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Exhibition: ‘Ana Mendieta: Traces’ at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Exhibition dates: 29th March – 6th July 2014

PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS PHOTOGRAPHS WHICH MAY BE DISTRESSING TO SOME PEOPLE

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Facial Hair Transplant)
1972
Suite of seven colour photographs, estate prints 1997
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

If I had half of this artists courage, I might not even have a quarter of her talent.

Marcus

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

View the catalogue essays Ana Mendieta: Traces by Stephanie Rosenthal and Embers by Adrian Heathfield (2.66Mb pdf)

“Art is a material act of culture, but its greatest value is its spiritual role, and that influences society, because it’s the greatest contribution to the intellectual and moral development of humanity that can be made”

“My art is grounded on the belief in one universal energy which runs through everything; from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.”

“To me, the work has existed on different levels. It existed on the level of being in nature and eventually being eroded away. But obviously when it’s shown to someone as a photograph, that’s what it is.”

Ana Mendieta

The few women working with the body at that time were in instant affinity with each other… The struggle for all of us was to keep the sensuousness of the body and to de-eroticize it in terms of cultural expectations. It was gratifying and exciting to discover her work. Those of us who had already been situating the body as central to our visual aesthetic could also anticipate the resistance that would be around her.

I see her death as part of some larger denial of the feminine. Like a huge metaphor saying, we don’t want this depth of feminine eroticism, nature, absorption, integration to happen. It’s too organic. It’s too sacral. In a way, her death also has a symbolic trajectory. More than Ana dies, when she dies.”

Carolee Schneeman quoted in Camhi, Leslie. “ART; Her Body, Herself,” on the New York Times website published June 20, 2004 [Online] Cited 20/06/2014

“You do feel the sadness that she’s not with us and you wonder where she would have gone with her work.”

Raquelin Mendieta

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Variations) (detail)
1972
Suite of eight colour photographs (estate prints, 1997)
Each 50.8 x 406cm
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Rape
1973
Colour photograph (lifetime print)
20.4 x 25.4cm
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Rape Scene
1973
Colour photograph (lifetime print)
39.8 x 31 x 3.2cm (framed)
Tate: Presented by the American Patrons of Tate, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2010

Rape Scene (1973) was part of series of works devised in response to the rape and murder of a fellow student on the Iowa University campus, where Mendieta completed her BA, MA (painting) and an MFA (inter-media). She invited friends and fellow students to her apartment. The viewer entered through a slightly ajar door into a dark apartment into a room where the artist appeared under a single source of light revealing Mendieta stripped from the waist down. The artist stood slouched and bound over a table, nude from the waist down with her body smeared in blood. Around her was an assemblage of broken plates and blood on the floor. Her direct identification with a specific victim meant that she could not be seen as an anonymous object in a theatrical tableau.

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Self-Portrait with Blood) (detail)
1973
Suite of six colour photographs (estate prints 1997)
Each 50.8 x 40.6cm
Private collection, London; Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Body Tracks)
1974
Colour photograph, lifetime print
Collection of Igor DaCosta
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints)
1972
Suite of six colour photographs, estate prints
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled
1973
Lifetime colour photograph
Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2011
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Blood and Feathers #2
1974
Colour photograph, lifetime print
Collection Raquelín Mendieta Family Trust
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Imagen de Yagul
1973
Lifetime colour photograph
Glenstone
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta: Traces is the first comprehensive survey of this influential artist’s work to be presented in Great Britain or the German-speaking world. It persuasively demonstrates that her art, while very much rooted in the concerns of her day, maintains a powerful connection to our present moment. Born in Cuba in 1948, Mendieta was forced to immigrate to the United States as a child due to her father’s political situation, and much of her work is obliquely haunted by the exile’s sense of displacement, while also reflecting her position as a double minority in North America’s largely white, male art world of the 1970s and 1980s. From the beginning, motifs of transience, absence, violence, belonging, and an identity in flux animated her multidisciplinary art, which ranged nomadically across practices associated with body art, land art, performance, sculpture, photography and film. At its core lay her recurring use of her own body – its physical and photographic traces – and her interest in marginal outdoor sites and elemental materials.

Spanning her brief, yet remarkably productive, career, this exhibition explores the many distinct facets of her practice. It captures her powerfully visceral evocation of ritual and sacrifice, as well as cycles of life and decay, while also highlighting her pioneering role as a conceptual border-crosser. Including photographs, drawings, sculptures, Super-8 films and a substantial selection of photographic slides, most of which have not been exhibited until now, Ana Mendieta: Traces reveals an artist whose underlying concerns led her to bravely re-work and re-combine genres, to draw on different cultures, both archaic and contemporary, while challenging the limits of the art discourse of her time. Her work continues to profoundly challenge, disturb, influence and inspire.

The Museum der Moderne Salzburg will open an extensive retrospective of the work of Ana Mendieta, one of our era’s most important and influential artists. Mendieta was born to a politically active family in Havana, Cuba in 1948. In the wake of the Cuban revolution, when she was only twelve years old, her parents sent her together with her sister to the United States. In 1985, at just thirty-six years old, she died under tragic circumstance in New York. During her short yet prolific career, she developed a unique visual language that is mesmerising in its intimacy, and equally challenging. Her pioneering work has been acknowledged by large retrospectives in the United States and Europe, and is represented in the collections of major museums.

According to Sabine Breitwieser, director at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, who has arranged the exhibition, “a comprehensive exhibition in the German-speaking area, especially in Austria, and the German monograph on Ana Mendieta are long overdue. The artist’s distinctive work, in which she stages her body within the landscape, seems to be ideally exhibited at this site, where nature and the theatrical take on such a major role. Due to the fragility of the work, this could possibly be one of the last extensive Mendieta exhibitions.”

Among the central themes in Mendieta’s artistic work are exile and cultural displacement. In her search for identity and finding her place in the world, she attempted to create a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Her work reveals numerous points of contingency with the emerging art movements of the 1960s and 1970s – Conceptual art, land art, and performance art. Nonetheless, it refuses any kind of categorisation and instead addresses missing links or gaps between different media and art forms. “Through my art I want to express the immediacy of life and the eternity of nature,” wrote Mendieta in 1981. Using her own body and elementary materials, such as blood, fire, earth, and water, she created transitory pieces that combine rituals with metaphors for life, death, rebirth, and spiritual transformation. Her disembodied “earth body” sculptures were private, meditative ceremonies in nature documented in the form of slides and films. From them, Mendieta developed the so-called Siluetas (silhouettes), which form the core of her work. In the 1980s, Mendieta’s body disappeared from her artworks and she started to generate indoor works for galleries. Her engagement with nature continued in her sculptures and drawings, which she created as lasting works.

The exhibition presents roughly 150 works, which are organised throughout twelve spaces; two of these spaces are reconstructions of the original exhibitions by the artist. The works shown are in a multitude of media ranging from photography, film, and sculpture through to drawing. A further section will present the artist’s archive. Slides and photographs, notebooks and postcards offer insight into Mendieta’s working methods. The concern of Stephanie Rosenthal, chief curator of the Hayward Gallery London, is “to show Ana Mendieta’s outstanding work in all of its facets, and to place her artistic process at the center.”

While the artistic media that Mendieta utilises in her works could not be any more diverse, the pictures that she produces are characterised by an unmistakable, overwhelming and mystical poetry. This exhibition makes clear that almost thirty years after the artist’s premature death, her work has lost none of its singularity and uniqueness.

Text from the Museum der Moderne Salzburg website

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Silueta Series)
1978
Gelatin silver print
20.3 x 25.4cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Alma, Silueta en Fuego (Soul, Silhouette on Fire) (still)
1975
Super-8 colour, silent film transferred to DVD
3:07 minutes
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris, and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece) (still)
1976
(Soul, Silhouette of Fireworks)
Super-8 colour, silent film transferred to DVD
2:22 minutes
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled (Cuilapán Niche)
1973
Black and white photograph (lifetime print)
25.4 x 20.4cm
Private collection, London; Courtesy Gallery Lelong, New York and Paris, and Alison Jacques Gallery London

Ana Mendieta died at just 36 years old, but the imprint of her life digs deeper than most. Mendieta’s work occupies the indeterminate space between land, body and performance art, refusing to be confined to any one genre while working to expand the horizons of them all. With the immediacy of a fresh wound and the weightlessness of a half-remembered song, Mendieta’s artwork remains as haunting and relevant today as ever.

Her haunting imagery explores the relationship between earth and spirit while tackling the eternally plaguing questions of love, death and rebirth. Like an ancient cave drawing, Mendieta’s art gets as close as possible to her subject matter allowing no excess, using primal and visceral means to navigate her themes. Decades after her death, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg will show a retrospective of the late feminist artist’s work, simply titled “Ana Mendieta: Traces.”

Mendieta, who was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, moved to the U.S. at 12 years old to escape Castro’s regime. There she hopped between refugee camps and foster homes, planting inside her an obsession with ideas of loss, belonging and the impermanence of place. As an artist in the 1970s, Mendieta embarked upon her iconic series “Silhouettes,” in which she merged body and earthly material, making nature both canvas and medium. In her initial “Silhouette,” Mendieta lay shrouded in an ancient Zapotec grave, letting natural forms eat up her diminutive form.

Her “earth-body” sculptures, as they came to be known, feature blood, feathers, flowers and dirt smothered and stuck on Mendieta’s flesh in various combinations. In “Imagen de Yagul,” speckled feverishly in tiny white flowers, she appears as ethereal and disembodied as Ophelia, while in “Untitled Blood and Feathers” Mendieta looks simultaneously the helpless victim and the guilty culprit. “She always had a direction – that feeling that everything is connected,” Ana’s sister Raquelin said of her work.

An uncertain mythology runs throughout Mendieta’s oeuvre, a feeling at once primal, pagan and feminine. Admirers have cited the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria as an influence, as well as the ancient rituals of Mexico, where Mendieta made much of her work. Yet many of Mendieta’s pieces removed themselves from the spiritual realm to address present day events, for example “Rape Scene,” a 1973 performance based off the rape and murder of a close friend. For the piece Mendieta remained tied to a table for two hours, motionless, her naked body smeared with cow’s blood. In another work, Mendieta smushes her face and body against glass panes, like a child eager to peek into an off-limits locale, or a bug that’s crashed into a windshield. Against the glass, her scrambled facial features almost resemble a Cubist artwork.

Mendieta died tragically young in 1985, falling from her New York City apartment window onto a delicatessen below. She was living with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre at the time. Andre was convicted of murder following the horrific incident and later acquitted. Though the art world remains captivated by the mysterious nature of Mendieta’s passing, her sister emphasised the importance of removing Ana’s work from her life story. “I don’t want it to get in the way of the work,” she said. “Her death has really nothing to do with her work. Her work was about life and power and energy and not about death.”

Fellow feminist performance artist Carolee Schneeman disagrees, however, telling The New York Times in 2004: “I see her death as part of some larger denial of the feminine. Like a huge metaphor saying, we don’t want this depth of feminine eroticism, nature, absorption, integration to happen. It’s too organic. It’s too sacral. In a way, her death also has a symbolic trajectory.”

Since many of Mendieta’s artworks were bodily performances, the ephemera that remain are but traces of her original endeavours. For an artist whose career was built on imprints, ghosts and impressions, this seems aptly fitting. Visceral yet distant, bodily yet spiritual, Mendieta’s images speak a language very distant from the insular artistic themes that so often populate gallery and museum walls. Mendieta’s works present the female body turned out, at once vulnerable and all-powerful, frail and supernatural. As her retrospective makes obvious, her artistic traces are still oozing lifeblood.

Priscilla Frank. “The Haunting Traces Of Ana Mendieta Go On View (NSFW),” on the Huffington Post website February 4, 2014 [Online] Cited 30/06/2014

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled
1976
“Silueta Series, Mexico”
Colour photograph (lifetime print)
39.8 x 31 x 3.2cm (framed)
Tate: Presented by the American Patrons of Tate, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2010

Mendieta formed a silueta on the beach at La Ventosa, Mexico, filling it with red tempera that was ultimately washed away by the ocean waves. The artist documented the obliteration of the figure by the tide in a sequence of 35 mm slides.

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Tree of Life
1976
Colour photograph, lifetime print
Collection Raquelín Mendieta Family Trust
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled
1978
“Silueta Series, Iowa”
Colour photograph (lifetime print)
25.4 x 20.3cm
The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Itiba Cahubaba (Esculturas Rupestres) [Old Mother Blood (Rupestrian Sculptures)]
1982
Black and white photograph, box mounted, exhibition copy
Collection Ignacio C. Mendieta
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
Untitled
1982
Graphite on leaf of a copey tree (Clusia major)
E. Righi Collection
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta with Untitled wood sculpture, 1984-1985
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985)
El Laberinto de Venus (Labyrinth of Venus)
1985
Acrylic on paper
Collection Raquelín Mendieta Family Trust
© The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, L.L.C.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York and Paris and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Mönchsberg 32
5020 Salzburg
Phone: +43 662 842220

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday: 10.00am – 6.00pm
Wednesday: 10.00am – 8.00pm
Monday: closed

Museum der Moderne website

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Exhibition: ‘John Divola: As Far As I Could Get’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Exhibition dates: 6th October 2013 – 6th July 2014

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Cone, 87CN09
1987
Black and White Polapan Print (Polaroid)
20 x 24 inches
© John Divola

FINALLY… two postings on consecutive days by conceptual artists who use photography to document their staging, performance, sculpture, body, earth-body, action art, found art, land art – WORK THAT I REALLY LIKE AND CAN REALLY CARE ABOUT.

I care about both artists work not so much because of the quality of the photography but because of their passion, insight, ideas and general human nous, their need to understand humans and the worlds we inhabit: that INTELLIGENCE necessary for understanding what is true or real, using their intuition to root out, to dig down into the human psyche.

In this posting Divola eloquently investigates the mysterious process of creation through imagination (only for the original “model” then to be destroyed); the notion of photographic authenticity and an interrogation of the human impulse to master the natural world; photography at its most deceptively naturalistic revealing hidden, dead animals; and the landscape altered by human presence and staged to serve as a theatre for creative activity through the “captured” act of running away.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation views of John Divola: As Far As I Could Get at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
© John Divola Photo
© 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Man in Vortex, 87CA2
1987
Black and White Polapan Print (Polaroid)
20 x 24 inches
© John Divola

In Divola’s words, the Polaroids feature “The photograph as an object has an relationship to that which it represents, something like the relationship the snake skin has to the snake that sheds it. The relationship of something dead to something living.” The Polapan prints especially lend themselves to this associate with skin. Their plasticity and their alchemical marks bear witness to a mysterious process of creation; their subject matter conjured up, and then discarded. Divola’s “studio constructions,” as he called them, were temporary structures made solely for the purpose of photographic depiction, including funnels, human and animal figures, and expressively painted backdrops. Divola’s photographs are themselves echo chambers: they replicate and reverberate light from objects that have long since vanished.

Divola’s process has important photo-conceptual precedents: Richard Long’s photographic records of lines made by walking, Jan Dibbets’ play with optical illusion through the camera’s lens, or Robert Smithson’s Yucatan Mirror Displacements. Divola’s work, though, is equally in conversation with the work of Jasper Johns. Johns, known for his paintings of numbers, flags, maps, and targets, focused on flat subjects as a means to conjoining the surface of subject matter with a painting’s flat picture plane. Divola has transmuted the achievements and medium-specificity of high modern painting into images that explore photography’s mimetic qualities and its sheer surface. These are images are about a recognisable reality we cannot access, dim echoes of a familiar world, yet one that has vanished.

“JOHN DIVOLA – Echo Chamber” on the Gallery Luisotti website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014. No longer available online

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Rock and Water #1, 88RW1
1988
Black and White Polapan Print (Polaroid)
20 x 24 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Cells, 87CA1
1987-1989
Internal Dye-diffusion print
20 x 24 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Man on Hill, 89MHA1
1987-1989
Internal Dye-diffusion Print
20 x 24 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Moon, 88MOA1
1988
Internal Dye-diffusion print
20 x 24 inches
Courtesy of the artist
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Rabbit, 87RBA1
1987
Internal Dye-diffusion print
20 x 24 inches
Courtesy of the artist
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Artificial Nature (detail, 1 of 36)
2002
Gelatin Silver Print
8 x 10 in.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Ralph M. Parsons Fund and the Photographic Arts Council, 2013
© John Divola

Across the gallery is a series of found photographs, “Artificial Nature” (2002), made up of continuity stills (the photographs taken on film sets to make ensure uniformity from scene to scene) from mid-century films. The photographs show fabricated landscapes created in studio backlots. The images zero in on the notion of photographic truth – the idea that when you look at a photograph, what you’re seeing is an accurate representation of the world – by presenting a false natural landscape. Without outside knowledge, upon first glance, the photographs look like ordinary landscapes.

Maxwell Williams. “John Divola’s SoCal Moment,” on the Art in America website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014. No longer available online

“Artificial Nature” (2002) stands out, and as with many of Divola’s series, the bluntness of the title belies the delicacy and actual locus of interest. Composed of thirty-six “continuity stills”, these black and white prints have been repurposed from movie studio archives, framed and hung in a tight grid. Ranging in provenance from the 1930s to the 1960s, each picture documents a movie set dressed as a lush, natural landscape. A clapperboard sign planted in the foreground might identify the scene as “wooded hillside” or “the beach.” At once romantic and businesslike, the series opens a delicious gap between intention and effect. To view these pictures only through the lens of nature vs. artifice would be reductive and superficial at best. Treat them instead as a peek into the cabinetry of early pop mechanics, or evidence of a peculiar temporality where worlds should be fixed with a sign because they so routinely congeal and vanish.

Kristin Posehn. “John Divola: As Far As I Could Get,” on The Miami Rail website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014.

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Artificial Nature (detail, 4 of 36)
2002
Gelatin Silver Print
8 x 10 in.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Ralph M. Parsons Fund and the Photographic Arts Council, 2013
© John Divola

With a career compromising four decades, John Divola is as distinctive for his commitment to the photographic community as for his thought-provoking work, Divola’s influence within the field of photography is widely recognised by curators, critics, scholars and photographers throughout the country; yet, his work has remained largely uncelebrated. Many of his former students have achieved illustrious careers and far more recognition, even as Divola continues to mentor and inspire both undergraduate and graduate students in contemporary practice.

As Far As I Could Get is the first over-arching presentation of Divola’s work and is a collaborative project led by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA), shown simultaneously at SBMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Pomona College Museum of Art (PCMA) in the fall of 2013. Though Divola’s photographic series are diverse in subject matter, this approach as one exhibition among three Southern California venues emphasises the consistent conceptual and performative threads that run through Divola’s entire body of work.

Divola was born in Los Angeles in 1949. After graduating with a BA from California State University, Northridge, he entered the MFA program at the University of California Los Angeles. There, under the tutelage of Robert Heineken, the artist began to develop his own unique photographic practice, one that merges photography, painting, and conceptual art. In addition to his own studio practice, he teaches contemporary art in the underserved California inland empire and writes on current photographic practice for a national audience.

John Divola’s photos of photographs range widely but the intellectual rigour from which they spring is unvarying. Whether testing the visual limits of photography by vandalising abandoned houses, interrogating the iconography of the divine through paint, flour, and film, or emphasising the distance between image and reality through the blurred figure of a running dog, Divola’s work is simultaneously fun and philosophical, visually appealing as well as intellectually stimulating.

LACMA On view: Four series of John Divola’s work in the Ahmanson Building, 2nd Floor

The series 20 x 24 Polaroids is Divola’s earliest work exhibited at LACMA, shot between 1987 and 1989. Hastily fabricated sculptures created out of impermanent materials attempt, on one level, to approximate actual physical objects in the world – branches, a rabbit, the moon, etc. At the same time, the roughly-hewn surfaces and ticky-tacky backdrops insist on the artificiality of what is depicted. These works express Divola’s ambivalence to the idea of photography as a descriptive medium with a one-to-one relationship to the real. Photography, in this case, is not employed in the service of documentary truth, but instead is held up as a crucial interlocutor in a creative exercise.

Artificial Nature (2002) offers a clear example of Divola’s interrogation of the human impulse to master the natural world. The work is a collection of 36 continuity stills from films made between the 1930s and the 1960s. These photographs, taken on film sets to establish consistency across multiple cuts (to ensure that the placement of objects remains constant from take to take), document fabricated landscapes contained within the artificial space of the film studio. Representing the diversity of natural topographies add weather patterns, the images also include accessories such as signage and clapperboards, highlighting the distance between ourselves and the natural world – a distance that is only accentuated by cinematic representation.

Seven Songbirds and a Rabbit (1995) is a series of details from the Keystone Mast collection of stereographic negatives housed at the California Museum of Photography, University of California Riverside. Stereoscopy, a three-dimensional imaging technology popular from the mid 19th to the early 20th century, exemplifies photography at its most deceptively naturalistic. When Divola began to examine the original glass-plate negatives in the Keystone collection, he found a wealth of detail, such as the birds and rabbit nestled amidst the foliage that gave the series its title.

The series As Far As I Could Get (1996-2010), five works of which are included in the LACMA exhibition, has Divola once again engaging with the natural environment, but this time in a more performative vein. Divola positioned his camera on a tripod, set the timer for ten seconds, and then ran straight into the established frame. At one level, this was a completely dispassionate endeavour. On another level, because the resulting pictures depict a man in a landscape, not in a controlled experimental setting, the viewer cannot suppress a frisson of physical and emotional tension. The works engage the viewer with the natural landscape – a landscape altered by human presence and staged to serve as a theatre for creative activity.

Press release from the LACMA website

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
Seven Songbirds and a Rabbit (details)
1995
Gelatin Silver Print on Linen
20 x 20 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
As Far As I Could Get (R02F09), 10 Seconds
1996-1997
Pigment Print
60 x 40 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
As Far As I Could Get (R02F06), 10 Seconds
1996-1997
Pigment Print
60 x 40 inches
© John Divola

“Divola is a photographer who works in distinct conceptual series that span and stretch the reaches of photography as art. For instance, at LACMA, the works include a series called “As Far As I Could Get” (1996-2010), where Divola sets a 10-second timer and sprints as far from the camera as he can. It’s performative, simple, amusing and alienating – a tiny body in full physical exertion, far off in the landscape.”

Maxwell Williams. “John Divola’s SoCal Moment,” on the Art in America website [Online] Cited 01/07/2014. No longer available online.

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
As Far As I Could Get (R02F33), 10 Seconds
1996-1997
Pigment Print
60 x 40 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
As Far As I Could Get, 10 Seconds
1996-1997
Pigment Print
60 x 40 inches
© John Divola

John Divola (American, b. 1949)
As Far As I Could Get (R02F33), 10 Seconds
1996-1997
Pigment Print
60 x 40 inches
© John Divola

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
5905 Wilshire Boulevard (at Fairfax Avenue)
Los Angeles, CA, 90036
Phone: 323 857 6000

Opening Hours:
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 11am – 6pm
Friday: 11am – 8pm
Saturday, Sunday: 10am – 7pm
Closed Wednesday

LACMA website

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Photographs and text: George Platt Lynes and the male nude

June 2014

*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
George Platt Lynes
1927

The greatest photographer of the male nude the world has ever seen – George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955).

Lynes worked as a fashion photographer in his own studio in New York (which he opened in 1932) before moving to Hollywood in 1946 where he took the post of Chief Photographer for the Vogue studios. Although an artistic success the sojourn was a financial failure and he returned to New York in 1948. Although continuing his commercial work he became disinterested in it, concentrating his energies on photographing the male nude. He began a friendship with Dr Alfred Kinsey of the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana and helped with his sex research. Between 1949 and 1955, Lynes sold and donated much of his erotic nudes to Kinsey.1 By May 1955 he had been diagnosed terminally ill with lung cancer. He closed his studio. He destroyed much of his print and negative archives particularly his male nudes. However, it is now known that he had transferred many of these works to the Kinsey Institute. After a final trip to Europe, Lynes returned to New York City where he died.2

Since the early 1930s Lynes had photographed male nudes and distributed the images privately to his circle of friends. He was reluctant to show them in public for fear of the harm that they could do to his reputation and business with the fashion magazines, for he was a gay man “passing” in a homophobic society. Generally his earlier male nude photographs concentrate on the idealised youthful body or ephebe. As Lynes became more despondent with his career as a fashion photographer his private photographs of male nudes tend to take on a darker and sharper edge. After a period of residence in Hollywood he returned to New York nearly penniless. His style of photographing the male nude underwent a revision. While the photographs of his European colleagues still relied on the sun drenched bodies of young adolescent males evoking memories of classical beauty and the mythology of Ancient Greece the later nudes of Platt Lynes feature a mixture of youthful ephebes and heavier set bodies which appear to be more sexually knowing. The compositional style of dramatically lit photographs of muscular torsos of older, rougher men shot in close up were possibly influenced by a number of things – his time in Hollywood with its images of handsome, swash-buckling movie stars with broad chests and magnificent physiques; the images of bodybuilders by physique photographers that George Platt Lynes visited; the fact that his lover George Tichenor had been killed during WWII; and the knowledge that he was penniless and had cancer. There is, I believe, a certain sadness but much inner strength in his later photographs of the male nude that harnesses the inherent sexual power embedded within their subject matter.

This monumentality of body and form was matched by a new openness in the representation of sexuality. There are intimate photographs of men in what seem to be post-coital revere, in unmade beds, genitalia showing or face down showing their butts off (see Untitled [Charles ‘Tex’ Smutney, Charles ‘Buddy’ Stanley, and Bradbury Ball] c. 1942, below). Some of the faces in these later photographs remain hidden, as though disclosure of identity would be detrimental for fear of persecution or prosecution. However, this photograph is quite restrained compared to the most striking series of GPL’s photographs which involves an exploration the male anal area (a photograph from the 1951 series can be found in the book titled George Platt Lynes: Photographs from The Kinsey Institute). This explicit series features other photographs of the same model – in particular one that depicts the male with his buttocks in the air pulling his arse cheeks apart. After Lynes found out he had cancer he started to send his photographs to the German homoerotic magazine Der Kries under the pseudonym Roberto Rolf, and in the last years of his life he experimented with paper negatives (see below), which made his images of the male body even more grainy and mysterious.

Further, when undertaking research into GPL’s photographs at The Kinsey Institute as part of my PhD I noted that most of the photographs had annotations in code on the back of them giving details of age, sexual proclivities of models and what they are prepared to do and where they were found. This information gives a vital social context to GPL’s nude photographs of men and positions them within the moral and ethical framework of the era in which they were made. Most of the photographs list the names of the models used but we are unable to print them due to an agreement between GPL and Dr. Kinsey as to their secrecy.

I believe that Lynes understood, intimately, the different physical body types that gay men find desirable and used them in his photographs. He visited Lon of New York (a photographer of beefcake men) in his studio and purchased photographs of bodybuilders for himself, as did the German photographer George Hoyningen-Huene. It is likely that these images of bodybuilders influenced his later compositional style of images of men; it is also possible that he detected the emergence of this iconic male body type as a potent sexual symbol, one that that was becoming more visible and sexually available to gay men.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Brown, Elspeth. “Queer Desire and Cold War Homophobia,” on the In The Darkroom blog May 2013 [Online] Cited 24/06/2014. No longer available online

2/ “He clearly was concerned that this work, which he considered his greatest achievement as a photographer, should not be dispersed or destroyed…We have to remember the time period we’re talking about – America during the post-war Red Scare… ”

Quotation from George Platt Lynes, The Male Nudes. Rizzoli International Pub, 2011 cited on “George Platt Lynes” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 24/06/2014.

Many thankx to Associate Professor Elspeth H. Brown for allowing me to publish her text “Queer Desire and Cold War Homophobia”. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“The depth and commitment he had in photographing the male nude, from the start of his career to the end, was astonishing. There was absolutely no commercial impulse involved – he couldn’t exhibit it, he couldn’t publish it.”

Allen Ellenzweig

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Untitled (male nude with tattoo)
1950-1955
Silver gelatin photograph
24.5 x 19.5cm

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Untitled
Nd [c. 1951]
Silver gelatin photograph

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Jack Fontan
c. 1950
Silver gelatin photograph

Samuel M. Steward. “George Platt Lynes,” in The Advocate, No. 332, December 10, 1981, pp. 22-24

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Untitled [Charles ‘Tex’ Smutney, Charles ‘Buddy’ Stanley, and Bradbury Ball]
c. 1942
Silver gelatin photograph

According to David Leddick the models are Charles ‘Tex’ Smutney, Charles ‘Buddy’ Stanley, and Bradbury Ball. The image comes from a series of 30 photographs of these three boys undressing and lying on a bed together. Leddick, David. Naked Men: Pioneering Male Nudes 1935-1955. New York: Universe Publishing, 1997, p. 21.

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Ted Starkowski (standing, arms folded)
c. 1950
Silver gelatin photograph from a paper negative

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Ted Starkowski (standing, arms behind back)
c. 1950
Silver gelatin photograph from a paper negative
22.9 x 19.1cm

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Untitled
1952
Silver gelatin photograph

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Untitled (male nude study)
Nd
Silver gelatin photograph

Queer Desire and Cold War Homophobia

Associate Professor Elspeth H. Brown

This photograph [above] archives queer, illicit desire in Cold War America. It was made by George Platt Lynes, and is part of a set of male nudes that the photographer made in the decades leading to his death, from lung cancer, in 1955. Because exhibiting these photographs was a impossibility during Lynes’s lifetime due to Cold War homophobia, he circulated them privately among his queer kinship networks.

Lynes was part of a closely connected circle of elite gay men who dominated American arts and letters in the interwar and early post-war years. For 16 years, Lynes lived with the writer Glenway Wescott and museum curator Monroe Wheeler, who were a couple for over fifty years; they had a variety of other sexual partners throughout, including Lynes, who shared a bedroom with Wheeler during their years together. All three of them, as well as friends and colleagues Lincoln Kirstein, Paul Cadmus, and other leading figures, participated in sex parties in the 1940s and 1950s, as documented in their personal papers. However, in the context of 1950s-era red scares, which particularly focused on homosexuals, the more open sexual subcultures of the 1930s and 1940s were driven even further underground.

In April of 1950, Glenway Wescott wrote George Platt Lynes that while the erotic explicitness of George’s nudes didn’t personally concern him, he was worried for Monroe Wheeler, since Wheeler held a public position as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. “I really don’t mind scabrousness, etc., on my account, as you must know,” he wrote. “Only that our poor M [Monroe] must conclude his career with good effect and honor, I am anxious not to involve him in what is now called (in the nation’s capital) ‘guilty by association’ (have you been reading the columns and columns in the newspapers upon this and correlative points?).”

Although McCarthyism is often understood as the effort to purge suspected communists from the State Department and other branches of the federal government, the Red Scare equally targeted homosexuals, who were forced out of public service and into the closet. Wescott may well have been referring to the front page of the New York Times on March 1, 1950, where Secretary of State Dean Acheson testified about the Alger Hiss trial and the loyalty program at the State Department. Although the article purportedly concerned communism, it shows that the red scare mainly affected homosexuals, as Wescott clearly understood. Senator Bridges asked John E. Peurifoy, Deputy Under-Secretary of State in charge of the security program, how many members of the State Department had resigned since the investigations began in 1947. “Ninety-one persons in the shady category,” Mr. Peurifoy replied, “most of these were homosexuals.” This was not necessarily newsworthy in and of itself, so far as the New York Times was concerned in 1950, and the remainder of the article detailed the testimony relating to other aspects of the hearings.

Lynes continued to make and circulate his portraits, despite this climate of homophobia. He was very concerned that the work find an audience, and published it in several issues of the German homosexual journal Der Kreis in the 1950s. He also became an important informant for Alfred Kinsey’s research, as did Glenway Wescott and other members of their circle. Between 1949 and 1955, Lynes sold and donated much of his erotic nudes to Kinsey, where they are now part of the Kinsey Institute collections in Bloomington, Indiana.

Reproduced with permission of the author.

Elspeth H. Brown website

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Untitled
1951
Silver gelatin photograph

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Untitled (Charles Romans in the artist’s apartment)
1953
Silver gelatin photograph
19.5 x 24.5cm

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Don Cerulli
1952
Silver gelatin photograph

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Male nude study
1951
Silver gelatin photograph

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Untitled
1951
Silver gelatin photograph
22.9 x 19.1cm

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Untitled
1936
Silver gelatin photograph

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
George Tooker
1945
Silver gelatin photograph

$George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 - December 6, 1955) 'Tex Smutney' 1943$

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Tex Smutney
1943
Silver gelatin photograph

Chronology by Jack Woody

1907-1924 Born April 15, 1907, East Orange, New Jersey. Raised in comfortable circumstances and privately educated. Schoolmate Lincoln Kirstein described the young Lynes as “precocious,” crediting him with a subsequent introduction to George Balanchine.

1925 Makes first trip to Europe. Meets lifetime companions Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler. Befriends Gertrude Stein, Pavel Tchelitchew and Jean Cocteau during his stay. Returns to New York City, works at Brentano’s Bookstore for a short time.

1926 Publishes the As Stable Pamphlets in his parents’ house, Englewood, New Jersey. Includes Gertrude Stein’s DESCRIPTIONS OF LITERATURE and Ernest Hemingway’s first published play TODAY IS FRIDAY with cover designs by Pavel Tchelitchew and Jean Codeau. Enters Yale University in Autumn, leaves in December.

1927 Opens Park Place Book Shop in Englewood. The gift of a view camera encourages Lynes to make a career of photography.

1928-1930 During 1928 Lynes exhibits his celebrity portraits at Park Place Book Shop to launch a portrait business in the shop. Continues travelling to Europe, teaching himself by trial-and-error a technical understanding of the medium.

1931 Introduced to Julien Levy. Together they experiment with photographing surrealistic still-lifes. Levy arranges to include Lynes in Surrealism exhibition at Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. Visits and photographs Gertrude Stein at Bilignin.

1932 First important exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in tandem with Walker Evans. The death of his father forces Lynes to take up photography as a means of economic support.

1933 Opens first New York City studio on East 50th Street. Continued public showings of his work and interest in his celebrity portraits attracts a large clientele of New York socialites and their families.

1934 Begins publishing his fashion and portrait work in such magazines as Town and Country, Harpers’ Bazaar and Vogue magazines.

1935 Invited by Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine to document the repertoire and principal dancers in their fledgling American Ballet (now New York City Ballet), a collaboration that will continue until Lynes’ death in 1955.

1936 Surrealistic composition The Sleepwalker included in New York Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism. Lynes undertakes an extensive project to photographically interpret mythological situations.

1937-1940 Continues involvement with mythology series. Successful commercial career now headquartered in a large studio at 604 Madison Avenue. Commercial fashion accounts include Hattie Carnegie, Henri Bendel, Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman.

1941-1945 Photographs airfield activities for First Air Force’s publicity and documentation. Begins to lose interest in commercial work, a process accelerated by the death of George Tichenor in 1942. Disillusioned with New York and his private life Lynes closes his studio and leaves for Los Angeles to head Vogue Magazine‘s Hollywood studio.

1946-1947 Lynes begins to photograph in his rented Hollywood Hills home, experimenting with effects achieved with minimal amounts of available light. Photographs Christopher Isherwood, Igor Stravinsky, Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley.

1948-1950 Friends sponsor the financially troubled Lynes’ return to New York where he is uninterested in and unable to repeat his earlier commercial successes. Economics force Lynes to experiment with cheaper photographic tools. He is particularly interested in the paper negative. Meets sex researcher Alfred Kinsey; impressed with Lynes’ work, Kinsey arranges to purchase hundreds of photographs for his Bloomington, Indiana institute.

1951-1954 Publishes his male nudes in homoerotic magazine Der Kries using the pseudonyms Roberto Rolf and Robert Orville. Declares bankruptcy. Lives in a succession of apartments and studios as illness becomes apparent.

1955 In May diagnosed terminally ill with cancer. Last portrait sitting is June 16 with Monroe Wheeler. Closes studio and undergoes radium and drug therapy. Lynes begins to destroy large portions of his negative and print archives. In the Autumn he leaves for Europe, returning to New York in November to be hospitalised. At night Lynes leaves the hospital to attend the theatre and ballet. He dies on December sixth, forty-eight years old.

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Mel Fillini
1950
Silver gelatin photograph

George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955)
Robert McVoy
c. 1941
Silver gelatin photograph

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Exhibition: ‘Bill Cunningham: Facades’ at the New York Historical Society, New York

Exhibition dates: 14th March – 15th June 2014

Unknown artist
Bill Cunningham Photographing Three Models at New York County Court House
c. 1968-1976
Gelatin silver photograph
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham

Now this is more like it!

If you want fabulousness with flair, and a dash of savoir-faire; if you want architecture with fashion, history with panache, you need look no further. Camp, kitsch, OTT but with poise, aplomb, grace and sophistication – here is the artist for the job. Oh, what fun he and his muse Editta Sherman must have had with this project.

But behind it all is a damn good photographer, with a great eye for composition. Look at the hat, the building and the “attitude” of the hands in Guggenheim Museum (c. 1968-1976, below). This is how you make people smile and think (about the city, conservation and creativity), not with some overblown frippery like the photographs of Lagerfeld in the last posting.

It’s a pity the press images were initially so poor. I had to spend hours cleaning up the images they were so badly scratched to present them to you in a viewable state. Be that as it may, these are a joy, I love them…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016)
Gothic bridge in Central Park (designed 1860)
c. 1968-1976
Gelatin silver photograph
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham

Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016)
Editta Sherman on the Train to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
c. 1972
Gelatin silver photograph
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham

Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016)
Guggenheim Museum (built 1959)
c. 1968-1976
Gelatin silver photograph
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham

This spring, the New-York Historical Society presents a special exhibition celebrating the creative intersection of fashion and architecture through the lens of a visionary photographer. Bill Cunningham: Facades, on view from March 14 through June 15, 2014, explores the legendary photographer’s project documenting the architectural riches and fashion history of New York City.

Beginning in 1968, Bill Cunningham scoured the city’s thrift stores, auctions and street fairs for vintage clothing and scouted architectural sites on his bicycle. The result was a photographic essay entitled Facades (completed in 1976), which paired models – most particularly his muse, fellow photographer Editta Sherman – posed in period costumes at historic New York settings.

Nearly four decades after Cunningham donated 88 gelatin silver prints from the series to the New-York Historical Society in 1976, approximately 80 original and enlarged images from this whimsical and bold work are being reconsidered in a special exhibition curated by Dr. Valerie Paley, New-York Historical Society Historian and Vice President for Scholarly Programs. The exhibition offers a unique perspective on both the city’s distant past and the particular time in which the images were created, examining Cunningham’s project as part of the larger cultural zeitgeist in late 1960s-70s New York City, an era when historic preservation and urban issues loomed large.

“We are thrilled to feature these important photographs by New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham, who captured an uncertain moment in our city’s history, when New York seemed on the brink of losing its place of privilege as a capital of the world. Cunningham’s vivid sense of New York’s illustrious past and his unfettered optimism about its future make the photographs among the most dramatic and important documentation of the city’s social history,” said Louise Mirrer, President and CEO of the New-York Historical Society. “The exhibition is especially timely, as Mrs. Editta Sherman, Bill Cunningham’s muse for his project and the famed ‘duchess of Carnegie Hall,’ passed away last November 2013 at the age of 101. Mrs. Sherman’s indomitable spirit, humour and creativity are powerfully felt through the photographic images. We are gratified that many of her family members will be with us for our opening exhibition event.”

Over eight years, Bill Cunningham collected more than 500 outfits and photographed more than 1,800 locations for the Facades project, jotting down historical commentary on the versos of each print. The selection of 80 images on view evoke the exuberance of Cunningham and Sherman’s treasure hunt and their pride for the city they called home. Cunningham’s images are contextualised with reproductions of original architectural drawings from New-York Historical’s collection.

During the years that Cunningham worked on Facades, New York City was in a municipal financial crisis that wreaked havoc on daily existence, with crime, drugs, and garbage seemingly taking over the city. However, the 1970s also was an era of immense creativity, when artists and musicians experimented with new forms of expression. While Cunningham’s photographs offer an unsullied version of the tough cityscape during this chaotic time, his vision was part of a larger movement towards preserving the historic heritage of the built environment to improve the quality of urban life.

Most images in Facades feel timeless, such as Gothic Bridge (designed 1860), featuring Editta Sherman strolling through a windswept Central Park, framed by the wrought-iron curves of a classic bridge. However, at least one will offer a peek behind the scenes of the project. Cunningham and Sherman often traveled to locations by public transportation to avoid wrinkling the costumes, and Editta Sherman on the Train to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden (c. 1972) captures the jarring juxtaposition of Sherman sitting primly in a graffiti-covered subway car.

Other exhibition highlights include Sherman dressed in a man’s Revolutionary War-era hat, powdered wig, overcoat and breeches at St. Paul’s Chapel and Churchyard (built c. 1766-1796), the oldest surviving church in Manhattan, where George Washington worshipped. In Federal Hall (built c. 1842), Cunningham paired the Parthenon-like architectural details of the building with a Grecian-style, 1910s pleated Fortuny gown. For Grand Central Terminal (built c. 1903-1913), Cunningham drew on his millinery background to create a voluminous feathered hat that echoes the spirit of the “crown of the Terminal,” the ornate rooftop sculpture with monumental figures of Mercury, Minerva, and Hercules.

Bill Cunningham (1929-2016) was a fashion photographer for the New York Times, known for his candid street photography. Cunningham moved to New York in 1948, initially working in advertising and soon striking out on his own to make hats under the name “William J.” After serving a tour in the U.S. Army, he returned to New York and began writing for the Chicago Tribune. While working at the Tribune and Women’s Wear Daily, he began taking photographs of fashion on the streets of New York. The Times first published a group of his impromptu pictures in December 1978, which soon became a regular series. In 2008 Cunningham was awarded the title chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. He is the subject of the award-winning documentary film Bill Cunningham New York (2010). Bill Cunningham and Editta Sherman were neighbours in the Carnegie Hall Studios, a legendary artists’ residence atop the concert hall, for 60 years.

Press release from the New York Historical Society website

Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016)
St. Paul’s Chapel and Churchyard (built c. 1766-96)
c. 1968-1976
Gelatin silver photograph
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham

Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016)
Grand Central Terminal (built c. 1903-1913)
c. 1968-1976
Gelatin silver photograph
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham

Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016)
Federal Hall (built c. 1842, costume c. 1910)
c. 1968-1976
Gelatin silver photograph
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham

Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016)
Bowery Savings Bank (built c. 1920)
c. 1968-1976
Gelatin silver photograph
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham

Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016)
Club 21 (founded c. 1920s; costume c. 1940)
c. 1968-1976
Gelatin silver photograph
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham

Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016)
Associated Press Building at Rockefeller Center (built c. 1939)
c. 1968-1976
Gelatin silver photograph
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham

Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016)
Paris Theater (built 1947)
c. 1968-1976
Gelatin silver photograph
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham

Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016)
General Motors Building
c. 1968-1976
Gelatin silver photograph
New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham

The New York Historical Society 
170 Central Park West
at Richard Gilder Way (77th Street)
Phone: (212) 873-3400

Opening hours:
Monday CLOSED
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 5pm

The New York Historical Society  website

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Exhibition: ‘Garry Winogrand’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Exhibition dates: 2nd March – 8th June 2014

More photographs by Gary Winogrand.

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

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
1950
Gelatin silver print
Framed: 40.64 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Fractional and promised gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Coney Island, New York
c. 1952
Gelatin silver print
Framed: 40.64 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase and gift of Barbara Schwartz in memory of Eugene M. Schwartz
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Richard Nixon Campaign Rally, New York
1960
Gelatin silver print
Framed: 45.72 x 55.88cm (18 x 22 in.)
Posthumous print made from original negative on the occasion of the Garry Winogrand exhibition organised by the National Gallery of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, courtesy Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
John F. Kennedy, Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles
1960
Gelatin silver print
Framed: 45.72 x 55.88cm (18 x 22 in.)
Posthumous print made from original negative on the occasion of the Garry Winogrand exhibition organised by the National Gallery of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, courtesy Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Metropolitan Opera, New York City
c. 1951
Gelatin silver print
Framed: 45.72 x 55.88cm (18 x 22 in.)
Posthumous print made from original negative on the occasion of the Garry Winogrand exhibition organised by the National Gallery of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, courtesy Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

The first retrospective in 25 years of work by artist Garry Winogrand – renowned photographer of New York City and postwar American life – will be on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, March 2 through June 8, 2014. Revealing the full breadth of his art for the first time, Garry Winogrand brings together some 190 of the artist’s most iconic images – many never before exhibited or reproduced.

“Winogrand is widely recognised as one of the preeminent photographers of postwar America, though his work remains largely unexplored and incompletely published,” said Earl A. Powell III. “Building on several recent exhibitions of 20th-century American photographers, such as Robert Frank and Harry Callahan, the Gallery is proud to present another major American photographer to our visitors.”

The exhibition was on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from March 9 through June 2, 2013. After Washington, the exhibition will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (June 27 through September 21, 2014); the Jeu de Paume, Paris (October 14, 2014, through January 25, 2015); and the Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (March 3 through May 10, 2015).

Exhibition highlights

Garry Winogrand (1928-1984), a New Yorker who roamed the United States during the postwar decades, left behind a sweeping portrait of American life. His photographs powerfully combine the hope and exhilaration as well as the anxiety and turbulence that characterised America during these vital years, revealing a country that glitters with possibility but threatens to spin out of control. From Fifth Avenue to Sunset Boulevard, from Cape Kennedy to the Texas State Fair, he made the American middle class the primary subject of his pictures. Endlessly curious, Winogrand scrutinised both cities and suburbs, always on the lookout for those instants when happenstance and optics might join to make a good picture that exposes some deep current in American culture.

Working in the tumultuous postwar decades, Winogrand captured moments of everyday American life, producing an expansive picture of a nation rich with possibility yet threatening to spin out of control. He did much of his best-known work in New York City in the 1960s, but he also traveled widely around the United States, from California and Texas to Miami and Chicago. Combining hope and buoyancy with anxiety and instability, his photographs trace the mood of the country itself, from the ebullience of the postwar optimism to the chaos of the 1960s and the gloom and depression of the post-Vietnam era.

When he died suddenly at age 56, Winogrand left behind thousands of rolls of exposed but undeveloped film and unedited contact sheets – some 250,000 frames in total. Many of these pictures have been printed for the first time for this long-awaited retrospective of his work. By presenting such archival discoveries alongside celebrated pictures, Garry Winogrand reframes a career that was, like the artist’s America, both epic and unresolved.

The exhibition is divided into three sections over seven galleries, each presenting a broad variety of subjects found in Winogrand’s art. “Down from the Bronx” presents photographs taken in New York City from his start in 1950 to 1971; “A Student of America” looks at work made in the same period during journeys outside New York; and “Boom and Bust” addresses Winogrand’s late period – from 1971, when he moved away from New York, to his death in 1984 – including photographs from Texas and Southern California, as well as Chicago, Washington, and Miami. The third section also presents a small number of Manhattan photographs made during Winogrand’s return visits; like much of his later work, they express a sense of desolation unprecedented in his earlier photographs.

Plunging headlong into his work, Winogrand preferred shooting film to editing his pictures or producing books and exhibitions. As a result, many of his strongest early photographs fell into obscurity as he matured, while numerous later ones remained unprocessed at his death. Winogrand never published or exhibited approximately one-third of the photographs presented here, and more than sixty have been printed for this exhibition and are being shown in public for the first time. By presenting such discoveries alongside his celebrated pictures, Garry Winogrand reinterprets a career that was, like the artist’s America, both epic and unresolved. A video of Winogrand at Rice University in the 1970s, edited for the exhibition, allows visitors to experience rare footage of the artist talking to students in a casual, extemporaneous manner.

Garry Winogrand (1928-1984)

Born in the Bronx, Winogrand is known primarily as a New York City street photographer, often associated with famed contemporaries Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. Exposing some 20,000 rolls of film in his short lifetime, Winogrand photographed business moguls, everyday women on the street, famous actors and athletes, hippies, politicians, antiwar demonstrators, soldiers, animals in zoos, rodeos, car culture, and airports. He was also an avid traveler who roamed around the United States to locations that included Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Ohio, Colorado, and the open country of the Southwest.

After serving in the military as a weather forecaster, Winogrand began working as a photographer while studying painting on the G.I. Bill at Columbia University (1948-1951). He supplied commercial photographs to such general-interest magazines as Life, Look, Sports Illustrated, Collier’s, and Pageant. His career was further shaped by the decline of these popular magazines and the rise of a new culture of photography centred in the art world.

Although Winogrand was a prolific photographer throughout his career, he largely postponed printing and editing his work, especially at the end of his life. He published five books, but they contain only a fraction of his oeuvre. In his later years he spoke of reviewing and reediting all of his photographs, but he died abruptly, leaving behind more than 6,500 rolls of film (almost 250,000 images) that he had never seen, as well as proof sheets from his earlier years that he had marked but never printed. Winogrand’s archive, including his film and proof sheets, is now housed at the Center for Creative Photography of the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Press release from the National Gallery of Art website

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
c. 1960
Gelatin silver print
Framed: 40.64 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.)
The Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Los Angeles
1980-1983
Gelatin silver print
Framed: 40.64 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.)
The Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Los Angeles
1980-1983
Gelatin silver print
Framed: 45.72 x 55.88cm (18 x 22 in.)
Posthumous print made from original negative on the occasion of the Garry Winogrand exhibition organised by the National Gallery of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, courtesy Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Los Angeles
1983
Gelatin silver print
Framed: 45.72 x 55.88cm (18 x 22 in.)
Posthumous print made from original negative on the occasion of the Garry Winogrand exhibition organised by the National Gallery of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, courtesy Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
1961
Gelatin silver print
Framed: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase and gift of Barbara Schwartz in memory of Eugene M. Schwartz
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Park Avenue, New York
1959
Gelatin silver print
Framed: 40.64x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

National Gallery of Art
National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Constitution Avenue NW, Washington

Opening hours:
Daily 10.00am – 5.00pm

National Gallery of Art website

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Exhibition / text: ‘Vivian Maier (1926-2009). A Photographic Revelation’ at Château de Tours

Exhibition dates: 9th November 2013 – 1st June 2014

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Untitled
1954
© Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

“Maier doesn’t have a partner to dance with. She sees something well enough, whereas Lee Friedlander expects something. If there is an idea out there in the ether she grabs onto it in a slightly derivative way. Maier states that these things happened with this subject matter but with Arbus, for example, she meets something extra/ordinary and alien – and goes beyond, beyond, beyond.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan May 2014

The next best thing

The photographs of Vivian Maier. Unknown in her lifetime (nanny as secretive photographer), her negatives discovered at an auction after her death – some developed, all scanned, in some cases cropped, the medium format images then printed. The latest “must have” for any self respecting photography collection, be it private or public. But are they really that good?

To be unequivocal about it, they are good – but, in most cases, they are not “great”. Maier is a very good photographer but she will never be a great photographer. This might come as a surprise to the legions of fans on Facebook (and the thousands of ‘Likes’ for each image), those who think that she is the best thing since sliced bread. But let’s look at the evidence – the work itself.

The photographs can seen on the Vivian Maier Official website and I have spent quite a lot of time looking at them. As with any artist, there are some strong images and some not so strong ones but few reach ‘master’ status. The lighting is good, the use of low depth of field, the location and the presence of the people she photographed are all there, as are the influences that you recite in your mind as to the people her photographs remind you of: Lewis Hine, Berenice Abbott, Lisette Model, Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt, Lee Friedlander et al. Somehow through all this she makes the photographs she takes her own for she has a “rare sense of photographic vision” as Edward Petrosky expressed it on my LinkedIn page, but ultimately they don’t really take you anywhere. It’s like she has an addiction to taking photographs (a la Gary Winogrand), but no way of advancing her art to the next level.

Vivien Maier’s photographs stand out because she hasn’t withheld enough within them. What do I mean by that? Let’s look at some examples to explain what I mean…

Included in the postings are two comparisons: Vivian Maier, June 19, 1961, Chicago IL, 1961 / Lee Friedlander, Stony Point, New York, 1966; and Vivian Maier, New York, Nd 1966 / Berenice Abbott, New York at Night, 1932. As with most of Maier’s photography, she relies on intuition when taking a photograph and a bloody good intuition it is too. This intuition usually stands her in good stead and she almost always gets the shot, but there is an underlying lack of structure to her images. Here I am talking as much about psychological structure as physical structure, for both go hand in hand.

If we compare the Maier with the Friedlander we can say that, if we look at the windows in the Friedlander, every one is a masterpiece! From the mother and son at left with the white-coated marchers, to the central window with the miniature house, dog and tree, to the dark-suited marchers at right. Everything feels compelling, intricate weavings of a narrative that the viewer has to try and make sense of. Each part of the Friedlander image is absolutely necessary for that picture… whereas there are so many things in the Vivien Maier that belong in other pictures ie. a good picture but a lot that doesn’t belong in that picture. Things that should have been held back, by making another image somewhere else. Her narrative is confusing and thus the eye is also confused.

A similar scenario can be observed when comparing the photographs of New York at night by Abbott and Maier. Abbott’s photograph is a tight, orchestrated and muscular rendition of the city which seethes with energy and form. Maier’s interpretation fades off into nothingness, the main arterials of the city leading the eye up to the horizon line and then [nothing]. It is a pleasant but wishy-washy photograph, with all the energy of the city draining away in the mind and in the eye.

One of Maier’s photographs that most resonates with me is September 1953, New York, NY (1953, below). This IS a masterpiece. There is a conciseness of vision here, reminiscent of Weston’s Nude of 1938 with its link to the anamorphic structure of his photographs of peppers. There is nothing auxiliary to the purpose of the photograph, yet there is that indefinable something that takes it out of itself. The dirt of the clothes, under the fingers, the ring on the hand, the shape that no human should be in and its descent onto the pavement, the despair of that descent captured in the angle of the camera looking down on the victim. The photograph has empathy, promotes understanding and empathy in the viewer. Most of us have been there. Other photographs that approach a higher perspective are Maier’s self-portraits, in which there is a conscious exploration of her reflection in/of the world: a slightly dour, serious figure reflected back from the world into the lens of the camera – a refracted identity, the phenomenon of self as light passing obliquely through the interface between one medium and another, between living, the camera and memory.

But too often Maier’s photographs are just so… obvious. Did she wait long enough for the composition to reveal itself to her more, god what’s the word, more ambiguously. Maier doesn’t have a partner to dance with. She sees something well enough, whereas Lee Friedlander expects something. If there is an idea out there in the ether she grabs onto it in a slightly derivative way. Maier states that these things happened with this subject matter but with Arbus, for example, she meets something extra/ordinary and alien – and goes beyond, beyond, beyond.

What we can say is that Maier’s vision is very good, her intuition excellent, but there is, critically, not that indefinable something that takes her images from good to great. This is the key thing – everything is usually thrown at the image, she withholds nothing, and this invariably stops them taking that step to the next level. This is a mighty difficult step for any artist to take, let alone one taking photographs in the shadows. Personally I don’t believe that these images are a “photographic revelation” in the spirit of Minor White. What is a revelation is how eagerly they have been embraced around the world as great images without people really looking deeply at the work; how masterfully they have been promoted through films, books, websites and exhibitions; how Maier’s privacy has been expunged in the quest for dollars; and how we know very little about her vision for the negatives as there are no extant prints of the work.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Nude
1936
Gelatin silver print

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
September 1953, New York, NY
1953
© Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
June 19, 1961, Chicago IL
1961
© Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Stony Point, New York, 1966
1966
Silver gelatin photograph

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
New York
Nd
© Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
New York at Night
1932
Gelatin silver print
12 7/8 x 10 9/16″ (32.7 x 26.9cm)

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
New York, NY, 18 Octobre 1953
1953
© Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
New York, NY
c. 1953
© Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
St East nº108, New York , NY, September 28, 1959
1959
© Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
New York, NY
1954
© Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Vivian Maier was the archetypal self-taught photographer with a keen sense of observation and an eye for composition. She was born in New York in 1926, but spent part of her childhood in France before returning to New York in 1951 when she started taking photos. In 1956, she moved to Chicago, where she lived until her death in 2009.

Her talent is comparable with that of the major figures of American street photography such as Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand. The exhibition presented at the Château de Tours by the Jeu de Paume, in partnership with the Municipality of Tours and diChroma photography, is the largest ever exhibition in France devoted to Vivian Maier. It includes 120 black and white and colour gelatin silver prints from the original slides and negatives, as well as extracts from Super 8 films she made in the 60s and 70s. This project, which is sourced from John Maloof’s collection, with the valuable assistance of Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, reveals a poetic vision that is imbued with humanity.

John Maloof discovered Vivian Maier’s astonishing photos completely by chance in 2007 at an auction in Chicago. At the time, this young collector was looking for historical documentation about a specific neighbourhood of the city and he bought a sizeable lot of prints, negatives and slides (of which a major part had not even been developed) as well as some Super 8 films by an unknown and enigmatic photographer, Vivian Maier. By all accounts, Vivian Maier was a discreet person and somewhat of a loner. She took more than 120,000 photos over a period of thirty years and only showed this consequential body of work to a mere handful of people during her lifetime.

Vivian Maier earned her living as a governess, but all her free time and every day off was spent walking through the streets of New York, then later Chicago, with a camera slung around her neck (first of all box or folding cameras, later a Leica) taking photos. The children she looked after describe her as a cultivated and open-minded woman, generous but not very warm. Her images on the other hand bear witness to her curiosity for everyday life and the attention she paid to those passers – by who caught her eye: facial features, bearing, outfits and fashion accessories for the well-to-do and the telltale signs of poverty for those who were less fortunate.

While some photos are obviously furtively taken snapshots, others bear witness to a real encounter between the photographer and her models, who are photographed face-on and from close up. Her photos of homeless people and people living on the fringe of society demonstrate the depth of her empathy as she painted a somewhat disturbing portrait of an America whose economic boom was leaving many by the wayside.

Vivian Maier remained totally unknown until her death in April 2009. She had been taken in by the Gensburgs, for whom she had worked for almost seventeen years, and many of her possessions as well as her entire photographic output had been placed in storage. It was seized and sold in 2007 to settle unpaid bills.

Her biography has now been reconstructed, at least in part, thanks to a wealth of research and interviews carried out by John Maloof and Jeffrey Goldstein after the death of Vivian Maier. Jeffrey Goldstein is another collector who purchased a large part of her work. According to official documents, Vivian Maier was of Austro-Hungarian and French origin and her various trips to Europe, in particular to France (in the Alpine valley of Champsaur where she spent part of her childhood) have been clearly identified and documented. However, the circumstances that led her to take an interest in photography and her life as an artist remain veiled in mystery.

Photography seemed to be much more than a passion: her photographic activity was the result of a deeply felt need, almost an obsession. Each time she changed employers and had to move house, all her boxes and boxes of films (that she hadn’t had developed for want of money), as well as her archives comprising books and press cuttings about various stories in the news, came along too.

Vivian Maier’s body of work highlights those seemingly insignificant details that she came across during her long walks through the city streets: odd gestures, strange figures and graphic arrangements of figures in space. She also produced a series of captivating self-portraits from her reflection in mirrors and shop windows.

Press release from the Château de Tours

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Self-portrait
Nd
© Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Chicago
Nd
© Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Florida, 9 January 1957
1957
© Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Untitled
1954
© Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Chicago, IL, January, 1956
1956
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Vivian Maier (American, 1926-2009)
Chicago, August 22, 1956
1956
© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Château de Tours
25 Avenue André Malraux
37000 Tours

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Friday: 2pm – 6pm
Saturday and Sunday: 3pm – 6pm

Vivian Maier Official website

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Exhibition: ‘Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal’ at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Exhibition dates: 1st February – 1st June 2014

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Grouped Towers, Chicago Project
1930
Perspective
Pencil on tracing paper
19 x 28 1/4″ (48.3 x 71.8cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

A change of pace now… some exquisite drawings in this posting about the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s a pity they can’t build a skyscraper such as the beautiful Mile High in Melbourne, instead of all the non-descript towers that are going up all over the place. At least we would then have a masterpiece on our hands.

Marcus

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

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Grouped Towers, Chicago Project
1930
Plan of the five towers and shared pedestal
Pencil on tracing paper
13 3/4 x 35 3/8″ (34.9 x 89.9cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Broadacre City Project
1934-1935
Study for a plan of a highway interchange
Pencil and coloured pencil on tracing paper
22 x 35″ (55.9 x 88.9cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Installation views of the exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal at The Museum of Modern Art, New York
February 1 – June 1, 2014
© 2014 The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Photos: Thomas Griesel

Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal celebrates the recent joint acquisition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s extensive archive by MoMA and Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. Through an initial selection of drawings, films, and large-scale architectural models, the exhibition examines the tension in Wright’s thinking about the growing American city in the 1920s and 1930s, when he worked simultaneously on radical new forms for the skyscraper and on a comprehensive plan for the urbanisation of the American landscape titled “Broadacre City.” Visitors encounter the spectacular 12-foot-by-12-foot model of this plan, which merges one of the earliest schemes for a highway flyover with an expansive, agrarian domain.

Promoted and updated throughout Wright’s life, the model toured the country for several years in the 1930s, beginning with a display at Rockefeller Center. This dispersed vision is paired with Wright’s innovative structural experiments for building the vertical city. Projects, from the early San Francisco Call Building (1912), to Manhattan’s St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Towers (1927-31), to a polemical mile-high skyscraper, engage questions of urban density and seek to bring light and landscape to the tall building. Highlighting Wright’s complex relationship to the city, the material reveals Wright as a compelling theorist of both its horizontal and vertical aspects. His work, in this way, is not only of historic importance but of remarkable relevance to current debates on urban concentration.

Text from the MoMA website

Frank Lloyd Wright and his assistant Eugene Masselink installing the exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright: American Architect at The Museum of Modern Art, November 13, 1940 – January 5, 1941. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York
Photo: Soichi Sunami

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Broadacre City Project
1934-1935
Model under construction in Chandler, Arizona, 1935
Gelatin silver print on paper
4 1/4 x 6 5/8″ (10.8 x 16.8cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)
Photo: Roy E. Peterson

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Broadacre City Project
1934-1935
Taliesin fellows working on the model. Chandler, Arizona, 1935
Gelatin silver print on paper
9 9/16 x 7″ (24.3 x 17.8cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
Broadacre City Project
1934-1935
Model in four sections
painted wood, cardboard, and paper
152 x 152″ (386.1 x 386.1cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
H. C. Price Company Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma
1952-1956
Apprentices working on the model in the Taliesin drafting room. Spring Green, Wisconsin, c. 1952
Gelatin silver print on paper
7 3/4 x 9 1/2″ (19.7 x 24.1cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

The Museum of Modern Art presents Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal, which celebrates the recent joint acquisition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s extensive archive by MoMA and Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, on view from February 1 to June 1, 2014. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867- 1959) – perhaps the most influential American architect of the 20th century – was deeply ambivalent about cities. For decades, Wright was seen as the prophet of America’s post–World War II suburban sprawl, yet the dispersed cities that he envisaged were also carefully planned – quite distinct from the disorganised landscapes that often developed instead. Paradoxically, Wright was also a lifelong prophet of the race for height that has played out around the world. Through an initial selection of drawings, films, and large-scale architectural models, the exhibition examines the tension in Wright’s thinking about the growing American city from the 1920s to the 1950s, when he worked simultaneously on radical new forms for the skyscraper and on a comprehensive plan for the urbanisation of the American landscape titled “Broadacre City.” The exhibition is organised by Barry Bergdoll, Acting Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, MoMA, and Carole Ann Fabian, Director, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, with Janet Parks, Curator of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, and Phoebe Springstubb, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA.

On view is Wright’s 1934-35 manifesto project, for what he called “Broadacre City,” which embodied his quest for a city of private houses set in nature and spread across the countryside. He believed that advances in technology had rendered obsolete the dense cities created by industry and immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Distributed along a rectilinear grid, these one-acre homesteads were to be combined with small-scale manufacturing, community centers, and local farming, and interspersed with parklands to form a carpet-like pattern of urbanisation. Visitors encounter the spectacular 12-foot-by-12-foot model of this plan, which merges one of the earliest schemes for a highway flyover with an expansive, agrarian domain. Promoted and updated throughout Wright’s life, the model toured the country for several years in the 1930s, beginning with a display at New York City’s Rockefeller Center. It is juxtaposed with the monumental models and drawings produced of his skyscraper visions: the six-foot tall model of his 1913 San Francisco Call Building; the model of his only built residential tower, the Price Tower, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma of 1952-56; and the eight-foot drawings of the Mile High tower project.

This dispersed vision is paired with Wright’s innovative structural experiments for building the vertical city, which engaged questions of urban density and sought to bring light and landscape settings to tall buildings. His ambitions grew from a 24-story design for the offices of the San Francisco Call newspaper (1913) to the 548-story, mile-high tower he envisioned in Chicago (1956) – a building large enough to house the entire population of Broadacre City. Wright’s proposal for the San Francisco Call Building celebrates verticality: repeated piers emphasise the height, drawing the eye up to a startlingly cantilevered cornice pierced with slots that frame the sky and allow daylight to wash the facades for dramatic effect. His design for the National Life Insurance Company Building (1924-1925) features a tower clad entirely in glass, setting aside the load-bearing frame of the Call Building to experiment with the curtain wall and other new building technologies. The project reveals Wright as a key participant in international debates on the possibility of cladding a tall building with a transparent glass facade, rather than cladding it in ornamental masonry for decorative effect.

An unregulated building boom in the 1920s in New York and Chicago resulted in an unprecedented urban density that Wright described as “congestion.” In response, he devised the Skyscraper Regulation – a set of design rules governing the lateral and vertical growth of American cities. By regulating the location and height of tall buildings, Wright sought to optimise light and views and to minimise the effects of closely spaced tall buildings that were turning urban streets into shadowy canyons. Wright’s Skyscraper Regulation was his last attempt to address the inherited city. He would turn instead to devising a set of regulations for an entirely new and dispersed urban fabric (Broadacre City), in which the unit of the city block was exchanged for the farmed acre.

In 1927, Wright’s design for the financially troubled Church of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery dramatically transformed the building by having the floors project outward from a single central core plunged deep into the ground. The concrete floors tapered toward the periphery, which he compared to the structural concept of the “taproot” of a tree. This “taproot” structure was finally tested in built form in the S.C. Johnson & Son Research Laboratory Tower (1943-1950) in Racine, Wisconsin. In 1956, Wright unveiled a 26-foot-tall rendering of a gleaming, vertiginously tapered skyscraper – which he said would house 100,000 employees of the state of Illinois. The mile-high tower adopts the “taproot” structure he had articulated 30 years before, in which a skyscraper’s vertical ascent is stabilised by a foundation plunged deep into the ground. Both a polemic and a rationalised proposal for the future of tall buildings, the Mile High marks the definitive return of Wright’s tower to the city. The Mile High embodies Wright’s paradoxical attitude toward the American city: meant to condense the experience of urban life and work within a single telescoping form, freeing the ground for the realisation of Broadacre, holding in tension two idealized images of the city – its extraordinary vertical reach and its extreme horizontal extension.

Press release from the MoMA website

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
National Life Insurance Company Building, Chicago Project
1924-1925
Axonometric view
Coloured pencil on tracing paper
40 x 24″ (101.6 x 61cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
S.C. Johnson & Son Inc. Research Laboratory Tower, Racine, Wisconsin
1943-50
Section
Pencil, coloured pencil, and ink on tracing paper
35 1/8 x 20″ (89.2 x 50.8cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Towers, New York Project
1927-1931
Aerial perspective
Pencil and coloured pencil on tracing paper
23 3/4 x 15″ (60.3 x 38.1cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Jeffrey P. Klein Purchase Fund, Barbara Pine Purchase Fund, and Frederieke Taylor Purchase Fund

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Tower, New York Project
1927-1931
Perspective, 1928
Pencil and coloured pencil on tracing paper
28 1/4 x 10 1/8″ (71.8 x 25.7cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Tower, New York Project
1927-1931
Section and perspective cutaway of a duplex apartment with balcony and living-room floor plans, 1929
Ink, pencil, and coloured pencil on linen window shade
47 x 35″ (119.4 x 88.9cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
The San Francisco Call Building Project
1913
Preliminary perspective
Pencil, coloured pencil, and cut-and-pasted tracing paper on paper
47 3/4 x 23 7/8″ (121.3 x 60.6cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959)
The Mile High Illinois, Chicago Project
1956
Perspective with Wright’s Golden Beacon Apartment Building project (1956-1957)
Pencil, coloured pencil, ink, and gold ink on tracing paper
105 x 30″ (266.7 x 76.2cm)
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019
Phone: (212) 708-9400

Opening hours:
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Open seven days a week

MoMA website

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Exhibition: ‘From the Village to Vogue: The Modernist Jewelry of Art Smith’ at the Cincinnati Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 22nd February – 18th May 2014

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
“Modern Cuff” Bracelet
designed c. 1948
Silver
1 5/8 x 2 1/2 x 4 in. (4.1 x 6.4 x 10.2cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Very much of their time, these beautiful, understated pieces of anamorphic jewellery are exquisitely designed objets d’art.

Marcus

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

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
“Lava” Bracelet
designed c. 1946
Silver
2 1/2 x 2 5/8 x 5 3/4 in. (6.4 x 6.7 x 14.6cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
Autumn Leaves Brooch
1974
Gold, jade
1/2 x 3 x 1 3/4 in. (1.3 x 7.6 x 4.4cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
Untitled
1948-1979
Wood, paint, copper
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

It will be a feast for the eyes of those who appreciate jewellery this Spring in the Queen City. The spirit of craft and its revival will shine through in large scale, highly sculpted pieces of jewellery created by Art Smith and his contemporaries in From the Village to Vogue: The Modernist Jewelry of Art Smith, February 22, 2014 through May 18, 2014.

This exhibition features twenty-four pieces of silver and gold jewellery created by African American artist Art Smith, as well as more than forty pieces by his contemporaries, including Sam Kramer, Margaret De Patta, and Harry Bertoia. Three pieces of jewellery by Alexander Calder, who influenced many of these artists/jewellers, will also be featured in this exhibition. This exhibition was organised by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Cincinnati Art Museum is the first to host this exhibition. It will then continue to the Dallas Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.

Inspired by surrealism, biomorphism and primitivism, Art Smith (1917-1982) was one of the leading modernist jewellers of the mid-twentieth century. Early in his career, Smith met Talley Beatty, a young black dancer and choreographer, who introduced him to the world of dance, in particular the salon of Frank and Dorcas Neal. It was there that he met several prominent black artists, including writer James Baldwin, musician and composer Billy Strayhorn, singers Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, actor Brock Peters, and painter Charles Sebree. Smith began to create pieces for dance companies, who in turn, encouraged him to design on a grander scale. This experience is evident in the scale of his mature work.

In 1946, Smith opened his own studio in Greenwich Village and started selling his jewellery. He soon caught the attention of buyers in Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago. In the early 1950s, Smith received pictorial coverage in both Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue and was mentioned in The New Yorker shoppers guide, “On the Avenue”. Smith soon established business relationships with Bloomingdales, Milton Heffling in Manhattan, James Boutique in Houston, L’Unique in Minneapolis and Black Tulip in Dallas. While his earlier work was executed primarily in copper and brass, because it was less expensive, growing recognition increased sales and special commissions for custom designs. This allowed him to begin producing more work in silver. He received a prestigious commission from the Peekskill, New York chapter of the NAACP, for example, to design a brooch for Eleanor Roosevelt. He was even commissioned to design a pair of cufflinks for Duke Ellington, whose music he often listened to while working.

Included in the exhibition are major works by Smith including his famous Patina Necklace (c. 1959). Worked in silver, it is an example both of the large scale of his jewellery and of his use of asymmetry. Alexander Calder’s influence is also clear in this piece. From the curved structure that wraps the neck, two pierced ellipses dangle over the breastbone, giving the necklace a kinetic energy that enlivens the piece. With a sculptor’s sensitivity, Smith emphasised negative space in his designs and viewed the human body as an armature for his creations. He considered his jewellery incomplete until it rested on the human structure.

According to Cincinnati Art Museum interim Chief Curator Cynthia Amnéus, “Working in the heart of Greenwich Village, Smith was influenced by jazz musicians like Charlie Parker, visual artists like Robert Motherwell, and the poetry readings of Beat Generation writers like Alan Ginsberg. Smith’s work, like that of his contemporaries, appealed to an artistic and intellectual clientele. These artisans were not concerned with making pretty jewellery. They created works of art that were meant to be worn on the body.”

Press release from the Cincinnati Art Museum website

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
Linked Oval Necklace
designed by 1974
Silver, amethyst quartz
11 x 10 1/2 x 1/2 in. (27.9 x 26.7 x 1.3cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
Triangle Necklace
c. 1969
Silver, turquoise, lapis lazuli, rhodochrosite
16 1/8 x 5 1/8 x 1/2 in. (41.0 x 13.0 x 1.3cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
Ellington Necklace
c. 1962
Silver, turquoise, amethyst, prase, rhodonite
16 7/8 x 9 7/8 x 3/4 in. (42.9 x 25.1 x 1.9cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
New Orleans Necklace
c. 1962
Silver, three semiprecious stones: Labradorite (?)
8 5/8 x 5 7/8 x 3/4 in. (21.9 x 14.9 x 1.9cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Art Smith (American, 1917-1982)
“Bauble” Necklace
c. 1953
Silver, colourless quartz
9 1/8 x 4 7/8 x 1/2 in. (23.2 x 12.4 x 1.3cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell

Peter Basch (American, 1921-2004)
Model Wearing Art Smith’s “Modern Cuff” Bracelet
c. 1948
Black-and-white photograph
13 3/4 x 103/4 in. (34.9 x 27.3cm)
Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum

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953 Eden Park Drive
Cincinnati, OH 45202
Phone: 513-639-2872

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The Art Museum is closed on Mondays

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Exhibitions: ‘New Women’ and ‘The Chanel Legend’ at Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

The Chanel Legend exhibition dates: 28th February – 18th May 2014
New Women exhibition dates: 28th February – 27th July 2014

Yva (German, 1900-1944)
Silk stockings
Nd
Silver gelatin print
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Yva (26 January 1900 – 31 December 1944) was the professional pseudonym of Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon who was a German Jewish photographer renowned for her dreamlike, multiple exposed images. She became a leading photographer in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. When the Nazi Party came to power, she was forced into working as a radiographer. She was deported by the Gestapo in 1942 and murdered, probably in the Majdanek concentration camp during World War II.

Do you feel like a new woman?

Do you feel like a god?

You, in the oft mentioned (ten times in the accompanying texts) LBD (Little Black Dress) or Chanel Suit (ten times as well)

It’s like the ten commandments.

And ~ on we go… say after me,

“Sashay! Shantay!”

PS some of the photos ain’t half bad tho!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

‘Sleeping with the Enemy, Coco Chanel and the Secret War’ written by Hal Vaughan further solidifies the consistencies of the French intelligence documents released by describing Coco as a “vicious anti-Semite” who praised Hitler.

World War II, specifically the Nazi seizure of all Jewish-owned property and business enterprises, provided Chanel with the opportunity to gain the full monetary fortune generated by Parfums Chanel and its most profitable product, Chanel No. 5. The directors of Parfums Chanel, the Wertheimers, were Jewish. Chanel used her position as an “Aryan” to petition German officials to legalise her claim to sole ownership.

“On 5 May 1941, she wrote to the government administrator charged with ruling on the disposition of Jewish financial assets. Her grounds for proprietary ownership were based on the claim that Parfums Chanel “is still the property of Jews” and had been legally “abandoned” by the owners”. …

Chanel was not aware that the Wertheimers, anticipating the forthcoming Nazi mandates against Jews had, in May 1940, legally turned control of Parfums Chanel over to Félix Amiot, a Christian French businessman and industrialist. At war’s end, Amiot returned “Parfums Chanel” to the hands of the Wertheimers.

During the period directly following the end of World War II, the business world watched with interest and some apprehension the ongoing legal wrestle for control of Parfums Chanel. Interested parties in the proceedings were cognisant that Chanel’s Nazi affiliations during wartime, if made public knowledge, would seriously threaten the reputation and status of the Chanel brand. Forbes magazine summarised the dilemma faced by the Wertheimers: [it is Pierre Wertheimer’s worry] how “a legal fight might illuminate Chanel’s wartime activities and wreck her image – and his business.”

Text from the Wikipedia website

Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Self-Portrait with silver ball
1931
Silver gelatin print
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg

Aenne Biermann (March 8, 1898 – January 14, 1933), born Anna Sibilla Sternfeld, was a German photographer of Ashkenazi origin. She was one of the major proponents of New Objectivity, a significant art movement that developed in Germany in the 1920s.

Major exhibitions of her work include the Munich Kunstkabinett, the Deutscher Werkbund and the exhibition of Folkwang Museum in 1929. Other important exhibitions include the exhibition entitled Das Lichtbild held in Munich in 1930 and the 1931 exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts (French: Palais des Beaux Arts) in Brussels.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Horst P. Horst (German-American, 1906-1999)
Coco Chanel
1937
Silver gelatin print
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann (August 14, 1906 – November 18, 1999), who chose to be known as Horst P. Horst, was a German-American fashion photographer. …

Horst is best known for his photographs of women and fashion, but is also recognised for his photographs of interior architecture, still lifes, especially ones including plants, and environmental portraits. One of the great iconic photos of the Twentieth-Century is “The Mainbocher Corset” with its erotically charged mystery, captured by Horst in Vogue‘s Paris studio in 1939. Designers like Donna Karan continue to use the timeless beauty of “The Mainbocher Corset” as an inspiration for their outerwear collections today. His work frequently reflects his interest in surrealism and his regard of the ancient Greek ideal of physical beauty.

His method of work typically entailed careful preparation for the shoot, with the lighting and studio props (of which he used many) arranged in advance. His instructions to models are remembered as being brief and to the point. His published work uses lighting to pick out the subject; he frequently used four spotlights, often one of them pointing down from the ceiling. Only rarely do his photos include shadows falling on the background of the set. Horst rarely, if ever, used filters. While most of his work is in black & white, much of his colour photography includes largely monochromatic settings to set off a colourful fashion. Horst’s colour photography did include documentation of society interior design, well noted in the volume Horst Interiors. He photographed a number of interiors designed by Robert Denning and Vincent Fourcade of Denning & Fourcade and often visited their homes in Manhattan and Long Island. After making the photograph, Horst generally left it up to others to develop, print, crop, and edit his work.

One of his most famous portraits is of Marlene Dietrich, taken in 1942. She protested the lighting that he had selected and arranged, but he used it anyway. Dietrich liked the results and subsequently used a photo from the session in her own publicity.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Boris Lipnitzki (1887-1971) was a Ukrainian-born French photographer of the arts; ballet, fashion, cinema, visual art, writing and music.

Haim Efime Boris Lipnitzki (or Lipnitzky) was born into a Jewish family in Oster, in Chernihiv Province of the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) on 4 February 1887. He died in Paris on 6 July 1971, aged 84, and is buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery.

Lipnitzki first worked for a photographer in Odessa, then opened his own studio in Pultusk. He arrived in Paris in the early 1920s. There, he established a studio at 40 rue du Colisée, where he photographed many of the artistic personalities of the 20th century from the 1920s-1960s, as well as picturing them in their own surroundings. His friendship with fashion designer Paul Poiret, with whom he would stay to photograph in Biarritz, provided an entrée into these circles.

His subjects included Maurice Ravel, René Hubert, Albert Camus, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Otto Preminger, Igor Strawinsky, Arthur Honegger, Leonid Massine, Serge Lifar, Paul Poiret, Coco Chanel, Olga Spessivtseva, Nyota Inyoka, Tamara Karsavina, Serge Gainsbourg, Les Six, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, as well as Josephine Baker of whom in 1926 he made a famous series of nude photographs.

Text from the Wikipedia website

New Women

In the 1920s Coco Chanel chiefly influenced the type of the “new woman”. She established skirts that reached just below the knee, encouraged women to wear trousers and represents functional ladies wear. In the photographs by among others Yva, Franz Roth, Lotte Jacobi and Hein Gorny presented here, women show legs in silk stockings, wear cropped hair, drive motorbikes or automobiles and play tennis or go into baths. In this period women begin to take charge of their lives. Being a photographer offered the opportunity to express this new notion of the self in images and in life. The special display of the Photography Department coincides with the exhibition The Chanel Legend.

The Chanel Legend

Coco Chanel (1883-1971) is one of the most eminent couturières of the twentieth century. She already appears as an advocate of simple, comfortable clothes in the years just after 1910, thus helping to pave the way for a style which has retained its major importance in the fashion world till today. Such outstanding fashion classics as the “little black dress”, the Chanel Suit and the Chanel handbag are inseparably linked with her person. Since her start-up in 1913, Chanel has built up an international and, till the present day, astoundingly successful fashion empire. It is not until 1983, in the shape of Karl Lagerfeld, that a personality with anything like her charisma and influence becomes her successor. Coco – her real name was Gabrielle – Chanel launched her perfume Chanel N° 5, whose overwhelming commercial success guaranteed her a financial independence which was to last all her life, at the beginning of the 1920s. She combined fashion jewellery and genuine gemstones with surefooted confidence and had herself portraited by celebrity photographers such as Man Ray or Horst P. Horst.

The Chanel Legend investigates why it is that the person of Coco Chanel and the brand she established have attracted such huge attention up to and including the present. It will turn the spotlight both on the fashion designer’s biography and the image which she created for herself, as well as the brilliant achievement of Karl Lagerfeld (b. 1933) in combining this legacy with the fluctuating currents of contemporary taste since 1983. The exhibition shows a total of more than 200 objects from eminent collections, including women’s suits, accessoires, jewellery, advertising graphic, historical photographs and over 75 fashion magazines spanning a period from 1920 to1971. Besides more than 54 original garments, among them 38 created by Coco Chanel, and some 50 jewellery creations, over 35 adaptions of the Chanel classics can be seen for the first time, which in their own individual way give us a new appreciation of the “Chanel Legend”.

The exhibition approaches the “Chanel Legend” in three chapters. The first documents, with 38 original garments, accessoires and more than 50 items of fashion jewellery from the period between 1925 and 1971 the fashion designer’s oeuvre. Designs for evening and day wear and the perfume Chanel N° 5, of which an original flacon is on show, belong to Chanel’s pre-Second World War creative phase. After her return to Paris in 1954, Chanel continued to lead her firm up to her death in 1971. The exhibition shows, among other items from this period, some 10 garments which Chanel designed for the actress and singer Marlene Dietrich, including day wear and garments for representative occasions. On top of this, a large quantity of pieces of fashion jewellery can be seen, supplemented by original photographs.

The second chapter throws light on the Chanel classics, which have retained their fascination till today. Thus historical original examples of the Chanel Suit are juxtaposed with some 20 different adaptations of it, including models from other fashion houses, unknown ateliers and garment manufacturers. The procession of “lookalikes” and “distant cousins” by no means comes to an end with Chanel’s lifetime, but integrates aspects of contemporary fashion. A selection of the endless variations on the theme of the “little black dress” from the 1920s till the present will also be on show, some of them by designers such as Yves Saint Laurent, Max Heyman and Issey Miyake or Nina Ricci. They should by no means be seen as just copies of Chanel models. The short black dress was in keeping with the modern, dynamic lifestyle of the 1920s. Later the “little black dress” is an indispensable requisite in every woman’s wardrobe and, in the Fifties and Sixties, the epitome of Parisian chic.

In the third section, the focus is on Karl Lagerfeld’s creations for the House of Chanel. He succeeded in modernising the brand without sacrificing the features which were typical for it. The exhibition shows in particular items which quote the Chanel classics, or pay homage to his revered predecessor in some of their details. This selection, too, is complemented by fashion jewellery. The development comes full circle here, since Lagerfeld’s present winter collection for 2013-14 playfully quotes references to Coco Chanel’s legendary initial phase in the 1920s. More than 100 historical fashion magazines spanning a period from 1920 to 1971 can also be seen in the exhibition, including an issue of the American Vogue dated 1st October 1926 in which the “little black dress” is shown. Magazines were the most important medium for the propagation and reception of Chanel’s fashion. Visitors can leaf through them on the tablet computers provided.

Text from press release from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg website

Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Portrait of Anneliese Schiesser
1929
Silver gelatin print
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg

Hein Gorny (German, 1904-1967)
Portrait of a Woman
c. 1930/1972
Silver gelatin print, Reprint ofHeinrich Riebesehl
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg

Hein Gorny (1904-1967) was a highly versatile photographer. Self-taught, he had extensive, in-depth knowledge of photographic techniques and was specialised both in photographic and darkroom processes. He photographed a broad range of subject matter, including portraits, architecture, and animals as well as images used in industrial, commercial, and illustrational contexts. In addition he created experimental photographs, primarily working with macrophotography. Advertising photography was the field in which Hein Gorny carried out numerous commissions and was most well-known. He was primarily active in Hanover and Berlin. Hein Gorny is described by Heinrich Riebesehl as a “pioneer of modern commercial photography” in a catalogue published in conjunction with the Spectrum Photogalerie’s inaugural exhibition of 1972. He was masterful in his groundbreaking ability to fuse the photographic spirit of his time with the demands of advertising photography.

“Especially in his early work, the joy of experimentation and the openness to everything new and unusual is clearly visible. His positive attitude towards life, his carefree, almost exuberant way of using the medium of photography made him – consciously or unconsciously – adopt the taste of the times.” ~ Heinrich Riebesehl

Atelier Benda/d’Ora
The actress Marlene Dietrich with beret
1927
Silver gelatin print
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Madame D’Ora
The fashion designer Coco Chanel
about 1927
Silver gelatin print
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Dora Philippine Kallmus (20 March 1881 – 28 October 1963), also known as Madame D’Ora or Madame d’Ora, was an Austrian fashion and portrait photographer.

She became interested in the photography field while assisting the son of the painter Hans Makart, and in 1905 she was the first woman to be admitted to theory courses at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (Graphic Training Institute). That same year she became a member of the Association of Austrian photographers. At that time she was also the first woman allowed to study theory at the Graphischen Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, which in 1908 granted women access to other courses in photography.

In 1907, she established her own studio with Arthur Benda in Vienna called the Atelier d’Ora or Madame D’Ora-Benda. The name was based on the pseudonym “Madame d’Ora”, which she used professionally. D’ora and Benda operated a summer studio from 1921 to 1926 in Karlsbad, Germany, and opened another gallery in Paris in 1925. She was represented by Schostal Photo Agency (Agentur Schostal) and it was her intervention that saved the agency’s owner after his arrest by the Nazis, enabling him to flee to Paris from Vienna.

Her subjects included Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Tamara de Lempicka, Alban Berg, Maurice Chevalier, Colette, and other dancers, actors, painters, and writers.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Roger Schall was a photographer during the interwar period, a contemporary of Brassaï. He excelled in photojournalism, in which he was one of the pioneers, as well as in the photographic disciplines of fashion and portraits. In the early 30s, the “revolution” Leica and Rolleiflex allowed him to fulfill his passion for images taken on the spot. Paris was his main exploration ground, where the night allowed him to capture and expose with strength and delicacy the particular shapes of a city made of diversities.

Text from the Artsper website [Online] Cited 25/03/2021

During World War II, Schall secretly documented the Nazi occupation of Paris. He also produced fashion photography for the fetish clothing company Diana Slip.

Coco Chanel

Gabrielle Chanel, who grew up in humble circumstances, opened her first Couture Salon in Paris in 1913, after she had already set up in business in 1908 as a modiste. In 1919 she moved to the Rue Cambon 31, which is still the address of the House of Chanel today. Coco Chanel’s first creative phase ended with the outbreak of war in 1939. Her fashion house stayed shut for 15 years before she dared a comeback in 1954, at the age of 70. The exhibition shows creations by Chanel from both periods. The “little black dress” becomes her trademark. Further models of day and evening wear show to what extent the fashion designer had her finger on the pulse of her time, and at the same time bear witness to the high quality of her models both in design and execution. In the 1950s and 1960s it is her women’s suits which cause a furore, first and foremost the “Chanel Suit”, which she first presented at a fashion show in 1957. Her celebrated quilted handbag, launched in February 1955 and called, simply, “2.55”, has long since attained the status of a classic and is a must in every collection of the luxury label. Her collections were always supplemented by matching fashion jewellery. Till today, Coco Chanel appears as an enigmatic and fascinating personality, and has been the theme of many films and books. Fierce controversy also surrounds her links to decision-makers of the Third Reich too, however, up to the present day.

The “little black dress” and suits by Chanel – their reception

he reception of Coco Chanel’s fashion and her style is already very widespread in her lifetime. A comparison with other contemporary couturiers reveals that Coco Chanel operated a very tolerant policy as regards the copyright for her models: The fashion designer allowed her models to be copied up to a certain point with her consent. For her, it was an acknowledgement of her eminence if women all over the world dressed in her style – an aspect whose influence on the “Chanel Legend” should not be underestimated, and which is investigated in this exhibition for the first time. In October 1926, the American Vogue magazine described a short black dress by Chanel as “The Chanel Ford – the frock that all the world will wear”. This drew a parallel between Chanel’s dress in its universality and modernity and one of the most important inventions of the time and prophesied a great future for it.

This is the birth of the “little black dress”. And although Chanel was not the first couturier to design simple black dresses for day wear it nevertheless remains inseparably linked with her name. Even the perhaps most celebrated “little black dress”, that worn by Audrey Hepburn in the film classic “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, is often wrongly attributed to Chanel. The exhibition traces the development of the fashion classic from the 1920s till today. Another model which has gone down as an icon in fashion history is the “Chanel Suit” with its boxy, collarless jacket and often contrasting braided edgings. The term “Chanel Suit” is even quoted as a reference in the Duden. The exhibition shown here also document the fact that Coco Chanel produced a whole range of women’s suits which were adapted by other fashion houses or even home dressmakers. It is mostly no longer possible today to reconstruct whether individual models were made under licence or whether they were freely interpreted or simply copied. Irrespective of this, however, it is certain that all these models also made their contribution to the “Chanel Legend”.

Text from press release from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg website

Gabrielle Chanel (French, 1883-1971)
Ensemble
1960s
Jahre Seidencloqué mit Lurex
Deutsche Kinemathek – Marlene Dietrich Collection, Berlin
© Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen, Fotografie von Christin Losta

Gabrielle Chanel (French, 1883-1971)
Tageskleid/Day Dress
1960-62
Seiden-Crêpe de Chine
Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag
© Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen, Fotografie von Christin Losta

Gabrielle Chanel (French, 1883-1971)
Costume, C. H. Kuehne & Zn
Autumn / Winter 1966/67, licensed by Chanel
Silk brocade
Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag © Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen, Fotografie von Christin Losta

Karl Lagerfeld (German, 1933-2019)
Costume, Chanel Boutique
Autumn/Winter 1989/90
Wool tweed, Wool georgette
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
© Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen, Fotografie von Christin Losta

Karl Lagerfeld (German, 1933-2019)
Costume, Chanel Boutique
Spring/Summer 1986
Cotton poplin, cotton pique
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
© Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen, Fotografie von Christin Losta

Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Steintorplatz, 20099 Hamburg

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 11am – 6pm
Wednesday and Thursday 11am – 9pm

Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg website

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Exhibition: ‘Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video’ at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Exhibition dates: 24th January – 14th May 2014

Installation view: Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, January 24-May 14, 2014
Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

A busy time with postings on the archive over the next week with a lot of exhibitions finishing on the 18th May 2014. The posting about this artist is one of the best of them. I have been wanting to show this artist on this site since it started, nearly 6 years ago. Finally, I get my chance!

I ask the question:

Who are the interesting photographers anywhere who are alive now?

That is – by looking at the ideas that are present in poetry, music, philosophy or even politics – who is there that is truly taking these ideas forward (or ideas that are as interesting). Or, who is arranging images with the elegance of a Sommer or an Atget or the dynamics of Arbus.

In other words whose acts am I hanging upon, so that I am waiting with great anticipation to see what they are going to do next?

Which living photographers would I walk over broken glass to see their work? = some

If I was being essential (and if you were walking over glass you would be), the list would be very short:

Carrie Mae Weems and Wolfgang Tillmans.

What both these image makers – for they are not photographers in the traditional sense – do, is problematise and reconfigure narration and visualisation in the conceptualisation of subject. Tillmans experiments with a sensory experiential backdrop against and within which the photographs are produced. Modes of perception and the regimes of emotion are inducted into the aesthetics of production and meaning so that, “the pictures communicate with each other in a way that is not bound to the pattern of a closed narrative or any particular line of argument.” The mobilisation and reversal of value and meaning are central strategies in Tillmans’ praxis, where realistic and abstract elements are never intentionally separated from each other, and where the physicality and space of the photographs is also acknowledged in the installation of the work.

A similar sensory experience can be observed in the work of Carrie Mae Weems, only this artist invites contemplation of issues surrounding race, gender, and class inequality – bringing to light the voices of marginalised and oppressed people and histories – through a multidimensional picture of history and humanity, intended to spur greater cultural awareness and compassion. As the press release observes, “Although her subjects are often African American, Weems wants “people of color to stand for the human multitudes” and for her art to resonate with audiences of all backgrounds… Weems often appropriates words and images, re-presenting them to viewers as biting reminders of the persistence of bigoted attitudes in the United States.”

This is the power of both artists work, the creation of open ended narratives, multidimensional pictures of history and humanity which allows the viewer to create a space beyond the art works.

Using ekphrasis – the structuring patterns of language, in Weems’ case emphasising the role of both spoken and written narrative – to vividly represent a wide range of perceptual experiences, she creates a complementary space outside of the art work in the reader’s mind. The author creates links, “designating the paths along which the reader may travel, and thus, in a much freer manner than modernist authors, structures the network of allusions, parallelisms, and juxtapositions that contribute to the sense of textual space.”1 This allows the viewer to create a language of personal associations and engages in them an autonomy of experience, one encouraged by the products, the texts and images that these authors create.

These thoughts come to mind. Some things we interpret and then remember that interpretation, but we are no longer involved in the actual act of interpretation – and there are other, probably fewer things that continue to involve us – where we never finish the first way of looking at them, we are always coming to them and not arriving. Unfortunately, I find a lot of things in the first group, and as much as theoreticians try to inspire me to re-interpret, the work they have done often only works as an adjunct to something that has settled.

The art of Weems and Tillmans resides, lives and breathes of the second category, for we can never be sure of the pattern of narrative, the form of aesthetic and thematic interaction and the specificity of the marginalised histories they examine. These histories apply to all of us.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Tolva, John. “Ut Pictura Hyperpoesis: Spatial Form, Visuality, and the Digital World,” in HYPERTEXT ’96 Proceedings of the the seventh ACM conference on Hypertext, 1996, p. 71.

Many thankx to The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Over the past thirty years, Carrie Mae Weems has yearned to insert marginalized peoples into the historical record. She does this not only to bring ignored or erased experiences to light but to provide a more multidimensional picture of humanity as a whole, a picture that ultimately will spur greater awareness and compassion. Weems believes deeply that “my responsibility as an artist is to … make art. beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.””

Carrie Mae Weems quoted in Kathryn E. Delmez. “Introduction,” from Kathryn E. Delmez (ed.,). Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video. Yale University Press 2012, p. 1.

“Weems [work] exist at the intersection of photography and race, image and text.”

John Pultz

“Belying the myth that conceptual artists disdain the old-fashioned notion of aesthetics, Weems has long been consumed and galvanized by the idea of beauty. The notion of beauty encompasses and reaches beyond aesthetics. It is not a simple concept, as often there are unspoken political implications in her use. Beauty is a powerful adjective in her hands and an important tool in her work. Her work is always about beauty and purposely so. She seduces the viewer through the very process of creating luscious prints, or beautiful images, without ever using beauty purely to seduce. But no matter what one encounters within the text or within one’s own revelations about what the texts ultimately say, the religion of beauty always undergirds Weem’s vision and informs her work.”

Thelma Golden. “Some Thoughts on Carrie Mae Weems,” in Golden, T. and Piché Jr., T. Carrie Mae Weems: Recent Work, 1992-1998. New York: George Braziller, 1998, p. 32 quoted in Deborah Willis. “Photographing between the Lines: Beauty, Politics, and the Poetic Vision of Carrie Mae Weems,” in Kathryn E. Delmez (ed.,). Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video. Yale University Press 2012, p. 33.

Installation views: Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, January 24-May 14, 2014
Photos: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, the first major New York museum retrospective devoted to this socially motivated artist. Weems has long been acclaimed as one of the most eloquent and respected interpreters of African American experiences, and she continues to be an important influence for many young artists today. Featuring more than 120 works – primarily photographs, but also texts, videos, and an audio recording – as well as a range of related educational programs, this comprehensive survey offers an opportunity to experience the full breadth of the artist’s oeuvre and gain new insight into her practice.

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video is organised by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, Tennessee. The exhibition has been curated by Kathryn Delmez, the Frist Center, where it opened in September 2012. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presentation is organised by Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, with Susan Thompson, Assistant Curator. This exhibition is supported in part by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. The Leadership Committee for Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video is also gratefully acknowledged for its support, including Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, Robert Menschel Vital Projects, and Jack Shainman Gallery, as well as Henry Buhl, Crystal R. McCrary and Raymond J. McGuire, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Toby Devan Lewis, Louise and Gerald W. Puschel, and Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins. Additional funding is provided by the William Talbott Hillman Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts.

The work of Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953, Portland, Oregon) invites contemplation of issues surrounding race, gender, and class inequality. Over the past thirty years, Weems has used her art to bring to light the ignored or erased experiences of marginalised people. Her work proposes a multidimensional picture of history and humanity, intended to spur greater cultural awareness and compassion. Although her subjects are often African American, Weems wants “people of colour to stand for the human multitudes” and for her art to resonate with audiences of all backgrounds.

Organised in a loosely chronological order throughout two of the museum’s Annex Levels, the exhibition begins on Level 2 with the series Family Pictures and Stories (1978-1984). This series, like many of Weems’s early works, explores matters relating to contemporary black identity, highlighting individuals in social contexts – including in this case her own kin. Her landmark Kitchen Table Series (1990) employs text and photography to explore the range of women’s roles within a community, pointedly situating the photographs’ subject within a domestic setting. Selections from Weems’s Sea Islands Series (1991-1992), Africa (1993), and Slave Coast (1993) demonstrate her ongoing interest in language and storytelling. These works, made during the artist’s travels to the titular locales, pair images with evocative vernacular texts or etymological investigations that trace English words to African roots. The artist’s practice emphasises the role of both spoken and written narrative, reflecting her graduate studies in folklore.

Weems often appropriates words and images, re-presenting them to viewers as biting reminders of the persistence of bigoted attitudes in the United States. Her renowned series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-1996), presented on Annex Level 4, layers new text over found historical imagery to critique and lament prejudiced attitudes toward African Americans throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A yearning to investigate the underlying causes and effects of racism, slavery, and imperialism has spurred Weems to travel widely throughout the United States, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. During extended visits to these places, depicted in series such as Dreaming in Cuba (2002), The Louisiana Project (2003), and Roaming (2006), all represented in the exhibition, she looks to the surrounding land and architecture in order to foster communion with inhabitants past and present.

Video is a natural extension of Weems’s narrative photographic practice, also providing an opportunity for the artist to include music in her work. Although she worked in film during her undergraduate years at the California Institute of the Arts, Weems’s first major endeavour in the medium came in 2003-2004 with Coming Up for Air, a work comprised of series of poetic vignettes that will be screened in the New Media Theater in the Guggenheim’s Sackler Center for Arts Education. Other video works, including Italian Dreams (2006), Afro Chic (2009), and Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment (2008) will be integrated into the exhibition near related photographs.

Press release from The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum website

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Blue Black Boy (from Colored People)
1989-90
Triptych, three toned gelatin silver prints with Prestype and frame
16 x 48 inches (40.6 x 121.9cm) overall
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchase, with funds from the Photography Committee
© Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
An Anthropological Debate (from From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried)
1995-96
Chromogenic print with etched text on glass
26 1/2 x 22 3/4 inches (67.3 x 57.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift on behalf of The Friends of Education of the Museum of Modern Art
From an original daguerreotype taken by J.T. Zealy, 1850. Peabody Museum, Harvard University.Copyright President & Fellows of Harvard College, 1977. All rights reserved.
Photo: © 2012, MoMA, NY

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Afro-Chic
2010
Digital colour video, with sound, 5 min., 30 sec.
Collection of the artist, courtesy Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
© Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Family Reunion (from Family Pictures and Stories)
1978-1984
Gelatin silver print
30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6cm)
Collection of the artist, courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
© Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled (Man and mirror) (from Kitchen Table Series)
1990
Gelatin silver print
27 1/4 x 27 1/4 inches (69.2 x 69.2 cm)
Collection of Eric and Liz Lefkofsky, Promised gift to The Art Institute of Chicago
© Carrie Mae Weems
Photo: © The Art Institute of Chicago

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled (Woman and daughter with makeup) (from Kitchen Table Series)
1990
Gelatin silver print
27 1/4 x 27 1/4 inches (69.2 x 69.2cm)
Collection of Eric and Liz Lefkofsky, Promised gift to The Art Institute of Chicago
© Carrie Mae Weems
Photo: © The Art Institute of Chicago

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
A Broad and Expansive Sky – Ancient Rome (from Roaming)
2006
Chromogenic print
73 x 61 inches (185.4 x 154.9cm)
Private collection, Portland, Oregon
© Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Listening for the Sounds of Revolution (from Dreaming in Cuba)
2002
Gelatin silver print
28 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches (72.4 x 72.4cm)
Collection of the artist, courtesy Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
© Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled (Box Spring in Tree) (from Sea Islands Series)
1991-1992
Gelatin silver print
20 x 20 inches (50.8 x 50.8cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Carrie Mae Weems and P•P•O•W, 97.97.1
© Carrie Mae Weems
Photo: Robert Gerhardt

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled (Colored People Grid)
2009-2010
11 inkjet prints and 31 coloured clay papers
Dimensions variable overall; individual components: 10 x 10 inches (25.4 x 25.4cm) each
Collection of Rodney M. Miller
© Carrie Mae Weems

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Avenue (at 89th Street)
New York

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