars, ballerinas, hotels, birds, the Renaissance, princes and princesses, the stars, games and chance. He was an avid collector, rummaging through the junk shops of New York and storing his collectibles for his art, something to which I have an affinity, being an avid op shopper (or thrift shopper) myself.

Here I can see an association with the words of Walt Whitman in his lines “Untold Want” from Leaves of Grass, those lines forming the title for the book upon which the film Now Voyager (1942) with Bette Davis was based. “The untold want” of Whitman’s lines are whatever you yearn for and cannot get in the social context (“life”) and place (“land”) where you are born. Whitman says, stop “studying the charts,” and “now obey, thy cherish’d, secret wish,” – in other words he’s saying that your heart’s desire is the best indicator of where your destiny lies, but it is possible to miss out on it by not going for it. Fast forward to Now Voyager where frumpy Bette Davis has an affair with a married man, becomes independent, defies her tyrannical mother who promptly dies, and ends up circuitously looking after her lover’s daughter. They decide to have a platonic relationship “sustaining a romantic, unconsummated relationship and creating a ‘family’ by becoming the surrogate, adoptive care-giver for his daughter.”

There is a specific desire here. Davis and Whitman are freed to love without restriction in a romantic way, and after the end of Now Voyager, perhaps Cornell is channelling Bette Davis. He loved in his mind, he created boxes in his imagination (and then physically), he astral travelled through the stars, he created games of chance (such as penny arcades and slot machines) and shooting galleries (that exposed his inner mind) letting the air rush out into the world. He created surreality itself but he was never surreal, for his work is always based on the collision of realities. His boxes are tiny cosmos, like the Tardis from Dr Who, the interior (under a microscope, within four walls) larger than the exterior … yet, magically, they inhabit the whole world, they inhabit our mind. He used the alchemical reaction of elements, the elementary, to affect travel, love, life and change. And he did it in four dimensions for his boxes affect us as much today as he did when he created them. Perhaps that is why I like his work so much… he used seemingly mundane materials, multi/media objects, imagination and love to let’s our spirits soar into the universe. No other artist has ever affected me so much. No one ever will.

Undeniably, Cornell’s poetic theatres are joyous creations that free our soul from the everyday.

Perhaps it is through love, or in death, or the afterlife, that the Voyager can seek that untold want.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

My Mind to me a Kingdom Is

Sir Edward Dyer (1543-1607)

1 My mind to me a kingdom is;
2 Such perfect joy therein I find
3 That it excels all other bliss
4 Which God or nature hath assign’d.
5 Though much I want that most would have,
6 Yet still my mind forbids to crave.

7 No princely port, nor wealthy store,
8 No force to win a victory,
9 No wily wit to salve a sore,
10 No shape to win a loving eye;
11 To none of these I yield as thrall, –
12 For why? my mind despise them all.

13 I see that plenty surfeit oft,
14 And hasty climbers soonest fall;
15 I see that such as are aloft
16 Mishap doth threaten most of all.
17 These get with toil and keep with fear;
18 Such cares my mind can never bear.

19 I press to bear no haughty sway,
20 I wish no more than may suffice,
21 I do no more than well I may,
22 Look, what I want my mind supplies.
23 Lo ! thus I triumph like a king,
24 My mind content with anything.

25 I laugh not at another’s loss,
26 Nor grudge not at another’s gain;
27 No worldly waves my mind can toss;
28 I brook that is another’s bane.
29 I fear no foe, nor fawn on friend,
30 I loathe not life, nor dread mine end.

31 My wealth is health and perfect ease,
32 And conscience clear my chief defence;
33 I never seek by bribes to please,
34 Nor by desert to give offence.
35 Thus do I live, thus will I die, –
36 Would all did so as well as I!

Many thankx to the Royal Academy of Arts for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the art work. The excellent, educational text was written by Asha McLoughlin, Learning Department © Royal Academy of Arts.

Bette Davis ~ Don’t Let’s Ask For The Moon (Now Voyager 1942)

“Cornell was a voyager, travelling through space and time to dimensions of the imagination and the spirit. He infused this sense of adventure and an infinite beyond into modestly scaled works whose fragments of reality give way to worlds to be explored.”

Robert Lehrman, Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay Eterniday, 2003

“White is just what I mean. Not monstrously, but in wonderful variations. All I want to perform is white magic.”

Joseph Cornell quoted in Tracking the Marvellous: A Life in the New York Art World, John Bernard Myers, 1984

Unidentified photographer
The Cornell family
c. 1915
Joseph Cornell (far right) with his parents (Joseph I. Cornell, Sr. and Helen Storms Cornell) and siblings (l to r: Elizabeth, Helen, and Robert)
Joseph Cornell papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Cornell’s basement studio, 3708 Utopia Parkway, Flushing, New York, 1964
Collection Duff Murphy and Janice Miyahira
© Terry Schutté

“What kind of man is this, who, from old brown cardboard photographs collected in second-hand bookstores, has reconstructed the nineteenth century “grand tour” of Europe for his mind’s eye more vividly than those who took it, who was not born then and has never been abroad, who knows Vesuvius’s look on a certain morning of AD 79, and of the cast-iron balconies of that hotel in Lucerne?”

Robert Motherwell on Joseph Cornell, Joseph Cornell’s Theatre of the Mind, 1993

“He uses selected, sought-for, desired objects. He must have been clipping all the time, poring through magazines, collecting things and haunting junk shops and flea markets, looking for the images that corresponded to his imagination.”

Susan Sontag, Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box, directed by Mark Stokes, 1991

Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977)
Joseph Cornell, New York
1933
Vintage photograph
‘Joseph Cornell, New York Studio, New York, USA 1933’ by Lee Miller (96-2)
© Lee Miller Archives, England 2015. All rights reserved

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Untitled (Schooner)
1931

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Untitled [Sagittarius, Scorpio, and Lupus Constellations]
c. 1934
Collage with ink on paper
14 x 18.6cm
Drs. Steven and Sara Newman. Photo Collection of Drs. Steven and Sara Newman, Chicago, Illinois, USA
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Untitled (M’lle Faretti)
1933
Box construction
27.9 x 20.3 x 5.1cm
Private Collection
Photo: Michael Tropea, Chicago
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Object (Soap Bubble Set)
1936
Box construction

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Object (Soap Bubble Set)
1941
Box construction
46.4 x 31.4 x 9.5cm
The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, Courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015
Photo: Quicksilver Photographers, LLC. Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Object (Soap Bubble Set) (detail)
1941
Box construction
46.4 x 31.4 x 9.5cm
The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, Courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015
Photo: Quicksilver Photographers, LLC. Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Pharmacy
1943
Box construction
38.7 x 30.5 x 7.9cm
Collection Paul Schärer
Photo Dominique Uldry, Bern
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/ DACS, London 2015

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Pharmacy (detail)
1943
Box construction
38.7 x 30.5 x 7.9cm
Collection Paul Schärer
Photo Dominique Uldry, Bern
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/ DACS, London 2015

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Palace
1943
Box construction
Glass-paned, stained wood box with photomechanical reproduction, mirror, spray-painted twigs, wood and shaved bark
26.7 x 50.5 x 13cm
The Menil Collection, Houston
Photo: The Menil Collection, Houston. Photography: Hickey-Robertson
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Untitled (Tilly Losch)
c. 1935-1938
Box Construction
25.4 x 23.5 x 5.4cm
Collection of Robert Lehrman, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman
Photo: The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman. Photography: Quicksilver Photographers, LLC
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015

“Creative filing
Creative arranging
As poetics
As technique
As joyous creation”

Joseph Cornell, diary entry, 9 March 1959

“On the way to ART OF THIS CENTURY from Julien’s, carrying De Medici girl Slot Machine and bird with cracked glass saw Marlene Dietrich in polo coat and black beanie cap on back of hair waiting at curb of Jay Thorpe’s for a taxi. First time I’d seen her off screen and brought an unexpectedly elated feeling. Working in cellar that night on Soap Bubble Set the green glass locket portrait of her on the floor evoked very special feelings.”

Joseph Cornell, diary entry, spring 1944

“Original inspiration of the bird store, windows, simplicity of magic, pet shop.”

Joseph Cornell, c. 1943, Joseph Cornell Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Untitled Object (Mona Lisa)
c. 1940-1942
Box construction
3.5 x 7.6cm
The Collection of Marguerite and Robert Hoffman
Photo: Brad Flowers
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Untitled (Owl Habitat)
c. mid- to late 1940s
Collection Jasper Johns Photo Collection Jasper Johns
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015

“Some of his boxes are less cryptic, and more naturalistic, such as Untitled (Owl Habitat), from the 1940s. The snowy owl trapped behind a pane of glass is not a fancy piece of taxidermy fit for a natural history diorama, but a mere paper illustration pasted onto plywood. The midnight-blue forest the owl inhabits is contrived from painted bark and lichen. Cornell, of course, was himself a famous night owl. In some ways the owl box can seem as close as he ever came to self-portraiture, with its majestic creature alone in the woods, eyes wide, watching.”

Deborah Solomon, May 2015

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery
1943
Mixed media
39.4 x 28.3 x 10.8cm
Purchased with funds from the Coffin Fine Arts Trust; Nathan Emory Coffin Collection of the Des Moines Art Center, 1975.27
Photo: Collection of the Des Moines Art Center
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Soap Bubble Set
1948
Box construction
36.8 x 52.1 x 9.8cm
Mr. and Mrs. John Stravinsky
Photo © 2014 Christie’s Images Limited
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Andromeda: Grand Hôtel de l’Observatoire
1954
Box construction
46.5 x 33 x 9.8cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Partial gift, C. and B. Foundation, by exchange, 1980
Photo © SRGF, New York
Photography: David Heald
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/ DACS, London 2015

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Andromeda: Grand Hôtel de l’Observatoire (detail)
1954
Box construction
46.5 x 33 x 9.8cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Partial gift, C. and B. Foundation, by exchange, 1980
Photo © SRGF, New York
Photography: David Heald
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/ DACS, London 2015

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Untitled (Medici Princess)
c. 1948
Box construction
44.8 x 28.3 x 11.1cm
Private collection, New York
Photo courtesy private collection, New York
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/ DACS, London 2015

Joseph Cornell and travel

The title of our Joseph Cornell exhibition is Wanderlust. Curator Sarah Lea describes how this theme is closely linked to Cornell’s artistic practice, and his travels of the imagination.

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Untitled (Celestial Navigation)
1956-1958
Box construction
30.8 x 43.2 x 9.2cm
The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman
Photo The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman
Photography: Quicksilver Photographers, LLC
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), born on Christmas Eve in Nyack, New York, remains one of the most enigmatic yet influential American artists of the twentieth century. Almost entirely self-taught as an artist, Cornell lived quietly for most of his life with his mother and younger brother, crafting in the confines of his basement or on the kitchen table the ‘shadow boxes’ for which he is best known.

He rarely travelled, and almost never left New York, yet his work, based on collage and assemblage, resonates with references to foreign places and distant times. In the course of his life he befriended ballerinas, film stars, poets and generations of world-famous artists. He showed in a succession of New York galleries, participated in landmark group shows at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was honoured before he died with major surveys at the Pasadena Museum of Californian Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

A popular romanticised image of Cornell pervades as an ascetic outsider – a shy, eccentric man yearning for intimacy, unable to converse with the women who enthralled him but with a vibrant interior life of daydreams and an imagination capable of crossing oceans, centuries and the celestial realm. Yet this mythologised version of the man belies his active interest in the art movements of his time, and the innovative nature of his creations which have paved the way for today’s appropriation and installation artists, contemporary collage and archive based practices.

This exhibition at the Royal Academy brings together 80 of Cornell’s most remarkable shadow boxes, assemblages, collages and films, including many works held in private collections and a number never seen before outside of the USA. The first major UK exhibition solely devoted to Cornell in almost 35 years, it presents a rare chance to experience a concentrated survey of his oeuvre, and to journey inside the mind of an artist who described himself as ‘an armchair voyager’. The ‘wanderlust’ referenced in the exhibition title – the desire to explore and travel the world – is central to Cornell’s art, as was his penchant for collecting and his astonishingly wide-ranging interests. His creations transport the viewer into private universes, populated with objects and ephemera imbued with personal associations.

From a basement in New York, Joseph Cornell channelled his limitless imagination into some of the most original art of the 20th century. Step into his beguiling world at this landmark exhibition. Cornell hardly ventured beyond New York State, yet the notion of travel was central to his art. His imaginary voyages began as he searched Manhattan’s antique bookshops and dime stores, collecting a vast archive of paper ephemera and small objects to make his signature glass-fronted ‘shadow boxes’. These miniature masterpieces transform everyday objects into spellbinding treasures. Together they reveal his fascination with subjects from astronomy and cinema to literature and ornithology and especially his love of European culture, from the Romantic ballet to Renaissance Italy.

Wanderlust brings together 80 of Cornell’s most remarkable boxes, assemblages, collages and films, some never before seen outside the USA. Entirely self-taught, the independence of Cornell’s creative voice won the admiration of artists from Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealists, to Robert Motherwell and the Abstract Expressionists, with echoes of his work felt in Pop and Minimalist art. Wanderlust is a long overdue celebration of an incomparable artist, a man the New York Times called “a poet of light; an architect of memory-fractured rooms and a connoisseur of stars, celestial and otherwise.”

Early Life

Joseph Cornell was the eldest of four children – he had two sisters, Elizabeth and Helen, and a brother, Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy and was confined to a wheelchair for most of his life. When Cornell was thirteen, his father died of leukaemia and Robert became Joseph’s responsibility (partly to assuage their overbearing mother). Robert however was a cheerful child and took pleasure in drawing and collecting model trains. Cornell considered Robert to be a pure soul, and willingly took on his brother’s care. A salesman and textile designer, Cornell’s father had left considerable debts for his family to manage and for several years Cornell’s mother was forced to take odd jobs to support the family, and move them into a succession of smaller rented houses. In 1917, with the help of his father’s former employer, Joseph was able to enrol at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts: a highly regarded private school. There he discovered an interest in American and European literature, poetry, history and French. Yet, away from his close knit family and after the relatively recent death of his father, Cornell struggled and was a mediocre student. He developed the first in a lifelong series of nervous crises and stomach problems, and left the Academy in 1921 without graduating.

Upon his return home, Cornell assumed the role of ‘man of the house’ and became a sample salesman in his father’s trade for a wholesale textile business, the William Whitman Company on lower Madison Avenue. Cornell found the job mundane and himself unsuited to its demands. In his twenties, a time when the stress of supporting his family was exacerbating his stomach ailments, he converted to Christian Science. This religion teaches that reality is purely spiritual and the material world an illusion, so disease and other afflictions associated with the physical body are thought to be manifestations of a troubled mind that ought to be treated with prayer, not medicine. Joseph remained an active member until his death and recruited his brother Robert and sister Elizabeth into the fold.

In 1929, Mrs Cornell moved the family to an unassuming house at 3708 Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, New York. Here, Cornell would live with his mother and brother until he died. His main escape from the tedium of domestic life and the awkward social interactions thrust upon him at work was to walk the city streets in his lunch hour, browsing the second-hand bookshops on Fourth Avenue, the flea markets and dime stores, collecting keepsakes and scavenging for relics and once-precious fragments of other people’s lives. Cornell loved to explore Manhattan and the ‘teeming life of the metropolis’, which seemed to him the epitome of glamour. These wanderings led to Cornell amassing a vast personal archive of treasured finds – books, prints, postcards and three-dimensional ephemera such as clay pipes and watch springs – often tinged with the romance of foreign places and the nostalgia of times past, which would in due course form the material elements of the very personal poetry that is his art.

Play and Experiment

Although he did not complete his formal education, Cornell was extremely well read and kept abreast of Manhattan’s literary, musical and artistic events. Not only did he regularly attend the theatre and the ballet, but he also became an avid cinema-goer, thriving on the excitement of the city. Indeed, Cornell often waited at the stage door of theatres and opera houses for a glimpse of the female performers he idolised. He also spent time in art galleries, and in 1931 at the Julien Levy Gallery he came across collages by Max Ernst (1891-1976), a pioneer of Surrealism, who combined high art and popular imagery in his work.

Although Cornell was never officially part of the Surrealist movement and came to dismiss Surrealist associations with his own practice, it had a major influence on him, most notably inspiring his embrace of unexpected juxtapositions in his assemblages and his experimental films, like Rose Hobart (1936). Rejecting Surrealism’s more violent and erotic aspects – the shock effect of jarring images – Cornell preferred instead what he described as the ‘white magic’ side of Surrealism, and the poetic connections between everyday objects.

By 1931 Cornell had shifted from simply collecting objects to creating them. He began to make collages and assemblages first in a style resembling Max Ernst’s, then in his own manner. The basis of collage – piecing together and assembling – would be central to Cornell’s works throughout his life, be they two- or three-dimensional. At this early stage he took images from the dense dossiers of engravings and clippings that he had accumulated by this time, fashioning compositions from seemingly unrelated cutout images to create whimsical pairings, which often revealed his dual interests in science and the world of children. Both these themes would recur and overlap throughout his career…

After viewing a number of Cornell’s small surreal collages, such as Untitled (Schooner), 1931, Julien Levy invited him to show in his exhibition, Surréalisme, which opened in January 1932. Later, Levy offered Cornell a solo show, the first of several that were held at his gallery. Entitled Objects by Joseph Cornell: Minutiae, Glass Bells, Shadow Boxes, Coups d’Oeil, Jouets Surréalistes, it included a series of collages and small three-dimensional objects such as bell jars and pillboxes. All the works were made at his kitchen table at night as his mother and brother slept.

Uneasy about his work being associated with Surrealism, Cornell later wrote to Alfred H. Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and organiser of the 1936 exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, in which Cornell’s work was to feature: “In the event that you are saying a word or two about my work in the catalogue, I would appreciate your saying that I do not share in the subconscious and dream theories of the Surrealists. While fervently admiring much of their work I have never been an official Surrealist, and I believe that Surrealism has healthier possibilities than have been developed.” Regardless of Cornell’s own attempt to distance himself from the movement, Surrealism provided him, at least, with a context in which he could make his collages and objets, and understand them as deserving of a mature and discerning audience.

Around this time, Cornell encountered the collages and box constructions of Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), composed of urban detritus, and the ‘readymades’ of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), which are ordinary, unaltered manufactured objects designated by the artist to be works of art. In Duchamp, Cornell discovered an unlikely friend; the two regularly corresponded throughout their lifetime. When Duchamp visited New York in the 1940s, he enlisted Cornell to help him with a new project, a miniature ‘museum’ of his work, known as the Boîte-en-valise or ‘box in a suitcase’. Cornell already had his own ‘valise’ experiment, Untitled (The Crystal Cage: Portrait of Berenice).

Collecting and Classification

In the 1930s, Cornell began to make the ‘shadow boxes’ for which he is best known – glass-fronted box constructions containing intimately-scaled arrangements of found objects and paper ephemera, assembled in a sort of three-dimensional collage. The 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at MoMA, New York, showed one of his first shadow boxes, Untitled (Soap Bubble Set) (above). This was the first in a long series of the same name and recalls the children’s pastime of blowing bubbles, as well as the eighteenth-century European painting association of bubbles as memento mori, a reminder of the transience of life. Precisely what led Cornell to the idea of the box remains unclear. In a Life magazine article from 1967 he said that it came to him during one of his walks through Manhattan, as he passed a collection of compasses in the window of an antique shop:

“I thought, everything can be used in a lifetime, can’t it, and went on walking. I’d scarcely gone two blocks when I came on another shop window full of boxes, all different kinds […] Halfway home on the train that night, I thought of the compasses and boxes, it occurred to me to put the two together.”

Before Cornell developed his own carpentry skills, his early shadow boxes were housed in prefabricated, semi-antique wooden boxes, popular during the Victorian era for displaying small paintings, ship models, ladies’ handiwork and mementoes. In the nineteenth century, a similar tradition existed in China, where hardwood boxes with sliding glass covers and papered or silk-lined interiors were used to display fine ceramics, especially figurines made for export. Cornell’s approach also recalls European traditions that began to appear in his research dossiers during the 1930s: small seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch and Flemish kunstschranke or kunstkammer – cabinets that housed separate elements assembled to represent the world in miniature. In the mid 1930s, Cornell’s neighbour Carl Backman taught him some basic carpentry skills, which allowed him to construct his own boxes. The boxes are often hard to date accurately, as Cornell would tinker with and refine his constructions over several years, returning to them gradually. However, except for his early boxes which tend to be singular, we can see patterns emerging in his practice as he worked on larger ‘families’ of works that share discernible visual motifs, often unfolding over a decade or more. These series include: ‘Hotels’, ‘Pharmacies’, ‘Aviaries’, ‘Dovecotes’, ‘Observatories’ and ‘Night Skies’.

The ‘Pharmacy’ assemblages, with their compartmentalised structures and associations with collection and classification – a nod to the ordered world of museum display – are a good illustration of one of Cornell’s ‘families’. Here, in this early example of a series that stretched over a decade with at least six similar works, we see a small specimen case containing four ordered rows of five glass jars. Its title appears to refer to medicine and healing, yet as a practising Christian Scientist, Cornell was forbidden to take medicine. Instead, in this miniature apothecary, he has created tonics for the soul and the imagination, with each fragile jar containing an object or substance that has poetic connotations – shells and sand for travel, feathers, delicate butterfly wings, tiny snippets of parchment. The interior is lined with mirrors, creating echoing reflections of the jars that line the shelves. Though its contents may seem trivial, each jar is imbued with significance, its humble items elevated and made precious through the language of their display. Looking into this box, we see a world of associations, nostalgia and elusive meaning.

By the time Cornell created Pharmacy, he had stopped working, and was pursuing his art full time. From this point on, Cornell regularly exhibited and sold his artwork. He also did freelance design work and picture research for magazines such as Vogue and House & Garden. He set up a workshop and storage area in the basement of the house on Utopia Parkway. Working in his new studio, which he sometimes referred to as his ‘laboratory’, Cornell was able to conceive works with more complex craftsmanship than he had been able to do when working at the kitchen table. While most days were spent at home, he would still escape into New York in search of inspiration and to visit friends. A keen diarist, he would sit in Manhattan coffee shops, indulging his notorious sweet tooth with sugary snacks while furiously scribbling notes on scraps of paper that would later be typed up into more formal diary entries.

As well as being an avid people-watcher, Cornell enjoyed ornithology and expressed his love of birds in the ‘Aviary’ and ‘Habitat’ series, which speak of their exoticism and beauty. Birds often symbolise freedom, their flight paths linking the heavens and the earth. In myths and religion, small birds in particular have been used to represent the souls of children freed from their earthly bonds.

While visually distinct from the ‘Pharmacy’ series, Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery (above) continues the theme of arrangement and classification in Cornell’s work, with the cut-out illustrations of macaws, a parrot and a cockatoo mounted like museum specimens or dioramas against a bright white background. However, this dynamic construction has an uncharacteristic aura of violence, and contrasts with other pieces where the box is seen as a safe environment in which objects could be placed, secure and cherished. In this case, the glass that protects the sanctuary of the box has been cracked, its contents exposed to external elements. The central ‘bullet hole’ directly in front of the cockatoo’s crown acts as a focal point for the assemblage, guiding our eye in and then out to the four corners of the box. Bold splashes of colour convey a sense of theatricality and drama (Cornell referred to some of his boxes as ‘poetic theatres’), and the game counters placed over each bird evoke the targets of shooting galleries in penny arcades. Scattered feathers at the bottom of the construction, the shot glass and splotches of paint all suggest a violent event. In a rare moment of political commentary in Cornell’s work, this habitat serves as a metaphor for the horrors of the Second World War, with the birds embodying the innocence of victims caught up in the destruction of war.

Observation and Exploration

One of the great paradoxes in Cornell’s life was the gulf between the multitudinous references in his work to distant times and foreign places, and the fact that he himself never physically left the USA. He was a devotee of nineteenth century European culture and a collector of Baedeker Guides (to travel, published in the 1830s), timetables and travel literature, yet he never went abroad – not because he didn’t have the means to do so but because, as one commentator noted, he ‘preferred the ticket to the trip’, which makes his evocation of a traveller’s sense of wanderlust even more remarkable. Cornell let dreams of voyages, particularly to Europe, remain imagined and thus unrealised, preserving his reveries in the same fashion as his glass-fronted boxes. Recurring often in his work are poignant emblems of transience and travel – birds, celestial maps, exotic-sounding hotels and luggage tags – but they remain frozen in their boxed confinement. Thus, fittingly, the central paradox in Cornell’s life found expression in the very medium for which he is now best known.

“Original inspiration of the bird store, windows, simplicity of magic, pet shop.”

Joseph Cornell, c. 1943, Joseph Cornell Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

Cornell also dreamed of celestial navigation and was fascinated by the night sky and planets. In Soap Bubble Set (1948, below), Cornell arranged fragments collected during his Manhattan wanderings against the backdrop of an antique lunar map, the roundness of the moon alluding to the titular spherical soap bubble. In his shadow boxes, soap bubbles came to symbolise the relationship between science and childhood imagination, knowledge and wonder, as well as serving as an allegory of vanitas and the ephemerality of life. White Dutch clay pipes, the signature motif of the ‘Soap Bubble’ series, are positioned symmetrically in side compartments, laid out like scientific instruments in a lab, gleaming against the dark velvet interior of the case. These pipes, used as toys for blowing bubbles, suggest the element air, while at a lower level a fragment of driftwood (probably scavenged by Cornell while beach combing on Long Island) grounds us in the natural world and hints at the weathering effects of wind and water over time. A cordial glass stands alone, delicate and vulnerable, empty in this construction but in others from this series cradling a marble, perhaps as a metaphor for forces securing the planets in place. At the top of the construction, the artist has hung a row of seven cylinders, the number possibly invoking the Copernican model of the solar system (in which seven planets orbit the Sun). The overall impression is of a poetic understanding of science, the infinity of space made bearable by the inclusion of objects whose culturally recognisable associations position us, along with Cornell, on Earth.

Ironically, Cornell’s first recorded response to the cosmos was fear. According to his sister Elizabeth, after having returned from school for the Christmas holidays, he woke her one night, ‘shaking like a leaf’, and stood at the window while confessing his anxiety about the concept of infinity. His concern translated to intrigue later in life and his shadow boxes abound with references to astronomy and space exploration. Cornell kept up to date with the latest scientific discoveries and was a keen stargazer, regularly observing the night sky from his backyard, or his kitchen window, sometimes referred to as his ‘observatory’.

In 1949, Cornell joined the Egan Gallery in New York, run by Charles Egan. Around this time we can see a fresh approach emerging in his work, as he branched away from the more theatrical Victorian constructs of his early career, which can appear comparatively dense. This may have been a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, a new movement developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) who used abstraction and gesture to convey expressive content. The Egan Gallery’s roster of artists included notable Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) and Franz Kline (1910-1962).

Cornell continued to explore themes of astronomy and celestial navigation in the ‘Observatory’, ‘Night Skies’, and ‘Hotel’ series (the latter also playing with the notion of a hotel as a microcosm of the wider world and, for Cornell, the universe). This work, Andromeda: Grand Hôtel de l’Observatoire (1954, above), combines many of the motifs prevalent in these series, yet is noticeably pared back. The deep, contemplative blue of the composition suggests a starry night sky, and the cracked, aged, white frame evokes the faded grandeur of forgotten European hotels, built for wealthy travellers between the 1880s and 1920s but now fallen into disrepair. Cornell scrapbooked the names of the hotels in this series from adverts in turn-of-the-century guidebooks to European cities.

Despite the smallness of the box, Cornell has created a sense of space within by foregrounding a delicate silver chain and white dowel against the rich starry expanse beyond. The female figure we see in the background is Andromeda, a character in Greek mythology who was chained to a rock as a sacrificial offering to a sea monster because her mother, Cassiopeia, had angered the sea god Poseidon and the Nereids by boasting of her and her daughter’s beauty. Andromeda was rescued from her plight by the hero Perseus, who then married her. Upon her death, she was placed in the skies as a constellation alongside her husband and her mother. Like her rescuer, Cornell has liberated Andromeda from the chains that bound her to the Earth. She is not attached to the silver chain, which both recalls the myth and suggests a ladder to the heavens. With the lightest touch, Cornell has skilfully created both the physical presence of a beautiful woman, and her heavenly equivalent as a constellation in the night sky.

As well as seeking inspiration across galaxies and the limitless expanses of space, Cornell would also delve into myth and history, both factual and personal, to seek out the characters who reside in his shadow boxes. In one of his most famous series, the ‘Medici Slot Machines’, Cornell superimposed memories of his own happy childhood (before his father’s death) onto reproductions of portraits of Medici princes and princesses by the Renaissance artists Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625), Bronzino (1503-1572) and Pinturicchio (1454-1513). By mixing his personal history (Cornell recalled with fondness the outings to penny arcades and shooting galleries of his youth) with these Florentine children, and further juxtaposing Old Master paintings with symbols of popular amusement, he created a mysterious world that contrasts high and low culture with haunting beauty.

This elegiac composition centres around Bronzino’s posthumous portrait of Bia de’ Medici. Bia, the illegitimate but beloved daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, died from a fever aged 6, and Bronzino used her death mask as a model. Around her neck, she wears a medallion with her father’s profile on it. Cornell has effectively enshrined Bia in this box, simultaneously surrounded by the trappings of childhood (marbles, jacks, toy blocks), and, notably, the metal spirals of watch springs in the upper corners, which act as a metaphor for time cycles and life repeating itself. A bright red ball in front of the young girl attracts the viewer, as do the sightlines, mimicking the cross-hair targets of amusement park shooting galleries, which converge over one eye. Bia is flanked by columns, decorated with Baedeker maps of Italy, and further side compartments stacked with repeated images, like the spliced frames of a film, recalling Eadweard Muybridge’s (1830-1904) early sequences of animal and human movement, as well as foreshadowing Pop artist Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) multiple silkscreen homages to celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. There is a concealed drawer at the base of the box, containing a bundle of letters tied with thread, and a paper fan, perhaps a nod to the attributes of the courtly life of a princess. Cornell’s creations often included kinetic elements like marbles or toy balls, although they are seldom activated now, as the assemblages are too delicate. In this box, the unfixed objects placed around Bia accentuate her stillness and steady gaze. Perhaps because of the blue staining of the glass, we become more aware of the wall that separates us from this young girl, frozen in a world that we can look in upon, but not enter. She looks out at us directly, but is she imprisoned or merely on display?

“Peering into glass panelled boxes to inspect their contents is not unlike looking through a telescope in order to bring the distant closer. Windows, doors, compartments, drawers, cross-hair targets – all of these elements grant access or focus as we navigate the world Cornell has framed.”

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay Eterniday, 2003

That he visited the opera and the ballet in New York is not surprising, as his miniature dioramas also recall stage sets with a scenic and narrative quality. As Mary Ann Caws writes in Joseph Cornell’s Theatre of the Mind, “Cornell’s shadow boxes invite us to peek, to peep, and finally to yield to our imagination… We meet in the confines of this tiny frame, this microcosm of complicity.” The boxes are filled with potential energy, as if just about to move, and are spaces in which multiple scales co-exist: time and history, the natural world and the cosmos. They are places of curious juxtaposition: take Untitled (Celestial Navigation) (1956-1958, above), in which the universe is depicted through everyday objects.

Longing and Reverie

For Cornell, a relationship with a woman (other than his mother) seemed unattainable. He never married, and for him the female figure took on an elevated accumulation of hope and desire of almost mythic proportions. Throughout his life he developed obsessions with opera singers, waitresses, film stars, shop girls and most vividly, ballerinas (alive or dead). In the 1930s he discovered the international revival of the Romantic ballet, and spent the next 30 years exploring his fascination with the ‘queens of the dance’. His favourites included Romanticera prima ballerinas Marie Taglioni (1804-1884) and Fanny Cerrito (1817-1909), and their modern counterparts Tamara Toumanova (1919-1996) and Allegra Kent (b. 1937). He also became good friends with Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957), the Russian Surrealist painter and set and costume designer who, as a well-known figure on the international dance scene, introduced Cornell to dancers and other balletomanes.

This box (Naples, 1942, below) is a tender homage to Fanny Cerrito, a nineteenth-century ballerina who captivated Cornell (he first came across her likeness in a bookstore on Fourth Avenue, on a souvenir lithograph from 1842). Cerrito was best known for her 1843 performance in Ondine, a ballet based on a fairy tale about a knight who falls in love with an ethereal water sprite. For her first entrance on stage, Cerrito posed in a giant cockleshell, rising up on a platform through the stage. In this assemblage, Cornell celebrates her birthplace of Naples, illustrating its famously narrow streets festooned with lines of laundry. The luggage label and the handle of the box, which recall a suitcase, give a sense of travel and distance, but the seashells propped up in the corners of the box and the faded sea-green paint that borders the scene speak to Cerrito’s most famous role.

Another example of Cornell’s devotional works is this stunningly austere piece entitled Toward the Blue Peninsula: for Emily Dickinson (1953, below). The purity of this box and the inclusion of a grid-like structure recall the signature style of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), a Minimalist artist who radically simplified the elements of painting to reflect the underlying spiritual order of the visible world that he believed in. Cornell admired Mondrian’s work and mentioned him in his 1946 diary: ‘Mondrian feeling strong. Feeling of progress and satisfaction.’

As the title suggests, this shadow box was created for the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), with whom Cornell felt a deep affinity. Like Cornell, Dickinson lived with her family, never travelled far from home or married, and translated her intense longing into her art. A withdrawn and enigmatic woman, she rarely left the upstairs bedroom in her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she wrote her poems. Dickinson’s bedroom inspired the setting for this simple, white-washed box that resembles an abandoned aviary. At first, almost everything about this box suggests containment – the white mesh cage, the dowel perch and bird feeder – but we find no resident here. In fact, the mesh has been cut open and to the left we see a rectangle of clear, refreshing blue suggesting a window open to the sky – the infinite beyond into which our bird has flown. Emily Dickinson sometimes referred to herself as a ‘little wren’ and often, like Cornell, included birds in her work. Here, Cornell ensures that she has been set free, present only in spirit, with two small scraps of printed paper at the bottom of the case the only physical reminder of her presence. The empty box is silent, a vacuum left after the action has occurred. The title of this work comes from a poem by Dickinson that begins: ‘It might be lonelier / Without the Loneliness / I’m so accustomed to my Fate.’ It ends:

It might be easier
To fail – with Land in Sight –
Than gain – My Blue Peninsula –
To perish – of Delight –

Here, Dickinson is asking whether longing is better than having, a question that clearly spoke to Cornell and his own deep-seated yearning. Better that dream remain imagined but unrealised, the poet advises, lest it disappoint. It seems these are words that Cornell heeded his entire life.

In the early 1960s, Cornell did finally break with tradition and became attached to a young woman, a New York waitress named Joyce Hunter. This was Cornell’s first real-life romance and he was dazzled by her, making her several gifts of his boxes and collages. Joyce eventually stole artworks from his home (though he refused to prosecute her), and was later murdered by an acquaintance in an unrelated incident in December 1964. Her death devastated Cornell, and marks the beginning of his decline into isolation; his brother Robert died in 1965, his mother a year later. In the winter of 1965 he began a series of collages dedicated to Robert’s memory…

Now alone in his family home, Cornell still received visitors (an invitation to Utopia Parkway had become something of an art-world trophy) but conditions in the house declined as his involvement in Christian Science and the metaphysical world increased. He would write letters to the ghosts of his former life – Robert, his mother, Joyce Hunter. Cornell became more and more interested in sharing his work with a younger audience and one of his last exhibitions in 1972 was expressly for children: A Joseph Cornell Exhibition for Children at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, where cake and soda pops were served instead of the traditional champagne and canapés. He often said children were his most enthusiastic and receptive audience, and lent boxes to children in his neighbourhood for their enjoyment. Cornell continued to work until the end of his life, although he stopped making new boxes sometime in the 1960s, after which he focused on ‘refurbishing’ earlier boxes by breaking them down and reconstituting them. His main focus was a renewed interest in creating collages, which he saw as freer and more spontaneous than box construction. He also concentrated on making films and re-editing earlier cinematic work. Following prostate surgery in June 1972, he spent several months recuperating with family in Westhampton before returning to Utopia Parkway in November. Cornell died of heart failure alone at home, just a few days after his sixty-ninth birthday.

Conclusion

What can we make of the life of Joseph Cornell? From his shadow boxes we get the impression of a man who preferred fantasy to reality, finding inspiration and affinity with long-dead characters from history, from Renaissance princesses to Romantic ballerinas. But Cornell was also conscious of and responded to the changing landscape of twentieth-century art – Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism – and had a tremendous influence on other artists during his lifetime. He had an appetite for subjects that were as far ranging as his imagination, and was able to express, with the deftest of touches, huge concepts within intimate, self-contained spaces. Cornell’s cloistered worlds seem to encompass the entire universe in microcosm – its infinity, wonder, mystery and power all contained within a small box. Their appeal can only be accentuated by the fact that their creator conjured these worlds purely from imagination rather than experience. His last reported words to his sister Elizabeth on the day he died were, “You know, I was thinking, I wish I hadn’t been so reserved.” While this restraint may have caused him regret in his daily life, we see little trace of it in his art, which seems instead to be a magical, generous invitation to the viewer as a gateway to reverie, and to dream.

Written by Asha McLoughlin
Learning Department
© Royal Academy of Arts

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
L’Égypte de Mlle Cléo de Mérode cours élémentaire d’histoire naturelle
1940
Box construction
11.9 x 27.1 x 18.4cm (closed)
The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman
Photo The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman
Photography: Quicksilver Photographers, LLC
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Naples
1942
Box construction
28.6 x 17.1 x 12.1cm
The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, Courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015
Photo: Quicksilver Photographers, LLC

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Toward the Blue Peninsula – for Emily Dickinson
c. 1953
Box construction
36.8 x 26 x 14cm
The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman
Photo The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman
Photography: Quicksilver Photographers, LLC
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015.

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy)
1942-1952
Box construction
35.4 x 28.4 x 9.8cm
Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art.com, courtesy Glenstone
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
A Parrot for Juan Gris
1953-1954
Box construction
45.1 x 31 x 11.7cm
The Collection of Robert Lehrman, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman
Photo The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman
Photography: Quicksilver Photographers, LLC
© The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015

Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust offers an overview of the American artist’s inventive oeuvre, surveying around 80 of his remarkable box constructions, assemblages, collages and films. The last major solo exhibition of Cornell in Europe took place nearly 35 years ago, originating at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1980, and travelling to the Whitechapel Gallery in the UK. With very few works on permanent display in European museums, the exhibition is an opportunity to see rarely lent masterpieces from public and private collections in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Cornell (1903-1972) never left America and hardly ventured beyond New York City, yet through his art he set out to travel through history, the continents of the globe and even the spiritual realm. His works are manifestations of a powerful ‘wanderlust’ of the mind and soul.

Collecting was central to Cornell’s creativity; he amassed a vast and eclectic personal archive of paper ephemera and found objects, eventually numbering tens of thousands of items. This material revealed his wide-ranging interests from opera, ballet, cinema and theatre to history, ornithology, poetry and astronomy. Europe held a special place in Cornell’s imagination, and many of the works selected for this exhibition highlight his love of its historic cultures, from the Belle Époque to the Italian Renaissance. Inspired by these interests, he incorporated his collected materials inside glass-fronted wooden box constructions creating miniature worlds known as his ‘shadow boxes’, as well as producing collages and film.

Cornell was entirely self-taught and has often been characterised as an outsider to the New York art scene. In reality, he was highly engaged with the art movements and artists of the time, exhibiting regularly alongside the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, whilst carefully maintaining his independence from any one group. He counted many vanguard artists among his friends including Marcel Duchamp, Robert Motherwell, and Dorothea Tanning.

The exhibition is arranged thematically in four sections that reflect the artistic processes expressed in Cornell’s diaries and notes; Play and Experiment, Collecting and Classification, Observation and Exploration and Longing and Reverie. The selection brings together key works from his major series: Museums, Aviaries, Soap Bubble Sets, Palaces, Medici Slot Machines, Hotels and Dovecotes.

Press release from the Royal Academy of Arts website

“Impressions intriguingly diverse – that, in order to hold fast, one might assemble, assort, and arrange into a cabinet – the contraption kind of the amusement resorts with endless ingenuity of effect, worked by coin and plunger, or brightly coloured pin-balls – travelling inclined runways – starting in motion compartment after compartment with a symphony of mechanical magic of sight and sound borrowed from the motion picture art – into childhood – into fantasy – through the streets of New York – through tropical skies – etc. – into the receiving trays the balls come to rest releasing prizes.”

Joseph Cornell

Royal Academy of Arts
Piccadilly site
Burlington House, Piccadilly
London W1J 0BD
Burlington Gardens site
6 Burlington Gardens
London W1S 3ET

Opening hours:
Saturday – Thursday 10am – 6pm
Friday 10am – 10pm

Royal Academy of Arts website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Storm in a Teacup’ at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery, Mornington

Exhibition dates: 24th July – 27th September 2015

Hotham Street Ladies (est. Australia 2007)
Dark tea (installation photo)
2015
Royal icing, butter cream icing, fondant, food dye, found objects
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artists
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

This is the best thematic group exhibition I have seen in Melbourne and surrounds this year.

Every piece in the exhibition is visually stimulating and intelligently constructed, all works combining to make an engaging exhibition. Nothing is superfluous, every work having something interesting to say, whether it is about the ceremony of tea drinking, colonisation, global warming, Stolen Generations or social mores. Congratulations must go to the curators and artists for their efforts.

Particular favourites where the Hotham Street Ladies Dark Tea (2015, below) made of royal icing, butter cream icing, fondant, food dye, and found objects; the many sculptural objects which form the backbone of the exhibition, especially the work of Sharon West and Penny Byrne; and the wonderful vintage photographs that are displayed in the foyer of the gallery.

Accompanying this exhibition is another excellent exhibition, Ways to draw: A selection from the permanent collection by Betty Churcher, on till 27th September as well. If you want a day out from Melbourne with lunch in Mornington, some seriously good art and a drive along the coast, you could do no better than visit the gallery in the next week. Highly recommended.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan and the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Hotham Street Ladies (est. Australia 2007)
Dark tea (installation view details)
2015
Royal icing, butter cream icing, fondant, food dye, found objects
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artists
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Charles Blackman (Australian, 1928-2018)
Feet beneath the table
1956
Tempera and oil on composition board
106.5 x 121.8cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented through the NGV Foundation by Barbara Blackman, Honorary Life Benefactor, 2005

Charles Blackman first encountered Lewis Caroll’s book, Alice in Wonderland, through a talking book for the blind which his wife, Barbara was listening to. Her developing blindness resulted in telescopic vision, spatial disorientation and a shrinking visual field. She was also pregnant with their first child and her distorted body image also had parallels with Alice’s experiences. By painting Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea party Blackman could express his wife’s feeling of bewilderment and disorientation.

E. Phillips Fox (Australian, 1865-1915)
The arbour
1910
Oil on canvas
190.5 x 230.7cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest 1916

Melbourne born E. Phillips Fox, described as ‘one of the greatest of Australia’s Impressionist painters and the most gifted of her colourists’1 went to Paris in 1887 to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts where he encountered the work of the French Impressionists. He remained in Paris for several years but made frequent trips back to Melbourne to visit his family. The Arbour was painted in Paris in Fox’s garden but is based upon observations of family life in his brother’s garden in Malvern. The depiction of an elegant family taking tea al fresco is a study of refined gentility. The Arbour was exhibited at both the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon exhibitions and was regarded by Fox as the finest thing he had done.2 At the time the painting was much admired for its ‘subtle lights ad shadow’3 and his exemplary ‘use of delicate colour and refined harmonies.’4

1/ Courier Mail, 12 May 1949
2/ Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October 1913
3/ Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October 1913
4/ Le Courrier Australien, Sydney, 15 April 1949

Clare Humphries (Australian, b. 1973)
Some things were out in the open
2007
Pigment print on Hahnemühle photo rag paper (ed. 3/5)
63 x 62cm
Courtesy of the artist

Adam Hill (Blak Douglas) (Australian, b. 1970)
Not everyone’s cup of tea
2009
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
150 x 260cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2009

Kendal Murray (Australian, b. 1958)
Exceed speed, mislead, concede
2011
Mixed media assemblage
18 x 24 x 14cm
Courtesy of the artist and Arthouse Gallery, Sydney

Penny Byrne (Australian, b. 1965)
Tea for two in Tuvalu
2011
Vintage porcelain figurine, vintage, Action man accessories, vintage coral, glass fish, epoxy resin, epoxy putty, retouching medium, powder pigments
15 x 19cm
Private Collection

Penny Byrne (Australian, b. 1965)
Tea for two in Tuvalu (installation view)
2011
Vintage porcelain figurine, vintage, Action man accessories, vintage coral, glass fish, epoxy resin, epoxy putty, retouching medium, powder pigments
15 x 19cm
Private Collection
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

This piece was inspired by an underwater cabinet meeting held in 2009 by Maldives President Mohammed Nasheed in a campaign to raise awareness for activity on climate change. The thirty minute meeting was held six metres below sea level and was attended by eleven cabinet members calling upon all countries to cut their emissions to halt further temperature rises.

Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu, located in the Pacific Ocean midway between Hawaii and Australia, experienced a severe drought in 2011. A state of emergency was declared and rationing of fresh-water took place which restricted households on some of the islands to two buckets of fresh water per day. Tuvalu is also especially susceptible to changes in sea level and it is estimated that a sea level rise of 20 to 40 centimetres in the next 100 years could make Tuvalu uninhabitable.

Kate Bergin (Australian, b. 1968)
The hunt for a room of one’s own
2012
Oil on canvas on board
75 x 101cm
Private Collection

Kate Bergin draws upon Dutch and Flemish seventeenth century tradition of still life painting to comment on our attitudes to animals. Bergin stages the scene on a crumpled white tablecloth upon which a large fox, based on a taxidermy fox she bought on eBay, regally sits centre stage. Meticulously rendered native birds, including a honeyeater, finch and triller, are based on photographs of specimens from the Melbourne Museum Collection. They flit about unperturbed by the introduced predator. Teaspoons, representing the impulse for collecting, entangle the fox and bird. Together with a teapot and cup, precariously placed, they contribute to the overarching sense of impending chaos.

Both afternoon tea and the fox represent English upper class social mores and were introduced into the colonies following British settlement. The fox arrived in 1855, brought in for recreational hunting, and has been a major cause of native bird extinctions. Fox numbers are increasing in some areas further threatening the precarious balance between wild life and introduced species.

Sharon West (Australian, b. 1963)
Two Koori Tribesmen receive a gift of afternoon tea from local colonists (installation photo)
2014
Mixed media assemblage
15 x 46 x 30cm
Courtesy of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Heather Shimmen (Australian, b. 1957)
Tip me up (installation view)
2005
Linocut on paper and organza (ed. 7/30)
56 x 76cm
Courtesy of the artist and Australian Galleries, Melbourne and Sydney
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Trent Jansen (Australian, b. 1981)
Briggs family tea service (installation view)
2011
Slip cast porcelain, bull kelp, wallaby pelt, copper and brass
George (teapot) 22.5 x 20.5 x 13cm; Woretermoeteyenner (sugar bowl) 16 x 13.5 x 9cm; Dolly (milk jug) 12.5 x 12.5 x 8.5cm; John (teacup) 7 x 8.5 x 8cm; Eliza (teacup) 7.5 x 10.5 x 8cm; Mary (teacup) 10 x 9 x 6.5cm
Courtesy of Broached Commissions, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The Briggs family tea service represents the marriage of George Briggs, a free settler, to Woretermoeteyenner of the Pairrebeenne people in Van Diemen’s Land and the four children they had together. Briggs arrived from Bedfordshire in 1791 and learned to speak the language of the local Pairrebeenne people, trading tea, flour and sugar fro kangaroo, wallaby and seal skins. It is understood that he became good friends with the leader of the Pairrebeenne people, Mannalargenna, and by 1810 he partnered his daughter Woretermoeteyenner. Their marriage meant she had to adapt to a way of life that merged her traditional cultural values with the ways of British settlers. The teapot and sugar bowl represent the parents while their first daughter, Doll Mountgarret Briggs is symbolised in the milk jug and the three cups each signify their other children John, Eliza and Mary.

The tea service is a hybrid design bringing together materials common to both cultures. To realise the set Jansen worked with Rod Bamford on the ceramic elements, Oliver Smith for the brass and copper and Vicki West, who uses the traditional methods of her Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestors, worked with the bull kelp components.

eX de Medici (Australian, b. 1959)
Blue (Bower-Bauer) (installation view)
1998-2000
Watercolour over black pencil on paper
114.0 x 152.8cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2004
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

eX de Medici (Australian, b. 1959)
Blue (Bower-Bauer) (installation view detail)
1998-2000
Watercolour over black pencil on paper
114.0 x 152.8cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2004
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

A turning point in eX de Medici’s career came in 1998 when she saw an exhibition of watercolours by Ferdinand Bauer comprising 2,000 rarely seen images of native flora and fauna made when Bauer was official artist on Matthew Flinder’s historic circumnavigation of Australia in 1801-1803. Previously working with tattoo imagery, Medici found the intricate works so compelling she decided to change course and ‘retrograde’ herself and explore watercolour as a medium.1

Referencing Australia’s Bower bird that adorns its nest with anything blue, Medici entangles the history of vanitas painting with commentary about the desire to seek permanence and affirmation in the accumulation of things. The broken willow pattern platter, upturned jugs and cups, amassed with so many other decorative and functional objects, are juxtaposed with skulls, fruit and flowers – symbols of mortality. A reaction to what she considered John Howard’s regressive politics at the time, the work ‘is a kind of a backhanded discussion about colonising our minds with retroactive ideas’.2

1/ Ted Gott. ‘eX deMedici an epic journey on a Lilliputian scale’ Art and Australia Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring 2002, p. 105
2/ eX deMedici in Paul Flynn. Artist Profile #5, March 2008, pp. 28-35.

Storm in a Teacup reflects upon tea drinking in Australia. Introduced by the British colonials, the afternoon tea party was an attempt to ‘civilise’ the land. Tea drinking became so popular in the colonies that by 1888 the amount of tea consumed per capita exceeded the amount consumed in England. Soon after, billy tea was to become an enduring symbol of the pioneering spirit, immortalised by Henry Lawson’s stories published under the title While the billy boils.

Beginning with elegant paintings of the afternoon tea table from E. Phillips Fox and Arthur Streeton, the exhibition goes on to explore the darker side of tea drinking and the social and environmental impacts of the humble cup of tea. Michael Cook’s Object (table), 2015, provides an alternative history to the narrative of colonialism while Sharon West and Adam Hill both use humour to subvert colonial understandings of the afternoon tea party as an occasion of refined gentility.

The humble cuppa has been around for thousands of years, but this exhibition explores how a popular beverage can impact on us culturally, socially, environmentally and politically. There is more to debate than just the proper way to make a cup of tea. Storm in a teacup explores far-reaching issues brewing from tea, including the imposition of one culture upon another – especially on the colonial frontier; the production of ceramics and the environmental impacts of porcelain and its production; gender stereotypes and socialisation through tea parties. The exhibition also reflects upon tea drinking ceremonies in Asia within a western Orientalist paradigm and tea drinking as an occasion for familial cohesiveness and disconnect.

Text from the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery

Mark James Daniel (Australian, 1867-1949)
Verandah, “Harefield” – afternoon tea
Feb 1900
Glass negative
8.5 x 11cm (quarter plate)
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

Michael J Drew (Australian, 1873-1943)
Group taking tea in a garden
between 1890 and 1900
Glass negative
12.2 x 16.5cm (half plate)
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

Rex Hazlewood (Australian, 1886-1968)
[Men drinking billy tea]
1911-1927
Silver gelatin print
Collection of the State Library of New South Wales

Anonymous photographer
Afternoon tea at “Vivaleigh”
1917
Gelatin silver print
12 x 16cm
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

James Fox Barnard (Australian, 1874-1945)
Lawn, Arylie, Hobart
c. 1900
Glass negative
8.5 x 11cm (quarter plate)
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

James Fox Barnard (Australian, 1874-1945)
[Tea on the verandah]
c. 1900
Glass negative
8.5 x 11cm (quarter plate)
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

Installation photograph of the exhibition Storm in a Teacup at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Tea is the medium of many a complex and commonplace rituals. Adopted in a variety of ceremonies and customs across the globe, its unique and symbolic place in our lives is subtle and powerful. Whether a quick cuppa around the kitchen table or a lavish display of refined gentility; from billy tea to Asian tea-drinking ceremonies, tea has played an important role in international trade but more curiously in facilitating social cohesiveness.

Comprising approximately 50 works including painting, photography, sculpture and installation Storm in a Teacup features artists such as Chares Blackman, John Perceval, Emma Minnie Boyd, E. Phillips Fox and contemporary artists Stephen Bowers, Danie Mellor, Penny Byrne, Rosalie Gasgoigne, Matthew Sleeth, eX de Medici, Anne Zahalka, Polixeni Papapetrou and a mad tea party installation by Hotham Street Ladies.

Tea is said to have first been invented in China around 2700 BC, with the earliest records of tea consumption dating to 1000BC. Initially consumed as a medicinal drink, it became widely popular as a common beverage and traded across Asia and Europe during the 16th century. It was King Charles II’s wife Catherine of Portugal who is said to have brought the tea habit to Great Britain. Indeed, the afternoon tea party first became fashionable in the seventeenth century following Queen Catherine de Braganza’s fondness for serving the beverage at Whitehall in London. It wasn’t until the 18th century that it became widely consumed with tea smuggling bringing the tipple to the masses and later influenced the Boston Tea Party.

Tea drinking became a demonstration of social aspirations and grew in popularity giving rise to a subtle orchestration of manners, dress and serving paraphernalia which created new forms of commodity consumption. In the colonies of New South Wales and Victoria afternoon tea parties were a lavish display of settler understandings of refined gentility that were an attempt to signal allegiance to the values of the home country and ground the displaced community in their originating culture. In this respect the afternoon tea party expressed collective understandings of British identity and was a means of domesticating and civilising the alien terrain of the colonies.

Press release from the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery

Clare Humphries (Australian, b. 1973)
Family confection II (installation views)
2015
Sugar cubes stained with coffee and tea
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Giuseppe Romeo (Australian, b. 1958)
Subjective landscape, ‘Of consequence rather than reason’ (installation views)
2015
Found discarded objects, bitumen, paint
80 x 100 x 60cm
Courtesy of the artist
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Guiseppe Rome asks the simple question: ‘What are you going to do with it all?’

Romeo recalls the tea sets his mother and aunts possessed and the ‘good set’ kept for special occasions that were rarely used. In this work a silver platter is the support for a silver cake stand upon which a teapot, creamer, sugar bowl and various serving implements jostle with items required to clean up the mess. The bat, ball and stumps are a reference to playing cricket which ‘became an excuse for a big afternoon tea party in England’. A ribbon of wire holds it all together ‘like a dream from Alice in Wonderland when nothing is as it seems’, while a tinkling melody from a music box is a lullaby that sends us in to a contented sleep.

Romeo coats the sculpture in bitumen then paints it entirely in white. The effect is reminiscent of excavated items from an ancient ruin, as if we are peering upon the remains from a modern day Pompeii – artefacts that have been covered in lava and buried. This work alludes to the ways in which we deceive ourselves and ‘attempt to keep it all together through consumption but ultimately we can’t’.

Samantha Everton (Australian, b. 1971)
Camellia
2009
From the series Vintage dolls 2009
Pigment print on rag paper (ed. AP2)
106 x 114cm
Courtesy of the artist and Anthea Polson Art, Queensland

Robyn Phelan (Australian, b. 1965)
Porcelain wall – ode to an obsession (installation view)
2010-2015
Porcelain, paper, clay, cobalt oxide, timber, pigment, Jingdezhen tissue transfer
240 x 122 x 42cm
Courtesy of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Robyn Phelan (Australian, b. 1965)
Porcelain wall – ode to an obsession (installation view detail)
2010-2015
Porcelain, paper, clay, cobalt oxide, timber, pigment, Jingdezhen tissue transfer
240 x 122 x 42cm
Courtesy of the artist

Robyn Phelan undertook a residency at the Pottery Workshop and Experimental Sculptural Factory of Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province in China in 2008. Jingdezhen is known as the porcelain capital because it has been the centre of China’s ceramic production, beginning in the fourteenth century Yuan Dynasty, where fine porcelain was first exported all over the world.

Deposits of kaolinite, a clay found at Mt Kaolin nearby which can sustain very high firing temperatures produced a superior white porcelain of increased strength and translucency. Items made from kaolinite were fired with cobalt landscape designs and were highly sought after by European collectors. Over the centuries, because of excessive mining, the mountain’s deposits have become depleted. Phelan’s work is a lament to the desecration of the mountain and a reminder of the potential destructiveness of consumer desire.

Penny Byrne (Australian, b. 1965)
‘Let’s forget about global warming’ said Alice ‘and have a cup of tea instead!’ (installation view)
2010
Vintage porcelain figurine, found toys, epoxy resin, epoxy putty, retouching medium, powder pigments
80 x 33cm
Williams Sinclair Collection
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Penny Byrne (Australian, b. 1965)
‘Let’s forget about global warming’ said Alice ‘and have a cup of tea instead!’ (installation view detail)
2010
Vintage porcelain figurine, found toys, epoxy resin, epoxy putty, retouching medium, powder pigments
80 x 33cm
Williams Sinclair Collection
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Penny Byrne’s reworked porcelain conversation piece was motivated by Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s cry to ‘drill, baby, drill’ during her campaign in 2008. A call for increase off-shore drilling of petroleum, including sites such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Palin claimed ‘that’s what we hear all across the country in our rallies because people are so hungry for those domestic sources of energy to be tapped into’.1

In Byrne’s piece the patriotic figures gorge themselves, blithely overindulging without care to the wastage. The new Disney production of Alice in Wonderland directed by Tim Burton had just been released and this led Byrne to reflect upon the Mad Hatter’s tea party in which tea was drunk all day because time stood still and was stuck at tea-time.

1/ Transcript: The Vice-Presidential Debate, 2 October 2008. Reprinted in the New York Times, 23 May 2012.

Sharon West (Australian, b. 1963)
Joseph Banks’ tea party for a Botany Bay tribesman is ruined by flies and spiders
2014
Digital print on paper (ed. 2/5)
66 x 57cm (sheet)
Courtesy of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Sharon West’s recreation of an afternoon tea party is set in the early days of first contact. Joseph Banks was the botanist who sailed with Captain Cook on the Endeavour on the first voyage of discovery which mapped the east coast of Australia between 1768 and 1771. While ashore he made an extensive collection of native flora and fauna which was sent back to natural history museums in England. Banks was also instrumental in the British government’s decision to colonise the New South Wales settlement.

Rosalie Gascoigne (b. New Zealand 1917; arr. Australia 1943; d. Canberra 1999)
The tea party (installation view)
1980
Painted wood, celluloid, plastic, enamelled metal, feathers
83 x 35 x 20cm
Private collection
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Rosalie Gascoigne (b. New Zealand 1917; arr. Australia 1943; d. Canberra 1999)
The tea party (installation view detail)
1980
Painted wood, celluloid, plastic, enamelled metal, feathers
83 x 35 x 20cm
Private collection
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Rosalie Gascoigne found the kewpie dolls amongst a large number of discarded things from an abandoned sideshow at the Bungendore dump in the summer of 1976. ‘I thought “Oh, those dollies, they’re having a … very joyful … picnic. They’re … in the paddock, they’ve got all these old things … they’ve sat down on the teapots and waved their wings around.”

For Gascoigne beauty existed in the most humble of objects and the wear and tear from use only added to the appeal. The enamel teapots were also found at various dumps and were a particular focus of her collecting.

‘I had a thing about enamelware because I see it as being elegant. People see the holes in it. I was collecting brown and white at the same time. To me it had a sort of elegance that a Dalmatian dog has, spotty, very elegant’.1

1/ Rosalie Gascoigne, excerpts from her correspondence, email communication with Martin Gascoigne, 13 March 2015

Julie Dowling (Australian, b. 1969)
Badimaya people, Western Australia
White with one
2003
Synthetic polymer paint and red ochre on canvas
121 x 100cm
Collection of Jane Kleimeyer and Anthony Stuart

Julie Dowling’s painting is a poignant reminder of the Stolen Generations and the plight of many young girls, forcibly removed from their families, who were brought up in government institutions and trained to be domestic servant to white families. Girls were targeted because women were considered the ‘uplifters’ or ‘civilisers’ of their communities and as future mothers their education into the values of white society was deemed essential to enable successful assimilation. Girls in service were supposed to receive a wage but often this was retained by their employer and not passed on. Dowling points out it is also a history of Stolen wages.

Michael Cook (Australian, b. 1968)
Bidjara people, south-west Queensland
Object (table)
2015
Inkjet print on Hahnemühle cotton rag (ed. 2/4 + 2AP)
140 x 99cm
Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY + dianne tanzer gallery, Melbourne

Michael Cook’s photographic tableau ‘turns the table’ on racism. By depicting the body of a white woman as a functional object in service to others, Cook considers the dehumanisation and objectification of one race of people by another in the history of slavery.

The double portrait on the back wall is by Johann Zoffany from 1778, and features Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804) who was born into slavery in the West Indies. The daughter of an African mother, her father was an English naval officer who left her to the care of his uncle, Lord William Murray, where she was raised as an equal with Murray’s niece. Murray was instrumental in outlawing slavery in the United Kingdom in 1772. In the painting Zoffany depicts the two women standing together, the niece affectionately reaching out to Belle. Hence Cook’s afternoon tea is also a reminder that prejudice and racial inequality can be surmounted.

Yenny Huber (b. Austria 1980; arr. Australia 2000)
Room No. 14
2006
Digital print on aluminium panel (ed. 1/6)
27.2 x 27.2cm
Warrnambool Art Gallery, Victoria

Underpinned by the belief that any one person is comprised of diverse, fragmentary and often illusory selves, Yenny Huber explores the various ego states that reside within. This photograph is a self portrait taken in a hotel room, but it is also an impersonation of an identity available to women. Tea-drinking was once described as ‘an infallible sign of an old maid’1 and in this work Huber offers us an image of a good Catholic girl, knees together, elbows in, sitting demurely on the couch sipping tea. It is an image of femininity constrained by the dictates of religion and outdated socially sanctioned ideals of respectable female behaviour.

1/ The Horsham Times, Victoria, 26 April 1898

Anne Zahalka (Australian, b. 1957)
Saturday 5.18 pm 1995
1995 (printed 1997)
Type C photograph (ed AP)
125 x 162cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Gift of the artist, 2011
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery
Civic Reserve, Dunns Road, Mornington

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 4pm

Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘When we share more than ever’ at Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Exhibition dates: 19th June – 20th September 2015

A project for the Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2015

Curators: Dr des. Esther Ruelfs and Teresa Gruber

Invited artists: Laia Abril, Ai Weiwei, Regula Bochsler, Natalie Bookchin, Heman Chong, Aurélien Froment, David Horvitz, Trevor Paglen, Doug Rickard, Taryn Simon, Jens Sundheim, Penelope Umbrico | From the Photography and New Media Collection of the MKG: Fratelli Alinari, Hanns-Jörg Anders, Nobuyoshi Araki, Francis Bedford, Félix Bonfils, Adolphe Braun, Natascha A. Brunswick, Atelier d’Ora / Benda, Minya Diez-Dührkoop, Rudolf Dührkoop, Harold E. Edgerton, Tsuneo Enari, Andreas Feininger, Lotte Genzsch, Johann Hamann, Theodor und Oscar Hofmeister, Thomas Höpker, Lotte Jacobi, Gertrude Käsebier, Kaku Kurita, Atelier Manassé, Hansi Müller-Schorp, Eardweard Muybridge, Arnold Newman, Terry Richardson, Max Scheler, Hildi Schmidt-Heins, Hiromi Tsuchida, Carl Strüwe, Léon Vidal, and more

Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968)
95zLs
2012
From the series N.A., 2011-2014
Archival Pigment Print
Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
© Doug Rickard

A fascinating exhibition about the processes of archiving and transferring images and the associated interaction, combining historic and contemporary images to illuminate various chapters: “Sharing a Portrait,” “Sharing a Group,” “Sharing Memories,” “Sharing a Product,” “Sharing Lust,” “Sharing Evidence,” “Sharing Knowledge,” “Sharing the World,” “Sharing a Collection,” and “Sharing Photographs”.

“The chapters juxtapose historical and contemporary works in order to illuminate how the use and function of photographic images have changed and which aspects have remained the same despite the digital revolution. The exhibition begins with photography used in the service of people: to record a life, create a sense of community, or share memories. The following chapters deal with applied contexts, such as advertising photographs, erotic photography, photojournalism, scientific photography, and travel photos.”

“Conceived in archive format, the exhibition explores the archive’s possible forms and uses. The featured works from the collection were selected from the MKG’s holdings of some 75,000 photographs to show how different photographic practices have been assimilated over the years. The springboard for our reflections was the question of how the digital era of picture sharing has changed the function of a museum collection of photography, seeing as today digital image collections are just a mouse click away on online archives such as Google Images.”

But it could have been so much more, especially with 75,000 photographs to choose from. Looking at the plan for the exhibition and viewing the checklist would suggest that the small amount of work in each of the ten chapters leaves little room for any of the themes to be investigated in depth. Any one of these chapters would have made an excellent exhibition in its own right. What an opportunity missed for a series of major exhibitions that examined each important theme.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Text in the posting is from the booklet When We Share More Than Ever.

Editors: Sabine Schulze, Esther Ruelfs, Teresa Gruber
Text editors: Esther Ruelfs, Teresa Gruber
Authors: Teresa Gruber (TG), Beate Pittnauer (BP), Esther Ruelfs (ER), Sven Schumacher (SS), Annika Sellmann (AS), Taryn Simon, Johan Simonsen (JS), Emma Stenger (ES) Grafikdesign
Graphic design exhibition and booklet: Studio Mahr
Translation German-English: Jennifer Taylor

Sharing memories

Creating mementoes is one of the central functions of photography. In David Horvitz’s case, it is the mobile phone camera that gives two people a feeling of togetherness. The bond is created through an action. On two different continents, both people stand at the seaside at the same time, recording and sending images of the sunrise and sunset with their iPhones.

Photography connects us with the subject or the person depicted – even beyond the bounds of the time. The photo is an imprint; it transmits to us something that was once really there. Like a fingerprint or a footprint, it remains closely related to what it captures. This special quality of photography predestined it from the start to be a medium of memory. The daguerreotype of a little girl presented in the exhibition is framed by a braid of the child’s hair. The idea of carrying part of a loved one with us and thus generating a special feeling of closeness is reflected in the practice of making friendship or mourning jewellery out of hair – and in the way we treasure portrait photographs as keepsakes of those we love.

Emotional relationships can also be expressed by a certain photographic motif or by the body language of the sitters. The arms of the sisters in the photo by Gertrude Käsebier are closely intertwined, as are the hands of the couple in the daguerreotype by Carl Ferdinand Stelzner. The relationship between photographer and subject may also be the focus of the work. Natascha Brunswick as well as Rudolf Dührkoop and Käsebier use the camera, for example, to capture and hold onto intimate moments with their own families. ER

David Horvitz (American, b. 1982)
The Distance of a Day
2013
Digital video on two iPhones, 12 min.
Courtesy Chert, Berlin
© David Horvitz

David Horvitz

With artworks in the form of books, photographs, installations, and actions, David Horvitz often explores varying conceptions of time and space, as well as interpersonal relationships and the dissemination of images via the internet. His work The Distance of a Day brings together all of these topics. With reference to the linguistic origin of the word “journey,” which defined the distance a traveler could cover in a day, Horvitz looks for two places located at opposite ends of the globe that are exactly one day apart. While his mother watches the sun set on a beach in his native California, the artist observes the sun rising over a Maldives island. Both document their simultaneous impressions with an iPhone, a device that today serves both for temporal and spatial orientation and which, as a communication medium, enables us to overcome the limits of space and time. Because it is a conceptual part of the performance, the iPhone is also used in the exhibition as a playback device. TG

Carl Ferdinand Stelzner (German, 1805-1894)
Unknown couple
1830-1880
Framed daguerrotype
15.2 x 17.2cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Carl Ferdinand Stelzner (German, 1805-1894)
Unknown couple (detail)
1830-1880
Framed daguerrotype
15.2 x 17.2cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Sharing a portrait

“Maxime carried portraits of actresses in every pocket. He even had one in his cigarette case. From time to time he cleared them all out and moved the ladies into an album (…) which already contained the portraits of Renee’s friends.”

This scene from Émile Zola’s The Kill testifies to the fad that started in the 1860s for mass-produced photographic calling cards, or “cartes de visite.” Contemporaries spoke of “cartomania” – long before anyone could imagine an artist like Ai Weiwei, who has posted 7,142 photographs on his Instagram profile since 2014. With the “invasion of the new calling card pictures,” photography left the private sphere of the middle-class family and fostered new social relationships. The demand for images of celebrities from politics, art, and literature grew as well.

“Galleries of contemporaries” and artist portraits like those produced by Lotte Jacobi and Arnold Newman responded to an avid interest in the physical and physiognomic appearance of well-known people. The photographers tried to capture not only the person’s likeness but also his character, whether inclose-ups that zero in on individual facial expressions or in staged portraits in which the surroundings give clues to the sitter’s personality.

What has changed since then is above all how we handle such images. The photographs that Minya Diez-Dührkoop took of the upper-class daughter Renate Scholz trace her growth and development in pleasingly composed studio portraits. In today’s Internet communities and on smartphones by contrast we encounter the portrait as a profile picture. This signature image, changeable at any time, may be a selfie or selected from a steadily growing pool of snapshots shared among friends. ER

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
16 June, 2014
Photo posted on Instagram, (https://instagram.com/aiww/)
Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
March 9, 2015
Photo posted on Instagram, (https://instagram.com/aiww/)
Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

Minya Diez-Dührkoop (German, 1873-1929)
Portraits of Renate Scholz
1920-1939
Silver gelatine prints, various formats
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Minya Diez-Dührkoop (German, 1873-1929)
Portrait of Renate Scholz (detail)
1920-1939
Silver gelatine prints, various formats
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
January 30, 2015
Photo posted on Instagram, (https://instagram.com/aiww/)
Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

Sharing a group

The photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) notes in his serialised book The Pencil of Nature, published in six parts between 1844 and 1846: “Groups of figures take no longer time to obtain than single figures would require, since the camera depicts them all at once, however numerous they may be.” For groups such as the middle-class family, colleagues in a profession or company, or leisure-time clubs – all of which took on renewed importance in the 19th century – the new technology provided an affordable way to preserve their feeling of community for posterity. The professional photographer was able to stage for the camera a picture designed to convey the self-image of the group. The Hamburg-based photographer Johann Hamann and the Studio Scholz were active around the turn of the 19th century, when the demand for professional group and family portraits reached a high point.

The classic commissioned group portrait still persists today in the form of class photos. These document each individual’s curriculum vitae while serving both as nostalgic souvenirs and as a basis for building a relationship network that can be maintained via websites such as stayfriends.com. On the Internet and especially on Facebook, new types of groups are being generated whose members share specific interests or traits. The artist Natalie Bookchin delves into the phenomenon of the virtual group in her work Mass Ornament, for which she collected amateur videos from YouTube showing people dancing alone and arranged them into an ensemble. She thus examines the possibilities offered by the World Wide Web to bring together crowds of people who are in reality each alone in front of their own screen. TG

Natalie Bookchin (American, b. 1962)
Mass Ornament
2009
Video, 7 Min.
Courtesy of the artist
© Natalie Bookchin

Natalie Bookchin (American, b. 1962)
Mass Ornament (detail)
2009
Video, 7 Min.
Courtesy of the artist
© Natalie Bookchin

Natalie Bookchin (American, b. 1962)
Mass Ornament
2009
Video, 7 Min.
Courtesy of the artist
© Natalie Bookchin

Natalie Bookchin (American, b. 1962)
Mass Ornament (detail)
2009
Video, 7 Min.
Courtesy of the artist
© Natalie Bookchin

Natalie Bookchin

Natalie Bookchin borrowed the title for her video from the prominent sociologist and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer. In his 1927 essay The Mass Ornament, Kracauer described the American dance troupe known as the Tiller Girls as the embodiment of capitalist production conditions after the First World War. He equated the automaton-like movements of the anonymous, interchangeable dancers with the assembly-line work in the factories. Bookchin’s work can likewise be understood as social commentary. She collects video clips of people dancing in front of webcams set up in their homes, which are posted on YouTube for all the world to see. The montage of such clips into a group choreography with almost synchronous dance moves paints a picture of individuals who share favourite songs, idols, and yearnings.

Instead of using today’s pop songs as soundtrack, Bookchin revives the movie music from Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (both from 1935). She thus generates an alienating effect while also reflecting on both the positive and negative connotations of movement in a group and of mass media. TG

Johann Hamann (German, 1859-1935)
The Women’s Department Forms an Artful Pyramid
1903
Albumen print
8.6 x 11.4cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Johann Hamann

The Hamburg photographer Johann Hamann opened his first daylight studio in 1889 in Hamburg’s Gängeviertel but is better known for his work outside the studio. By using a magnesium powder flash, he succeeded in portraying individuals and especially groups in a natural environment even in poor lighting conditions. Butchers, cobblers, and gymnasts posed with their props and wearing their specific “uniforms” before his camera. From 1899 to 1906, Hamann produced a complete set of photos of ship captains working for the Hamburg-based shipping line HAPAG, on behalf of which he also photographed the emigration halls on Veddel Island in the Elbe River. His group photographs provide insights into the working life and club activities in the Hanseatic city around the turn of the century, and are often characterised by situational humour. TG

Sharing knowledge

A droplet whirling off a rotating oil can, the impact of a falling drop of milk, or a bullet in flight are phenomena whose speed makes them imperceptible to the naked eye. With the help of a telescope or microscope, we can look into the distance and observe things that are too far away, or enlarge things that are too small to see, and with the aid of photography these things can then be captured in images that can be shared.

The objects of artist Trevor Paglen’s interest are military spy satellites, which he locates based on information on amateur websites and then captures using elaborate special cameras. His work draws on the aesthetics of scientific photography, inquiring into our faith in the objectivity of such images – a credibility that runs through the entire history of photography.

With the positivist mood pervading the 19th century, photography was associated much more closely with science than with art. Surveying and recording were central functions assigned to the new medium. The photographic work of Eadweard J. Muybrigde, Harold E. Edgerton, and Impulsphysik GmbH Hamburg-Rissen is associated with this applied context.

Already during the 19th century, however, the confidence invested in photography as a medium for capturing reality was being challenged by the exploration of borderline areas verging on the irrational and by metaphysical speculations. Myth and science overlapped here, especially when it came to recording invisible phenomena such as ultraviolet light, heat rays, and X-rays. These trends are evident in Carl Strüwe’s photomicrographs, which in his proclaimed “New Order” combine the aesthetics of scientific photography with esoteric notions of the archetype. ER

Unknown photographer
Griffith & Griffith (publisher)
Full Moon
1850-1900
Albumen print on cardboard
8.8 x 17.8cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Unknown photographer
Griffith & Griffith (publisher)
Full Moon (detail)
1850-1900
Albumen print on cardboard
8.8 x 17.8cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

One year after the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, a photographic image was already made of the moon. The first stereographic photographs were presented by the chemist and amateur astronomer Warren de la Rue in 1858. Stereo images, which enjoyed great popularity in the latter half of the 19th century, consist of two photographs, which display a scene from slightly different perspectives, thus imitating the viewing angle of the human eyes and generating a spatial impression of the subject when viewed through a stereoscope.

Because the moon is too far from the earth to be able to photograph it from two different angles at once, a stereo photograph is only possible by taking into account optical libration, or the apparent “oscillation” of the moon. Due to the earth’s elliptical orbit, the half of the moon visible from earth is not always exactly the same. For a stereo photograph like the one the publisher Griffith & Griffith offered – certainly not as a scientific document – the shots that were combined were taken at an interval of several months.TG

Trevor Paglen (American, b. 1974)
MISTY 2/DECOY near Altair (Decoy Stealth Satellite; USA 144db)
2010
C-Print
101.6 x 127cm
Courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Köln
© Trevor Paglen

More pictures are being taken and digitised than ever before, innumerable snapshots pile up on hard disks and in clouds, are shared via the Internet and commented on. But portals such as Facebook and Flickr as well as professional databases only supersede older forms of archiving, transferring material, and interaction. For the Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2015, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG) is examining these new collections and forms of usage. The MKG sees the future-oriented motto of the Triennial, “The Day Will Come,” as an opportunity to reflect on the sharing of images, under the title: When We Share More Than Ever. The exhibition shows how today’s rampant exchange of digital photos links in with the history of the analogue medium. In fact, photography has been a means of capturing, storing, and communicating visual impressions ever since its early days in the 19th century. In ten chapters, selected contexts are examined in which collecting and sharing images has played – and still plays – a role. More than 200 historical works from the MKG’s collection are set in counterpoint against twelve contemporary artistic projects. The present-day artists reflect in their works on the ways digital photography is used as well as on the mechanisms and implications of new media. They focus on the Internet as a new picture archive, with collections of images such as Apple Maps or photos on eBay, and on images such as those exchanged via mobile phones. Important aspects are the digital image collection as a research resource and inspiration for contemporary art, and the relevance of the classic analogue collection in relation to today’s often-invoked image overkill.

The exhibition is conceived as a kind of archive in order to explore the archive’s possible forms and uses. The featured works from the collection were selected from the MKG’s holdings of some 75,000 photographs to show how different photographic practices have been assimilated over the years. Rather than being a collection of only art photography, the MKG archive reflects the everyday uses of the medium. It gathers together various photographic applications, whether the scientific photos taken at an institute for impulse physics, the fashion spread created by Terry Richardson for Sisley, or Max Scheler’s report on Liverpool’s club scene for Stern magazine.

The chapters “Sharing a Portrait,” “Sharing a Group,” “Sharing Memories,” “Sharing a Product,” “Sharing Lust,” “Sharing Evidence,” “Sharing Knowledge,” “Sharing the World,” “Sharing a Collection,” and “Sharing Photographs” juxtapose historical and contemporary works in order to illuminate how the use and function of photographic images have changed and which aspects have remained the same despite the digital revolution. The exhibition begins with photography used in the service of people: to record a life, create a sense of community, or share memories. The following chapters deal with applied contexts, such as advertising photographs, erotic photography, photojournalism, scientific photography, and travel photos.

We share memories: While in the old days a manageable number of photographs found their way into albums, which were then taken out and perused on special family occasions, on today’s sharing platforms thousands of images are constantly being shared and “liked” around the clock. The works on view include pictures of Renate Scholz, whose affluent parents had the studio photographer Minya Diez-Dührkoop record each stage of her growth and development for fifteen years in annual portrait sessions. Studio portraits have been replaced today by snapshots, while the family photo album is complemented by the Internet portal Instagram. Ai Weiwei began in 2006 to post his diary photos in a text/image blog, which was taken offline by the Chinese authorities in 2009. Since 2014 he has been publishing daily picture messages on Instagram which are readable across language barriers.

We share the world: Starting in 1860, the Fratelli Alinari produced photographs that brought the art treasures of Italy to living rooms everywhere. As an armchair traveler, the 19th-century burgher could feel like a conqueror of far-off lands. Today, the same kind of cultural appropriation takes place instead on computer screens. Regula Bochsler and Jens Sundheim explore landscapes and cities via webcams and Apple Maps. And instead of traveling like a photojournalist to real-world hotbeds of social ferment, Doug Rickard journeys to the dark reaches of the YouTube universe. He shows us ostensibly private scenes not meant for public consumption – drug abuse, racial and sexual violence. The low-resolution, heavily pixelated stills excerpted from mobile phone videos suggest authenticity and turn us into silent witnesses and voyeurs.

We share knowledge: From its earliest days, photography has been indispensable for storing and sharing the results of scientific research and military expeditions. Trevor Paglen uses powerful precision astronomical telescopes to make “invisible” things visible, for example the American “Misty 2” stealth satellites used for reconnaissance, or a dummy put in place by the military intelligence service. In order to locate these satellites, Paglen actively participates in various networks set up by amateur satellite observers.

We share image collections: Before the invention of Google Image Search, analogue photo collections provided an opportunity to compare images. Museum archive cabinets can be seen as a precursor to today’s digital image databases. The Internet is increasingly taking on the function of a picture library, opening up new possibilities for classification and research. Artists like Taryn Simon investigate image collections to ascertain their ordering systems and their implications. Who controls what images we get to see and which ones vanish in the depths of the archives? Part of this chapter is the project “Sharing Blogs“.

The exhibition is dedicated to the broader question of how the function of a museum collection of photography has changed in the digital era, when vast digital image archives are only a mouse click away thanks to Google Image Search. The exhibits are arranged on a horizontal axis, in keeping with modern notions of how a database is set up. Everything is thus presented on a “neutral” plane, and the visitors are tasked with placing the images in context with the help of a “search aid” in the form of a booklet.”

Press release from Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Sharing the World

Google Earth and the 3D Flyover feature of the Apple Maps software make the world accessible to all of us through images. The idea of a comprehensive photographic world archive that would be available to the general public began to spread soon after the invention of photography. In parallel with the expansion of the railway network in the mid-19th century, photographic societies were founded in France and the United Kingdom with plans to make, archive, and preserve pictures of cities, cultural heritage, and landscapes. Governments organised expeditions to photograph their dominions, and photographers and companies began specialising in producing picturesque scenes echoing the tradition of painted landscapes and engraved vedutes, developing a successful business model with international sales channels. Views of popular tourist attractions – for example famous buildings in Italy – were offered as an early form of souvenir. At the same time, such pictures allowed the Biedermeier burgher back home in his living room to become an armchair traveler without taking on the exertions and expense of visiting far-off places – just as the Internet surfer is able to do today.

Artistic works such as those by Regula Bochsler confront representations of reality on the World Wide Web that are ostensibly democratic and yet are in fact controlled by corporations. Bochsler has culled subjective images from the liquefied, constantly updated parallel universe and given them a lasting material form. TG

Jens Sundheim (German, b. 1970)
From the series 100100 Views of Mount Fuji
2008-2010
Digital C-type prints
100 x 130cm
© Jens Sundheim

Regula Bochsler (Swiss, b. 1958)
Downtown # 1
2013
From the series The Rendering Eye, 2013
Inkjet print
80 x 100cm
© Regula Bochsler
Images based on Apple Maps

Regula Bochsler

For her project The Rendering Eye, the historian Regula Bochsler has been traveling through a virtual parallel universe since 2013 using the 3D flyover feature in Apple Maps. Unlike Google Streetview, Apple Maps gives the viewer a volumetric impression of cities and landscapes. In order to create these views, the mapped zones are scanned from an airplane using several cameras aligned at different angles. With the help of vector graphics as well as actual maps and satellite images, the software then automatically merges the countless overlapping photographs into a realistic view. The program was developed for the purpose of steering military rockets by the Swedish defence company Saab, which sold it to Apple in 2011 for around 240 million dollars. Under the pressure of competition from Google, Apple released its app before some major development bugs could be fixed. In her surreal-looking, carefully composed views of American cities, Bochsler preserves for posterity the image errors ( so-called “glitches”) in the program, which are gradually being corrected and disappearing, as well as the still-visible areas where photographs taken at different times are patched together. The result is an apocalyptic vision of a world of technoid artificiality and absolute control. TG

Unknown photographer
Wissower Klinken, Photochrom Zürich
1890
Photochromic print
16.5 x 22.2cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Trevor Paglen (American, b. 1974)
Detachment 3, Air Force Flight Test Center #2 Groom Lake, NV/ Distance ~ 26 Miles
2008
C-Print
101.6 x 127cm
Courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Köln
© Trevor Paglen

Sharing evidence

Catastrophes and events are documented today by eyewitnesses at close range and communicated over the Internet. Mobile phone cameras even enable images to be transmitted directly: people involved in the incidents can share their perspective with a wide audience, the poor quality of the pixelated images often being perceived as a guarantee of their authenticity and credibility. The artist Doug Rickard also relies on this effect when he provides inside glimpses of marginal areas of American society on YouTube, assembling them to create picture stories that can be compared to classic photo reportage. By the early 1900s, photographic images were already established as evidence and information material that could be printed in newspapers. During World War II, the suitability of the medium as a means for objective documentation was then fundamentally called into question as photos were exploited for political propaganda purposes. Nevertheless, photojournalism experienced a heyday in the 1960s and 70s, before serious competition in the form of television posed a threat to print media and many magazines discontinued publication. Photographers such as Thomas Hoepker and Max Scheler supplied personal picture essays to Stern magazine in Hamburg that gave readers a look at different countries and told of the destinies of various individuals. With today’s citizen journalism, the evidential value of the photographic image seems to have once again regained its importance. TG

Hanns-Jörg Anders (German, b. 1942)
Riots in Northern Ireland
1969
Silver gelatine print
25.8 x 38.8cm
© Hanns-Jörg Anders – Red. STERN

Hanns-Jörg Anders (German, b. 1942)
We want peace, Londonderry, Northern Ireland
May 1969
Silver gelatine print
25.8 x 38.8cm
© Hanns-Jörg Anders – Red. STERN

Sharing lust

In 1859, Charles Baudelaire derided the “thousands of greedy eyes” indulging in the shameless enjoyment of “obscene” photographs. He was referring in particular to stereoscopic images, which convey a realistic corporeal impression of piquant subjects when seen through a special optical device. In parallel with the spread of the photographic medium, the sales of erotic and pornographic pictures grew into a lucrative business. European production centres for such material were located around 1900 in the cities of Paris, Vienna, and Budapest. Illegal pictures could be had from vendors operating near train stations or through discreet mail-order. Two daguerreotypes in the Photography and New Media Collection bear witness to the early days of this pictorial tradition.

Starting in the 1910s, the new vogue for magazines and pin-ups coming out of the USA served to democratise and popularise erotic imagery. Studio Manassé in Vienna, for example, supplied numerous magazines with such photographs. While erotic imagery was increasingly co-opted by advertising, a new industry arose: the pornographic film, which increasingly competed with print media. Today, the spread of pornographic imagery on the Internet has taken on immense proportions, while digital technology has led to a boom in the sharing of amateur photos and films, as well as their commercialisation. Laia Abril shows by-products of this online marketing of private sex in her video work Tediousphilia. TG

William H. Rau (American, 1855-1920)
An Intruder
1897
Albumen print on cardboard
8.8 x 17.8cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Nobuyoshi Araki (Japanese, b. 1940)
From the series Kimbaku
1983
Silver gelatin print
26 x 33.4cm
© Nobuyoshi Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki

Fragmented through artfully knotted ropes, the nude bodies of young women in Nobuyoshi Araki’s photographs are turned into objects of voyeuristic curiosity. Critical opinions in the literature are divided, with some emphasising the pictorial character of the images and others accusing the photographer of a sexist point of view catering to the exotic tastes of the European public. Araki’s photographs have thus set off a discussion on where to draw the line between pornography and art.

Araki’s photos were exhibited in the West for the first time in 1992. The show featured views of Tokyo, still lifes, and female nudes that dealt with love, loss, and sexuality – all intertwined into a very personal narration. From that point forward, the perception of Araki’s images became very selective, and at the latest with Tokyo Lucky Hole (1997) the obscene aspect came to the fore. In the 1980s, the photographer explored the escalating sex and entertainment boom in Tokyo. Araki himself insists on varied applications for his photographs. He displays them in a wide range of exhibition venues, from soup kitchens to museums, and publishes his images in art books as well as in porn magazines, S&M periodicals, and popular calendars. The images in the collection of the MKG were acquired in the mid-1980s, at a time when Araki was still unknown in Europe. The choices made already anticipate the selective perception of his work in the 1990s. ER

Laia Abril (Spanish, b. 1986)
Tediousphilia
2014
Video, c. 4 min.
© Laia Abril/INSTITUTE

Laia Abril

Laia Abril’s series Tediousphilia shows young couples who set up a webcam in their bedroom in order to earn money by giving customers an intimate peek at their ostensibly private sex lives. This online peepshow concept is a phenomenon of the commercialisation of private sex on the internet. Abril is interested in the moments before the sexual act, taking a look behind the scenes, as it were, where the couples succumb to the lethargy of waiting while the camera is already rolling. The title is thus composed of the word tedious and the Greek term philia, indicating a preference or inclination, referring to the embracing of boredom before the impending performance. These “pre-intimate” moments seem almost more real and personal than what we imagine the pseudo-private performances must be like. The images of the waiting lovers illuminate the voyeuristic relationship between audience and performer, between private and public, focusing, as in other works by Abril, on themes such as sexuality, intimacy, and the media representation of human bodies. ES

Sharing products

Since the 1920s, consumer products have been advertised primarily through photographic images. Fuelled by the rapidly developing field of advertising and by advances in printing techniques, advertising photos began to proliferate in newspapers and magazines and on billboards. Advertisers increasingly relied on the suggestive power of the photographic images rather than on text or drawings as before.

Johannes Grubenbecher had his students take pictures of objects of daily use as a way of preparing them for work in the advertising field. The arrangement of object shots demonstrates the form and materiality of the items and reflect the image language of the 1920s, which focused on functionality and faithfulness to materials. By contrast, the commercial photographs by Hildi Schmidt-Heins and Arthur Benda from the 1930s stylise the objects as consumer fetishes. Benda has draped a silk nightgown as though it had just slipped off a woman’s shoulders and onto the floor in order to whet the observer’s desires, which he should then transfer onto the goods.

Today, nothing has changed in the fetishisation of merchandise through professional product photography. New, however, are the non-professional snapshots on consumer-to-consumer platforms such as eBay. Household items that are no longer needed are photographed by the owners themselves for sale to others. Penelope Umbrico uses this imagery in her work. She has collected photographs of tube televisions – an outdated technique – and presents them as a comment on the changes in our use of images brought about by inexpensive and ubiquitous digital photography, making pictures easy to upload to the appropriate platforms. ER

Hildi Schmidt-Heins (German, b. 1915)
Gartmann Schokolade
1937
Tempera on silver gelatine print
17.3 x 23cm
© Archiv Schmidt Heins

The sandwich boards created by Hildi Schmidt-Heins for the Stuhr Coffee Roastery and the Gartmann Chocolate Factory appeared as still images on Hamburg’s movie screens in 1937. She used open packaging so that potential customers could see the food product inside and also recognise it easily in the store. Her few commissions for advertisements came from her photography lecturer Johannes Grubenbecher during her studies at the Hansa Academy for Visual Arts. Schmidt-Heins focused in her studies on typeface design, attending the class conducted by the graphic designer Hugo Meier-Thur. Her silver gelatin prints with tempera lettering present a method of visual communication that fuses typography with product photography. Later, the photographer dedicated herself to the documentation of workspaces, taking pictures of workshops. AS

Penelope Umbrico (American, b. 1957)
Signals Still
2011
C-Prints
23 x 30cm
Courtesy Mark Moore Gallery, USA, and XPO Gallery, Paris
© Penelope Umbrico

In her tableau Signals Still, Penelope Umbrico presents a collection of six sets of eleven photographs each of illuminated, imageless screens. The product photos were taken by the owners of the devices in order to provide proof of their working order to potential buyers. Umbrico scours consumer-to-consumer marketplaces like eBay and Craigslist for such images and groups them into individual types. By transforming the intangible pixel images into C-prints on Kodak paper, Umbrico then distances them from their original function as digital communication media. The artist appropriates the found material and imposes on it a shift in meaning. Minimal deviations in the angle of the shot and variations in the forms and colours of the monochromatic snowy light surfaces combine to form a collective template. The promise of modern technology – progress and mass availability – is juxtaposed with its somber flip side of obsolescence and superfluity. Umbrico’s use of contemporary digital media unites the tired flicker of the television screens into a chorus singing the requiem of an era. AS

Sharing collections

“According to which criteria should a collection be organised? Perhaps by individual lectures, by masters, chronologically, topographically, or by material?” asked the curator Wilhelm Weimar in 1917. His query was prompted by the production of a slide cabinet holding 7,600 slides. His solution was to furnish each image carrier with a numerical code, so that they could be cross-referenced with a card catalogue in which the objects were filed under various keywords. His search aid was an early form of database.

Like this slide collection, the photographic reproductions created by Léon Vidal and Adolphe Braun to record and disseminate art treasures can also be understood as precursors to digital databases. Today, search engines such as Google Images are available to anyone with an Internet connection, presenting with their infinite number of comparison pictures a plethora of new possibilities for ordering and research, and supplanting the function of the photographic collection as image database. Photographs are no longer bound as physical media to a single storage location but have become immaterial and thus available anytime, anywhere. Images that once slumbered in archives, organised by strict criteria for ease of retrieval, become in Aurélien Froment’s film weightless ephemera. A magician moves them through space with a sweep of his hand, just as the modern user swipes his pictures across the digital interface.

Taryn Simon is also interested in such image ordering systems and how the images in them are accessed. By entering identical search terms in various national image search engines in her Image Atlas and then examining the standardised search results, she inquires into what the new archives remember and what they forget. ER

Glass diapositives for slide lectures from the archive of the MKG
Nd
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Glass diapositives for slide lectures from the archive of the MKG (detail)
Nd
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

In the late 1890s, photography’s triumphant advance also had an impact on the everyday work of the MKG. Under Justus Brinckmann, the museum’s first director, the objects in the collection were regularly recorded for the files with the help of a camera. The self-taught photographer Wilhelm Weimar, initially employed by the museum as a draftsman, thus managed in the course of fifteen years to produce some 1,700 shots of pieces in the collection. The prints were mounted on cardboard and filed according to functional groups. In case of theft or suspected counterfeiting, the object photos also served Brinckmann as evidence hat could be sent by post within a network of museums.

Art history as an academic discipline worked from the outset with photographic reproductions, which made it possible to compare far-flung works and to bring them together in a shared historical context. In his essay Le Musée imaginaire, author André Malraux even makes the claim that the history of art has been tantamount since the 19th century to the “history of the photographable.” The over 7,000 slides the museum has preserved of its own holdings and other objects, together with architectural images and exhibition photographs, were assembled for use in slide presentations, compellingly illustrating this idea of a museum without walls which can be rearranged at will according to prevailing contemporary thinking. AS

Aurélien Froment (France, b. 1976)
Théâtre de poche
2007
with Stéphane Corréas
HD video with sound, c. 12 min.
Courtesy of the artist and Marcelle Alix, Paris
© Aurélien Mole

Aurélien Froment

The work Théâtre de Poche (2007) showcases in a seemingly infinite black space a contemporary form of magic with images. A magician in a trance-like state pushes photographs across an invisible surface like an iPhone user swiping through information on his touch screen. His sweeping motions pass through thin air, like those of a player at a Wii station. Froment thus connects these gestures, obviously influenced by contemporary electronic user interfaces, with a centuries old magic technique. The images, consisting of family photos, playing cards, found film stills, reproductions of non-European art, and arts and crafts items, are rearranged in new juxtapositions. They are resorted, lined up, and rethought, recalling Aby Warburg’s panels for his Mnemosyne Atlas. The artist is interested here in the discrepancy between sign and meaning, exploring how it shifts when the images are placed in new contexts and new, weightless archives. ER

Sharing photographs

At the end of the 19th century, more and more amateur and professional photographers came together in the major cities of Europe to form groups. They shared the conviction that photography should be seen as an independent artistic medium, and they sought a forum in which to present their works. Magazines such as Camera Work, which was distributed internationally, as well as joint exhibitions, encouraged lively exchanges about stylistic developments and technical procedures while serving to expand and strengthen the network. The Pictorialists saw their pictures not as a mere medium for communicating information or as illustrations: they instead shared the photographs themselves as pictures in their own right, with a focus on their composition and the details of their execution.

The Hofmeister brothers put their artworks into circulation as photo postcards. The artist Heman Chong picks up on this popular tradition of collecting and sharing images by reproducing his numerous photographs as cards, taking recourse to the “old” medium of the postcard to highlight the fact that photographs are today mainly immaterial images shared via the Internet.

Platforms like Instagram and Flickr define themselves as global “photo communities” with millions of users and thousands of uploads per second. Image data is archived there, groups founded, albums curated, and an interactive space created through keywording with tags and comment functions. For the exhibition When We Share More Than Ever, examples of such virtual galleries are presented with commentary on the blog http://sharingmorethanever.tumblr.com/. TG

Theodor (German, 1868-1943) and Oscar Hofmeister (German, 1871-1937)
Postcards
1910s and 1920s
Silver gelatine prints
14.8 x 10.6cm
3 Intaglio prints
14 x 8.9cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Theodor (German, 1868-1943) and Oscar Hofmeister (German, 1871-1937)
Postcards (details)
1910s and 1920s
Silver gelatine prints
14.8 x 10.6cm
3 Intaglio prints
14 x 8.9cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Theodor and Oscar Hofmeister

Theodor and Oscar Hofmeister, one a merchant and the other a judicial employee, discovered their passion for photography in the 1890s. Upon viewing international photography exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, they became acquainted with the Viennese Pictorialists and were inspired to adopt similarly picturesque imagery coupled with advanced technical implementation. Starting in 1895, they began to exhibit their work and were soon recognised internationally as specialists in the multicolour gum bichromate printing process. Some of their large-format one-off images are found in the collection of the MKG.

A good idea of the brothers’ prodigious productivity and clever marketing is however supplied by their landscape scenes, which Munich publisher Hermann A. Wiechmann reproduced using the rotogravure process. He published these scenes taken on rambles through the countryside, meant to reflect the “characteristic effect” of various parts of the country and hence the “German soul,” in over twenty “homeland books,” combining them with poems by German authors, as well as in portfolios and as “Hofmeister picture postcards.” The Hofmeister brothers themselves amassed an extensive collection of postcards of their own making – addressed in some cases to family members – as well as copies of postcards by other photographers. TG

Heman Chong (Malaysia, b. 1977)
God Bless Diana
2000-2004
Installation with postcards
© Heman Chong

Heman Chong (Malaysia, b. 1977)
God Bless Diana (detail)
2000-2004
Installation with postcards
© Heman Chong

Heman Chong

In his conceptual works, the artist, writer, and curator Heman Chong often deals with social practices and different kinds of archives. The installation God Bless Diana presents 550 postcards as if in a museum shop display. The artist is alluding here to the contemporary flood of commercial and private photographs, inviting the viewer to respond and make his own selections. Chong offers viewers scenes evoking ephemeral traces and grotesque situations he has filtered out of the daily big-city jungle in Beijing, London, New York, and Singapore and captured on analogue 35mm film. In contrast to the data in an Internet image archive, the postcards are actual material objects: for one euro, as symbolic antipode to the exorbitant art market prices, the exhibition visitor can purchase his favourites among these works, take them home with him, and use them to curate his own “show” or as the bearer of a written message, thus sharing them with friends. TG

Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Steintorplatz, 20099 Hamburg

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 10am – 6pm
Thursday 10am – 9pm
Closed Mondays

Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget’ and ‘Impressions of Melbourne’ at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 17th July 2015 – 20th September 2015

National Gallery of Australia touring exhibition

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927)
No title (Brocanteur)
c. 1898-1905
Albumen silver photograph
17.8 x 21.9cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1980

Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget is a particularly dry and uninspiring National Gallery of Australia touring exhibition, which was only enlivened for me by the enlightened presence of 20 or so vintage Eugène Atget photographs, specifically added for this showing at the Monash Gallery of Art, the home of Australian photography.

Atget’s photographs have an almost ether/real quality to them in their visual representation and, physically, an ephemeral feel to the quality of the paper – as though the images are about to dissolve into nothing – even as he photographs solid objects such as stairways, doors and door knockers. Observe the photographs Hôtel du Maréchal de Tallard, 78 rue des Archives (c. 1898-1905), A la Grâce de Dieu, 121 rue Montmartre (c. 1900) and Heurtoir, 6 rue du Parc Royal (c. 1901-1914), below, to witness this shimmering phenomenon. It is as if the emulsion of the plate is insufficient to capture the light of life.

In an accompanying exhibition in the smaller gallery, Impressions of Melbourne, photographs by Nicholas Caire, Charles Kerry, Max Dupain, Mark Strizic and Noel Jones investigate the city of Melbourne… but it is the stunning photographs by Atget that make the long drive out to Wheeler’s Hill worth the visit.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927)
Versailles, Grand Trianon
c. 1901-1925
Gold-toned silver chloride photograph
17.6 x 22cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1980

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927)
Hôtel du Maréchal de Tallard, 78 rue des Archives
c. 1898-1905
Gold-toned silver chloride photograph
22 x 18.1cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1980

Eugène Atget (France 1857-1927)
A la Grâce de Dieu, 121 rue Montmartre
c. 1900
Printing out paper photograph
22 x 17.7cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1984

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927)
Heurtoir, 6 rue du Parc Royal
c. 1901-1914
Gold-toned silver chloride photograph
21.9 x 17.8cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1980

Monash Gallery of Art is delighted to present its major international exhibition of 2015, Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget featuring over 120 prints, posters and photographs drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget examines the major contribution to French art made by key figures: Honoré-Victorin Daumier (1808-1879), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and includes a selection of photographs by Eugène Atget (1857-1927) specially conceived for Monash Gallery of Art.

Newly appointed Gallery Director Kallie Blauhorn states, “I’m thrilled that for my first exhibition at MGA we are able to present a major international show, Impressions of Paris. Residents of Monash and art lovers across Melbourne will experience the extraordinary works by household names, Toulouse Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Honore Daumier and the wonderful photographer Eugène Atget.”

“This is a first for MGA and a true testament to the reputation of the gallery that we can host this important and significant exhibition,” said Blauhorn.

A generation apart, Lautrec, Degas and Daumier were consummate draughtsmen whose innovative compositions and embrace of modern subject matter played a significant role in artistic developments in France over the nineteenth century. Atget, the only specialist photographer among these artists, spent much of his life documenting the streets of Paris as they underwent modernisation. His photographs show us how modern life was expressed in the architectural experience of France, giving us a glimpse of what modernity left behind.

The generation of French artists who followed Daumier in the nineteenth century were inspired by his critical observations, which became an extraordinary reservoir of ideas. Both Degas and then Lautrec were enthusiastic admirers of French caricature, delighting in its animated qualities, stylistic freedoms and contemporary themes. They were particularly enamoured of Daumier’s caricature.

Degas adopted themes of modern French life, the ballet, the race course, the café-concert and the demi-monde and played an important role in the rejection of mythological and historical subjects favoured by the Impressionists. Many of Degas’ ideas on composition and subjects were, in turn, drawn from Daumier. This French satirist was both extraordinarily gifted and prolific, making a name for himself by lampooning the affectations, stupidities and greed of members of the French bourgeois society in caricatures, which Degas avidly collected.

The youngest of the artists, Lautrec, who sadly dies before reaching 37, borrowed themes and compositions from Degas, an artist he much admired and emulated. Images of drinkers at a table, ballet and cabaret scenes and nudes reveal the powerful influence that Degas had on the younger artist, as well as Lautrec’s own considerable originality, particularly as a portrayer of individuals rather than the depiction of types often favoured by Degas.

For the most part, Atget’s pictures of streets, parks, courtyards, buildings and their ornamental motifs record remnants of Old Paris. While there is a nostalgic aspect to these views, for contemporary viewers these pictures were about modern Paris. They recorded and helped make sense of changes to the city as it struggled to cope with modernism. Atget’s views of modern Paris focussed on its intimate places, those spaces of the everyday in which people had always worked, loved and lived.

These four artists captured the spirit of Paris in their prints, posters and photographs. Through the examination of this work, we find clues as to why dramatic changes took place in French art over the nineteenth century. They formed part of other generations of artists who admired Daumier and who adapted the caricaturist’s critical lithographic observations. In this way Daumier’s legacy was a brilliant journalistic record of the modern capital and contributed to an era in France ripe for a new art.

Press release from the MGA website

Eugène Atget: growth and decay in the great city

After an unspectacular career in the theatre, Eugène Atget (1857-1927) began to take photographs of Paris in 1892. By 1897 he had established a successful business photographing the spaces that remained of Old Paris. In all, Atget made over 10,000 images of Paris and its surrounds, each taken with a straightforward approach that laid the basis for much of the documentary photography that followed. Atget’s pictures were immensely popular: he sold thousands of prints, satisfying a strong demand for views of a city undergoing massive social and architectural transformation.

For the most part, Atget’s pictures of streets, parks, courtyards, buildings and their ornamental motifs record remnants of pre-Revolutionary Paris. While there is a nostalgic aspect to these views, for contemporary viewers these pictures were about modern Paris. They recorded and helped make sense of changes to the city as it struggled to cope with modernism. Street traders and other workers are seen selling their wares along old streets and laneways; ancient buildings stand in laneways and courtyards undergoing physical transformation; cafes and shops await bustling crowds. Atget’s views of modern Paris focussed on its intimate places, those spaces of the everyday in which people had always worked, loved and lived.

Impressions of Melbourne

17th July 2015 – 20th September 2015

In response to the photographs by Eugène Atget (1857-1927) included in the National Gallery of Australia’s touring exhibition, Impressions of Paris, this exhibition offers views of Melbourne’s streets, laneways and urban landscape. Drawn from the Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection, this selection traverses a period from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.

Atget photographed Paris during a time when the French capital was undergoing significant transformation. From the 1850s through to the 1920s, the dark medieval neighbourhoods of the city were demolished to make way for the wide avenues and open public spaces that Paris is known for today. Atget’s ambition was to produce clear and detailed photographs that would document the heritage of Paris before it disappeared. Typically taking his photographs in the early morning when the streets were empty, Atget imbued the city with ghostly nostalgia.

The earliest photographs in Impressions of Melbourne, taken by Nicholas Caire and Charles Kerry in the late nineteenth century, are contemporary to those of Atget. While Atget focused longingly on the past, however, these Australian photographers celebrated the civic accomplishments of modern progress in the colonies. The portrayal of Melbourne as a civilised metropolis, attractive to both immigrants and tourists, persisted through the twentieth century. Max Dupain captured the city as a lively and enterprising place, while Mark Strizic lingered on the shimmering ambience of window shopping and city strolling.

Impressions of Melbourne showcases a range of photographic responses to our urban environment, revealing some of Melbourne’s many moods and highlighting the city as a rich photographic subject. The exhibition includes photographs by Nicholas Caire, Charles Kerry, Max Dupain, Mark Strizic and Noel Jones.

Nicholas Caire

Nicolas Caire was born in Guernsey and arrived in Australia, settling in Adelaide, in 1858. He set up his first photographic studio in Adelaide in 1867. He moved to the Victorian goldmining town of Talbot in 1870 before relocating to Melbourne in 1876. At this time, Melbourne was the largest Australian city.

While Caire is best known for his picturesque landscape photographs of the Victorian countryside, he also produced photographs of major city thoroughfares, public buildings, parks and gardens. These subjects were common amongst photographers in the second half of the nineteenth century, conveying a sense of local pride and achievement. Caire’s photographs were often mounted in albums and accompanied by individual descriptive texts, a format that was popular amongst local and overseas visitors at the time.

Charles Kerry

Charles Kerry grew up in country New South Wales before moving to Sydney at the age of 17 to begin his photographic career. After a failed studio partnership, which left him with a lot of debt, Kerry rebuilt his business and by 1890 found himself running a successful studio that had a monopoly on the popular postcard market. By 1898 Kerry’s studio was the largest in Australia, housed in a three-storey building at 310 George Street, Sydney.

Throughout his career, Kerry photographed a broad range of subjects including social and sporting events, portraits of Indigenous people, city streets as well as the New South Wales countryside. He also spent a year documenting every station homestead in New South Wales. Kerry retired in 1913.

Nicholas Caire (born United Kingdom 1837; arrived Australia 1858; died 1918)
View of Bourke Street, Melbourne
1877-1878
From the series Views of Victoria
Albumen print
13.4 x 18.7cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1987

Original album caption: Bourke Street is the principal business thoroughfare in the great City of Melbourne. It is about a mile in length, extending from the Parliament House to the Spencer Street Railway Station. On the left hand side of the picture is the Post Office, and at the extreme end of the street can be seen the Parliament House.

Nicholas Caire (born United Kingdom 1837; arrived Australia 1858; died 1918)
The Government Domain of Victoria
1877-1878
From the series The public buildings of Melbourne and suburbs
Albumen print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1987

Original album caption: The Governor’s Residence is on an eminence near the Botanical Gardens, and occupies one of the best positions around the City of Melbourne. Looking westward from the front of the Domain, a splendid view is obtained of Hobson’s Bay, with the townships of St Kilda, Emerald Hill, Sandridge, and Williamstown on the coast. On the north side can be seen the City of Melbourne, with its busy suburban towns – Hotham, Carlton and Fitzroy. From the rear of the building towards the east, in the distance, the retired towns of Richmond, Hawthorn, and Toorak can be distinguished. The building, as seen in the illustration, was completed in the year 1876. Sir G F Bowen, GCMG, being the Resident Governor at the time.

Nicholas Caire (born United Kingdom 1837; arrived Australia 1858; died 1918)
The Royal Mint, Melbourne
1877-1878
From the series The public buildings of Melbourne and suburbs
Albumen print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1987

Original album caption: The Royal Mint of Victoria is situated in the north-easterly part of William Street, West Melbourne. This Government Building is not thrown open to the public for visitation at any time; but an inspection by visitors can be effected on an order from a Member of the Ministry, conditionally that there be no fewer than eight persons at each visitation; one of the number being required to become responsible for the conduct of the party.

Nicholas Caire (born United Kingdom 1837; arrived Australia 1858; died 1918)
The Post Office, Melbourne
1877-1878
From the series The public buildings of Melbourne and suburbs
Albumen print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1987

Original album caption: This imposing structure is erected at the junction of Bourke and Elizabeth Streets, which may be considered perhaps the most central position in Melbourne. It is provided with a very long corridor for the posting and delivery of letters, & c. The Telegraph Department, as also the Post Office Savings Bank and Money Order Office, are all conducted in connection with the General Post office, Melbourne, of which the Hon. R Ramsay, MLA, is at present Postmaster-General.

Charles Kerry (Australia, 1858-1928)
Collins Street, looking south
c. 1890
Albumen print
14.5 x 17.5cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1984

Max Dupain (Australia, 1911-1992)
Melbourne with rain
1946
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1987

Max Dupain

Max Dupain began his photographic career in 1930 as an apprentice in the studio of Cecil Bostock. In 1934 he established his own studio in Sydney and continued to produce a broad range of commercial work over the course of his life. Dupain was strongly influenced by modernist photographic principles and is renowned for his architectural photography as well as his iconic images of Australian beach culture.

While he primarily worked in Sydney, the photographs exhibited here are among several he took of otherAustralian cities. They highlight his interest in documenting city life as well as his use of light, shadow and aerial perspective. They were taken during the post war period; in the year that Dupain was commissioned by the Department of Information to photograph Australia’s way of life as part of a campaign to increase migration to Australia. This period marked a shift in Dupain’s practice, away from advertising and fashion toward social documentary.

Mark Strizic (born Germany 1928; arrived Australia 1950; died 2012)
Near 101 Collins Street, Jan 1963
1963
Gelatin silver print
36 x 53.5cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by the Bowness Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008
Reproduction courtesy of the artist

Mark Strizic (born Germany 1928; arrived Australia 1950; died 2012)
Collins Street at McPherson’s building – 1, 1967
1967
Gelatin silver print
53.8 x 36cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by the Bowness Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008
Reproduction courtesy of the artist

Mark Strizic

Mark Strizic was born in Berlin and migrated to Melbourne from Zagreb, Croatia in 1950. Strizic had no formal training in photography, but began taking photographs of Melbourne in the 1950s. He abandoned his studies in physics to become a full-time photographer in 1957, taking up subsequent commissions in architectural, industrial, interior design and portrait photography.

Among Strizic’s most widely recognised images are those he created of Melbourne between 1955 and 1970. Strizic documented the streets of Melbourne, showing many sides of the city, from derelict back alleyways to the grand arcades and buildings of Melbourne’s ‘Paris end’. Strizic’s photographs were produced during a period of dramatic change, a time when Melbourne’s Victorian-era buildings were being replaced by modern architectural developments. The images not only serve to document this change but also provide significant and important records of Melbourne pre-modernisation.

Monash Gallery of Art
860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill
Victoria 3150 Australia
Phone: + 61 3 8544 0500

Opening hours:
Tue – Fri: 10am – 5pm
Sat – Sun: 10pm – 4pm
Mon/public holidays: closed

Monash Gallery of Art website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great’ at NGV International, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 31th July 2015 – 8th November 2015

Melbourne Winter Masterpieces 2015

Hermitage Museum, the Winter Palace in Winter, St Petersburg
Photo: Pavel Demidov

Some beauty to cheer me up from my sickbed.

These are the official press photographs for the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great. To see my installation photographs of the exhibition go to this posting.

The paintings look as fresh today as when they were first painted, some of them in the early 1500s. To see the thumbs up gesture in Diego Velázquez’s Luncheon (c. 1617-1618, below) echoing down the centuries, is worth the price of admission alone. We cannot imagine what life would have been like back then… no medication, rampant disease and malnutrition, little law enforcement with danger lurking around each turn (see Matthew Beaumont. Night Walking: A Nocturnal History of London, Chaucer to Dickens. London and New York: Verso, 2015).

And yet these talented artists, supported by the elite, produced work which still touches us today.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the art works in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the art works.

Chinese
Cup
early 17th century
Silver, enamel
4 x 3 x 7cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ЛС-133, ВВс-250)
Acquired before 1789

Chinese
Teapot with lid
17th century
Silver, enamel
18.0 x 5.5cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ЛС-80 а, б, ВВс-219)
Acquired before 1789

Sèvres Porcelain Factory
Sèvres (manufacturer) France est. 1756
Cameo Service
1778-1779
Porcelain (soft-paste), gilt
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg Commissioned by Catherine ll as a gift for Prince Grigory Potemkin in 1777; Potemkin’s Taurida Palace, St Petersburg from 1779; transferred to the Hofmarshal’s Office of the Winter Palace after his death; 1922 transferred to the State Hermitage Museum

Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna (Russian, 1795-1828) (engraver)
Russia (manufacturer)
Catherine the Great as Minerva
1789
Cameo
Jasper, gold
6.5 x 4.7cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. К 1077)
Acquired 1789

James Tassie, London (England, 1735-1799) (workshop of)
Head of Medusa
1780s
Coloured glass, gilded paper
7.6 x 9.2cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. R-T, 3296 a)
Purchased from James Tassie 1783-88

Chinese
Toilet service
early 18th century
Glass, mercury amalgam, paper, silver, filigree, parcel-gilt, wood, velvet, peacock and king-fisher feathers, mother-of-pearl, crystals
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ЛС-472/ 1,2, ВВс-373)

Chinese
Table decoration in the form of a pair of birds
1740s-50s
Silver, enamel, silver-gilt
26.0 x 26.0 x 15.0cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ЛС-26, ВВс-189)

Chinese
Crab-shaped box on a leaf tray
1740s-50s
Silver, enamel, silver-gilt
(a) 4.0 x 14.0 x 13.0cm (box)
(b) 3.0 x 22.0 x 17.0cm (stand)
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ЛС-9 а,б, ВВс-186)

Marie-Anne Collot (French, 1748-1821)
Voltaire
1770s
Marble
49 x 30 x 28cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. Н.ск. 3)
Acquired from the artist, 1778

Jean-Antoine Houdon (French, 1741-1828)
Catherine II
1773
Marble
90 x 50 x 32cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. Н.ск. 1676)
Transferred from the Stroganov Palace, Leningrad, 1928

Jean-Baptiste Greuze (French, 1725-1805)
Head of an old man. Study for The paralytic
1760s
Red and black chalk
49.3 x 40cm (sheet)
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-14727)
Acquired from the artist in 1769 for the Museum of the Academy of Arts. Transferred to the Hermitage in 1924

François Boucher (French, 1703-1770)
Study of a female nude
1740
Red, black and white chalk on brown paper
26.2 x 34.6cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-382)
Acquired from the collection of Count Cobenzl, Brussels, 1768

Charles-Louis Clérisseau (French, 1721-1820)
Design for the paintings in the cell of Father Lesueur in the Monastery of Santissima Trinità dei Monti in Rome
1766-1768
Pen and black and brown ink, brown and grey wash
36.9 x 53cm (sheet)
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-2597)
Acquired from the artist by Catherine II on 5 May 1780, Provenance: before 1797

Carlo Galli-Bibiena (Austrian, 1728-1787)
Design for the interior decoration of a library
1770s
Pen and ink, grey wash and watercolour over pencil
32 х 44cm (sheet)
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-231)
Acquired before 1797

Giacomo Quarenghi (Italian, 1744-1817)
Façade of the Hermitage Theatre
1780s
Pen and ink, watercolour
33 х 47cm (sheet)
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-9626)
Acquired from Giulio Quarenghi in 1818

Konstantin Ukhtomsky (Russian, 1818-1881)
The Raphael Loggia
1860
Watercolour
42 х 25cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-11741)
Acquired from the artist, 1860

Over 500 works from the personal collection of Catherine the Great will travel to Australia in July. Gathered over a 34-year period, the exhibition represents the foundation of the Hermitage’s collection and includes outstanding works from artists such as Rembrandt, Velasquez, Rubens and Titian. Exemplary works from Van Dyck, Snyders, Teniers and Hals will also travel, collectively offering some of the finest Dutch and Flemish art to come to Australia. The exhibition, presented by the Hermitage Museum, National Gallery of Victoria and Art Exhibitions Australia, is exclusive to Melbourne as part of the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series.

The Premier of Victoria, the Hon. Daniel Andrews MP said: “Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great will showcase treasures from one of the largest, oldest and most visited museums in the world. Another major event for Melbourne, this exhibition will provide visitors with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see first-hand the extraordinary personal collection of Catherine the Great, drawn from the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.”

NGV Director, Tony Ellwood said, “This exhibition celebrates the tenacity and vision of a true innovator in the arts. Catherine the Great’s inexhaustible passion for the arts, education and culture heralded a renaissance, leading to the formation of one of the world’s great museums, the Hermitage.”

“We are delighted that we have the good fortune of bringing one of the world’s most important collections to Australian audiences. The exhibition is a rare opportunity to be immersed in the world of Catherine the Great and her magnificent collection of art,” Tony Ellwood said.

Catherine the Great’s reign from 1762 to 1796 was known as the golden age and is remembered for her exceptional patronage of the arts, literature and education. Of German heritage, Catherine the Great was well connected in European art and literature circles. She saw herself as a reine-philosophe (Philosopher Queen), a new kind of ruler in the Age of Enlightenment. Guided by Europe’s leading intellectuals, such as the French philosophers Voltaire and Diderot, she sought to modernise Russia’s economy, industry and government, drawing inspiration both from classical antiquity and contemporary cultural and political developments in Western Europe.

A prolific acquirer of art of the period, Catherine the Great’s collection reflects the finest contemporary art of the 18th century as well as the world’s best old masters of the time, with great works by French, German, Chinese, British, Dutch and Flemish artists. Notable in this exhibition are entire groups of works acquired from renowned collections from France, Germany and England representing the best collections offered for sale at the time. The exhibition will feature four Rembrandts, including the notable Young woman with earrings, known as one of most intimate images Rembrandt ever created. The exhibition will also include 80 particularly fine drawings by artists including Poussin, Rubens, Clouet and Greuze.

Exquisite decorative arts will be brought to Australia for this exhibition, including 60 items from the Cameo Service of striking enamel-painted porcelain made by the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory in Paris. Commissioned by Catherine the Great for her former lover and military commander, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the dinner service features carved and painted imitation cameos, miniature works of art, based on motifs from the French Royal collection.

Director of the Hermitage Museum, Mikhail Piotrovsky said, “These outstanding works from the personal collection of Catherine the Great represent the crown jewels of the Museum. It was through the collection of these works and Catherine the Great’s exceptional vision that the Hermitage was founded. Today it is one of the most visited museums in the world. We are very pleased to be able to share these precious works with Australian audiences at the 250-year anniversary of this important institution.”

Catherine the Great’s love of education, art and culture inspired a period of enlightenment and architectural renaissance that saw the construction of the Hermitage complex. This construction includes six historic buildings along the Palace Embankment as well as the spectacular Winter Palace, a former residence of Russian emperors. On view in the exhibition will be remarkable drawings by the Hermitage’s first architects Georg Velten and Giacomo Quarenghi, complemented by excellent painted views of the new Hermitage by Benjamin Patersen. These, along with Alexander Roslin’s majestic life-size portrait of Catherine, set the scene for a truly spectacular exhibition.

Visitors to the exhibition will be able to immerse themselves in Catherine the Great’s world evoking a sensory experience of a visit to the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The exhibition design will have rich treatments of architectural details, interior furnishings, wallpapers and a colour palette directly inspired by the Hermitage’s gallery spaces. Enveloping multimedia elements will give visitors a sense of being inside the Hermitage, evoking the lush and opulent interiors.

The Hermitage Museum was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and has been open to the public since 1852. With 3 million items in its holdings, the Hermitage is often regarded as having the finest collection of paintings in the world today. In 2014, The Hermitage celebrated its 250-year anniversary and opened a new wing of the museum with 800 rooms dedicated to art from the 19th to 21st centuries. The exhibition is organised by The Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg in association with the National Gallery of Victoria and Art Exhibitions Australia.

Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great will be at NGV International from 31 July – 8 November 2015 and will be presented alongside the David Bowie is exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image as part of the 2015 Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series.

Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria

Jean-Baptiste Santerre (French, 1651-1717)
Two actresses
1699
Oil on canvas
146 х 114cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-1284)
Acquired 1768

Anthony van Dyck (Flemish, 1599-1641)
Portrait of Philadelphia and Elizabeth Wharton
1640
Oil on canvas
162 х 130cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-533)
Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779

Jean Louis Voille (French, 1744-1804)
Portrait of Olga Zherebtsova
1790s
Oil on canvas
73.5 х 58cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-5654)
Acquired from the collection of E. P. Oliv, Petrograd, 1923

Peter Paul Rubens and workshop (Flemish, 1577-1640)
The Apostle Paul
c. 1615
Oil on wood panel
105.6 х 74cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-489)
Acquired before 1774

Leonardo Da Vinci (school of)
Female nude (Donna Nuda)
Early 16th century
Oil on canvas
86.5 х 66.5cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-110)
Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669)
Portrait of a scholar
1631
Oil on canvas
104.5 х 92cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-744)
Acquired from the collection of Count Heinrich von Brühl, Dresden, 1769

Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (French, 1715-1783)
Portrait of a boy with a book
1740s
Oil on canvas
63.0 х 52cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-1270)
Acquired from the collection of A. G. Teplov, St Petersburg, 1781

Domenico Capriolo (Italian, c. 1494-1528)
Portrait of a young man
1512
Oil on canvas
117 х 85cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-21)
Acquired from the collection of Baron Louis-Antoine Crozat de Thiers, Paris, 1772

Alexander Roslin (Swedish, 1718-1793)
Portrait of Catherine II
1776-1777
Oil on canvas
271 х 189.5cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-1316)
Acquired from the artist, 1777

Titian (Italian, 1485-1490 – 1576)
Portrait of a young woman
c. 1536
Oil on canvas
96 х 75cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-71)
Acquired from the collection of Baron Louis-Antoine Crozat de Thiers, Paris, 1772

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669)
Young woman trying on earrings
1657
Oil on wood panel
39.5 х 32.5cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-784)
Acquired from the collection of the Comte de Baudouin, Paris, 1781

Francois Clouet (French, c. 1516-1572)
Portrait of Charles IX
1566
Black and red chalk
33.1 x 22.5cm (sheet)
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. OР-2893)
Acquired from the collection of Count Cobenzl, Brussels, 1768

David Teniers II (Flemish, 1610-1690)
Kitchen
1646
Oil on canvas
171 х 237cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-586)
Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779

Cornelis de Vos (Dutch/Flemish, c. 1584-1651)
Self-portrait of the artist with his wife Suzanne Cock and their children
c. 1634
Oil on canvas
185.5 х 221cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-623)
Donated by Prince G. A. Potemkin, 1780s

Anthony van Dyck (Flemish, 1599-1641)
Family portrait
c. 1619
Oil on canvas
113.5 х 93.5cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-534)
Acquired from a private collection, Brussels, 1774

Charles Vanloo (French, 1705-1765)
Sultan’s wife drinking coffee
1750s
Oil on canvas
120 х 127cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-7489)
Acquired from the collection of Madame Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin, Paris, 1772

Peter Paul Rubens and workshop (Flemish, 1577-1640)
The Adoration of the Magi
c. 1620
Oil on canvas
235 х 277.5cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. № ГЭ-494)
Acquired from the collection of Dufresne, Amsterdam, 1770

Diego Velázquez (Spanish, 1599-1660)
Luncheon
c. 1617-1618
Oil on canvas
108.5 х 102cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-389)
Acquired 1763-1774

Melchior d’Hondecoeter (Dutch, 1636-1695)
Birds in a park
1686
Oil on canvas
136 х 164cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-1042)
Acquired from the collection of Jacques Aved, Paris, 1766

Frans Snyders (Flemish, 1579-1657)
Concert of birds
1630-1640
Oil on canvas
136.5 х 240cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-607)
Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779

NGV International
180 St Kilda Road

Opening hours for exhibition
10am – 5pm daily

National Gallery of Victoria website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Exhibition dates: 17th January 2015 – 13th September 2015

Robert and Jane Burke Gallery (Gallery 335)

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Husband and Wife, Sunday Morning, Detroit, Michigan
1950
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

It’s been a really tough time writing the Art Blart recently, as my beloved Apple Pro tower that has served me so well over the years has died and gone to god. I have been making do with a small laptop, but tomorrow I pick up my new 27 inch iMac with Retina screen, to pair with my Eizo Flexscan monitor. I can’t wait!

I have so much admiration for the work of this man. The light, the sensitivity to the social documentary narrative just emanates from these images. You don’t need to say much, it’s all there in front of you. Just look at the proud profile of that old woman, Mrs. Jefferson, Fort Scott, Kansas (1950, below), and you are instantly transported back to the slave fields and southern plantations of the 19th century. No words are necessary. The bony hands, gaunt cheeks and determined stare speak of a life hard lived.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled, St. Louis, Missouri
1950
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Tenement Dwellers, Chicago, Illinois
1950
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (1912-2006), one of the most celebrated African-American photographers of all time, is the subject of a new exhibition of groundbreaking photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott (January 17 – September 13, 2015) traces Parks’ return to his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas and then to other Midwestern cities, to track down and photograph each of his childhood classmates. On view in the MFA’s Art of the Americas Wing, the exhibition’s 42 photographs were from a series originally meant to accompany a Life magazine photo essay – but for reasons unknown, the story was never published. The images depict the realities of life under segregation in 1950 – presenting a rarely seen view of everyday lives of African-American citizens in the years before the Civil Rights movement began in earnest. One of the most personal and captivating of all Parks’ projects, the images, now owned by The Gordon Parks Foundation, represent a rare and little-known group within Parks’ oeuvre. This exhibition, on view in the Robert and Jane Burke Gallery, is accompanied by a publication by Karen Haas, the MFA’s Lane Curator of Photographs, in collaboration with The Gordon Parks Foundation, which includes an introduction by Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. The book includes previously unpublished photographs as well as archival materials such as contact sheets and a portion of the 1927 yearbook from the segregated school Parks attended as a child.

“These personal and often touching photos offer a glimpse into the life of Gordon Parks and the prejudice that confronted African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director at the MFA. “We’re grateful to The Gordon Parks Foundation for giving us the opportunity to display these moving works.”

Fort Scott, Kansas was an emotional touchstone for Gordon Parks and a place that he was drawn to over and over again as an adult, even though it held haunting memories of racism and discrimination. Parks was born in Fort Scott in 1912 to a poor tenant farmer family and left home as a teenager after his mother died and he found himself – the youngest of 15 children – suddenly having to make his own way in the world. By 1948, Parks was the first African-American photographer hired full time by Life magazine. One of the rare African-American photojournalists in the field, Parks was frequently given magazine assignments involving social issues that his fellow white photographers were not asked to cover. For an assignment on the impact of school segregation, Parks returned to Fort Scott to revisit early memories of his birthplace – many involving racial discrimination – and to reconnect with childhood friends, all of whom went to the same all-black elementary school that Parks had attended. He was able to track down all but two members of the Plaza School Class of 1927, although only one was still living in Fort Scott at the time. As he met with fellow classmates, his story quickly shifted its focus to the Great Migration north by African Americans. Over the course of several days Parks visited with his childhood friends – by this time residing in Kansas City; Saint Louis; Columbus, Ohio; Detroit; and Chicago – joining them in their parlours and on their front porches while they recounted their life stories to him. Organised around each of these cities and families, the exhibition features previously unpublished photographs as well as a seven-page draft of Parks’ text for the article.

“With the Back to Fort Scott story, Parks showed – really for the first time – a willingness to mine his own childhood for memories both happy and painful, something he would continue to do in a series of memoirs over the course of his long career” said Haas. “The experience also seems to have inspired him to write The Learning Tree in 1963, his best-selling novel about growing up poor and black in Kansas, that he transformed a few years later into a groundbreaking Hollywood movie – the first by an African American writer-director.”

Parks began his research in Fort Scott, where he found classmate Luella Russell. In addition to photographing Luella with her husband and 16-year-old daughter, Parks took photos of his own family and life around town – finding friends and acquaintances at the local theatre, railway station and pool hall. Parks also visited the local baseball field at Othick Park, where he recorded a group of white spectators seated at one end of the bleachers watching a game, while two African-American girls in summer dresses stand at the other end, in an area loosely designated for the town’s black residents. Parks’ image of the girls at the ballpark, where black and white baseball teams sometimes competed against each other, subtly refers to the separation of the races that marked much of everyday life in Fort Scott.

Fort Scott had not changed dramatically since Parks’ youth. Parks attended the all-black Plaza School through the ninth grade in 1927, and as he wrote in his draft for Life magazine: “Twenty-four years before I had walked proudly to the centre of the stage and received a diploma. There were twelve of us (six girls and six boys) that night. Our emotions were intermingled with sadness and gaiety. None of us understood why the first years of our education were separated from those of the whites, nor did we bother to ask. The situation existed when we were born. We waded in normal at the tender age of six and swam out maladjusted… nine years later.”

After Fort Scott, Parks discovered three of his classmates in Kansas City and St. Louis – cities that were easily reached by rail and were often the first stops made by African Americans leaving smaller towns. Many left towns like Fort Scott in the hope of finding jobs and better futures for their children in these larger, more industrial cities. When Parks tracked down his classmates, he recorded their jobs and wages – the sort of detail that Life typically included in such pieces, allowing its readers to measure their own lives against a story’s subjects. In Kansas City, classmate Peter Thomason was working as a postal transportation clerk (a position, Parks noted, with a minimum salary of $3,700 a year), while in St. Louis, Parks recorded that classmate Norman Earl Collins was doing quite well, making $1.22 an hour at Union Electric of Missouri. Parks’ sympathetic images of Earl and his daughter, Doris Jean, may have been a conscious effort on Parks’ part to offset contemporary stereotypes of black families as less stable and strong than their white counterparts.

By 1950, Chicago was the de facto capital of African-American life in the US, with more black inhabitants than any other city in America – including three of Parks’ classmates. Parks discovered them residing only a mile or two apart from one another on the city’s South Side. Untitled, Chicago, Illinois (1950), depicts Parks’ classmate Fred Wells and his wife Mary in front of their apartment building in the Washington Park neighbourhood. A number of the photographs in the exhibition repeat the simple compositional device seen here – featuring a classmate and his or her family, framed by the front door of their home. These images highlighted the families’ similarities to, rather than differences from Life‘s readers, who would have found such strong representations of black families at once surprising and reassuring.

In Detroit, Parks traced classmate Pauline Terry to the McDougall-Hunt neighbourhood. In Fort Scott, Pauline had married Bert Collins, who had run a restaurant during much of the 1930s. By 1950, they were settled in Detroit and had five children. Unlike Parks’ other classmates who had migrated north in search of opportunity, Pauline (yearbook ambition: “To be young forever; to be a Mrs.”) now had a large family and no longer worked outside the home. In the course of her conversation with Parks, she emphasised the importance of religion in their lives. Parks’ powerful portrait of the couple walking to Sunday services at the Macedonia Baptist Church, Husband and Wife, Sunday Morning, Detroit, Michigan (1950) reinforces the seriousness of their faith. The cigar-smoking Bert wears a sharp suit and straw boater and carries a well-worn Bible.

Once completed, Parks’ Fort Scott photo essay never appeared in Life. The reason for that remains a mystery, although the US entry into the Korean War that summer had a major impact on the content of its pages for some time. The magazine’s editors did try to resuscitate the story early in April of 1951 only to have it passed over by the news of President Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur. In the end, all that survives, as far as written documentation of the Fort Scott assignment, are Parks’ project notes from his individual visits with his classmates in May and June of 1950; several telegrams sent by Life staffers regarding his friends’ whereabouts before his arrival; fact-checking when the piece was again slated to run in April 1951; and an annotated seven-page draft. Because the photos were never published, and most have never before been on view, the exhibition presents a unique opportunity to explore a body of work that is almost completely unknown to the public.

“The Gordon Parks Foundation is pleased to collaborate with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on this exhibition and publication highlighting a series of very personal, early works by the artist” said Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., the Foundation’s executive director. “Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott allows us a focused look at a single Life magazine story and reveals a fascinating tale of Gordon Parks’ segregated beginnings in rural Kansas and the migration stories of his classmates, many of whom, like him, left in search of better lives for themselves and their families.”

Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled, Fort Scott, Kansas
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled, Chicago, Illinois
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled, Columbus, Ohio
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The lives of the classmates – six girls and five boys who graduated from the segregated Plaza School in 1927, in what was then a town of 10,000 people – present a miniature snapshot of African-American aspiration and struggle in the years before Brown v. Board of Education or the civil rights movement.

Parks found Emma Jane Wells in Kansas City, Mo., where she sold clothes door-to-door to supplement her husband’s salary at a paper-bag factory. Peter Thomason lived a few blocks away, working for the post office, one of the best jobs available to black men at the time. But others from the class led much more precarious lives. Parks tracked down Mazel Morgan on the South Side of Chicago, in a transient hotel with her husband, who Parks said robbed him at gunpoint after a photo session. Morgan’s middle-school yearbook description had been ebullient (“Tee hee, tee ho, tee hi, ha hum/Jolly, good-natured, full of fun”), but in 1950 she told Parks, “I’ve felt dead so long that I don’t figure suicide is worthwhile anymore.”

The most promising of the classmates, Donald Beatty, lived in an integrated neighbourhood in Columbus, Ohio, where he had a highly desirable job as a supervisor at a state agency and where Parks’s pictures show him – very much in the vernacular of Life magazine’s Eisenhower-era domestic scenes – happy and secure with his wife and toddler son and a brand-new Buick. But notes made by a Life fact-checker just a year later, when the magazine planned once again to run Parks’s article, recorded a tragedy, blithely and with no explanation: “Aside from the death of their son, nothing much has happened to them.”

Lorraine Madway, curator of Wichita State University’s special collections, said of the Fort Scott story: “There are those moments in an archive when you know you’ve found the gold, and this is one of them. It’s a wonderful example of micro-history. It’s not only that there is so much material written at a specific time in people’s lives, but then there are Parks’s reflections on it later.” …

Besides fact-checking notes, Parks’s own notes and a typewritten draft for what might have been his introduction to the photo spread, there is almost no other documentation surrounding the project, for which Parks shot about 30 rolls of 35-millimetre and medium-format film. And so the question of why it was not published might never be answered. In an essay for the show’s catalog, Ms. Haas speculates that it might have been doomed by its very newsworthiness, as national challenges to school segregation began gathering speed and Life waited – in the end too long – for just the right moment…

Parks carried his own psychic wounds from those years, which profoundly shaped his writing and approach to photography. But his feelings were always bittersweet. Though he lived for many years in New York City, he chose to be buried in his hometown, whose African-American population has declined even more markedly than its overall population. In a 1968 poem about his childhood, he wrote that he would miss “this Kansas land that I was leaving,” one of “wide prairies filled with green and cornstalk,” of the “winding sound of crickets rubbing dampness from wings” and “silver September rain.”

Then he added: “Yes, all this I would miss – /along with the fear, hatred and violence/We blacks had suffered upon this beautiful land.”

Extract from Randy Kennedy. “‘A Long Hungry Look’: Forgotten Gordon Parks Photos Document Segregation,” on The New York Times website, December 24, 2014 [Online] Cited 29/08/2015.

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Railway Station Entrance, Fort Scott, Kansas
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Shoes, Fort Scott, Kansas
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled (Outside the Liberty Theater)
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled, Fort Scott, Kansas
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Uncle James Parks, Fort Scott, Kansas
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Mrs. Jefferson, Fort Scott, Kansas
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Monday 10am – 5pm
Closed Tuesdays

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top