Exhibition: ‘The Platinum Process: Photographs from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century’ at Philadelphia Museum of Art

Exhibition dates: 27th February – 23rd May, 2010

Co-curators: Peter Barberie, The Brodsky Curator of Photographs for the Alfred Stieglitz Center, and Julia Dolan, Horace W. Goldsmith Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) 'Kelmscott Manor: Attics' 1896 from the exhibition 'The Platinum Process: Photographs from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century' at Philadelphia Museum of Art, February - May, 2010

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Kelmscott Manor: Attics
1896
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 6 1/16 x 7 7/8 inches (15.4 x 20cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Gift of the artist, 1932

Attics often serve as metaphors for the space where memories reside. Here Frederick Evans captures the warm glow, the simple, rough-hewn timbers, and the striking geometry of the attic at Kelmscott Manor, the beloved summer retreat of designer William Morris (British, 1834-1896).

Morris, the leader of the Arts and Crafts movement – which valued Britain’s craft tradition and rejected its industrial revolution – drew inspiration from the architecture and workmanship of Kelmscott, designed and constructed in the 1500s. In 1896 Morris invited Evans to photograph the home, which he felt embodied the memory of Britain’s aesthetic past.

Text from the Philadelphia Museum of Art website

Platinum prints always have such luminosity. A Sea of Steps by Fredrick H. Evans (1903, below) is a knockout. I remember some beautiful platinum prints many years ago (1989) up in Sydney at the Museum of Contemporary Art in the touring exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment that were an absolute knockout as well. Pity he didn’t print them himself but they were still superlative!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Shen Shellenberger and the Philadelphia Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the last five images in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) 'Kelmscott Manor' 1896 from the exhibition 'The Platinum Process: Photographs from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century' at Philadelphia Museum of Art, February - May, 2010

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Kelmscott Manor
1896
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 7 3/8 x 4 1/4 inches (18.7 x 10.8cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman and with the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 1968

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) 'Angers: Prefecture, Sculptured Arches of 11th-12th Century' c. 1906-1907 from the exhibition 'The Platinum Process: Photographs from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century' at Philadelphia Museum of Art, February - May, 2010

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Angers: Prefecture, Sculptured Arches of 11th-12th Century
c. 1906-1907
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 9 11/16 x 7 7/8 inches (24.6 x 20cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman and with the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 1968

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Southwell Cathedral, Chapter House Capital
1898
Platinum print
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
View across the nave to the transept at York Minster
1901
Platinum print
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Durham Cathedral: West End Nave
1912
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 9 1/2 x 4 13/16 inches (24.1 x 12.3cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1973

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Ancient crypt cellars in Provins
1910
Platinum print
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Westminster Abbey: North Transept: East Side
1911
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 9 7/16 x 6 inches (23.9 x 15.3cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Westminster Abbey: Staircase in Confessor’s Chapel
1911
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 9 1/2 x 6 1/8 inches (24.2 x 15.6cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Westminster Abbey: From the South Transept
1911
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 9 1/2 x 7 7/16 inches (24.2 x 18.9cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Westminster Abbey: East Ambulatory
1911
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 9 5/16 x 6 11/16 inches (23.7 x 17cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Westminster Abbey: 12th-Century Mosaic Floor at the Sanctuary
1911
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 7 5/16 x 8 7/8 inches (18.6 x 22.6cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969

Although Evans indicated that this mosaic floor was created in the twelfth century, the surface surrounding the High Altar of Westminster Abbey was in fact laid in 1268. King Henry III (1207-1272) commissioned the mosaic from Roman craftsmen who specialised in the opus sectile, or “cut work” technique, commonly called “Cosmati” after a well-known Italian family of mosaic artists. Materials used here include blue, red, and turquoise glass as well as yellow limestone, purple porphyry, green serpentine, and onyx. Evans’s unusual composition privileges the floor, drawing attention to the intricate and abstract design of squares, rectangles, and roundels.

Text from the Philadelphia Museum of Art website

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Westminster Abbey: East End, North Ambulatory
1911
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 9 3/8 x 7 1/2 inches (23.8 x 19.1cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Westminster Abbey: Apse from Choir
1911
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 9 7/16 x 7 1/2 inches (23.9 x 19.1cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969

Country Life magazine commissioned Evans to photograph the interior of London’s Westminster Abbey in 1911, while the church was closed to worshipers in preparation for the coronation of King George V (1865-1936) and Queen Mary (1867-1953). Although the construction and removal of temporary facilities relating to the coronation regularly disrupted Evans’s work, the more than fifty photographs in the resulting portfolio reveal only the timeless beauty and grandeur of the Gothic structure that has hosted thirty-eight royal coronations since the year 1066.

Text from the Philadelphia Museum of Art website

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Westminster Abbey: Henry VII Chapel, Detail of Henry VII Tomb
1911
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 8 1/16 x 7 3/16 inches (20.4 x 18.2cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Westminster Abbey: Tomb of Edward III, Mary and William
1911
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 8 11/16 x 6 5/8 inches (22.1 x 16.9cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
York Minster – In Sure and Certain Hope
1903
Platinum print
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
A Sea of Steps – Stairs to Chapter House – Wells Cathedral
1903
Platinum print
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Wells Cathedral: North Transept
c. 1903
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 7 1/4 x 5 7/16 inches (18.4 x 13.8cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1973

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Ely Cathedral: Octagon into Nave Aisle
c. 1899
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 7 15/16 x 6 1/8 inches (20.2 x 15.6cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1973

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Fr: Sec: Spine of Echinus x. 40
c. 1887
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 4 3/4 x 4 5/8 inches (12 x 11.8cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1973

Unlike many beginning photographers of the nineteenth century who experimented with straightforward portrait or landscape compositions, Evans’s earliest trials with photography involved minute organic matter and required the use of a microscope. His complicated “photo-microgram” process allowed him to capture the intricate structures of objects including a water beetle’s eye, tiny sea shells, and this section of a sea urchin’s spine. Although classified as scientific rather than artistic imagery by the Photographic Society of Great Britain, this photo-microgram demonstrates Evans’s ability to delineate the magnificence of organic patterns and presage his photographs that depict the structural beauty of cathedrals.

Text from the Philadelphia Museum of Art website

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Berberis: Plant Study
c. 1908
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 9 3/8 x 7 1/16 inches (23.8 x 17.9cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman and with the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 1968

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Redlands Woods
c. 1908
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 6 x 4 3/16 inches (15.3 x 10.6cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman and with the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 1968

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
An English Glacier: Near Summit of Scafell
c. 1905
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 9 3/4 x 6 1/2 inches (24.8 x 16.5cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman and with the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 1968

Exhibition Highlights the Exceptional Beauty of the Platinum Process in Photography

A cornerstone of photographic practice during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the platinum print is revered by photographers and viewers alike as one of the most beautiful forms of photography, with subtle and lustrous shades that range from the deepest blacks to the most delicate whites. The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present an exhibition of more than 50 works from the late 19th century to the present, showcasing outstanding prints largely drawn from the Museum’s collection of photographs. The Platinum Process: Photographs from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century, on view February 27 – May 23 in the Julien Levy Gallery at the Museum’s Perelman Building, will include images by early masters of the process including Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) and Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946), as well as works by skilled contemporary practitioners such as Lois Conner (American, born 1951) and Andrea Modica (American, born 1960), who continue to engage in this historic and painstaking process in an era noted for electronic imaging.

“The exhibition offers an opportunity to share this exceptionally beautiful form of photography with our visitors, some of whom may be seeing it for the first time,” Curator of Photographs Peter Barberie said, adding “the Museum is fortunate to have a particularly strong and varied collection of work by some of the truly great practitioners of this process.”

Unlike standard silver printing, in which particles are suspended in gelatin, platinum is brushed directly onto the paper, allowing artists to create a matte image with an exceptionally wide tonal range. Introduced in 1873, the process was enthusiastically embraced by the group of photographers known as the Pictorialists, who believed that fine art photography should emulate the aesthetic values of painting. The group included Evans, whose beautifully rendered images of Britain’s Westminster Abbey, York Minster Abbey and Ely Cathedral are included in the exhibition, and Stieglitz (American, 1876-1946), who is represented in the show by a portrait of his wife, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986), as well as a landscape that foreshadows his Equivalents series.

While encompassing works spanning many dates and styles, The Platinum Process highlights one of the Museum’s treasures, the 1915 masterpiece “Wall Street” by Paul Strand (1890-1976, see above), whose work was at the forefront of the modernist aesthetic developing in New York during the early 20th century. Strand used the subtlety of the platinum print in this work to emphasise abstract patterns in the long shadows cast by figures that walk before a succession of monumental windows.

Reserves of platinum were appropriated for military use during World War I, and its high cost led manufacturers to cease production of commercial platinum paper by the 1930s. As photographers became more engaged in social concerns, documentation and realism, the process fell into disuse. It was not until the early 1960s when Irving Penn, then a successful photographer for Vogue magazine, began to experiment with the long-forgotten technique and took the first steps toward its revival. A meticulous craftsman, Penn was delighted by the luminous prints and lavish tonal range he could achieve using platinum and began to make new photographs with this process in the 1970s. Penn and many of the other contemporary artists on view including Thomas Shillea and Jennette Williams followed Strand’s example, using platinum not for idealised pictures, but to capture nuances of modern experience.

Press release from The Philadelphia Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 25/07/2019. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Robert S. Redfield (American, 1849-1923)
Heloise Redfield at Mount Washington
1889
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 6 5/16 x 8 1/4 inches (16 x 21cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Gift of Alfred G. Redfield, 1985

F. Holland Day (American, 1864-1933)
Untitled
1905
Platinum prints mounted to paper
Image and sheet (overall): 10 1/16 x 7 1/2 inches (25.6 x 19.1cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
From the Collection of Dorothy Norman, 1970

Katharine Steward Stanbery (American, 1870-1928)
Untitled (Two Girls Playing Jacks)
1907
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 8 15/16 x 4 11/16 inches (22.7 x 11.9cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
125th Anniversary Acquisition. Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, the Alice Newton Osborn Fund, and with funds contributed by The Judith Rothschild Foundation, 2002

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
City Hall Park, New York
1915
Platinum print
Sheet: 13 7/8 x 7 3/4 inches (35.2 x 19.7cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Gift of the artist, 1972

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Washington Heights, New York
1915 (negative); 1915 (print)
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 9 3/8 x 11 7/8 inches (23.8 x 30.2cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Paul Strand Retrospective Collection, 1915-1975, gift of the estate of Paul Strand, 1980

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) 'Wall Street, New York' 1915

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Wall Street
1915 (negative); 1915 (print)
Platinum print
Image: 9 3/4 x 12 11/16 inches (24.8 x 32.2cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Paul Strand Retrospective Collection, 1915-1975, gift of the estate of Paul Strand, 1980

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Man in a Derby, New York
1916
Platinum print
Image: 12 13/16 x 9 15/16 inches (32.5 x 25.2cm)
Mat: 22 11/16 x 19 7/16 inches (57.6 x 49.4cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Paul Strand Retrospective Collection, 1915-1975, gift of the estate of Paul Strand, 1980

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
The Italian, New York
1916 (negative); 1916 (print)
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 13 x 9 5/16 inches (33 x 23.7cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Paul Strand Retrospective Collection, 1915-1975, gift of the estate of Paul Strand, 1980

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Rebecca, New York
1922 (negative); 1922 (print)
Palladium print
Image: 9 3/4 x 7 13/16 inches (24.8 x 19.8cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Paul Strand Collection, purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Hauslohner (by exchange), 1985

Alvin Langdon Coburn (British, born United States, 1882-1966)
George Seeley
c. 1902-1903
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 11 x 8 9/16 inches (27.9 x 21.7cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, the Alice Newton Osborn Fund, and with funds contributed by The Judith Rothschild Foundation in honour of the 125th Anniversary of the Museum, 2002

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934)
The Two Families
c. 1910
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 5 3/8 x 11 5/16 inches (13.6 x 28.8cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Gift of William Innes Homer, 1986

Käsebier’s family members and close friends served as her earliest photographic subjects, and familial themes remained paramount in the images she produced throughout her career. This photograph of Käsebier’s two daughters and their families, taken in Woburn, Massachusetts, is a dynamic portrait of a multigenerational gathering. Curiously, Käsebier manipulated this print to emphasise the act of photography. In the original scene, the young boy and seated woman at right look downward at a wire-mesh food cover resting on a plate. These objects have been removed from this print, replaced by the considerably more fascinating camera.

Text from the Philadelphia Museum of Art website

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934)
Mrs. F. H. Evans
c. 1900
Platinum print
Image and sheet: 7 1/2 x 5 1/4 inches (19.1 x 13.4cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1973

In 1889, at the age of thirty-seven, Käsebier enrolled at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute to study portrait painting. Although the art school did not teach photography, Käsebier began using a camera at home to document her growing children, eventually favoring photography over other mediums. She established a commercial portrait studio in New York City in 1897, working to “bring out in each photograph the essential personality that is variously called temperament, soul, humanity.” This portrait features Ada Emily Longhurst, wife of photographer Frederick H. Evans, whom Käsebier befriended while on a trip to England in 1901.

Text from the Philadelphia Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan’ at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Exhibition dates: 12th February – 9th May, 2010

Curator: Toby Jurovics, curator of photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Timothy H. O'Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) 'Sand Dunes, Carson Desert, Nevada' 1867 from the exhibition 'Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan' at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., February - May, 2010

Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882)
Sand Dunes, Carson Desert, Nevada
1867
Albumen print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

The photograph shows O’Sullivan’s photographic wagon in which he developed his glass plates.

O’Sullivan died at the age of forty two but what photographs he left us!
The human scales the sublime, literally; figures in the descriptive landscape.
The last photograph is, if you will forgive the colloquialism, a doozy.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

“If the world is unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest it is not surprising things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. Sublime places acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming, but it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time with them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.”

Alain de Botton. The Art of Travel. London: Penguin, 2002, pp. 178-179.

Many thankx to Laura Baptiste and the Smithsonian American Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Timothy H. O'Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) 'Lake in Conejos Cañon, Colorado' 1874 from the exhibition 'Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan' at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., February - May, 2010

Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882)
Lake in Conejos Cañon, Colorado
1874
Albumen print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Timothy H. O'Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) 'Black Cañon, Colorado River, From Camp 8, Looking Above' 1871 from the exhibition 'Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan' at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., February - May, 2010

Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882)
Black Cañon, Colorado River, From Camp 8, Looking Above
1871
Albumen print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882)
Buttes near Green River City, Wyoming
1872
Albumen print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882)
Cañon de Chelle, Walls of the Grand Canon about 1200 feet in height
1873
Albumen print
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment

Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan is the first major exhibition devoted to this remarkable photographer in three decades. The exhibition is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., from Feb. 12 through May 9. The museum is the only venue for the exhibition

“Framing the West” – a collaboration between the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Library of Congress – offers a critical reevaluation of O’Sullivan’s images and the conditions under which they were made, as well as an examination of their continued importance in the photographic canon. It features more than 120 photographs and stereo cards by O’Sullivan, including a notable group of King Survey photographs from the Library of Congress that have rarely been on public display since 1876. The installation also includes images and observations by six contemporary landscape photographers that comment on the continuing influence of O’Sullivan’s photographs. Toby Jurovics, curator of photography, is the exhibition curator.

“Timothy H. O’Sullivan is widely recognised as an influential figure in the development of photography in America, so I am delighted that we have partnered with our colleagues at the Library of Congress to present this new assessment of his work and to expose a new generation to his forceful images,” said Elizabeth Broun, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

“In the years following the Civil War, the West was fertile ground for American photographers, but Timothy H. O’Sullivan has always stood apart in his powerful and direct engagement with the landscape,” said Jurovics. “Almost a century and a half after their making, his photographs still speak with an unparalleled presence and immediacy.”

O’Sullivan was part of a group of critically acclaimed 19th-century photographers – including A.J. Russell, J.K. Hillers and William Bell – who went west in the 1860s and 1870s. O’Sullivan was a photographer for two of the most ambitious geographical surveys of the 19th century. He accompanied geologist Clarence King on the Geologic and Geographic Survey of the Fortieth Parallel and Lt. George M. Wheeler on the Geographical and Geological Surveys West of the 100th Meridian. During his seven seasons (1867-1874) traversing the mountain and desert regions of the Western United States, he created one of the most influential visual accounts of the American interior.

His assignments with the King and Wheeler surveys gave O’Sullivan the freedom to record the Western landscape with a visual and emotional complexity that was without precedent. His photographs illustrated geologic theories and provided information useful to those settling in the West, but they also were a personal record of his encounter with a landscape that was challenging and inspiring.

Of all his colleagues, O’Sullivan has maintained the strongest influence on contemporary practice. The formal directness and lack of picturesque elements in his work appealed to a later generation of photographers who, beginning in the 1970s, turned away from a romanticised view of nature to once again embrace a clear, unsentimental approach to the landscape. Observations about his images by Thomas Joshua Cooper, Eric Paddock, Edward Ranney, Mark Ruwedel, Martin Stupich and Terry Toedtemeier appear in the exhibition and the catalog.

O’Sullivan (1840-1882) was born in Ireland. He emigrated to the United States with his family at the age of two, eventually settling in Staten Island, N.Y. Biographical details about O’Sullivan are spare, yet he is thought to have had his earliest photographic training in the New York studio of portrait photographer Mathew Brady. He is believed to have accompanied Alexander Gardner to Washington, D.C., to assist in opening a branch of the Brady studio in 1858, and when Gardner opened his own studio in Washington in 1863, O’Sullivan followed. O’Sullivan first gained recognition for images made during the Civil War, particularly those from the Battle of Gettysburg, and 41 of his images were published in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War. O’Sullivan’s experience photographing in the field helped earn him the position as photographer for King’s survey. After his survey work, he held brief assignments in Washington with the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Treasury. O’Sullivan died of tuberculosis on Staten Island at the age of 42.

Press release from the Smithsonian American Art Museum website [Online] Cited 25/04/2010. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882)
Green River Cañon, Colorado
1872
Albumen print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882)
Horse Shoe Cañon, Green River, Wyoming
1872
Albumen print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882)
Summit of Wahsatch Range, Utah (Lone Peak)
1869
Albumen print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882)
Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho, View Across Top of Falls
1874
Albumen print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882)
The Pyramid & Domes, Pyramid Lake, Nevada
1867
Albumen print
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

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Review: ‘Autumn Masterpieces: Highlights from the Permanent Collection’ at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 19th March – 18th May, 2010

Curator: Mark Feary

Featuring Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk by Andrea Fraser (USA) as well as works from the collections of Hany Armanious, Liv Barrett, Polly Borland (UK), Steve Carr (NZ), Lane Cormick, Chantal Faust, Marco Fusinato, Tony Garifalakis, Matthew Griffin, Irene Hanenbergh, Christopher Hanrahan, Hotham Street Ladies, the Kingpins, Paul Knight, Andrew Liversidge, Rob McLeish, Callum Morton, Nat & Ali, Geoff Newton, Martin Parr (UK), Stuart Ringholt, David Rosetzky, Darren Sylvester, Christian Thompson, Lyndal Walker and Caroline Williams.

Autumn Masterpieces: Highlights from the Permanent Collection

Curated by Mark Feary, this is a deliciously ironic exhibition that asks the audience to question the social and political construction of the blockbuster exhibitions regularly held by large museums around Australia; to question the role of the curator in assembling such exhibitions; and to question the cultural value of permanent collections of ‘Masterpieces’.

Autumn Masterpieces displays work that is anything but permanent and undermines the process whereby museums construct frameworks for social understanding. The work, displayed in a roped off space on plinths of various heights, in cheap frames and at skew-whiff angles, seems ephemeral and transitory all the more to contradict both main tenants of the title of the exhibition: masterpiece and permanence.

Sitting on plinths that are adorned with plastic gold name plaques emblazoned with the condition of the possibility of the works existence, “From the collection of …” , the untitled works reinforce the conceptual thrust of the exhibition.

In one sense the content of the specific images seemed almost irrelevant; in another the collective dialectical argument of the images deconstructs normative interpretations of the masterpiece. ‘Instructions for the Tourist’ and ‘Rules for How to use the playground’ sit next to photographs of dejected clowns; ‘Confusion & Reversals’ sit next to ambiguous photographs of events and actions: people doing ‘normal’ things displayed though Polaroids, newspaper clippings, snapshots, photographs from albums, black and white and colour, framed and in museological glass cases.

The highlight of the exhibition for me was the guffaw-inducing DVD Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989) by American artist Andrea Fraser. Where Mark Feary found this post-cultural gem is beyond me but I am so glad he did!

I stood transfixed as the narrator / curator takes us on a virtual tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, along the way pointing out the magnificence and subliminal beauty of the objects in the museum. She stresses the decorum of the institution, it’s tradition in measured, ordered, dignified arrangements that are fine and simple while addressing a water fountain. Oh the deliciousness!

She continues with the exultation of the institution, that is to develop an appreciation of values – true / false, better / worse, right / wrong, what is good for you / what is good for society – standards that should be adopted by a discriminating public, while addressing a broom cupboard.

The piece subverts an approach “in which visitors’ individual meanings are only validated by the extent to which they concord with the conclusions intended by exhibition-makers or to which they conform to some predetermined and fixed standard truth.”1

And so it goes in an ever-so-serious, side-splitting soliloquy, critiquing the functions of art, linking the aspirations of humanity with the highest privileges of wealth and leisure. Wonderful!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Hein, George E. Learning in the Museum. London: Routledge, 1998 quoted in Sandell, Richard. “Reframing conversations,” in Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference. London and New York: Routledge, p. 179

Many thanks to Mark Feary and the CCP for allowing me to use the images in the posting. Please click on the last photographs in the posting for a larger version of the image. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition 'Autumn Masterpieces: Highlights from the Permanent Collection' at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne

Installation views of the exhibition Autumn Masterpieces: Highlights from the Permanent Collection at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Courtesy of the collection of Tony Garifalakis

Courtesy of the collection of Irene Hanenbergh

Courtesy of the collection of Hany Armanious

Andrea Fraser. 'Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk' 1989 from the exhibition 'Autumn Masterpieces: Highlights from the Permanent Collection' at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne, March - May, 2010

Andrea Fraser (American, b. 1965)
Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk
1989
DVD (colour video with sound. 29′)
Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York

Centre for Contemporary Photography

No permanent exhibition space at the moment

Centre for Contemporary Photography website

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Exhibition: ‘Desire’ at The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

Exhibition dates: 5th February – 25th April, 2010

Curator: Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, curator of American and contemporary art and director of curatorial affairs at The Blanton Museum of Art

Many thankx to the Blanton Museum of Art for allowing me to reproduce images from the exhibition in the post. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Olaf Breuning (Swiss, b. 1970) 'Brian' 2008 from the exhibition 'Desire' at The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, February - April, 2010

Olaf Breuning (Swiss, b. 1970)
Brian
2008
C-print
60 x 70 inches
Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Glenn Ligon (American, b. 1960) 'Lest We Forget' 1998 from the exhibition 'Desire' at The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, February - April, 2010

Glenn Ligon (American, b. 1960)
Lest We Forget
1998
Series including cast aluminium or bronze plaques, colour photographs of plaques on site
Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York

Valeska Soares (Brazilian, b. 1957) 'Duet' 2008 from the exhibition 'Desire' at The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, February - April, 2010

Valeska Soares (Brazilian, b. 1957)
Duet
2008
Hand-carved white marble
Installation dimensions variable
Private Collection

Tracey Emin (English, b. 1963)
You Should Have Loved Me
2008
Warm white neon
Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York

This February, The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin investigates the notion of desire in an exhibition of the same name. Curated by Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Blanton curator of American and contemporary art and director of curatorial affairs, the exhibition features over fifty works from an international group of contemporary artists working in all media, including Glenn Ligon, Marilyn Minter, Petah Coyne, Bill Viola, Tracey Emin, Isaac Julien and many others. The accompanying illustrated catalogue will contain texts by art critics, fiction writers, poets, performing and visual artists, all written in direct response to the works of art in the exhibition.

Carlozzi states, “”Desire” is a complex human emotion and a driving force in our lives from childhood through old age. We all can recall examples of literature, film, and music that are rife with expressions of physical desire, but how do contemporary visual artists portray it, and all its attendant psychological states – anticipation, arousal, longing, regret, and so on? “Desire” assembles a really broad range of compelling works that together present a surprisingly diverse portrait of the experience.”

One provocative aspect of the exhibition is not its imagery, per se, but the manner by which many of the works translate intimate experiences into art a public expression. Marilyn Minter’s Crystal Swallow would seem to capture a private moment of visceral response, yet in such detail and exaggerated scale that it becomes a grotesque advertisement for arousal. Glenn Ligon’s series, Lest We Forget, commemorates those flickers of romantic fantasy that sometimes occur while people watching. And Tracey Emin’s You Should Have Loved Me is an accusation from a lover scorned, created with the neon light of public signage as if to broadcast raw feeling to an uncaring world.

Works by Kalup Linzy, William Villalongo, Olaf Breuning, James Drake, Petah Coyne, Gajin Fugita, Georganne Deen, Adam Pendleton, Peter Saul, Valeska Soares, Danica Phelps, Miguel Angel Rojas, Mads Lynnerup, Rochelle Feinstein, Richard Prince, Laurel Nakadate, Jesse Amado, Isabell Heimerdinger, Alejandro Cesarco, Eve Sussman, Robert Kushner, Luisa Lambri, Chris Doyle, and a dozen others, provide an engaging multi-generational exploration of desire. In addition, an informed selection of works of art from The Blanton’s print collection will add a historic counterpoint to the contemporary works on view.

Press release from The Blanton Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 17/04/2010

Will Villalongo (American, b. 1975)
The Last Days of Eden
2009
Cut velour paper
Courtesy the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York

William Villalongo (born December 14, 1975 in Hollywood, Florida) is an American artist working in painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation. Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, Villalongo is also a professor at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York.

Villalongo typically focuses in his works on the politics of historical erasure, with a particular focus on the artistic reassessment of Western, American, and African Art histories. The artist states that his intention toward these reassessments evolves in part from the West’s histories of “taking African art objects and placing them on the side of the sofa to decorate, although that is not their purpose. We are obsessed with fitting a narrative, a story.”

His works engage with the black body, examining the influences of socialisation, history, occupation, dress, and speech on it. In many of his portraits, bodies emerge from “a tumult of white negative space cut out of black velour paper,” in ways that evoke leaves, branches, feathers, or slashes.

Villalongo is also influenced by Pablo Picasso, who incorporated African masks into his primitivist works, and Aaron Douglas who he credits as inspiring him. Villalongo reexamines the power dynamics of history and representation in his own pieces. “It’s problematic and interesting, and I wanted to think about how to use it and tell a story.”

Text from the Wikipedia website

Petah Coyne (American, b. 1953)
Untitled #1103 (Daphne)
2002-2003
Mixed media
77 x 83 x 86 inches
Collection of Julie and John Thornton

Petah Coyne (born 1953) is an American sculptor and photographer. She is known for her large-scale sculptures composed of unconventional, and often organic, materials, such as clay, silk, wax, and hair.

Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) 'Becoming Light' 2005 (still)

Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024)
Becoming Light (still)
2005
Colour High-Definition video on plasma display mounted on wall
47.6 in x 28.5 in x 4 in (121 x 72.5 x 10.2cm)
Performers: John Hay, Sarah Steben
Photo: Kira Perov
Courtesy Bill Viola Studio

Marilyn Minter (American, b. 1948)
Crystal Swallow
2006
Enamel on metal
Promised gift of Jeanne and Michael Klein, 2007

Blanton Museum of Art
MLK at Congress (200 East MLK)
Austin, Texas 78701

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Saturday 10am – 5pm
Sunday 1 – 5pm
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays

The Blanton Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Nude Visions. 150 Years of Nude Photography’ at Museum Fur Kunst und Gewerbe (MKG), Hamburg

Exhibition dates: 29th January – 25th April, 2010

Curator: Ulrich Pohlmann

Many thankx to the MKG for allowing me to publish the photographs in this post. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Kusakabe Kimbei (Japanese, 1841-1934)
Sumo wrestlers
c. 1880

Gerhard Riebicke (German, 1878-1957) 'Couple Performing German Dance' c. 1930 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Nude Visions. 150 Years of Nude Photography' at Museum Fur Kunst und Gewerbe (MKG), Hamburg, January - April, 2010

Gerhard Riebicke (German, 1878-1957)
Couple Performing German Dance
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
11.6 x 16.2cm
Bodo Niemann and Münchner Stadtmuseum

Gerhard Riebicke spent his childhood in Switzerland. He studied in Tübingen, worked as a tutor in Poznan, and appropriated the technique of self taught photographer. In 1909 he was a press photographer in Berlin. Gradually, his focus shifted to the sports and nudity culture photography (ball games, jumps, dance or bathing scenes).

As a friend of Adolf Koch, he documented his school for physical education and nude culture. As a chronicler of the reform movement, he also maintained contacts with the Laban School of Hertha Feist and other dance and gymnastics schools Hedwig Hagemann, Berte Trümpi and Mary Wigman. He was represented in Hans Surén’s “The Man and the Sun” in 1924. After 1933 he concentrated on sports photography.

Text translated from the German Wikipedia website

T.W. Salomon (attributed)(German)
Female Nude in Armchair
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
27.5 x 27.4cm
Münchner Stadtmuseum

T.W. Salomon was a notable German photographer best known for his “Revuegirls” series from 1935. He was a contemporary of Erich Salomon, another influential German photographer, but there is no direct connection between the two.

T.W. Salomon (attributed)(German)
Revuegirls
1935
Gelatin silver print
© Münchner Stadtmuseum

Jan Mutsu. 'Japanese Man with Tattoo' c. 1955 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Nude Visions. 150 Years of Nude Photography' at Museum Fur Kunst und Gewerbe (MKG), Hamburg, January - April, 2010

Jan Mutsu
Japanese Man with Tattoo
c. 1955
Gelatin silver print
20.2 x 25.7cm
Münchner Stadtmuseum

Josef Breitenbach (German-American, 1896-1984) 'Nude' from the series 'This beautiful landscape' 1963 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Nude Visions. 150 Years of Nude Photography' at Museum Fur Kunst und Gewerbe (MKG), Hamburg, January - April, 2010

Josef Breitenbach (German-American, 1896-1984)
Nude from the series This beautiful landscape
1963
Gelatin silver print
27.5 x 35.3cm
Breitenbach Trust USA and Munchner Stadtmuseum

An exhibition with more than 250 original photos, books and folders with studies from the nude, including masterpieces from each period.

The representation of the unclothed human body has exuded a great fascination ever since time began. The exhibition Nude Visions invites visitors to embark on a journey through a collection of depictions of the human body spanning 150 years. More than 250 original photos, books and folders with studies from the nude will be on view, including masterpieces from each period: from photographs dating from the 19th century which seek their models in Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance, up to Surrealistic experiments and fashion and lifestyle photography. The exhibition illustrates changing ideals of beauty and moral perceptions, and reveals once again the constant attempt to balance between educational openness, titillation and curiosity.

“Without any doubt, there is nothing which draws the attention of the observer to it so much as the naked human body.” This comment of the journalist and photographer Kurt Freytag in1909 is as true today as it was then. The exhibition turns this fact to its advantage and deals with the historical, aesthetic and ideological development of images of the human body in photography. The show is divided into seven chapters devoted to the meaning and function of the unclothed human body in photography, and tracing the history of the medium: “Academies and Exotic Pictures in the 19th century,” “Art photography around 1900 (Pictorialism),” “Avant-gardes of the 20s and 30s,” “Artistic positions after 1945,” “Naturism,” “The Male Nude” and “Glamourous Nudes.” The first coloured Daguerreotypes of curvaceous ladies with blushing cheeks dating from 1855 meet the unflatteringly in-your-face and voyeuristic self-portrait of the photographer Frank Stürmer from 2004. These two photos mark the two ends of the spectrum covered by the exhibition, which illustrates the evolution of nude photography over sixteen decades by the example of more than 250 eminent works.

Nude photography is always, too, a process of negotiation between revealing and concealing. This exhibition makes clear the ambivalence of what is visible and what is unseen, of shame and curiosity, of legitimation and provocativeness. How nakedness is treated is closely bound up with the specific social context in which it occurs, the ideas of morality and the aesthetic ideal of an era. The motif of the nude is always influenced here both by the historical artistic tradition and reactions to contemporary impulses, which are interpreted by the photographer. Thus the movement for women’s emancipation, for instance, led to new ways of looking at both the female and the male body, as seen for example in the work of Herlinde Koelbl. Images which were still regarded as being scandalous at the beginning of the 20th century, triggering moral misgivings and controversy about a subject perceived as being delicate, would hardly bring a blush to the face of anyone living today. It is not only the motifs which have moved on, but also the reproducibility of the images and the extent of their media coverage impact on the awareness and significance of nakedness in society.

The origins of the history of nude photography lie in the so-called “academies,” which provided painters, graphic artists and sculptors with study objects in the 19th century and which followed the historical artistic models of Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance. Nude photography soon increasingly became emancipated from being a mere model for painting and sculpture, and developed artistic ambitions of its own: photographers discovered in the art of the fin de siècle, with its debt to Symbolism, the nude as a reflection of emotional states and yearnings. In the outgoing 19th century, with its bias towards the exact sciences, the human body served as an object for the study of movement, such as in the celebrated series shots by Eadweard Muybridge showing the sequence of motions in human movement.

Whereas historically staged scenes and compositions are still created in the sheltered environment of the atelier at the beginnings of photography, we find the first open-air nudes after 1870. Wilhelm von Gloeden, Guglielmo Plüschow and others took advantage of the light in the Mediterranean South to stage their visions of an earthly Arcadia. As a feature of the Lebensreform back-to-nature movement which gained ground from the turn of the century onwards, especially in Germany, nude photography became a torchbearer of the Naturist movement. The ornamentally arranged groupings of naked dancers which Gerhard Riebicke for example photographs, mainly in the German countryside, became a symbol for the liberation from the moral constraints of civilisation and industrialisation. The aesthetic of athletic bodies engaged in sporting activities or dancers in motion was taken up in the heroic physical ideal of the National Socialists and can later still be found in the cult of bodybuilding.

A new, more radical vision was developed by the Avant-garde movements after the 1920s, with their abstract and surrealistic experiments, such as the stories narrated in a play of light and shadow by František Drtikol or the deformed bodies in the works of Hans List. The theme of “glamour” plays a crucial role above all in fashion photography. That chapter poses the question as to what role is played in the debate on fashion by the way of showing the unclothed female body, by male desire and how perceptions change in the course of cultural history. Glamour can be seen in the erotic images from the Atelier Manassé, shown in soft focus, in Bert Stern’s portraits from the “last sitting” of Marilyn Monroe, up to and including Helmut Newton’s photos. In addition to these, selected works by amateurs as well as the male nude as an expression of gay emancipation will also be presented in pictures, particularly by Will McBride or Herbert Roettgen, who placed the representation of the naked male body in the focus of their work as an expression of their homosexuality, an emblem of their coming-out.

The depiction of the naked torso is shrouded in an aura of scandal and has always been a political bone of contention, whereby images of the bare human body send signals which differ according to their historical context: the photographic artists of the 1970s, working within the framework of body art and performance events, declared the directness of their own physical experience to be a political necessity. In retrospect, their work can be seen as a last desperate attempt to grapple with the vanishing concept of the subjective personality before the transition to the post-modern age. The private spaces of life too are meanwhile also illuminated in a quite different way than 25 years ago. The photographer Thomas Ruff deals in his works, which he imbues with a diffuse haziness by digital means, with the theme of the exhibitionism which can go as far as pornographic exposure of one’s own and others’ nakedness in internet forums. Nude Visions shows that the representation of the naked human body always also has something to do with the quest for insight into what human beings (and one’s own self) really are and what role they play in society.

Press release from the MKG website [Online] Cited 15/04/2010. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Franz Hanfstaengl (Bavarian, 1804-1877)
Eugenie von Klenze
about 1855
© Münchner Stadtmuseum

Lehnert & Landrock. 'Artistic Nude Study 3113' around 1920

Lehnert & Landrock
Rudolf Lehnert (Bohemia, 1878-1948) & Ernst Landrock (German, 1878-1948)
Artistic Nude Study 3113
around 1920
© Münchner Stadtmuseum

Lehnert & Landrock was a photographic studio run by Rudolf Franz Lehnert and Ernst Heinrich Landrock active in Tunisia and Egypt in the early 20th century, noted for producing Orientalist images. Rudolf Franz Lehnert and Ernst Heinrich Landrock produced images of North African people, landscapes, and architecture for a primarily European audience. These images were mainly distributed in monographs, though also as original prints, photogravures, and lithographic postcards.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Rudolf Koppitz (Austrian, 1994-1936)
In the Arms of Nature (Self-portrait)
around 1925
Gelatin silver print
© Münchner Stadtmuseum

Anonymous photographer
Untitled
c. 1928
© Münchner Stadtmuseum

Around 1900, photography increasingly established itself as an artistic medium, with proponents like Frank Eugene attempting to conceal its true character through soft-focus lenses, gauze curtains, and post-processing of the image.

Herbert List (German, 1903-1975)
Arab Boy with Desert Candles
1935
Gelatin silver print
29.7 x 22.5cm
Herbert List-inheritance, Hamburg and Munchner Stadtmuseum

Will McBride (American, 1931-2015)
Barbara in our bed, recording for ‘twen’
1959
Gelatin silver print
© Will McBride and Münchner Stadtmuseum

Bert Stern (American, 1929-2013)
Marilyn Monroe from the series The Last Sitting
1962
C-print
48 x 48.1cm
Bert Stern

André Gelpke (German, b. 1947)
Angelique, Salambo, St.Pauli/Hamburg
1976
Gelatin silver print
32.6 x 22cm
André Gelpke and Münchner Stadtmuseum

Anonymous photographer
Female Nude Watching Television
1980s
© Münchner Stadtmuseum

Hermann Stamm (German, b. 1953)
Homage to Helmut Newton
1985
Gelatin silver print
© Hermann Stamm and Münchner Stadtmuseum

Norbert Przybilla (German, 1953-1996)
Franz
1986
Gelatin silver print
50 x 50cm
Münchner Stadtmuseum

Ulrike Frömel (German)
Body image
1993
Gelatin silver print
© Ulrike Frömel and Münchner Stadtmuseum

Juergen Teller (German, b. 1964)
Kristen McMenamy
1996
© Juergen Teller and Münchner Stadtmuseum

Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Steintorplatz | 20099 Hamburg

Opening hours:
Tuesdays to Sundays 10 am – 6 pm
Wednesdays and Thursdays 10 am – 9 pm
Closed on Mondays

Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg website

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Exhibition: ‘Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration’ at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

Exhibition dates: 13th February – 11th April, 2010

Curator: Valerie Fletcher, Senior Curator

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
6 and 3
1931

One of my favourite artists – what a genius!

His exploration of colour and form is exquisite, sensitive and very moving – despite his belief that colours have no inherent emotional associations.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) 'Rolling After' 1925-1928 from the exhibition 'Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration' at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., February - April, 2010

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Rolling After
1925-28

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Piano Keys
1932

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Steps
1932

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Untitled (Leaf Study)
c. 1940

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Structural Constellation, Transformation of a Scheme No.12
1950
Machine engraving on black vinylite mounted on board

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Structural Constellation, Transformation of a Scheme No.23
1951
Machine engraving on black vinylite mounted on board

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Structural Constellation, Transformation of a Scheme No.10
1950-1951
Machine engraving on black vinylite mounted on board

Exhibition Illustrates Albers’ Sphere of Influence

The Hirshhorn possesses one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive collections of work by Josef Albers (b. Bottrop, Germany, 1888; d. New Haven, Connecticut, 1976). “Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration” presents nearly 70 works spanning the artist’s 55-year career, many on view for the first time. Supplementing pieces from the museum’s holdings are key objects on loan from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Organised by senior curator Valerie Fletcher, the exhibition also includes documentary photographs and examples of Albers’ teaching aids, and concludes with a display of works by artists who knew, worked with, studied under or openly admired Albers. The exhibition opens on February 11 and runs through April 11, 2010.

Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration encompasses the artist’s distinguished career from 1917 to 1973. The exhibition begins with four early self-portrait prints dating from the years of World War I, followed by a group of boldly abstract compositions from Albers’ tenure at Germany’s revolutionary Bauhaus, where he taught alongside such remarkable modernists as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. Albers participated in the school’s utopian aspiration to improve modern life through manufacturing and design ideas that resonated throughout Albers’ career. The Hirshhorn’s show includes a series of black-and-white designs intended for mass production in glass, such as “6 and 3” (1931, see above), and an illuminated display of eight glass panels, in which the artist modernised and transformed the medieval tradition of stained-glass windows, best characterised by “Fugue (B)” (1925-1928).

Following the Nazi party’s rise to power, the Bauhaus was forced to close in 1933. Albers fled to the United States, where he was recruited to head the art program at the new Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There, Albers introduced a modified Bauhaus curriculum and hired vanguard modernists as teachers. He enthusiastically taught his students how art could be made from virtually any material, which he demonstrated in some of his own works, such as three “Leaf Study” collages (c. 1940, see above). Albers continued to advocate the clear structures of geometric abstraction, still mostly in black, white and primary colours, but was open to different stylistic approaches. He also briefly adopted the biomorphic forms associated with surrealism, as seen in the work “Proto-Form (B)” (1938).

In 1949, at the age of 62, Albers became chairman of the art school at Yale University, with a mandate to transform it from a conservative academic program to a proponent of modern concepts and applications. Believing firmly that colours have no inherent emotional associations, he meticulously explored their nuances and combinations in his work. He eventually limited the shape and number of his forms, which resulted in a standardised format that he called “Homage to the Square,” for which he is best known. Two dozen “Homage to the Square” compositions fill the central gallery in the exhibition, inviting viewers to examine the subtle complexities of their perceptions. The vivid yellow-orange-reds of “Glow” (1966, see below) startle the eye, while the pale grays of “Nacre” (1965, see below) suggest cool neutrality. These images create optical illusions, challenging viewers’ visual acuity. This series concludes with the artist’s vivid red-print duo, “In Honor of the Hirshhorn Museum,” on view for the first time since the museum opened in 1974.

In addition, this exhibition includes examples from Albers’ “Structural Constellation” series of reliefs (1954-1964, see above), which anticipated op art with their linear patterns. The reliefs’ commonplace material-laminated plastic-also fulfils the utopian goal of making art affordable to everyone. The two largest paintings on view, both titled “Variant” (1973), were donated by the artist’s wife and foundation in 1979.

Albers remained active and influential until his death in 1976, and many of his pedagogical innovations have become standard methodology in art schools across the country. His explorations of abstract form and colour also inspired and stimulated generations of artists and designers. Shortly after his arrival in America, he became a co-founder of the American Abstract Artists group and participated in exhibitions across the country, from New York to Michigan and beyond. The Hirshhorn’s exhibition ends with an array of works by colleagues, students and admirers, among them: weavings by the artist’s wife, Anni Albers; abstract constructions by Burgoyne Diller; streamlined images of labor by Jacob Lawrence; a large op art painting by Richard Anuskiewicz; textured creations by Eva Hesse and Robert Rauschenberg; and a minimalist stacked wall sculpture by Donald Judd.”

Press release from The Hirshhorn Museum website [Online] Cited 01/04/2010. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Homage to the Square – Soft Spoken
1969

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Homage to the Square – Porta Negra
1965

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Homage to the Square – Profundo
1965

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Homage to the Square – Nacre
1965

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Homage to the Square. Soft Edge – Hard Edge
1965

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Homage to the Square – Arctic Bloom
1965

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Homage to the Square – Blue Reminding
1966

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Homage to the Square – Glow
1966

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
The Hirshhorn is located on the National Mall at the corner of 7th Street and Independence Avenue SW, Washington D.C.

Opening hours:
Open daily 10am – 5.30pm

The Hirshhorn Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction’ at The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.

Exhibition dates: 6th February – 9th May, 2010

Curators: The exhibition was curated by Elizabeth Hutton Turner for its presentation at The Phillips Collection, as part of a touring collaboration led by Whitney curator Barbara Haskell along with a wider curatorial team, while Elsa Smithgall served as the coordinating curator at the Phillips Collection

Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887-1986) 'Grey Blue & Black - Pink Circle' 1929 from the exhibition 'Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction' at The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., February - May, 2010

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
Grey Blue & Black – Pink Circle
1929
Oil on canvas
36 x 48 in. (91.4 x 121.9cm)
Dallas Museum of Art
Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation

Many thankx to Shira Pinsker and The Phillips Collection for allowing me to reproduce the images in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

For an excellent analysis of the convergences between Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams see Geneva Anderson’s review Masters of the Southwest: Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams Natural Affinities.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

“It is surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colours put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.”

“I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing that I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.”

Georgia O’Keeffe, 1976

Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887-1986) 'Flower Abstraction' 1924 from the exhibition 'Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction' at The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., February - May, 2010

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
Flower Abstraction
1924
Oil on canvas
48 x 30 in.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
50th Anniversary Gift of Sandra Payson
© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887-1986) 'Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV' 1930 from the exhibition 'Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction' at The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., February - May, 2010

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV
1930
Oil on canvas
40 x 30 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest of Georgia O’Keeffe
Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) is fixed in the public imagination as a painter of places and things. She has long been recognised for her still lifes of flowers, leaves, animal bones and shells, her images of Manhattan skyscrapers, and her Lake George and New Mexico landscapes. Yet it was with abstraction that O’Keeffe entered the art world and first became celebrated as an artist. In the spring of 1916, she burst onto the New York art scene with a group of abstract charcoal drawings that were among the most radical works produced in the United States in the early twentieth century. As she expanded her repertoire in the years that followed to include watercolour and oil, she retained the fluid space and dynamic, organic motifs of these early charcoals.

Abstraction dominated O’Keeffe’s output in the early part of her career and remained a fundamental language for her thereafter. Some of her abstractions have no recognisable source in the natural world; others distill visible reality into elemental, simplified forms. For O’Keeffe, abstraction offered a way to portray what she called the “unknown” – intense thoughts and feelings she could not express in words and did not rationally understand. Her abstractions recorded an array of emotions and responses to people and places. At the heart of her practice was an affinity for the flux and sinuous rhythms of nature. Through swelling forms and sumptuous colour, O’Keeffe depicted the experience of being in nature – so enveloped by its sublime mystery and beauty that awareness of all else is suspended.

Wall text from the exhibition

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
Early Abstraction
1915
Charcoal on paper
24 x 18 5/8 in. (61 x 47.3cm)
Milwaukee Art Museum
Gift of Jane Bradley Pettit Foundation and The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation
Photography by Malcolm Varon
© Milwaukee Art Museum

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
Blue II
1916
Watercolour on paper
27 7/8 x 22 1/4 in. (70.8 x 56.5cm)
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Gift, The Burnett Foundation
© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
Untitled (Abstraction/Portrait of Paul Strand)
1917
Watercolour on paper
12 x 8 7/8 in. (30.5 x 22.5cm)
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Gift, The Burnett Foundation
© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

The artistic achievement of Georgia O’Keeffe is examined from a fresh perspective in Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction, a landmark exhibition debuting this winter at The Phillips Collection. While O’Keeffe (1887-1986) has long been recognised as one of the central figures in 20th-century art, the radical abstract work she created throughout her long career has remained less well-known than her representational art. By surveying her abstractions, Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction repositions O’Keeffe as one of America’s first and most daring abstract artists. The exhibition, one of the largest of O’Keeffe’s work ever assembled, goes on view February 6 – May 9, 2010.

Including more than 125 paintings, drawings, watercolours, and sculptures by O’Keeffe as well as selected examples of Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photographic portrait series of O’Keeffe, the exhibition has been many years in the making.

While it is true that O’Keeffe has entered the public imagination as a painter of sensual, feminine subjects, she is nevertheless viewed first and foremost as a painter of places and things. When one thinks of her work it is usually of her magnified images of open flowers and her iconic depictions of animal bones, her Lake George landscapes, her images of stark New Mexican cliffs, and her still lifes of fruit, leaves, shells, rocks, and bones. Even O’Keeffe’s canvasses of architecture, from the skyscrapers of Manhattan to the adobe structures of Abiquiu, come to mind more readily than the numerous works – made throughout her career – that she termed abstract.

This exhibition is the first to examine O’Keeffe’s achievement as an abstract artist. In 1915, O’Keeffe leaped into the forefront of American modernism with a group of abstract charcoal drawings that were among the most radical creations produced in the United States at that time. A year later, she added colour to her repertoire; by 1918, she was expressing the union of abstract form and colour in paint. First exhibited in 1923, O’Keeffe’s psychologically charged, brilliantly coloured abstract oils garnered immediate critical and public acclaim. For the next decade, abstraction would dominate her attention. Even after 1930, when O’Keeffe’s focus turned increasingly to representational subjects, she never abandoned abstraction, which remained the guiding principle of her art. She returned to abstraction in the mid 1940s with a new, planar vocabulary that provided a precedent for a younger generation of abstractionists.

Abstraction and representation for O’Keeffe were neither binary nor oppositional. She moved freely from one to the other, cognisant that all art is rooted in an underlying abstract formal invention. For O’Keeffe, abstraction offered a way to communicate ineffable thoughts and sensations. As she said in 1976, “The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.” Through her personal language of abstraction, she sought to give visual form (as she confided in a 1916 letter to Alfred Stieglitz) to “things I feel and want to say – [but] havent [sic] words for.” Abstraction allowed her to express intangible experience – be it a quality of light, colour, sound, or response to a person or place. As O’Keeffe defined it in 1923, her goal as a painter was to “make the unknown – known. By unknown I mean the thing that means so much to the person that he wants to put it down – clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand.”

This exhibition and catalogue chronicle the trajectory of O’Keeffe’s career as an abstract artist and examine the forces impacting the changes in her subject matter and style. From the beginning of her career, she was, as critic Henry McBride remarked, “a newspaper personality.” Interpretations of her art were shaped almost exclusively by Alfred Stieglitz, artist, charismatic impresario, dealer, editor, and O’Keeffe’s eventual husband, who presented her work from 1916 to 1946 at the groundbreaking galleries “291”, the Anderson Galleries, the Intimate Gallery, and An American Place. Stieglitz’s public and private statements about O’Keeffe’s early abstractions and the photographs he took of her, partially clothed or nude, led critics to interpret her work – to her great dismay – as Freudian-tinged, psychological expressions of her sexuality.

Cognisant of the public’s lack of sympathy for abstraction and seeking to direct the critics away from sexualised readings of her work, O’Keeffe self-consciously began to introduce more recognisable images into her repertoire in the mid-1920s. As she wrote to the writer Sherwood Anderson in 1924, “I suppose the reason I got down to an effort to be objective is that I didn’t like the interpretations of my other things [abstractions].” O’Keeffe’s increasing shift to representational subjects, coupled with Stieglitz’s penchant for favouring the exhibition of new, previously unseen work, meant that O’Keeffe’s abstractions rarely figured in the exhibitions Stieglitz mounted of her work after 1930, with the result that her first forays into abstraction virtually disappeared from public view.”

Text from the Phillips Collection website [Online] Cited 15/03/2010. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
Music, Pink and Blue No. 2
1918
Oil on canvas, 35 x 29 1/8 in. (88.9 x 74cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Gift of Emily Fisher Landau in honour of Tom Armstrong
© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York
Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
Series I – No. 3
1918
Oil on board
20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6cm)
Milwaukee Art Museum
Gift of Jane Bradley Pettit Foundation and The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation
Photography by Larry Sanders
© Milwaukee Art Museum

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
Series I, No. 4
1918
Oil on canvas
20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6cm)
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
Abstraction White Rose
1927
Oil on canvas
36 x 30 in. (91.4 x 76.2cm)
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Gift, The Burnett Foundation and The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation
© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
Black Place II
1944
Oil on canvas
36 x 40 in. (91.4 x 101.6cm)
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Gift, The Burnett Foundation
© 1987, Private Collection

The Phillips Collection
1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, D.C., near the corner of 21st and Q Streets, NW

Opening hours:
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Exhibition: ‘In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes before the Digital Age’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Exhibition dates: 25th October, 2009 – 14th March, 2010

Co-curators: Sarah Kennel (associate curator of photographs) and Diane Waggoner (assistant curator of photographs)

Many thankx to Kate Afanasyeva and the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to reproduce the photographs from the exhibition below. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877) 'Lace' 1839-1844 from the exhibition 'In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes before the Digital Age' at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., October 2009 - March, 2010

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877)
Lace
1839-1844
Photogenic drawing (salted paper print)
Sheet (trimmed to image): 17.1 x 22cm (6 3/4 x 8 11/16 in.)
Support: 24.8 x 31.1cm (9 3/4 x 12 1/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Public domain

Anna Atkins (British, 1799-1871) 'Ferns, Specimen of Cyanotype' 1840s from the exhibition 'In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes before the Digital Age' at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., October 2009 - March, 2010

Anna Atkins (British, 1799-1871)
Ferns, Specimen of Cyanotype
1840s
Cyanotype
National Gallery of Art, Washington
R.K. Mellon Family Foundation Fund

Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes. 'The Letter' c. 1850 from the exhibition 'In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes before the Digital Age' at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., October 2009 - March, 2010

Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes
The Letter
c. 1850
Daguerreotype
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Patrons’ Permanent Fund

Southworth and Hawes’ aspirations for their portraits went far beyond those of the average photographer of their day. Whereas most daguerreotypists, simply concerned with rendering a likeness, used stock poses, painted backdrops, and even head restraints to firmly fix their subjects, Southworth and Hawes were celebrated not just for their technical expertise, but also for their penetrating studies, innovative style, and creative use of natural light. They sought to elevate their subjects “far beyond common nature” and embody their “genius and spirit of poetry,” as Southworth wrote in 1871. “What is to be done is obliged to be done quickly. The whole character of the sitter is to be read at first sight; the whole likeness, as it shall appear when finished, is to be seen at first, in each and all its details, and in their unity and combination.”2

Among Southworth and Hawes’ most accomplished studies, The Letter is exceptional in its composition and mood. Most American daguerreotype portraits made in the 1840s and 1850s were frontal, bust-length studies of single figures who rarely show any kind of facial expression because of the often long exposure times. The Letter, however, is a highly evocative study. With its carefully constructed composition and tight pyramidal structure, it presents two thoughtful young women contemplating a letter. Through their posture and expression, these women seem to gain not only physical support from each other, but also emotional strength. Although the identity of the women is unknown, as is the content of the letter, this large and distinguished daguerreotype reflects Southworth and Hawes’ aspiration to capture “the life, the feeling, the mind, and the soul” of their subjects.3

(Text by Sarah Greenough, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation, 2000)

Text from the National Gallery of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 17/02/2010. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880)
Saint John the Evangelist, Chartres Cathedral
c. 1854
Salted paper print from a paper negative
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Eugene L. and Marie-Louise Garbaty Fund, Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund and New Century Fund
Public domain

In 1851 the French government’s Commission des Monuments Historiques selected five photographers to document architectural treasures throughout the country. Nègre was not included, perhaps because he was a member of the opposition party, but he took it upon himself to photograph extensively in Marseilles, Arles, Avignon, and Aix-en-Provence in the early 1850s, and in 1854 he made many photographs of Chartres Cathedral.

Nègre applied his growing understanding of light, shadow, line, and form in Saint John the Evangelist, Chartres Cathedral, and the photograph beautifully illustrates his willingness to sacrifice “a few details,” as he wrote, to capture “an imposing effect.” In addition, unlike photographers associated with the Commission des Monuments Historiques, who were asked to provide general studies of a building’s façade, Nègre was free to explore more unusual views. The statue of Saint John the Evangelist is situated high in the north spire of Chartres, several feet above a nearby balcony. Although difficult to see and even harder for Nègre to record (he most likely perched his camera on a platform), the view in his photograph succinctly captured what he called the cathedral’s “real character” and “preserved the poetic charm that surrounded it.”

Text from the National Gallery of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 17/02/2010. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Unknown photographer (American 19th Century)
George E. Lane, Jr.
c. 1855
Ambrotype
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Kathleen, Melissa, and Pamela Stegeman
Public domain

Étienne Carjat (French, 1828-1906)
Charles Baudelaire
1861, printed 1877
Woodburytype
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Jacob Kainen
Public domain

William James Stillman (American, 1828-1901)
The Acropolis of Athens
1869/1870
Carbon print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation through Robert and Joyce Menschel

J.G. Ellinwood (American, 1844-1924)
Portrait of a Woman
c. 1870
Tintype, hand-coloured
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Mary and Dan Solomon Fund

Clarence White (American, 1871-1925)
Mrs. White – In the Studio
1907
platinum print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation through Robert and Joyce Menschel and R.K. Mellon Family Foundation Fund

Karl Struss (American, 1886-1981)
Columbia University, Night
1910
Gum dichromate over platinum print
Image: 24.1 x 19.9cm (9 1/2 x 7 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation through Robert and Joyce Menschel

Laura Gilpin (American, 1891-1979)
Ghost Rock, Colorado Springs
1919
Platinum print
24.2 x 19.1cm (9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Marvin Breckinridge Patterson Fund
© 1979 Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946)
Untitled (Positive)
c. 1922-1924
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of The Circle of the National Gallery of Art

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946)
Untitled
c. 1922-1924
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
New Century Fund

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Magasin, Avenue des Gobelins
1925
Gelatin silver print, printed-out
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Public domain

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Pioneer with a Bugle
1930
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Patrons’ Permanent Fund

Sid Grossman (American, 1913-1955)
San Gennaro Festival, New York City
1948
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Anonymous Gift

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Snow
1960, printed 2005
Chromogenic colour print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Saul Leiter

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C., 1966
1966
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of the Collectors Committee

The extraordinary range and complexity of the photographic process is explored, from the origins of the medium in the 1840s up to the advent of digital photography at the end of the 20th century, in a comprehensive exhibition and its accompanying guidebook at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. On view in the West Building, from October 25, 2009 through March 14, 2010, In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes Before the Digital Age chronicles the major technological developments in the 170-year history of photography and presents the virtuosity of the medium’s practitioners. Drawn from the Gallery’s permanent collection are some 90 photographs – ranging from William Henry Fox Talbot’s images of the 1840s to Andy Warhol’s Polaroid prints of the 1980s.

“In the Darkroom and the accompanying guidebook provide a valuable overview of the medium as well as an introduction to the most commonly used photographic processes from its earliest days,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art.

In the Darkroom

Organised chronologically, the exhibition opens with Lace (1839-1844), a photogenic drawing by William Henry Fox Talbot. Made without the aid of a camera, the image was produced by placing a swath of lace onto a sheet of sensitised paper and then exposing it to light to yield a tonally reversed image.

Talbot’s greatest achievement – the invention of the first negative-positive photographic process – is also celebrated in this section with paper negatives by Charles Nègre and Baron Louis-Adolphe Humbert de Molard as well as salted paper prints made from paper negatives by Nègre, partners David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, and others.

The daguerreotype, the first publicly introduced photographic process and the most popular form of photography during the medium’s first decade, is represented by a selection of British and American works, including an exquisite large-plate work by the American photographers Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes (see photograph above). By the mid-1850s, the daguerreotype’s popularity was eclipsed by two new processes, the ambrotype and the tintype. These portable photographs on glass or metal were relatively inexpensive to produce and were especially popular for portraiture.

The year 1851 marked a turning point in photographic history with the introduction of the collodion negative on glass and the albumen print process. Most often paired together, this negative-print combination yielded lustrous prints with a subtle gradation of tones from dark to light and became the most common form of photography in the 19th century, seen here in works by Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, and Gustave Le Gray.

Near the turn of the 20th century, a number of new, complex print processes emerged, such as platinum and palladium, gum dichromate, and bromoil. Often requiring significant manipulation by the hand of the artist, these processes were favoured by photographers such as Gertrude Käsebier, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.

One of the most significant developments of the late 19th century was the introduction of gelatin into photographic processes, which led to the invention of the film negative and the gelatin silver print. These became the standard for 20th-century black-and-white photography. A chronological selection of gelatin silver prints, including a contact print made by André Kertész in 1912; a grainy, blurred image of Little Italy’s San Gennaro festival at night by Sid Grossman from 1948 (see photograph above); and a coolly precise industrial landscape by Frank Gohlke from 1975, reveals how the introduction of the film negative and changes in the gelatin silver print process profoundly shaped the direction of modern photography. This section also explores the development of ink-based, photomechanical processes such as photogravure, Woodburytype, and halftone that enabled the large-scale, high-quality reproduction of photographs in books and magazines.

The final section of the exhibition explores the rise of colour photography in the 20th century. Although the introduction of chromogenic colour processes made colour photography commercially viable by the 1930s, it was not widely employed by artists until the 1970s. The exhibition celebrates the pioneers of colour photography, including Harry Callahan and William Eggleston, who made exceptional work using the complicated dye transfer process. The exhibition also explores the range of processes developed by the Polaroid Corporation that provided instant gratification to the user, from Andy Warhol’s small SX-70 prints to the large-scale Polaroid prints represented by the work of contemporary photographer David Levinthal.

Press release from the National Gallery of Art website [Online] Cited 15/02/2010. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) 'The Cloisters, Tintern Abbey' 1854 from the exhibition 'In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes before the Digital Age' at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., October 2009 - March, 2010

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869)
The Cloisters, Tintern Abbey
1854
Salted paper print from a collodion negative
18.3 x 22.1cm (7 3/16 x 8 11/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation through Robert and Joyce Menschel
Public domain

Although Roger Fenton’s photographic career lasted for only 11 years, he exerted a profound influence on the medium. Trained as a lawyer, he began to paint in the early 1840s, studying in Paris with Michel-Martin Drölling and later in London with Charles Lucy. But in 1851 he took up photography and produced a distinguished and varied body of work. He was a pivotal figure in the formation of the Photographic Society (later known as the Royal Photographic Society), garnering support from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He is best known for his 1855 photographs made during the Crimean War, among the first to document war. But he also made ambitious studies of English cathedrals, country houses, and landscapes as well as portraits of the royal family, a series of still lifes, and studies of figures in Asian costume.

When Fenton first began to make photographs, he generally posed figures in a fairly stiff, even anecdotal manner. But in 1854 he began to use figures to create a sense of tension at once intriguing and compelling. The Cloisters, Tintern Abbey shows this more dynamic approach. Fenton placed people in three groups, not interacting with one another but engaging in silent and solitary dialogue with their decaying surroundings. Tintern Abbey had, of course, inspired many artists and poets to reflect on both “the life of things” – as William Wordsworth wrote in his 1798 poem, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” – and on the transitory nature of life itself.

Text from the National Gallery of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 17/02/2010. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880)
Cathédrale de Chartres – Portique du Midi XIIe Siècle (Chartres Cathedral, South Portal, 12th Century)
c. 1854, printed c. 1857
Photogravure
National Gallery of Art, Washington
William and Sarah Walton Fund

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869)
Fruit and Flowers
1860
Albumen print from a collodion negative
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Paul Mellon Fund
public domain

In the summer of 1860 Fenton made his most deliberate and exacting photographs to date: a series of still lifes. Although the subject obviously had its roots in painting, his densely packed compositions are far removed from the renditions of everyday life by the Dutch masters. Instead, Fenton extravagantly piled luscious fruits and intricately patterned flowers on top of one another and pushed them to the front of his composition so that they seem almost ready to tumble out of the photograph into the viewer’s space. It is that very immediacy – the precarious composition, the lush sensuousness of the objects, and our knowledge of their imminent decay – that makes these photographs so striking.

Text from the National Gallery of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 17/02/2010. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Cavalry Maneuvers behind barrier, Camp de Châlons
1857
Albumen silver print from glass negative
National Gallery of Art, Washington

Platt D. Babbitt (American, 1822-1879)
Niagara Falls
c. 1860
Ambrotype
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Vital Projects Fund

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
The Terminal
1893, printed 1920s/1930s
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
Martha’s Vineyard 108
1954
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Diana and Mallory Walker Fund

Dave Heath (Canadian, born United States, 1931-2016)
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York
1963
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Howard Greenberg

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Untitled (Car in Parking Lot)
1973
Dye imbibition print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Anonymous Gift

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Providence
1977
Dye transfer print

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Summer Nights #2 (Longmont, Colorado)
1979
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Mary and David Robinson

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Dead Fish, Salton Sea, California
1983, printed 1997
Chromogenic colour print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Anonymous Gift

Mark Klett (American, b. 1952)
Under the Dark Cloth, Monument Valley, May 27
1989
Gelatin silver print from Polaroid instant film negative
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of the Collectors Committee

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955)
Shipbreaking #10, Chittagong, Bangladesh
2000, printed 2001
Chromogenic colour print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Fund for Living Photographers

The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
The National Gallery of Art, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW.

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Daily 10.00am – 5.00pm

National Gallery of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act’ at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM)

Exhibition dates: October 15th, 2009 – April 11th, 2010

Curator: Michael Darling, Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at SAM

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

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Alexander Calder. 'Form against Yellow (Yellow Panel)' 1936 from the exhibition 'Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act' at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), October 2009 - April 2010

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Form against Yellow (Yellow Panel)
1936

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Little Spider
c. 1940

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976) 'Bougainvillier' 1947 from the exhibition 'Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act' at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), October 2009 - April 2010

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Bougainvillier
1947
Sheet metal, wire, lead and paint
78 x 86 inches
Collection of John and Mary Shirley
© Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS)
Photo: Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource NY

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Bracelet
c. 1948
Silver, silver wire

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Louisa Calder’s 53rd Birthday Gift
1958
Pin
Gold and steel wire

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
The Y
1960

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Teodelapio [maquette II]
1962

Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act on view at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) downtown October 15, 2009, to April 11, 2010, traces the master American sculptor’s work from the late 1920s to the 1970s. Organised by the Seattle Art Museum and curated by Michael Darling, SAM’s Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, the survey features his signature mobiles, stabiles, works on paper and jewellery. Drawn primarily from the Seattle area collection of Jon and Mary Shirley, the exhibition will showcase the wide range of Calder’s interests, abilities, materials and phases during his long and productive career. Accompanying the exhibition will be 44 photographs and a film by Calder’s contemporary Herbert Matter that show his working process in many different studios over the years.

“This will be a singular occasion to appreciate the work of one of the 20th century’s titans of modern art,” said Darling. “The Shirleys’ collection allows us to examine Calder’s variations on themes and scale in a depth that few museums have the opportunity to present.”

The title of the exhibition refers to the artist’s feats of artistry and engineering, as well as his ability to work in many different arenas, from pure abstraction to playful naturalism. Calder was one of the leaders in defining what mattered in 20th-century art, balancing delicacy and the handmade with industrial materials and processes.

Calder’s work is a crucial bridge between abstract painting and sculpture that was taking root in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and the abstract language being embraced in the US after World War II. The mobiles, in particular, were a giant leap forward in the expansion of artistic possibilities, both for artists and audiences, as their moveable parts ensured that a work was never “finished.” They defy stasis and are constantly, emphatically alive. He also pushed the boundaries of pure colour and bold form to the forefront of aesthetic consideration.

Small-Scale Works in Wire and Metal

Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act features groupings of small standing mobiles that demonstrate how Calder played with variations on certain themes, such as red tripod bases with arcing cantilevers on top. When looking at works such as Black, White, Yellow and Brass on Red (1959) and Polychrome Dots and Brass on Red (1964, see image below), one can imagine them at a gigantic scale, but they are also satisfying at a diminutive size, where the hand-pounding and forming of metal is direct and evident. Some of these spirals and branching forms find direct complements in Calder’s jewellery creations, as well, revealing how fluid his approach was between the two genres. The exhibition includes examples of earrings, bracelets, necklaces, brooches, even a key ring designed and created by the artist. In addition, Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act features several of the artist’s delicate wire sculptures. Often compared to drawings that exist in three-dimensional space, these small-scale works demonstrate Calder’s acuity at balancing his keen artistic sense with playfulness and elegant craftsmanship.

Mobiles and Stabiles

Alexander Calder is perhaps most famous for having invented the fine art mobile. His mobiles and stabiles (or non-moving sculptures) are among his most recognised works, and a number of important pieces in these genres – from smaller maquettes to some of Calder’s largest, monumental works – will be on view in the exhibition. At about eight-feet across, Untitled, a mobile from about 1948, includes organic, leaf-like “paddles” or “leaves” that move gracefully on the breeze, alongside a dangling, abstract carved wood element and a bright yellow circle. The balance of organic and geometric forms makes one think of plants, astronomy or even microbiology, all at once.

Some of the recognised masterpieces in the show include the “standing mobile” (a piece that has moving parts but rests on the ground) Bougainvillier (1947, see image above), and the large-scale, 23-foot mobile Red Curly Tail (1970) from much later in the artist’s career. Eagle (1971) currently in SAM’s collection and on view at the Olympic Sculpture Park is a good example of the later, monumental variants of Calder’s stabiles. Eagle will be part of the exhibition Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act through a live-feed video from the sculpture park and on view in the downtown Seattle galleries.

Photographs and Film by Herbert Matter

Alexander Calder’s working process comes to life in the exhibition through photographs by Herbert Matter that document the artist in his studio. On loan from the Calder Foundation, the photographs span more than ten years in the 1930s and 40s and many different studios and working spaces, revealing the creative chaos of Calder’s working environment, the almost surreal abstraction of having all of that metal and curving wire around and the workmanlike, quasi-industrial feel to the artist’s processes and surroundings. The photographs also document some of his past exhibitions and give museum visitors a sense of how Calder himself liked to display his works. A full-colour film produced by Matter in 1951, with music by John Cage and narration by Burgess Meredith, also gives great insight into Calder’s Roxbury, Connecticut, studio.

Text from the Seattle Art Museum website [Online] Cited 06/02/2010. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
The Spider
1940

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Blue Feather
c. 1948

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Big Red
1959

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Polychrome Dots and Brass on Red
1964

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Eagle
1971
Photo: Ronincmc

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Exhibition: ‘Calder: Sculptor of Air’ at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome

Exhibition dates: 22nd October, 2009 – 14th February, 2010

Curator: Alexander S. C. Rower (President of the Calder Foundation and grandson of Alexander Calder)

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

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Calder: Sculptor of Air at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, October 2009 – February 2010 showing at centre, Calder’s The Spider 1940 (below)
Photograph by Claudio Abate

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
The Spider
1940
Sheet metal, wire, and paint
95″ x 99″ x 73″
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Little Spider
c. 1940
Media
Sheet metal, rod, wire, and paint
55″ x 50″
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Gift of Mr. & Mrs. Klaus G. Perls, 1996

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976) 'Gibraltar' 1936 from the exhibition 'Calder: Sculptor of Air' at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, October 2009 - February 2010

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Gibraltar
1936
Wood, wire, and paint
Dimensions
51 7⁄8″ x 24 1⁄4″ x 11 3⁄8″
The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gift of the Artist

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Cascading Flowers
1949

The City of Rome is to devote its first ever major exhibition to Alexander Calder. The exhibition is being organised by the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo to celebrate the famous US artist born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, in 1898 and who died in New York in 1976. His Mobiles are some of the modern era’s most celebrated icons. Exuberance, happiness, vigour and a strong and lively sense of humour are features James J. Sweeney already attributed to Calder in the catalogue of a retrospective held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943. This was the exhibition that raised Calder to the level of one of the leading artists of the day. After majoring in engineering, being awarded a diploma at the Art Students’ League in New York and immersing himself fully in the Parisian Avant-Garde movement in the twenties, Calder went on in the following decade to produce his first Mobiles, as Marcel Duchamp was to christen them. In these sculptures, which were to become enormously popular, the artist harmonically fused shape, colour and movement into an essential whole, which he himself saw as a “universe” where “each element can move, shift and oscillate back and forth in a changing relationship with each of the other elements.”

The exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni – over 100 works from major public and private collections and the Calder Foundation itself – is set out in the form of a chronological journey designed to explore the artist’s entire creative cycle starting in the twenties. A large selection of his most important works will be on display, including some of the sculptures that were shown at the 1943 exhibition at the MoMa. The exhibition will also be taking a look at some of the lesser known aspects of his work, with groups of works that are rarely on display to the general public. The exhibition opens with his wire sculptures of acrobats, animals and portraits, most of which were created in Paris in the twenties. They include his first attempts to portray movement in a playful and wryly ironic mood.

A lesser known series of small bronze figures produced in 1930 showing contortionists and acrobats will allow the visitor to see how the artist resorted to different techniques to experiment in expressing the notion of movement. An important selection of works also illustrates the way in which Calder wholeheartedly embraced the Abstract movement after paying a visit to Mondrian’s studio in Paris. The visitor will also be able to track Calder’s surrealist vein and his interest in biomorphic shapes through a series of masterpieces produced in the mid-thirties including: Gibraltar, Tightrope, Yellow Panel and Orange Panel, all completed in 1936 (see images above).

The exhibition will be built around the Mobiles that the artist produced throughout his career, working industrial metal plates using a craftsman’s technique. Throughout the exhibition, visitors will be able to admire a selection of the most representative pieces from different periods: Arc of Petals, 1941 (see image below); Cascading Flowers, 1949 (see image above); Le 31 Janvier, 1950; and The Y, 1960 (see image below). The exhibition will also be hosting a significant selection of Stabiles, free-standing sculptures that were given their name by Hans Arp. The Stabiles on display will range from those produced in the mid-thirties, such as Black Beast and Hollow Egg (dated 1939), right up to the more recent Cactus, dated 1959, and La Grande Vitesse created in 1969 (see image below). The exhibition will also be exploring the chronological development of Calder’s painting, a branch of his art in which the artist resorted principally to the agile and dynamic method of gouache on paper. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Motta, with contributions from Alexander S. C. Rower and Giovanni Carandente as well as a broad anthology of texts by the artist himself and other authors, many of whose works will be appearing in Italian translation for the first time.

Press release from the Palazzo delle Esposizioni website [Online] Cited 01/09/2010. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Helen Wills
1927

Helen Newington Wills (October 6, 1905 – January 1, 1998), also known as Helen Wills Moody and Helen Wills Roark, was an American tennis player. She became famous around the world for holding the top position in women’s tennis for a total of nine years: 1927-33, 1935 and 1938. She won 31 Grand Slam tournament titles (singles, women’s doubles, and mixed doubles) during her career, including 19 singles titles.

Wills was the first American woman athlete to become a global celebrity, making friends with royalty and film stars despite her preference for staying out of the limelight. She was admired for her graceful physique and for her fluid motion. She was part of a new tennis fashion, playing in knee-length pleated skirts rather than the longer ones of her predecessors. Unusually, she practiced against men to hone her craft, and she played a relentless game, wearing down her female opponents with power and accuracy. In 1933 she beat the 8th-ranked US male player in an exhibition match.

Her record of eight wins at Wimbledon was not surpassed until 1990 when Martina Navratilova won nine. She was said to be “arguably the most dominant tennis player of the 20th century”, and has been called by some (including Jack Kramer, Harry Hopman, Mercer Beasley, Don Budge, and AP News) the greatest female player in history.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Parasite
1947
Sheet metal, wire, and paint
41″ x 68″ x 28″
Calder Foundation, New York

Installation view of the exhibition Calder: Sculptor of Air at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, October 2009 – February 2010 showing at left, Calder’s Mobile (Arc of Petals) 1941 (below)
Photograph by Claudio Abate

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Mobile (Arc of Petals)
1941
Sheet metal, wire, rivets, and paint
94 1⁄2″ x 86 5⁄8″ x 35 7⁄16″
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
The Y
1960
Sheet metal, rod, and paint
Dimensions
98 13⁄16″ x 14’6 1⁄2″ x 66 3⁄8″
Collection
The Menil Collection, Houston

Installation view of the exhibition Calder: Sculptor of Air at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, October 2009 – February 2010 showing at centre, Calder’s La Grande vitesse (1:5 intermediate maquette) 1969 (below)
Photograph by Claudio Abate

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
La Grande vitesse (1:5 intermediate maquette)
1969
Sheet metal, bolts, and paint
8’6″ x 11’3″ x 93″
Calder Foundation, New York