Eadweard Muybridge (English-American, 1830-1904) Ruins of a Church, Antigua, Guatemala 1875 Albumen print Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal
While rightly famous for his work on animal locomotion it is the first group of photographs in this posting that shine most brightly. It is often overlooked how magnificent a photographer Eadweard Muybridge was and what a brilliant eye he had. The top three photographs, especially the first one (above), are knockouts – radiant jewels in which the tensional points of the composition and the atmosphere of the scene are captured magnificently. I also love the use of human figures to give scale to the scene.
It is rare to find Eadweard Muybridge photographs other than his locomotion studies on the Internet (do a search under Google and see for yourself!), so it is a particular pleasure to post these photographs. It is something I have been wanted to do for quite a while now and finally it has come to pass; earlier iterations of this exhibition had few press images so I must heartily thank the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Eadweard Muybridge (English-American, 1830-1904) The Ramparts, Funnel Rock, Hole in the Wall, Pyramid, Sugar Loaf, Oil House, and Landing Cove on Fisherman’s Bay, South Farallon Island (4150) 1871 Albumen print U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office
Eadweard Muybridge (English-American, 1830-1904) Ruins of the Church of San Domingo, Panama 1875 Albumen print Image courtesy The Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington
Eadweard Muybridge (English-American, 1830-1904) Bridge on the Porto Bello, Panama 1875 Albumen print Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA
Eadweard Muybridge (English-American, 1830-1904) Tenaya Canyon. Valley of the Yosemite. From Union Point. No. 35 1872 Albumen print Collection National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Eadweard Muybridge (English-American, 1830-1904) First-Order Lighthouse at Punta de los Reyes, Seacoast of California, 296 Feet Above Sea (4136) 1871 Albumen print U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office
Eadweard Muybridge (English-American, 1830-1904) Pi-Wi-Ack. Valley of the Yosemite. (Shower of Stars) “Vernal Fall.” 400 Feet Fall. No. 29 1872 Albumen print Collection San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; gift of Jeffrey Fraenkel and Frish Brandt
From February 26 through June 7, 2011, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will showcase the first-ever retrospective examining all aspects of artist Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering photography. Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change brings together more than 300 objects created between 1857 and 1893, including Muybridge’s only surviving zoopraxiscope – an apparatus he designed in 1879 to project motion pictures. Originally organised by Philip Brookman, Corcoran Gallery of Art chief curator and head of research, the San Francisco presentation is organised by SFMOMA Associate Curator of Photography Corey Keller.
Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change includes numerous vintage photographs, albums, stereographs, lantern slides, glass negatives and positives, patent models, zoopraxiscope discs, proof prints, notes, books, and other ephemera. The works have been brought together from 38 different collections and include a number of Muybridge’s photographs of Yosemite Valley, including dramatic waterfalls and mountain views from 1867 and 1872; images of Alaska and the Pacific coast; an 1869 survey of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads in California, Nevada, and Utah; pictures from the Modoc War, pictures from Panama and Guatemala; and urban panoramas of San Francisco. The exhibition also includes examples from Muybridge’s experimental series of sequential stop-motion photographs such as Attitudes of Animals in Motion (1881) and his later masterpiece Animal Locomotion (1887).
The exhibition is organised in a series of thematic sections that present the chronology of Muybridge’s career, the evolution of his unique sensibility, the foundations of his experimental approach to photography, and his connections to other people and events that helped guide his work. The sections include: Introduction: The Art of Eadweard Muybridge (1857-1887); The Infinite Landscape: Yosemite Valley and the Western Frontier (1867-1869); From California to the End of the Earth: San Francisco, Alaska, the Railroads, and the Pacific Coast (1868-1872); The Geology of Time: Yosemite and the High Sierra (1872); Stopping Time: California at the Crossroads of Perception (1872-1878); War, Murder, and the Production of Coffee: the Modoc War and the Development of Central America (1873-1875); Urban Panorama (1877-1880); The Horse in Motion (1877-1881); Motion Pictures: the Zoopraxiscope (1879-1893); and Animal Locomotion (1883-1893).
Muybridge and San Francisco
Best known for his groundbreaking studies of animals and humans in motion, Muybridge (1830-1904) was also an innovative and successful landscape and survey photographer, documentary artist, inventor, and war correspondent. Born in Kingston upon Thames, England, in 1830, Muybridge immigrated to the United States around 1851. He worked as a bookseller in New York and San Francisco and returned to London in 1860 following a serious injury. Muybridge learned photography in Britain and by 1867 returned to the United States, where began his career as a photographer in San Francisco. He gained recognition through innovative landscape photographs, which showed the grandeur and expansiveness of the American West. Between 1867 and 1871, these were published under the pseudonym “Helios.”
Muybridge spent most of his career in San Francisco and Philadelphia during a time of rapid industrial and technological growth. In the 1870s he developed new ways to stop motion with his camera. Muybridge’s legendary sequential photographs of running horses helped change how people saw the world. His projected animations inspired the early development of cinema, and his revolutionary techniques produced timeless images that have profoundly influenced generations of photographers, filmmakers, and visual artists.
Press release from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) website [Online] Cited 02/06/2011 no longer available online
Eadweard Muybridge (English-American, 1830-1904) Savings and Loan Society, Clay Street (340) 1869 albumen stereograph Collection of Leonard A. Calle
Eadweard Muybridge (English-American, 1830-1904) Contemplation Rock, Glacier Point (1385) 1872 Albumen stereograph Collection of California Historical Society
Eadweard Muybridge (English-American, 1830-1904) Group of Indians (489) 1868 Albumen stereograph Collection of Leonard A. Walle
Eadweard Muybridge (English-American, 1830-1904) The Brandenburg Album of Bradley & Rolufson “Celebrities” and Muybridge Photographs, page 104 1874 Albumen prints Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Museum Purchase Fund
Eadweard Muybridge (English-American, 1830-1904) Horses. Running. Phryne L. Plate 40 1879 From The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, 1881 Albumen print Image courtesy The Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon
Eadweard Muybridge (English-American, 1830-1904) Studies of Foreshortenings. Horses. Running. Mahomet. Plates 143-144 1879 From The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, 1881 Albumen print Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA
Eadweard Muybridge (English-American, 1830-1904) Leland Stanford, Jr. on his pony “Gypsy” – Phases of a Stride by a Pony While Cantering 1879 Collodion positive on glass Wilson Centre for Photography
Eadweard Muybridge (English-American, 1830-1904) General view of experiment track, background and cameras, Plate F 1881 From The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, 1881 Albumen print Courtesy Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) 151 Third Street (between Mission + Howard) San Francisco CA 94103
Opening hours: Friday – Tuesday 10 am – 5 pm and Thursday 10 am – 9 pm Wednesday Closed
Many thankx to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Works by Ray K. Metzker, one of the most original and influential photographers of the last half century, will be on view from Jan. 15 to June 5, 2011, at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. The Photographs of Ray K. Metzker will reveal Metzker’s ability to turn ordinary subjects, including the urban experience and nature, into the visual poetry of the finely crafted black-and-white print.
At the age of nearly 80, Metzker is greatly admired for his passionate engagement with both photography and the world. He has explored the use of high contrast and selective focus, the potentials of multiple and composite images, and the infinite gradations of daylight, from dazzling white to inky shadow.
This is great and lasting work – the very best of a classic form of American modernism, said Keith F. Davis, senior curator of photography at the Nelson-Atkins. Metzker has led a life of deep devotion to understanding the potential, challenge and pleasure of photographic seeing. In so doing, he has transcended any simple notion of technical experimentation or formalism to illuminate a vastly larger human realm – one of uncertainty, isolation and vulnerability, as well as of unexpected beauty, grace and transcendence.
Thanks to a major gift from the Hall Family Foundation, the Nelson-Atkins now has the largest holding of Metzker’s work (92 prints) in the United States.
Born in Milwaukee, Wis., in 1931, Metzker first took up photography as a teenager. After two years in the army, he entered the graduate program at the Institute of Design, Chicago, in the fall of 1956. His professors, Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, were acclaimed artists and inspiring teachers, and they emphasised the medium’s remarkable range and visual potential. Metzker’s artistic vision grew from a union of ideas: the realities of modern life, the medium’s myriad technical possibilities, and the quest for a distinctly individual vision.
Metzker has lived and worked in Philadelphia since 1962, and as he approaches the age of 80, he continues to make new pictures there.
The photographs in the exhibition feature examples from all his major series, including his earliest mature work from Chicago (1957-1959); photographs from an extended visit to Europe (1960-1961); the street activity, people, and structures of Philadelphia (from 1962 to the present); beachgoers at the New Jersey shore, Sand Creatures (1968-1977); the starkness of the Southwestern light and landscape, New Mexico (1971-1972); and the lush mysteries of the natural realm, in his Landscapes (1985-1996) from Italy, France and the United States.
The exhibition features a host of innovative and ingenious approaches to photography, including the use of the double image, Double Frame (1964-1966) and Couplets (1968-1969); single works created from an entire roll of film, Composites (1964-1966); and the creative control of focus in both Pictus Interruptus (1976-1980) and Landscapes (1985-1996).
Press release from The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art website
Many thankx to Fundació Foto Colectania for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Foundation Foto Colectania presents for the first time in Barcelona the famous series Women Are Beautiful by Garry Winogrand.
Garry Winogrand is considered one of the greatest innovators of photography of the twentieth-century in America. He knew like no other how to capture the social transformation of females in the 60’s and 70’s through his portraits of women who stand as an allegory of women’s emancipation and their new role in society. The Foundation Foto Colectania presents his series Women Are Beautiful, including 85 photographs taken between 1960 and 1975 and collected in the book with the same title by the legendary director of photography at the MoMA, John Szarkowski. The exhibition from the collection of Lola Garrido, is part of the programming line of the foundation which is dedicated to authors who changed the course of the history of photography. The exhibition can be seen in Barcelona until June 4, 2011. In the 60’s ended the era of big images as symbols of timeless truths, by the devastating influence first from Walker Evans, and later from Robert Frank and William Klein. The pictures are focused on the reflection of reality, no retouching or other ideas added. Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander represent “the new American style” which broke new ground in the so-called Street Photography.
Winogrand combines spontaneity with an apparent confusion, which is more than aware of the complexity of the photography world: “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.” The presence of human beings, contrasting with the crowds and the streets in his photographs reveals a new way of looking, in which the anarchy results in a wealth of shapes and structures. The biased and cold style of Winogrand is associated with Abstract Expressionism and its sharp diagonals are similar to paint brush strokes of those years. If the photographer Robert Frank was critical of the 50’s, Garry Winogrand is one of the largest photographers of the 60’s.
Press release from the Fundació Foto Colectania website
Many thankx to the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) Fork 1928 Gelatin silver print
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) Elizabeth and I 1933, printed in the 1960s Gelatin silver print 25.3 x 17.5cm Collection of Sarah Morthland, New York
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) Distortion No. 200 1933, printed c. 1938/1939 Gelatin silver print 34.4 x 25.7cm Courtesy of Klever Holdings
André Kertész is possibly the most photographic of all photographers: he sought out the play of light and shadow; he liked the concentration and overlapping of forms, of moments; and in the everyday, in banality, he recognised poetry, beauty, and even, for all his innate modesty, the “sublime.” Kertész is a photographic poet and seer, for whom it was long difficult to break into the market precisely because of his rich, chiseled iconography.
André Kertész (Budapest 1894 – 1985 New York) supported Brassaï, inspired Henri Cartier-Bresson, is considered one of the founders of photojournalism, and introduced stylistic elements into photography that can still be found in works by contemporary photographers. At heart, he was a photographer and artist in equal measure, poetic, probing, vital, independent in thought and actions. In a word, he was a master of photography, whose long period of production was very influential. Nevertheless, it took a remarkably long time for his special abilities, his poetic experimental version of photography, to find recognition in the history of photography. The three locations where he lived (Budapest, Paris, New York), his freedom, his form of “contemplative photography,” as Roland Barthes characterised it, made quick reception and categorisation of his work impossible. Today, more than twenty-five years after his death, he is recognised and considered to be a central photographer of the twentieth century who crucially enriched the language of photography.
With around 250 photographs and countless magazine contributions, the retrospective at Fotomuseum Winterthur on view until May 15, 2011, allows a comprehensive view of his work. The chronological order and the major themes show what it is that makes up his photographic practice: his unique methods (in photographic postcards, in distortions), his editorial engagement (for example, in the volume Paris vu par Kertész, 1934), his passion for experimentation (with light and shadow), and the evocation of emotions, above all of melancholy and loneliness. Periods that have remained neglected or unexplored until today (his life as a soldier from 1914-1918, for example) are reassessed, and juxtaposed with the development of photojournalism in Paris and the distribution of his pictures in the media, with which he earned his living.
André Kertész liked to characterise himself as an “eternal amateur.” But what a virtuosic “amateur” he was; what virtuosic visual language he employed his entire life to capture the poetry of the everyday! His photographic production was closely connected to his life and psyche. Even when he seemed to be documenting something, he let himself be guided almost exclusively by feeling, by instinct, from his soul. This resulted in a body of work that he liked to compare to a “visual journal”, and about which he said, “I have never just ‘made photos’. I express myself photographically.”
Text from the Fotomuseum Winterthur website
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) Satiric Dancer 1926 Gelatin silver print
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) Self-Portrait Paris, 1927, printed in the 1970s Gelatin silver print 25.4 x 20.3cm Courtesy of Estate of André Kertész, New York
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) Arm and Ventilator 1937, printed in the 1940s-1950s Gelatin silver print 30.5 x 26.7cm Collection of Eric Cepotis and David Williams
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) Washington Square New York, January 9, 1954 Vintage gelatin silver print 12.7 x 9.2cm Collection of Leslie, Judith and Gabrielle Schreyer
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) July 3, 1979 1979 Polaroid SX-70 original 7.9 x 7.9cm Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery
In the history of group photography Nixon’s ongoing series of family portraits The Brown Sisters (1975- ) is the best in the world. Beautifully structured and composed the photographs are nuanced and sensitive to the people portrayed and the passage of time. The subjects project and recede within the image frame, exposing vulnerability, intimacy and strength. Simply breathtaking!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Amelia Kantrovitz for her help and 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.
Themes such as the passage of time and the enduring nature of close family relationships are brought into focus in the exhibition Nicholas Nixon: Family Album at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). The show, on view from July 28, 2010, through May 1, 2011, in the MFA’s Herb Ritts Gallery, features more than 70 black and white portrait photographs by Nicholas Nixon, one of the most celebrated American photographers of this generation. Among them are pictures of Nixon’s wife, Beverly (Bebe) Brown Nixon, and their two children, Clementine and Sam. Nicholas Nixon also includes The Brown Sisters, the ongoing annual series of portraits of Bebe and her sisters taken each summer for the past 35 years. Nixon will take another photograph of the sisters this summer, which will be hung in the gallery during the course of the exhibition.
The promised gift to the MFA of The Brown Sisters series is the impetus for Nicholas Nixon. The group of photographs has been lent to the Museum for the exhibition from the collection of James Krebs, a Distinguished Benefactor of the MFA, and his late wife, Margie. Also included are works by Nixon purchased by the Museum, and a number that were given and lent to the MFA by the artist. Nicholas Nixon is presented with support from the Shelly and Michael Kassen Fund.
“Nicholas Nixon rose to prominence in the mid 1970s for his large-format black-and-white views of Boston and New York. Since then, he has turned almost exclusively to portraiture, and has produced many celebrated series of pictures – of the elderly, people with AIDS, and couples – but his portrayals of his family are particularly evocative and beloved. Nick has been a friend of the MFA for a long time and has generously given the Museum many of his photographs,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA.
Nicholas Nixon’s photographs of family are both personal in nature and have a universality with which observers can connect. These pictures, a number of which have never been publicly displayed, celebrate the bonds of close family relationships, especially as they grow over time. Included in the exhibition is the luminous image that Nixon took of his wife in the bathtub, Bebe, Cambridge (MFA, Boston, 1980). The beautiful glowing light on her face suggests her interior state, as well as the depth of their long relationship. There are also many photographs in the show that highlight the richness and warmth of daily life with children. In an image from 1985, a cropped view of Bebe pictures her gazing downward, as Clementine’s fist emerges from the bottom of the frame, evoking the power of a new life. A close-up of Clementine’s face made the following year, with her wide eyes gazing upward, captures the toddler’s impression of wonder. The latest photograph of Clementine in the exhibition dates to 2003 and depicts her as a young woman, embracing her mother. Images of Nixon’s son, Sam, are also included, showing him in different stages over the years and in portraits with his sister.
The most recognised images in the exhibition are those that Nixon has taken of the Brown sisters each summer since 1975. The four women – Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie – always appear in the same order in the portraits, from left to right. These compelling photographs reveal the evolving nature of the sisters’ relationship over time. The serial portraits begin with The Brown Sisters, 1975 (James and Margie Krebs Collection, 1975), which captures them as young women, ranging in age from 15 to 25. With each passing year, observers can note changes in appearance, stance, and demeanour. In several of the portraits, the presence of the photographer is suggested through the shadow of himself and his camera projected across the figures, which makes reference to his role in the family dynamic. The series unfolds in a grid display on the central wall of the Ritts Gallery.
“In his serial pictures of family, Nicholas Nixon explores a classic conundrum in photography: how to suggest the passage of time by means of an instrument that records the instantaneous image. His effort is related to that of several predecessors – Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Harry Callahan, to name the most important – who, like him, used their wives as subject matter, photographing them over a period of years. What Nixon has added to the discussion – beyond recording facets of appearance, personality, or emphasising formal concerns – is his emphasis on the meaning of family,” said Anne Havinga, the MFA’s Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs, who curated the show with Emily Voelker, the MFA’s Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Assistant Curator of Photographs.
Born in Detroit in 1947, Nixon graduated from the University of Michigan in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in English, and from the University of New Mexico in 1974 with a Masters of Fine Arts degree. Later that year, he moved to Boston, where he teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Nixon is known for his documentary photography, especially city views and portraits rooted in the snapshot tradition. He works primarily in black and white, creating gelatin silver prints with a 8 x 10-inch view camera as did many of the great photographers who influenced him, including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Walker Evans. Working in large format and making contact prints enables him to create images of crisp detail and subtle tone. In recent years, Nixon has also begun to experiment with colour, although the photographs in the exhibition are all black-and-white, for which he is best known. He is the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and two Guggenheim Fellowships, and, in addition to the MFA, his work is included in numerous museum collections, among them, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website [Online] Cited 26/04/2011 no longer available online
Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947) The Brown Sisters 1976 Gelatin silver print Promised gift of James and Margie Krebs Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947) The Brown Sisters 1978 Gelatin silver print Promised gift of James and Margie Krebs Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947) The Brown Sisters 1980 Gelatin silver print Promised gift of James and Margie Krebs Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947) The Brown Sisters 1996 Gelatin silver print Promised gift of James and Margie Krebs Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947) The Brown Sisters 1999 Gelatin silver print Promised gift of James and Margie Krebs Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Avenue of the Arts 465 Huntington Avenue Avenue of the Arts Boston, Massachusetts 02115-5523 617-267-9300
Opening hours: Thursday and Friday 10am – 10pm Saturday – Monday 10am – 5pm Closed Tuesday and Wednesday
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Couple Seated on Porch, Gunlock, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
Dorothea Lange
Lange observes the minutiae, the precise details that go to make up the lives of these three towns and puts them together in a wonderful symphony of beautifully calculated, seemingly happenstance associations. Masterful!
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Doorway, Toquerville, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Mulberry Tree, Neagle Home, Toquerville, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Riley Savage, Toquerville, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Hands, Toquerville, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Eggs, Toquerville, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Collection of John and Lolita Dixon
In August 1953, renowned American photographer Dorothea Lange travelled to southern Utah where she met up with her long-time friend Ansel Adams. The two photographers spent three weeks photographing the landscape and people of Toquerville, Gunlock and St. George with the intention of publishing the work in LIFE magazine.
Lange’s enthusiasm for her subject yielded hundreds of photographs from which she composed an extended essay of 135 photographs, including images by Ansel Adams. Thirty-five of those photographs with text by Daniel Dixon appeared under the title Three Mormon Towns in the September 6, 1954 issue of LIFE.
“Dorothea Lange’s Three Mormon Towns,” a new exhibition at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art, features 21 of Lange’s photographs from this series acquired by the museum. The exhibition also draws from the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago, and the collection of John and Lolita Dixon.
The 62 vintage prints in the exhibition, accompanied by excerpts from Dixon’s original text, examine Lange’s lasting interest in the people of southern Utah and their relationship with the land, their heritage and the transformation of the West in post-war America.
“Subtle and poetic, the series of photographs that has come to be known as Three Mormon Towns is a bridge between Lange’s famous Depression Era photographs and her detailed photo essays of the 1950s,” Diana Turnbow, Curator of Photography at Brigham Young University Museum of Art, said.
Utah attracted Lange’s interest when she and her first husband, Maynard Dixon, spent the summer of 1933 camping and working in Zion National Park. She originally intended to photograph southern Utah with the support of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in 1941; however, a family crisis, followed by the onset of World War II prevented Lange from traveling to Utah. Yet, the desire to photograph the Mormon towns of southern Utah never faded. In 1953, Lange returned to the place that had captured her attention decades earlier.
“While Lange’s photographs depict communities bound together by hard work and religion in the formidable landscape of the Colorado Plateau, they also explore the changes that were beginning to affect not only Utah, but rural communities throughout the United States,” Turnbow said. “Three Mormon Towns was a study of contrasts – of old and new, of quiet villages and a growing city, of deep roots and transient highways. In this series, Lange memorialised the dignity and simplicity of agrarian life in light of post-war urbanisation.”
Published in the September 6, 1954 issue of LIFE magazine, the series of photographs that has come to be known as Three Mormon Towns bridges Dorothea Lange’s famous Depression era photographs with her detailed photo essays of the 1950s. Featuring sixty-two vintage photographs from the series, this exhibition considers Dorothea Lange’s lasting interest in the people of southern Utah and their relationship with the land, their heritage, and the transformation of the West in post-war America.
Known for her candid and sympathetic depiction of people, Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) is one of the most revered photographers of the twentieth century. For over four decades she explored the human psyche through portraiture and documentary photography. The probing portraits of her early career prepared Lange to photograph the people involved in the tumultuous events of the San Francisco labor strikes of 1934, the Great Depression, and the Japanese internment during World War II. Her 1935 photograph, TheMigrant Mother, is one of the great icons of the American century.
In the 1950s, Lange began to create photographic essays for the popular picture and news magazine LIFE. She eventually completed five major essays for publication, with two of the essays, including Three Mormon Towns, printed in LIFE. In addition, Lange was a founding member of Aperture magazine and played a role in organising the influential Family of Man exhibition that premiered in New York in 1955.
In the later part of her life, Lange photographed and traveled extensively with her husband, Paul Taylor, in conjunction with his work in international development. Her photographs of South America, Africa, and Asia were deft and subtle, exploring a rich visual landscape populated with diverse objects and people.
In 1964, Lange was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Sustained by determination, she worked steadily to complete a number of projects including a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She passed away on October 11, 1965, content with the life that she had been able to live.
Text from the Brigham Young University Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 24/03/2011 no longer available online
Gunlock, Utah
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Sky and Clouds, Gunlock, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Jake Jones’ Hands, Gunlock, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Horseplay, Gunlock, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Four Young Riders in Summer 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago
St. George, Utah
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Anne Carter Johnson, St. George, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Young Woman, St. George, Utah 1953 Silver gelatin photograph Brigham Young University Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Jack and Mary Lois Wheatley
Brigham Young University Museum of Art North Campus Drive, Provo, UT 84602-1400
Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea pictures two creatures dancing between sea and sky, surrounded by arabesques, spirals, and stripes. The forms “have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them one recognises the principle and passion of organisms,” Rothko said. For him art was “an adventure into an unknown world”; like the Surrealists before him, Rothko looked inward, to his own unconscious mind, for inspiration and material for his work.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
What a privilege to post all of these works together.
Aaron Siskind has to be one of my favourite photographers of all time (and space). His Martha’s Vineyard (see photograph below), like most of his work, is superb: the abstraction and counterpose are magnificent. Team this with a couple of Rothko, a Motherwell, a de Kooning and a knockout of a Hartigan and you certainly have the start of ‘The Big Picture’. I wish I could have been there to see this exhibition – sigh!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture at MoMA, New York October 3, 2010 – February 28, 2011 Photograph by Thomas Griesel
In the early 1940s Pollock, like many of his peers, explored primeval or mythological themes in his work. The wolf in this painting may allude to the animal that suckled the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, in the myth of the city’s birth. But “She-Wolf came into existence because I had to paint it,” Pollock said in 1944. In an attitude typical of his generation, he added, “Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.” The She-Wolf was featured in Pollock’s first solo exhibition, at Art of This Century gallery in New York in 1943. MoMA acquired the painting the following year, making it the first work by Pollock to enter a museum collection.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
Installation view of the exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture at MoMA, New York October 3, 2010 – February 28, 2011 showing at right, Jackson Pollock’s painting Number 1A, 1948 Photograph by Thomas Griesel
While the style of “drip” painting has become synonymous with the name Jackson Pollock, here the artist has autographed the work even more directly, with several handprints found at the composition’s upper right. Around this time Pollock stopped giving his paintings evocative titles and began instead to number them. His wife, artist Lee Krasner, later explained, “Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a painting for what it is – pure painting.” Collectors did not immediately appreciate Pollock’s radical new style, and when first exhibited, in 1949 (then titled Number 1, 1948), this painting remained unsold. Later that year the work was shown again in the artist’s second solo exhibition (Pollock added “A” to the title to avoid confusion with more recent work) and shortly thereafter was purchased by MoMA.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
Bradley Walker Tomlin (American, 1899-1953) Number 20 1949 Oil on canvas 7′ 2″ x 6′ 8 1/4″ (218.5 x 203.9cm) Gift of Philip Johnson
Although some of the ribbons and bars that animate Number 20 are recognisable letters of the alphabet (E, X, or Z) these and their more abstract neighbours evoke calligraphy without constituting it. A critic described these symbols as “hieroglyphs that lack only the appropriate Rosetta Stone for their deciphering.” Tomlin distributed his nonobjective imagery evenly on the canvas, depriving the work of a traditional focal point and creating a staccato rhythm and allover design that invites the viewer’s glance to travel across its surface.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
Installation view of the exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture at MoMA, New York October 3, 2010 – February 28, 2011 showing at left, Barnett Newman’s painting Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-1951) Photograph by Thomas Griesel
Vir Heroicus Sublimis, Newman’s largest painting at the time of its completion, is meant to overwhelm the senses. Viewers may be inclined to step back from it to see it all at once, but Newman instructed precisely the opposite. When the painting was first exhibited, in 1951 at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, Newman tacked to the wall a notice that read, “There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance. The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance.” Newman believed deeply in the spiritual potential of abstract art. The Latin title of this painting means “Man, heroic and sublime.”
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
Installation view of the exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture at MoMA, New York October 3, 2010 – February 28, 2011 showing at right, David Smith’s sculpture Australia (1951) Photograph by Thomas Griesel
At the time of its completion, Australia was Smith’s largest sculpture. By welding together thin rods and plates of steel he created a work that is simultaneously delicate and strong, a masterpiece of tension, balance, and form that he described as a “drawing in space.” Sculpture has traditionally been defined by volume and mass; Australia is, in contrast, built of lines. In what might be described as an allover sculpture, the linear activity is greatest at the perimeters, while the center is nearly empty. Because of its title, the work is sometimes read as an abstracted kangaroo, its lines capturing the spring of the animal’s leap.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
Installation view of the exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture at MoMA, New York October 3, 2010 – February 28, 2011 showing a wall of photographs by Aaron Siskind including at second right, Martha’s Vineyard (1954-1959) Photograph by Thomas Griesel
In the 1940s Gottlieb began to emulate the art of early Native American and Middle Eastern cultures, explorations that eventually inspired his Pictograph paintings, including Man Looking at Woman. This work and others like it feature hieroglyphic-like script distributed across the canvas in a series of gridded compartments. Gottlieb avoided using decipherable signs. In 1955 he said of these works, “I frequently hear the question, ‘What do these images mean?’ That is simply the wrong question. Visual images do not have to conform to either verbal thinking or optical facts. A better question would be: ‘Do these images convey any emotional truth?'”
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
The evocative title of this work and the fiery intensity of the palette signal a departure from Gorky’s more lyrical abstractions of the preceding years. Agony, a blazing, impassioned scene, is often understood in relation to the traumatic events of the artist’s personal life, including a fire in his studio and cancer.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
Subtitled The Big Picture, this installation of 100 Abstract Expressionist paintings and a rich selection of some 60 sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs, occupies the entire fourth floor of the Museum and chronicles the era of Abstract Expressionism. The movement drew together a host of artists with greatly varying stylistic approaches, but with a common commitment to the power of an abstract art that could express personal convictions and profound human values.
Organised in a loose chronology, intermittently interrupted by monographic galleries that allow for the in-depth study of an individual artist’s practice, the installation opens with a selection of paintings and drawings that attest to the acutely self-conscious sense of new beginnings present in the work of individuals such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, they and their peers – not yet a cohesive group – created imagery that evoked primitive man or ancient myth, and conjured an aquatic or geological pre-human world.
Upon entering the galleries, visitors are greeted by Jackson Pollock’s The She-Wolf (1943), which was featured in the artist’s first solo exhibition, in 1943, and was the first work by Pollock to enter a museum collection when MoMA acquired it the following year. Made before Pollock developed his signature “drip” style, the canvas shows that a free-form abstraction and an unfettered play of materials were already parts of his process. Also on view is Mark Rothko’s Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1944), a canvas picturing two creatures floating between sea and sky, surrounded by arabesques, spirals, and stripes that betrays the influence of Surrealism on Rothko’s early work.
A monographic gallery devoted to the work of Barnett Newman includes Onement, I (1952), which the artist later identified as his breakthrough painting. Modest in size, it consists of a monochromatic background divided in half by a vertical band, or “zip” as the artist later called it. Every successive painting by Newman, as seen in the seven works in this gallery, features this particular compositional motif, although their formal and emotional differences are apparent. The scale and proportions of the paintings, as well as their palette and brushwork, vary from work to work, as do the number of zips and their location in the field of colour. At the other end of the spectrum from this relatively small canvas is Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-1951), an 18-foot-wide, vibrant red expanse that was Newman’s largest painting at the time of its creation.
The distinctive materials, techniques, and approaches developed and practiced by the Abstract Expressionists can be seen in a number of other works from the late 1940s and early 1950s. For Painting (1948), Willem de Kooning used oil and enamel sign paint to create a densely packed painting in which the paint drips, bleeds, congeals, or dissolves into delicate streaks. Lee Krasner’s Untitled (1949) shows that she applied thick paint – sometimes directly from the tube – in rhythmic and repetitive strokes, giving equal attention to every inch of the canvas and creating an allover composition. Bradley Walker Tomlin, in Number 20 (1949), and Adolph Gottlieb, in Man Looking at Woman (1949), distributed imagery evoking the alphabet and hieroglyphics evenly across their canvases.
A large gallery focusing on the work of Jackson Pollock includes Full Fathom Five (1947), one of earliest “drip” paintings, and Number 1A, 1948 (1948), the first drip painting to enter MoMA’s collection (in 1950). For One: Number 31, 1950 (1950), a masterpiece of the drip technique and one of Pollock’s largest paintings (8′ 10″ x 17′ 5 5/8″ (269.5 x 530.8 cm)), the artist laid the canvas on the floor of his studio and poured, dribbled, and flicked enamel paint onto the surface, sometimes straight from the can, or with sticks and stiffened brushes. The density of interlacing liquid threads of paint is balanced and offset by puddles of muted colours and by allover spattering.
Eight paintings made by Mark Rothko over a 14-year period are presented in a single gallery. The earliest examples from 1948, such as No. 1 (Untitled), feature variously sized abstract forms caught mid-motion as they shift on the canvas. Beginning in 1950, Rothko’s “classic” style forms as the artist creates a composition from horizontal planes of thinly layered paint and highly modulated colour, simplifying the compositional structure of his paintings and arriving at his signature style. No. 10 (1950) is divided horizontally into three dominant planes of blue, yellow, and white that softly and subtly bleed into one another. Acquired by MoMA in 1952, it was the first Rothko to enter the Museum’s collection, and was considered so radical that a trustee of the Museum resigned in protest.
MoMA’s practice of making in-depth acquisitions of work by artists that its curators judged to be of greatest importance was complemented by acquisitions of smaller numbers of works by other artist who played roles too significant to be forgotten. The Big Picture includes paintings and sculptures by more than 20 artists.
There is a gallery devoted to a selection of photographs made by individuals who used a camera to explore kindred artistic concerns – often resulting in work with striking stylistic similarities. Aaron Siskind may be the photographer most closely associated with Abstract Expressionism, and numerous works of his on display suggest the depth of this connection. Also featured in this installation is work by Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Minor White, and others, revealing the variety of ways in which the sensibility or structure of paintings from this period manifested itself photographically.
The exhibition includes some 30 items from the MoMA Archives, documenting the relation of the Museum to Abstract Expressionism. Materials represent the institution’s influential series of “Americans” exhibitions, organised by Dorothy C. Miller, which included several Abstract Expressionist artists in four of its iterations. In addition, documentation regarding the internationally circulating New American Painting show (also organised by Miller) is presented. This important exhibition travelled to eight European cities in 1958-59 and propelled the homegrown Abstract Expressionist movement onto the international art scene. A third section includes photographs of artists and their own statements and letters. Highlights include: exhibition catalogues, installation photographs, news clippings, and ephemera; photographs of artists in the studio with their artworks; a letter from Robert Motherwell to Miller describing the four themes of his art (automatic means, pure abstractions, political or a kind of “disasters” series, and intimate pictures), a letter from Ad Reinhardt to Miller recommending a different installation of his paintings, and a statement by Grace Hartigan identifying her subject as the “vulgar and vital in American life, and the possibilities of its transcendence into the beautiful.”
Text from the Museum of Modern Art press release
Installation view of the exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture at MoMA, New York October 3, 2010 – February 28, 2011 showing a wall of the photographs of Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Photograph by Thomas Griesel
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Paris 1952 Gelatin silver print
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Mississippi, St Louis 1948 Gelatin silver print
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) New York c. 1949 Gelatin silver print
This sculpture represents Kwannon (also known as Kannon), the Buddhist goddess of mercy and an attendant of Buddha. Lassaw thickened steel wire with molten bronze, creating an openwork metal scaffolding of irregular lines and voids – what he called a “drawing in space.” Lassaw wrote of this abstract figure, “Although I never try to depict or narrate or communicate, I feel that something of Kwannon entered this piece of sculpture.”
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
De Kooning famously said, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented,” and although he often worked in an abstract style he continually returned to the figure. Woman I took an unusually long time to complete. De Kooning made numerous preliminary studies then repainted the canvas repeatedly, eventually arriving at this hulking, wild-eyed figure of a woman. An amalgam of female archetypes, from a Paleolithic fertility goddess to a 1950s pinup girl, her threatening gaze and ferocious grin are heightened by de Kooning’s aggressive brushwork and intensely coloured palette.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
In Memoria in Aeturnum (Eternal memory) Hofmann remembers five American painters who died in their prime: Arthur B. Carles, an early American Cubist, and four abstract painters whose work is on display in this exhibition – Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Painted near the end of his life, Hofmann’s work is a tribute to the preceding decades of abstract art, incorporating a wide range of techniques that evoke the spirits of the departed: stains, drips, drawn-out brushstrokes, and smooth-edged geometric forms.
Gallery label from Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011
Installation view of the exhibition, Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture at MoMA, New York October 3, 2010 – February 28, 2011 showing at right, Mark Rothko’s painting No. 5 / No. 22 (1950) Photograph by Thomas Griesel
Exhibition dates: 10th November 2010 – 10th April 2011
Many thankx to the The Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Terminal 1893, printed 1920s-30s Gelatin silver print 8.9 x 11.5cm (3 1/2 x 4 1/2 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
As proprietor of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession and publisher of the photographic journals Camera Notes and later Camera Work, Stieglitz was a major force in the promotion and elevation of photography as a fine art in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His own photographs had an equally revolutionary impact on the advancement of the medium.
Stieglitz took this picture using a small 4 x 5″ camera, an instrument not considered at the time to be worthy of artistic photography. Unlike the unwieldy 8 x 10″ view camera (which required a tripod), this camera gave Stieglitz greater freedom and mobility to roam the city and respond quickly to the everchanging street life around him. The Terminal predicts by over a decade the radical transformation of the medium from painterly prints of rarified subjects to what the critic Sadakichi Hartmann dubbed “straight photography.” This new photography would take as its subject matter the quotidian aspects of modern, urban life, using only techniques that are unique to the medium.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) The Little Round Mirror 1901, printed 1905 Gum bichromate over platinum print 48.3 x 33.2cm (19 x 13 1/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Hand of Man 1902, printed 1910 Photogravure 24.2 x 31.9cm (9 1/2 x 12 9/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
The Hand of Man was first published in January 1903 in the inaugural issue of Camera Work. With this image of a lone locomotive chugging through the train yards of Long Island City, Stieglitz showed that a gritty urban landscape could have an atmospheric beauty and a symbolic value as potent as those of an unspoiled natural landscape. The title alludes to this modern transformation of the landscape and also perhaps to photography itself as a mechanical process. Stieglitz believed that a mechanical instrument such as the camera could be transformed into a tool for creating art when guided by the hand and sensibility of an artist.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) The Flatiron 1904 Gum bichromate over platinum print 47.8 x 38.4cm (18 13/16 x 15 1/8 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Alfred Stieglitz 1907 Autochrome 23.9 x 18cm The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1955
For the first time in more than 25 years, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will display five of its original Autochromes by Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz for one week only – January 25-30, 2011 – as part of the current exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand. Invented by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1907, Autochromes are one-of-a-kind color transparencies that are seductively beautiful when backlit.
The invention of the Autochrome was a milestone in the history of photography. It was the first commercially available means of making color photographs. Steichen was enthralled by the process and recommended it to his fellow photographers. Praising the luminosity of the new medium, he wrote, “One must go to stained glass for such color resonance, as the palette and canvas are a dull and lifeless medium in comparison.” Among the five Autochromes exhibited are Steichen’s portrait of Rodin in front of his sculpture The Eve and his widely reproduced portrait of Stieglitz holding an issue of his influential publication, Camera Work.
These fragile photographs – composed of minute grains of potato starch dyed red, blue, and green – cannot withstand the exposure of long-term display without suffering irreversible damage. Because of the high risk of the color fading, the Metropolitan – like most museums – has had a policy of not exhibiting its important collection of Autochromes. The Metropolitan recently completed a three-year study of the stability and light-sensitivity of Autochrome dyes, conducted by Luisa Casella, the Museum’s first Mellon Research Scholar in Photo Conservation, in close collaboration with Masahiko Tsukada of the Museum’s Department of Scientific Research, and supervised by Nora Kennedy, Sherman Fairchild Conservator of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum. The study established that the Autochrome dyes are partially, though not completely, protected from light fading when in an environment where all oxygen has been removed.
Guided by this research, the Museum will display five original Autochromes by Steichen and Stieglitz within individual oxygen-free enclosures and under carefully controlled lighting conditions from January 25 to 30 in the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand. During the other weeks of the exhibition, facsimiles of the photographs are displayed in their place.
Edward J. Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Balzac, The Open Sky – 11 P.M. 1908, printed 1909 Direct carbon print 48.7 x 38.5cm (19 3/16 x 15 3/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
In late summer 1908 Rodin moved the plaster of his sculpture of the French writer Honoré de Balzac out of his studio and into the open air so that Steichen, who disliked its chalky aspect in the daylight, could photograph it by the moon. Waiting through several exposures as long as an hour each, Steichen made this exposure at 11 p.m., when the moonlight transformed the plaster into a monumental phantom rising above the brooding nocturnal landscape. Steichen recalled that when he presented his finished prints some weeks later, an elated Rodin exclaimed: “You will make the world understand my Balzac through your pictures. They are like Christ walking on the desert.”
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand
Go behind the lens with Sarah Greenough and Joel Smith as they speak about the relationships between three giants of early twentieth-century photography – Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand – whose diverse and groundbreaking works are among the Metropolitan’s greatest photographic treasures. Followed by a discussion among the participants. Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge, Department of Photographs, MMA, introduces the program.
“Steichen, Stieglitz, and the Art of Change” Joel Smith, Curator of Photography, Princeton University Art Museum
“Stieglitz and Strand: Mentor and Protégé/Friend and Rival” Sarah Greenough, Senior Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Stieglitz and the New York Art Scene (1905-46)
Lisa M. Messinger, associate curator, Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Three giants of 20th-century American photography – Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand – are featured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through April 10, 2011, in the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand. The diverse and groundbreaking work of these artists will be revealed through a presentation of 115 photographs, drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection. On view will be many of the Metropolitan’s greatest photographic treasures from the 1900s to 1920s, including Stieglitz’s famous portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe, Steichen’s large coloured photographs of the Flatiron building, and Strand’s pioneering abstractions.
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was a photographer of supreme accomplishment and a forceful and influential advocate for photography and modern art through his gallery “291” and his sumptuous journal Camera Work. Stieglitz also laid the foundation for the Museum’s collection of photographs. In 1928, he donated 22 of his own works to the Metropolitan; these were the first photographs to enter the Museum’s collection as works of art. In later decades he gave the Museum more than 600 photographs by his contemporaries, including Edward Steichen and Paul Strand.
Among Stieglitz’s works to be featured in this exhibition are portraits, views of New York City from the beginning and end of his career, and the 1920s cloud studies he titled Equivalents, through which he sought to arouse in the viewer the emotional equivalent of his own state of mind at the time he made the photograph, and to show that the content of a photograph was different from its subject.
The exhibition will also include numerous photographs from Stieglitz’s extraordinary composite portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), part of a group of works selected for the Museum’s collection by O’Keeffe herself. Stieglitz made more than 330 images of O’Keeffe between 1917 and 1937 – of her face, torso, hands, or feet alone, clothed and nude, intimate and heroic, introspective and assertive. Through these photographs Stieglitz revealed O’Keeffe’s strengths and vulnerabilities, and almost single-handedly defined her public persona for generations to come.
Stieglitz’s protégé and gallery collaborator, Edward Steichen (1879-1973), was the most talented exemplar of the Photo-Secession, the loosely-knit group of artists founded by Stieglitz in 1902, seceding, in his words, “from the accepted idea of what constitutes a photograph,” but also from the camera clubs and other institutions dominated by a more retrograde establishment. In works such as The Pond – Moonrise (1904), made using a painstaking technique of multiple printing, Steichen rivalled the scale, colour, and individuality of painting.
Steichen’s three large variant prints of The Flatiron (1904) are prime examples of the conscious effort of Photo-Secession photographers to assert the artistic potential of their medium. Steichen achieved coloristic effects reminiscent of Whistler’s Nocturne paintings by brushing layers of pigment suspended in light-sensitive gum solution onto a platinum photograph. Although he used only one negative to create all three photographs, the variable colouring enabled him to create three significantly different images that convey the chromatic progression of twilight. The Metropolitan’s three prints, all donated by Stieglitz in 1933, are the only exhibition prints of Steichen’s iconic image.
In 1908 Steichen photographed the plaster of Rodin’s sculpture of Honoré de Balzac in the open air, by the light of the moon, making several exposures as long as an hour each. In Balzac, The Silhouette – 4 A.M., the moonlight has transformed the plaster into a monumental phantom rising above the brooding nocturnal landscape. Steichen recalled that when he presented his finished prints to Rodin, the elated sculptor exclaimed, “You will make the world understand my Balzac through your pictures.”
Among the unique early-20th-century works by Stieglitz and Steichen in the Museum’s collection are Autochromes, an early process of colour photography that became commercially available in 1907. Because of the delicate and light-sensitive nature of these glass transparencies, five original Autochromes by Stieglitz and Steichen will be displayed for one week only, January 25-30, 2011. During the other weeks of the exhibition, facsimiles of these Autochromes will be on view.
Stieglitz’s and Steichen’s younger contemporary, Paul Strand (1890-1976), pioneered a shift from the soft-focus aesthetic and painterly prints of the Photo-Secession to the straight approach and graphic power of an emerging modernism. Strand was introduced to Stieglitz as a high-schooler by his camera club advisor, Lewis Hine, the social reformer and photographer. He quickly became a regular visitor to “291,” where he was exposed to the latest trends in European art through groundbreaking exhibitions of works by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi.
Strand incorporated the new language of geometric abstraction into his interest in photographing street life and machine culture. His photographs from 1915-1917 treated three principal themes: movement in the city, abstractions, and street portraits. Stieglitz, whose interest in photography had waned as he grew more interested in avant-garde art, saw in Strand’s work a new approach to photography. He showed Strand’s groundbreaking photographs at 291 and devoted the entire final double issue of Camera Work (1917) to this young photographer’s work, marking a pivotal moment in the course of photography.
In From the El (1915), Strand juxtaposed the ironwork and shadows of the elevated train with the tiny form of a lone pedestrian. In 1916, he experimented with radical camera angles and photographing at close range. Among the astonishingly modern photographs he made that summer is Abstraction, Twin Lakes, Connecticut, one of the first photographic abstractions to be made intentionally. When Stieglitz published a variant of this image in Camera Work, he praised Strand’s results as “the direct expression of today.”
In the same year, Strand made a series of candid street portraits with a hand-held camera fitted with a special lens that allowed him to point the camera in one direction while taking the photograph at a 90-degree angle. Blind, his seminal image of a street peddler, was published in Camera Work and immediately became an icon of the new American photography, which integrated the humanistic concerns of social documentation with the boldly simplified forms of Modernism. As is true for most of the large platinum prints by Strand in the exhibition, the Metropolitan’s Blind, a gift of Stieglitz, is the only exhibition print of this image from the period.
Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand is organised by Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Photographs, assisted by Russell Lord, Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow in the Department of Photographs.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The City of Ambitions 1910, printed 1910-1913 Photogravure 33.8 x 26.0cm (13 5/16 x 10 1/4 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
This photograph belongs to a series of dynamic images Stieglitz made of New York of 1910. It appeared in the October 1911 issue of Camera Work along with eight other examples of his lyrical urban modernism – a contemporary vision certainly not lost on Coburn, Struss, and Strand.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Old and New New York 1910, printed in or before 1913 Photogravure 33.2 x 25.5cm (13 1/16 x 10 1/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) From the El 1915 Platinum print 33.6 x 25.9cm (13 1/4 x 10 3/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
Paul Strand was introduced to Alfred Stieglitz by his teacher Lewis Hine, and quickly became part of the coterie of painters and photographers that gathered at Stieglitz’s gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. There he was exposed to the latest trends in European vanguard art through groundbreaking exhibitions of Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi. Strand incorporated their abstracting compositional techniques into his work, marrying the new language of geometric surface design to his interest in street life and machine culture.
Strand’s vision of the city during these years often focuses on the problematic exchange between the sweep and rigor of the urban grid with the human lives that inhabit and pass through it. From the El is a good example of this dialectical approach, with the graphic power of the ironwork and street shadows punctuated by the tiny, lone pedestrian at the upper right. Strand addresses the effects of the new urban condition obliquely here, embedding a subtle political statement within the formal structure of the image.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) From the Back Window – 291 1915 Platinum print 25.1 x 20.2cm (9 7/8 x 7 15/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
At the turn of the century, Stieglitz’s duties as gallery owner, publisher, editor, and promoter left him little time to photograph. When the mood struck him, however, which began to happen with some frequency about 1915, he did not look far afield but photographed his colleagues at the gallery and the view from his window with a modernist rigor exceeded only by Strand.
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Blind 1916 Platinum print 34 x 25.7cm (13 3/8 x 10 1/8 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Hodge Kirnon 1917 Palladium print 24.6 x 19.9cm (9 11/16 x 7 13/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
One of the least well known and most beautiful of Stieglitz’s portraits, this photograph depicts Hodge Kirnon, a man Stieglitz saw in passing every day. When preparing to close his historic gallery “291” in 1917 as a result of World War I, Stieglitz assessed his work and life and saw that Kirnon – who operated the elevator that transported the gallery’s visitors, its critics, and its provocative modern art – had been a true fellow passenger on the momentous trip.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands 1917 Platinum print 22.6 x 16.8cm (8 7/8 x 6 5/8 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, through the generosity of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997
Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands is one of the images that Stieglitz made during his first portrait session with O’Keeffe, in 1917, when she traveled by train to New York to see her second show of drawings and watercolours at 291. “A few weeks after I returned to Texas, photographs of me came,” she recalled. “In my excitement at such pictures of myself I took them to school and held them up for my class to see. They were surprised and astonished too. Nothing like that had come into our world before.” The notion that an expressive portrait might be made without including the sitter’s face was indeed novel.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Exhibition Overview
This exhibition features three giants of photography – Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946), Edward Steichen (American, b. Luxembourg, 1879-1973), and Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) – whose works are among the Metropolitan’s greatest photographic treasures. The diverse and groundbreaking work of these artists will be revealed through a presentation of approximately 115 photographs, drawn entirely from the collection.
Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer of supreme accomplishment as well as a forceful and influential advocate for photography and modern art through his gallery “291” and his sumptuous journal Camera Work, laid the foundation of the Met’s collection. He donated twenty-two of his own works in 1928 – the first photographs to be acquired by the Museum as works of art – and more than six hundred by other photographers, including Steichen and Strand, in later decades. Featured in the exhibition will be portraits, city views, and cloud studies by Stieglitz, as well as numerous images from his composite portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986), part of a group selected for the collection by O’Keeffe herself.
Stieglitz’s protégé and gallery collaborator Edward Steichen was the most talented exemplar of Photo-Secessionist ideas, with works such as his three large variant prints of The Flatiron and his moonlit photographs of Rodin’s Balzac purposely rivaling the scale, color, and individuality of painting. By contrast, the final issue of Camera Work (1917) was devoted to the young Paul Strand, whose photographs from 1915-1917 treated three principal themes – movement in the city, abstractions, and street portraits – and pioneered a shift from the soft-focus Pictorialist aesthetic to the straight approach and graphic power of an emerging modernism.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe – Neck 1921 Palladium print 23.6 x 19.2cm (9 5/16 x 7 9/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, through the generosity of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Dancing Trees 1922 Palladium print 24.2 x 19.3cm (9 1/2 x 7 5/8 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of David A. Schulte, 1928
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Spiritual America 1923 Gelatin silver print 11.6 x 9.2cm (4 9/16 x 3 5/8 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
In the decade leading up to the Great Depression, American modernism was a highly contested concept. Stieglitz, perhaps justifiably, considered himself one of the few qualified to dictate its course, having surrounded himself with a group of like-minded and devoted artists, critics, and writers whom he directed in an almost shamanistic fashion. Spirituality loomed large in his vision of American identity, but he was disheartened and offended with what he viewed as a pent-up, materialist, and culturally bankrupt American way. In a rare attempt at ironic commentary, Stieglitz produced this picture of a harnessed, castrated horse – a pure representation of eradicated sexual prowess and restrained muscular energy – and labelled it Spiritual America. In effect, he suggested that America was lacking in spirit by reinterpreting the horse, a traditional American symbol of unstoppable force, as a trussed-up pattern of slick geometry.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Edward J. Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Gloria Swanson 1924, printed 1960s Gelatin silver print 24.0 x 19.1cm (9 7/16 x 7 1/2 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Grace M. Mayer, 1989
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Wild Iris, Maine 1927-1928 Gelatin silver print 24.8 x 19.8cm (9 3/4 x 7 13/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1955 Courtesy Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Looking Northwest from the Shelton, New York 1932 Gelatin silver print 24.2 x 19.2cm (9 1/2 x 7 9/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Ford Motor Company Collection Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
Stieglitz recorded the construction of the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan from the windows of his gallery and of his nearby apartment in the Shelton Towers. His photographs seem not to celebrate the astonishing growth of new buildings but rather almost geological permanence and stability: “Crammed on the narrow island the million-windowed buildings will jut glittering, pyramid on pyramid…,” as John Dos Passos wrote.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe – Hand and Wheel 1933 Gelatin silver print 24.1 x 19.5cm (9 1/2 x 7 11/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, through the generosity of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Cristo – Oaxaca 1933, printed 1940 Photogravure 25.4 x 20.2cm (10 x 7 15/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1940
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Coapiaxtla, Church 1933, printed 1940 Photogravure 16.2 x 12.7cm (6 3/8 x 5 in.) David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1940
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 Information: 212-535-7710
Opening hours: Sunday – Tuesday and Thursday: 10am – 5pm Friday and Saturday: 10am – 9pm Closed Wednesday
Exhibition dates: 19th November 2010 – 10th April 2011
Gene Pelham (American, 1909-2004) Photograph for The Tattoo Artist 1944 Study for The Saturday Evening Post, March 4, 1944 11 1/4 x 8 3/4 in Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
The first and last photographs (precursor to Avedon’s white background photographs) are a knockout – and then just look what Rockwell does with them!
The background of traditional tattoo ‘flash’ behind The Tattoo Artist (1944, below) is inspired, as is the humour in the crossing out of the names. The book of the English painter Augustus John nonchalantly placed on the counter in the photographic studies for Soda Jerk (1953) is delicious. Just fantastic to see some of the preparatory work behind the paintings.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Brooklyn Museum for allowing me to publish the artwork and text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Gene Pelham (American, 1909-2004) Photograph for The Tattoo Artist 1944 Study for The Saturday Evening Post, March 4, 1944 11 1/4 x 8 3/4 in Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
Gene Pelham (American, 1909-2004) Photograph for Going and Coming 1947 Study for The Saturday Evening Post, August 30, 1947 11 1/4 x 15 5/8 in Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978) Photographs for The Problem We All Live With 1964 Study for Look, January 14, 1964 Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
To create many of his iconic, quintessentially American paintings, most of which served as magazine covers, norman rockwell worked from carefully staged study photographs that are on view for the first time, alongside his paintings, drawings, and related tear sheets, in Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera. The exhibition, which will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum from November 19, 2010, through April 10, 2011, was organised by the norman rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, following a two-year project that preserved and digitised almost 20,000 negatives.
Beginning in the late 1930s, norman rockwell (1894-1978) adopted photography as a tool to bring his illustration ideas to life in studio sessions. Working as a director, he carefully staged his photographs, selecting props, locations, and models and orchestrating every detail. He began by collecting authentic props and costumes, and what he did not have readily available he purchased, borrowed, or rented – from a dime-store hairbrush or coffee cup to a roomful of chairs and tables from a New York City Automat. He created numerous photographs for each new subject, sometimes capturing complete compositions and, in other instances, combining separate pictures of individual elements. Over the forty years that he used photographs as his painting guide, he worked with many skilled photographers, particularly Gene Pelham, Bill Scovill, and Louis Lamone.
Early in his career Norman Rockwell used professional models, but he eventually found that this method inhibited his evolving naturalistic style. When he turned to photography, he turned to friends and neighbours instead of professional models to create his many detailed study photographs, which he found liberating. Working from black-and-white study photographs also allowed Rockwell more freedom in developing his final work. “If a model has worn a red sweater, I have painted it red – I couldn’t possibly make it green… But when working with photographs I seem able to recompose in many ways: as to form, tone, and color,” Rockwell once commented.
Included in the exhibition will be more than one hundred framed digital prints alongside paintings, drawings, magazine tear sheets, photographic equipment, and archival letters, as well as an introductory film. Among the paintings on view will be the Brooklyn Museum’s painting The Tattoo Artist – one of many that Rockwell created during World War II – depicting a young sailor stoically having his arm tattooed, shown alongside working photographs by Gene Pelham, and the watercolour Dugout, also from the Museum’s collection, portraying the Chicago Cubs baseball team being jeered by fans of the Boston Braves. This work will be displayed along with the September 4, 1948, Saturday Evening Post cover on which it appeared and study photographs by Gene Pelham.
Among the magazine covers included in the exhibition are several from The Saturday Evening Post, for which Rockwell worked for nearly fifty years before turning his attentions to more socially relevant subjects for Look magazine, with which he had a decade-long relationship. Included is The Art Critic, showing an aspiring artist scrutinising paintings in a gallery, which appeared in the April 16, 1955, issue. The exhibition also includes several series of photographs and the final paintings and magazine tear sheets, among them the July 13, 1946, Saturday Evening Post illustration Maternity Waiting Room, shown along with a series of images by an unidentified photographer that served as details of the final work, which portrays ten anxious soon-to-be fathers.
Norman Rockwell became one of the most famous illustrators of his generation through his naturalistic, narrative paintings done in a readily recognisable style, which appeared in national magazines that reached millions of readers. Born in 1894 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, he left high school to study at the National Academy of Design and later the Art Students League of New York. By the age of eighteen he was already a published artist specialising in children’s illustration and had become a regular contributor to magazines such as Boys’ Life, the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, where he was soon named art director. In 1916 he painted his first cover for The Saturday Evening Post, beginning a forty-seven-year relationship that resulted in 323 covers and was the centerpiece of his career.
Early in his career Rockwell had a studio in New Rochelle, New York. He later moved with his wife and three sons to Arlington, Vermont, where many of his family and neighbours served as models in working photographs for his illustrations, which began to focus on small-town American life. In 1943 a fire destroyed his Vermont studio, along with numerous paintings and many of the photographic studies. A decade later the family relocated to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1963 he severed his forty-seven-year association with The Saturday Evening Post and began to work for Look magazine, where, during his ten-year association, he produced work that reflected his personal concerns, including civil rights, America’s war on poverty, and space exploration.
Press release from the Brooklyn Museum website
Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978) New Kids in the Neighborhood 1967 Tear sheet, Look, May 16, 1967 13 x 20 1/2 in Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
Gene Pelham (American, 1909-2004) Photograph for Shuffleton’s Barbershop 1950 Study for The Saturday Evening Post, April 29, 1950 11 5/16 x 7 15/16 in Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
Gene Pelham (American, 1909-2004) Photograph for Soda Jerk 1953 Study for The Saturday Evening Post, August 22, 1953 9 1/2 x 7 9/16 in Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
Gene Pelham (American, 1909-2004) Photograph for Soda Jerk 1953 Study for The Saturday Evening Post, August 22, 1953 9 1/2 x 7 9/16 in Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
Gene Pelham (American, 1909-2004) Photograph for The Dugout 1948 Study for The Saturday Evening Post, September 4, 1948 Norman Rockwell Art Collection Trust Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
Brooklyn Museum 200 Eastern Parkway Brooklyn New York 11238-6052
Exhibition dates: 10th November 2010 – 10th April 2011
Aleksey Ivanovich Saveliev (Russian, 1883-1923) At the Prepared Grave 1910 Gelatin silver print 8.9 x 13.3cm (3 1/2 x 5 1/4 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Pierre Apraxine, 2010
These six photo-postcards show various places and moments surrounding the death and burial of Leo Tolstoy. In November 1910 the eighty-two-year-old novelist walked away from his great wealth to devote himself to Christian charity and died in a stationmaster’s house after falling ill on a train. Tolstoy’s death was of tremendous national importance, and how he was to be mourned – whether to kneel or stand at the grave, for instance – signified a contrast between old and new that would be decided during the Russian Revolution seven years later.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
What an eclectic group of photographs in this posting as well as a great title for an exhibition!
Marcus
Many thankx to the The Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Aleksey Ivanovich Saveliev (Russian, 1883-1923) Peasant Carts with Funeral Wreaths 1910 Gelatin silver print 8.9 x 13.3cm (3 1/2 x 5 1/4 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Pierre Apraxine, 2010
Aleksey Ivanovich Saveliev (Russian, 1883-1923) Deputation of the Yasno-Polyanskyi Peasants 1910 Gelatin silver print 8.9 x 13.3cm (3 1/2 x 5 1/4 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Pierre Apraxine, 2010
Felix Thiollier (French, 1842-1914) A Village Street in the Auvergne c. 1910 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2008
An industrialist and serious amateur photographer in Saint-Étienne, Thiollier left to posterity a vast archive of photographs and negatives. Most are landscapes done in the Pictorialist style, but his more unusual images depict factories and daily life outside major cities in early twentieth century France.
Paul Haviland (American, 1880-1950) Passing Steamer 1910 Platinum print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection Purchase, Harriette and Noel Levine Gift, 2005
The son of a well-off china manufacturer in Limoges, Haviland encountered Alfred Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1908. He soon contributed articles to and published photographs in Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work (and acted as the gallery’s secretary at one point), even bankrolling the gallery’s three-year lease for Stieglitz when the rent was raised. In 1915 he started – with the Mexican-born caricaturist and gallerist Marius de Zayas and the journalist Agnes Ernest Meyer – a new magazine called 291, named for Stieglitz’s gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue.
This image appeared as a photogravure in a 1912 issue of Camera Work. While the soft focus and platinum printing are traces of the waning Pictorialist style, the unexpected vantage point and stark design made Passing Steamer a harbinger of things to come.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Anton Giulio Bragaglia (Italian, 1890-1960) Change of Position 1911 Gelatin silver print 12.8 x 17.9cm (5 1/16 x 7 1/16 in) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005
At age nineteen, Bragaglia became enamored of the Italian Futurist movement, which espoused the beauty of speed and war, the interdependence of time and space, and the total dissolution of time-consecrated institutions. Not following the stop-motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey from the previous century, Bragaglia left the camera’s shutter open to register the absolute fluidity of motion itself – in this case, the trajectory created by the sweeping, continuous arc of a simple change of body position. The result is a dissolution or dematerialisation of the man’s body in a seamless picture of active life. Although later banished from the Futurists’ ranks, the photographer created perhaps the first truly avant-garde images with the camera – the kind that would become prevalent across the continent only a decade later.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Adolph de Meyer (American born France, 1868-1949) [Dance Study] c. 1912 Platinum print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
De Meyer – who would become Vogue magazine’s first official fashion photographer, in 1913 – photographed the dancer Nijinsky and other members of Sergei Diaghilev’s troupe when L’Après midi d’un Faun was presented in Paris in 1912. It has been suggested that this photograph, the only nude by de Meyer, has some connection to the Russian ballet, but if so, it remains mysterious. In 1913 Mabel Dodge, a patroness of the avant-garde, wrote: “Nearly every thinking person nowadays is in revolt against something, because the craving of the individual is for further consciousness, and because consciousness is expanding and bursting through the moulds that have held it up to now.”
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) Tadeus Langier, Zakopane 1912-1913 Gelatin silver print 12.6 x 17.6cm (4 15/16 x 6 15/16 in) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection Purchase, Denise and Andrew Saul Gift, 2005
A painter who considered photography a hobby, Lartigue was seven when his father, an accomplished amateur photographer, presented him with his first camera. reserving his images from childhood onward in album after album, Lartigue created a rich chronicle of the sporting life and entertainments of his upper-class milieu but one that, like his diaries, remained essentially private. Until 1963, when a show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, revealed Lartigue as a major photographer, his work was known only to a group of friends.
[This print has] been made by Lartigue prior to his public recognition, in his customary intimate scale. He made the Grand Prix picture by swinging the camera from left to right as the racing car sped by. It captures the same awestruck, slate-erasing feeling that inspired the Futurist Marinetti to rhapsodise four years earlier, “A roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown Artist, British School The Great British Advance in the West: A Raiding Party Waiting for the Word to Go 1914-1918 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2010 Wikipedia Commons public domain
Unknown Artist, French School The Great Nave: Wounded Soldiers Performing Arms Drill at the End of Their Medical Treatment, Grand Palais, Paris 1916 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005 Wikipedia Commons public domain
During World War I, wounded soldiers who had been sent to Paris to recover were drilled in the cavernous Grand Palais to prepare them for a return to the front.
Unknown artist (American School) (Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks Selling Liberty Loans during the Third Loan Campaign at the Sub Treasury Building on Wall Street, New York City) 1918 Gelatin silver print 19.4 x 24.1cm (7 5/8 x 9 1/2 in) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1996
The twentieth century was truly born during the 1910s. This exhibition, which accompanies Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, surveys the range of uses to which photography was put as its most advanced practitioners and theorists were redefining the medium as an art. The title “Our Future Is in the Air“ is taken from a military aviation pamphlet that figures prominently (in French) in a 1912 Cubist tabletop still life by Picasso; it suggests the twinned senses of exhilarating optimism and lingering dread that accompanied the dissolution of the old order.
Photography was handmaiden and witness to the upheavals that revolutionised perception and consciousness during this tumultuous era. Space and time were overcome by motorcars and airplanes, radio and wireless, and man seemed liberated from the bounds of gravity and geography. This seemingly limitless expanse was mirrored by a new understanding of the unconscious as infinitely deep, complex, and varied – a continent ripe for discovery. The camera was seen as the conduit between these two states of self and world, and “straight photography” – stripped of the gauzy blur of Pictorialist reverie – was espoused by Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand among others.
This turn was not accidental: since handheld cameras became available in the late 1880s, anyone could be a photographer; similarly, photography had snaked its way into every corner of the culture. Elevated perception would distinguish the new artists from the amateur and the tradesman. The exhibition casts the widest possible net in order to show the foundations upon which the medium staked its claim as an independent art.
The 1910s – a period remembered for “The Great War,” Einstein’s theory of relativity, the Russian Revolution, and the birth of Hollywood – was a dynamic and tumultuous decade that ushered in the modern era. This new age – as it was captured by the quintessentially modern art of photography – will be the subject of the exhibition “Our Future Is In The Air”: Photographs from the 1910s, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from November 10, 2010, through April 10, 2011.
An eclectic centennial exhibition devoted to photography of the 1910s, “Our Future Is In The Air” provides a fascinating look at the birth of modern life through 58 photographs by some 30 artists, including Eugène Atget, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Eugène Druet, Lewis Hine, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Adolph de Meyer, Christian Schad, Morton Schamberg, Charles Sheeler, and Stanislaw Witkiewicz, among others. Drawn exclusively from the Museum’s collection, the exhibition also features anonymous snapshots, séance photographs, and a family album made by Russian nobility on the eve of revolution. “Our Future Is In The Air” complements the Museum’s concurrent presentation of groundbreaking photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand in the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand. The exhibition’s title is taken from a pamphlet for military aviation that figures prominently (in French) in a 1912 Cubist tabletop still-life by Picasso, but is used here because of its double meaning: the feelings of excitement and anxiety that accompanied such radical change.
“Our Future Is In The Air” opens in dramatic fashion with a series of photographs showing moments in the funeral procession and burial of Leo Tolstoy on November 9, 1910. The great Russian novelist passed away just after walking away from his great wealth and literary fame to lead a life of Christian charity. Certain details that can be seen in the photo-postcards – such as whether or not to kneel by the grave – represented a long simmering struggle between old and new, spiritual and secular, that would lead to revolution seven years later.
As cameras became smaller, faster, and easier to operate, amateur photographers such as the child prodigy Jacques-Henri Lartigue pushed the medium in directions that trained photographers shied away from. Since Lartigue was only recognised much later as a key figure in photography, prints such as the ones included here – showing speeding motorcars – are exceedingly rare. Lartigue made one of his most memorable photographs, Le Grand Prix A.C.F. (1913), by swinging his camera in the same direction as the car, as it sped by.
The camera also afforded access to the previously invisible, whether capturing a broken leg bone, revealed in an X-ray from 1916 or the trajectory created by a simple change in body position, in a 1911 motion study by the Futurist artist Anton Giulio Bragaglia.
At the same time, photography became an agent of democratic communication, and documentary photographers used its growing influence to expose degrading conditions of workers, the injustice of child labor, and the devastation of war. Beginning in 1908, Lewis Hine made 5,000 photographs of children working in mills, sweatshops, factories, and street trades; six of his photographs will be featured in this exhibition, including Newsboy asleep on stairs with papers, Jersey City, New Jersey, February 1912. Hine’s reports and slide lectures were meant to trigger a profound, empathetic response in the viewer.
During World War I, photography was utilised to document the mass casualties of mechanised warfare; in the exhibition, an affecting image from 1916, by an unknown artist, shows wounded French soldiers performing drills in the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris as part of their rehabilitation.
Also in the exhibition is an evocative 1918 photograph, again by an unknown artist, of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks entertaining a huge crowd at a war bonds rally on Wall Street.
“Our Future Is In The Air” accompanies the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, which focuses on contemporaneous works by three modernist masters of American photography: Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand. It includes photographs by several friends and compatriots of Alfred Stieglitz, from Adolph de Meyer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Paul Haviland, and Karl Struss to Morton Schamberg and Charles Sheeler, in whose works one can trace the transition from soft focus Pictorialism to a harder-edged, more detached “straight photography.”
Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born America, 1882-1966) The Octopus 1909 Platinum print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
During the early 1910s, photographers such as Paul Strand, Karl Struss, and Coburn were using Pictorialist techniques from the previous century to depict startling perspectives on contemporary urban subjects, such as this dizzying, bird’s-eye view of New York’s Madison Square from a new skyscraper.
Unknown artist (American School) (Man Holding Baseball in Catcher’s Mitt) 1910 Gelatin silver print 13.8 x 8.7cm (5 7/16 x 3 7/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Funds from various donors, 1998
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) 11:00 A.M. Monday, May 9th, 1910. Newsies at Skeeter’s Branch, Jefferson near Franklin. They were all smoking. Location: St. Louis, Missouri 1910 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection Gift of Phyllis D. Massar, 1970
Trained as a sociologist at Columbia University, Hine gave up his teaching job in 1908 to become a full-time photographer for the National Child Labor Committee. The success of the reform agency, created four years earlier, was largely dependent on its ability to sway public opinion.
Influenced by Jacob Riis’s pictures of slum conditions on New York’s Lower East Side, Hine obsessively documented the working conditions of children in mills, factories, and fields across the country, often going undercover to gain access to his subjects. The results – more than five thousand photographs – were used in field reports, exhibitions, pamphlets, and slide lectures. Hine’s decidedly unromantic, understated pictures served as a potent weapon of persuasion.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) Addie Card, 12 years. Spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill. Girls in mill say she is ten years. She admitted to me she was twelve; that she started during school vacation and now would “stay”. Location: Vermont, August 1910 1910 Gelatin silver print 24.4 x 19.3cm (9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection Purchase, Anonymous Gifts, by exchange, 2005
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) Newsboy asleep on stairs with papers, Jersey City, New Jersey February 1912 Gelatin silver print Image: 11.5 x 16.8cm (4 1/2 x 6 5/8 in) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005
Exhibition Overview
The twentieth century was truly born during the 1910s. This exhibition, which accompanies Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, surveys the range of uses to which photography was put as its most advanced practitioners and theorists were redefining the medium as an art. The title “Our Future Is in the Air” is taken from a military aviation pamphlet that figures prominently (in French) in a 1912 Cubist tabletop still life by Picasso; it suggests the twinned senses of exhilarating optimism and lingering dread that accompanied the dissolution of the old order.
Photography was handmaiden and witness to the upheavals that revolutionised perception and consciousness during this tumultuous era. Space and time were overcome by motorcars and airplanes, radio and wireless, and man seemed liberated from the bounds of gravity and geography. This seemingly limitless expanse was mirrored by a new understanding of the unconscious as infinitely deep, complex, and varied – a continent ripe for discovery. The camera was seen as the conduit between these two states of self and world, and “straight photography” – stripped of the gauzy blur of Pictorialist reverie – was espoused by Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand among others.
This turn was not accidental: since handheld cameras became available in the late 1880s, anyone could be a photographer; similarly, photography had snaked its way into every corner of the culture. Elevated perception would distinguish the new artists from the amateur and the tradesman. The exhibition casts the widest possible net in order to show the foundations upon which the medium staked its claim as an independent art.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Boulevard de Strasbourg 1912 Albumen silver print from glass negative 22.4 x 17.5cm (8 13/16 x 6 7/8 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005
Atget found his vocation in photography in 1897, at the age of forty, after having been a merchant seaman, a minor actor, and a painter. He became obsessed with making what he termed “documents for artists” of Paris and its environs and compiling a visual compendium of the architecture, landscape, and artefacts that distinguish French culture and history. By the end of his life, Atget had amassed an archive of more than eight thousand negatives, which he organized into such categories as Parisian Interiors, Vehicles in Paris, and Petits Métiers (trades and professions). In Atget’s inventory of Paris, shop windows figure prominently and the most arresting feature mannequin displays. In the 1920s the Surrealists recognised in Atget a kindred spirit and reproduced a number of his photographs in their journals and reviews. Antiquated mannequins such as the ones depicted here struck them as haunting, dreamlike analogues to the human form.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) Jadwiga Janczewska, Zakopane c. 1913 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection Museum Purchase, 2005
Witkiewicz was prolific in many mediums, writing plays, novels, and philosophical treatises as well as painting and making darkly brooding photographic portraits and self-portraits. In all his work, he describes a proto-existential sense of the self struggling in vain against the undifferentiated mass of men and the indifference of death; he often turned to drugs to recover this missing plenitude of existence.
Between 1912 and 1913, when he thought he was going mad, Witkiewicz made a series of extraordinary self-portraits and portraits of friends, his dying father, and his fiancée, Jadwiga Janczewska. After this time, his engagement with photography was brief, as he devoted himself instead to literature and painting. He took his life on the day Russian troops entered Poland in 1939 – in part a gesture of national solidarity.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Karl Struss (American, 1886–1981) Claremont Inn, Riverside Drive 1915 Platinum print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Warner Communications Inc. Purchase Fund, 1977
A member of the Photo-Secession, Struss was a student of Clarence White and a friend of Alfred Stieglitz. He made dozens of photographs of New York City at dusk, delighting in the way things merged and were illuminated by strings of fine lights. This photograph, with its gleaming automobiles and electric lights, shows a popular summer restaurant housed in a colonial-era home on the Upper West Side. Four years later, Struss moved to Los Angeles to work as a still photographer in the burgeoning movie business. He wound up being hired as a cameraman by Cecil B. DeMille and in 1927 won the first Oscar for cinematography for his work on F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Morton Schamberg (American, 1881–1918) [View of Rooftops] 1917 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 Public domain
Had he not died of influenza in 1918, Schamberg likely would have remained one of the best avant-garde painters and photographers of his generation in America. He absorbed the lessons of Cubism through his contacts with the Stieglitz and Arensberg circles, and in photographs such as this one he demonstrated his deft application of the new artistic idioms.
After reaching a point of almost pure abstraction in his painting in the wake of the Armory show of 1913, Schamberg turned in 1915 toward more objective machine forms in his pastels and paintings, and toward urban images in his photographs.
Like Stieglitz’s photographs of the city made from the windows of his galleries, Schamberg’s New York is seen from an elevated perspective, but unlike the elder photographer’s images, Schamberg’s photograph is cool, altogether lacking in human or natural references, and celebrates an almost wholly geometric order underscored by his calculated framing and point of view. For many years this print, the only one Schamberg made from this negative, belonged to his closest friend, Charles Sheeler.
Morton Schamberg (American, 1881-1918) Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (German, 1874-1927) “God” by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Schamberg 1917 Gelatin silver print 24.1 x 19.2cm (9 1/2 x 7 9/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1973 Wikipedia Commons public domain
This photograph of a drain pipe attached to a miter box documents one of the most famous examples of American Dada. The sculpture God, a Readymade in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp’s upended urinal Fountain, has traditionally been attributed to Schamberg. Recent scholarship suggests, however, that it was primarily the creation of Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, a poet, shoplifter, junk collector, and Duchamp worshiper famous for strolling the streets of Greenwich Village with cancelled postage stuck to her face and a birdcage with a live canary dangling from her neck. The sculpture’s irreverent title recalls the sculptor Beatrice Wood’s unattributed comment, included in a published defence of Duchamp’s Fountain, “The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.”
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Charles Sheeler (American, 1883–1965) Dan Mask c. 1918 Gelatin silver print 24.2 x 18.2cm (9 1/2 x 7 3/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, Denise and Andrew Saul Gift, 2005
When Charles Sheeler took up the camera sometime in 1910-11, he was already a modestly accomplished painter. He began to photograph domestic architecture in the Philadelphia area, and within three years he had a successful sideline documenting fine private and public American collections of Chinese bronzes, Meso-American pots, and modern painting and sculpture by Cézanne, Picasso, and Duchamp. Through this work Sheeler met Walter Arensberg, Alfred Stieglitz, and other important collectors and dealers; to a few of them he sold his paintings.
The rigorous demands of detailed record photography soon influenced his painting as the direct, generally frontal assessment of both an object’s form and structure retrained and refined his eye. By 1916, Sheeler had begun to paint from photographs and also to pursue photography as an end in itself. With his first exhibition of photographs, a three-person show with Paul Strand and Morton Schamberg at Marius de Zayas’s Modern Gallery in 1917, Sheeler emerged as one of America’s few prominent artists equally skilled with brush and camera.
This photograph of a Dan mask from Ivory Coast may have been commissioned by John Quinn, a New York lawyer, collector of African art, and patron of the avant-garde. The ceremonial mask emerges from virtual obscurity, filled with mystery, its highly polished wood surface animated by a raking, angular light. The photograph functions as a fetish, speaking with its own voice, commanding our attention, and even, it would seem, judging our response.
This photograph was published in the March 1923 issue of “The Arts,” in an article by de Zayas entitled “Negro Art.”
Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965) Doylestown House – Stairs from Below 1917 Gelatin silver print 21 x 15cm (8 1/4 x 5 15/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
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