Artists: Danica Chappell, Peta Clancy, Eliza Hutchison, Megan Jenkinson, Justine Khamara, Paul Knight, Derek Kreckler, Luke Parker, Emidio Puglielli, David Rosetzky, Jo Scicluna, Martin Smith, Vivian Cooper Smith, James Tylor and Joshua Yeldham
This is a solid if slightly dour exhibition at the Monash Gallery of Art which examines the phenomena of the deconstruction of the physicality of the photograph. It “features the work of contemporary artists who disrupt the seamless uniformity of screen-based photography by cutting, pinning, folding and puncturing photographic prints. These are photographs that need to be engaged with in physical space, rather than contemplated on a screen; this is an exhibition about making rather than taking photographs.”
Therein lies the rub. If you start such an exercise (the physical deformation of the surface of the print), without caring about the quality of the base image, then you are automatically starting from a bad position. It’s like printing a black and white print from an underexposed negative. Further, much as many of these works are interesting conceptual exercises, most of them lead to emotional dead ends.
A friend of mine, Ian Lobb, has a good analogy: imagine standing on a bridge with a fast running stream flowing underneath, and dropping a pebble off the bridge. And then another, and another. Unless they cluster around each other to form an ongoing enquiry by a group of people – such as Australian women’s hand-coloured photography of the 1970s – INTO ONE IDEA (in the 1970s it was feminism and the urban environment), then they will be washed away. And this is the feeling I get from this exhibition: every idea possible is up for grabs (in an earnest kind of way), but nothing sticks memorably in the mind. That is the world in which we live today.
To my mind the best work in the exhibition is the simplest and most eloquent. Out of Joshua Yeldham’s trio of images, it is Owl of tranquillity (2015, below) which is the standout. The base image is beautiful and the careful incision work just adds to the magical resonance of the image. A truly knockout piece that would be a joy in any collection. The other two works suffer from the base image being taken on a mobile phone… the quality of the image is just not there to start with, and to then print and work the image at such great scale (see installation images below) means both images tend to loose cohesiveness. You can get away with it once, but not three times.
I also very much liked the concept and execution of the installation by Jo Scicluna (below). The photographs were well printed, the alterations intellectually and visually challenging, the framing and construction of the installation effective with the use of wood and shadow, and the whole had a wonderful resonance in the corner of the gallery. Plus you got a free poster of the work to take away with you!
In the early years of the 21st century many cultural commentators were excited by the prospect of photography becoming a truly global art form. With cameras, computers and printers all communicating seamlessly through digital networks, and with the internet providing a worldwide platform for sharing photographs, it looked like the photographic medium might transcend the specificities of both place and materials.
While global digital networks have clearly impacted photography generally, the work of many art photographers has taken a different turn. Instead of embracing the seamless space of digital production, or the expanded horizon of online galleries, artists working with photography have found a range of ways to ground their practices in the material world.
Cutting edge: 21st-century photography features the work of contemporary artists who disrupt the seamless uniformity of screen-based photography by cutting, pinning, folding and puncturing photographic prints. These are photographs that need to be engaged with in physical space, rather than contemplated on a screen; this is an exhibition about making rather than taking photographs.”
Danica Chappell‘s practice belongs to a long artistic tradition of visual abstraction, which rejects representation in favour of sensual and experimental processes. While this tradition is dominated by painters, Chappell employs the light-sensitive chemistry of traditional photography to generate her images. Even though Chappell’s practice can be described as ‘photographic’, she doesn’t use a camera to produce her work. This helps turn photography into something abstract, rather than representational, but it also allows Chappell to distance herself from the ‘instamatic moment’ and foreground an extended process of creative intuition with colour and form. The work being exhibited here, Light shadow (5 days + 5 hrs in 8 parts + test strips), was created in a colour darkroom over several hours. Approaching this as a type of unseeable performance, Chappell arranged and rearranged scraps of paper and other off-cuts on the light sensitive paper while exposing it to light for different periods of time. Chappell’s final installation of this work incorporates test strips, which have been placed at intervals over the print. The test strips, which were integral in the making of the work, interrupt the fl ow of the underlying print, adding an extra layer of abstraction and temporality.
David Rosetzky (Australian, b. 1970) Hamish 2004 Chromogenic prints Courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery (Melbourne) Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2005
David Rosetzky‘s practice encompasses a range of media, including video and photography, and typically explores themes of identity and interpersonal relationships. Throughout his career, Rosetzky has created photographic series and has periodically returned to work on photographic cut-out and collaged portraits. To produce these images, Rosetzky creates cool studio portraits of young models, referencing the style of photography found in advertising and fashion magazines. He then layers as many as three photographic portraits on top of each other before hand cutting sections to reveal parts of the underlying prints (above). Through these works Rosetzky represents his subjects as being multi-layered and highlights the idea that identity is fragile, changeable and often concealed. The crumpled paper, represented in his more recent portraits (below), suggests that surfaces are dynamic thresholds rather than superficial masks. Used in a photographic context, the crumpled paper can also be seen as a reference to photography’s power to transform and elaborate a person’s social identity.
David Rosetzky (Australian, b. 1970) Pieces #2 2015 Chromogenic prints Courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery (Melbourne) Collection of Ten Cubed Collection of the artist
Megan Jenkinson began working with lenticular printing technologies in 2007. Lenticular printing combines multiple still images to give the impression of movement and three-dimensionality. The work on display here is from Jenkinson’s Transfigurations series, which employs a handmade form of lenticular photography to evoke the transience of the natural world. This large-scale image of water foliage is composed of two separate photographs that have been digitally spliced together and printed on a single sheet of paper. The artist has then hand-folded the photograph to create a concertinaed surface that can only be seen in its complete form when viewed from multiple angles. As a consequence, viewers need to physically interact with the photographic object, walking from side-to-side in order to experience the artwork. This form of photography disrupts traditional expectations of two-dimensional photography and introduces a tactile aspect to digital production.
In a world where photographs are often viewed on screens, Justine Khamara is interested in the physicality of the photographic surface and how this affects the meaning of an image. Her works begin as two-dimensional photographic portraits, which she then sculpts into three-dimensional forms that protrude from walls or stand alone in exhibition spaces. To create these works, Khamara cuts her photographic prints, either by hand or using a laser cutter. She then manipulates the intricately shredded surfaces by hand to give them a sculptural form. This involves an array of different techniques, such as adhering part of the photograph to a backing board and allowing the filleted paper to hang loosely from the top. In other instances she pulls and weaves the segmented photograph to create more purposeful geometric shapes. By working in this way, Khamara invests the photographic still with a sense of movement and playful elaboration, which effaces the mechanical nature of photographic reproduction.
Justine Khamara (born Australia 1971) Orbital spin trick #2 2013 UV print on plywood 50.0 x 50.0 x 50.0cm Reproduction courtesy of the artist and ARC ONE Gallery (Melbourne) Collection of the artist
Luke Parker works across a range of media, his practice is largely concerned with giving a sense of metaphysical weight to everyday events and chance encounters. The works on display here are made up of Parker’s own photographs combined with found images that he has collected over the past 20 years. To create these works, Parker categorised seemingly disparate images according to formal patterns and poetic associations. He then arranged the images onto a unifying background and used a needle and thread to stitch them into a type of artistic circuit board. Parker created this series as a way of making sense of his own image archive as well as the proliferation of images encountered in everyday life.
In a world where images are increasingly set adrift from specific economies of meaning, to circulate freely through digital networks, Parker’s works function as conceptual nets that encourage viewers to think about photographs rather than just watch them pass by.
Martin Smith‘s practice revolves around the integration of photography and text. Using photographs that have been recovered from family albums or personal archives, Smith incorporates texts into the visual fi eld of the image. The texts, which have no obvious relationship with the content of the photographs, recall personal memories or lyrics from popular songs. To incorporate the texts, Smith hand-cuts letters out of the photographic prints, often leaving the letters scattered beneath the image. The disconnect between the text and the image is a deliberate attempt to combine two discrete methods of storytelling – image and text – while also emphasising the way memories of an event are usually different from the original experience. By cutting letters out of the photograph, Smith complicates the viewer’s ability to believe in either the text or the image, and opens up a space that encourages new interpretations.
Paul Knight‘s style of his photographs is influenced by his background in commercial photography; they are technically proficient and almost illustrative in their documentary clarity. These cool formal qualities, however, are unsettled by the subject matter, which is often about private desires and passions. Knight’s 2010-11 untitled series of folded photographs document couples embracing in bed. The series reflects Knight’s broader interest in photographing moments of candour and intimacy between lovers, which remains a preoccupation of his practice. In this series, however, Knight has folded the photographic prints to frustrate any expectation we might have about a photograph’s capacity to show or reveal its subject. Instead of offering a crude, voyeuristic perspective, the intimacy documented in these images is obscured and concealed in the folds of the print.
Emidio Puglielli‘s work focuses on the relationship between the photograph as a material object and the photograph as an image. He is particularly interested in old photographs and their continued resonance in contemporary society. Puglielli finds and collects vernacular photography to use as the starting point for his works. He then highlights the materiality of the photographs by drawing attention to their surface and structure. To do this he employs strategies such as rubbing off the emulsion or piercing the surface with map pins. Puglielli is interested in the way such interventions alter the meaning of a photograph and offer new readings of images.
By damaging the smooth surface of the print, he is able to disrupt the illusion of the photographic image, but his interventions also embellish the photographs in sympathetic ways. This is particularly evident in Snow disruption, where the pins appear as snowflakes, and Shadow disruption where pins become eyeballs in the shadow of the unknown photographer. Puglielli’s works therefore seek to question the nature of photography and the way in which photographs are viewed and reinterpreted.
Vivian Cooper Smith‘s artistic practice revolves around photography. Timeless (2013) explores identity and conceptions of self while also reflecting on the nature of photography. To create this work, Smith photographed film noir classics directly from an old television screen. He then printed the images and hand-cut them to fit pieces of irregularly shaped plywood. Smith created this work during a period of personal turmoil and felt that the film noir genre of the post-war period resonated with his own desire to remake himself after a relationship breakdown. As is common to his practice, Smith has interfered with the photograph’s smooth, seamless surface, in this case by dissecting it and creating a three dimensional sculpture. By focussing on the materiality of the photograph, Smith aims to highlight its artificial or constructed nature.
Derek Kreckler originally trained as a sculptor and established himself as a performance and sound artist during the 1990s, he has more recently concentrated on producing photographic and installation work. Kreckler’s Holey series consists of beach scenes and seascapes that have been punctured with circular apertures. The excised sections of the images have been transformed into spherical objects that sit in front of the two photographs, as if the photographs have spawned offspring from their holey orifices. This sculptural configuration challenges the notion that photography offers a straightforward document of time and place. Instead, the photograph has been turned into a type of puzzle that the viewer is encouraged to investigate and solve. To further deepen the viewing experience, Holey 1 is a diptych. The two photographs show the same location; the right side captured a short time after the left side. A number of the subjects in the photographs, beach goers on a summer’s day, are displaced by time. Some have remained static, some seem to have meandered between beach and sand, whilst others have disappeared from the scene altogether.
Jo Scicluna works with a range of media, including photography, video, sculpture and installation, often combining these art forms to bring photography into the space of lived experience. Dissatisfied with the way photography, as a documentary device, is almost always tied to past events, Scicluna encourages viewers to engage with the presence of photographic objects. By cutting into the smooth surface of a photographic print, she disrupts the notion that a photograph is a window into the past. She also elaborates conceptual relationships between different photographic objects in her installations. In doing this, Scicluna activates the space between the photographic print, the sculptural form and the phenomenology of a gallery space. For Scicluna, the experience of being in-between things is related to her personal experience of migration and geographic rupture. Scicluna is not interested in using photography to create documents of specific times and places but uses the medium in a conceptual way to evoke sensations that are not as easy to represent in a literal sense.
Joshua Yeldham uses a range of media, his practice is focused on exploring the landscape and elaborating spiritual and symbolic narratives around his engagement with the natural world. He captures photographic images on a smart phone before blowing them up and printing them on cotton paper. He then uses tools to physically carve into the paper, disrupting the smooth surface of the photographic image and adding a personal, handmade effect. It is as if the artist is tattooing his own map or story into the skin of the image. The intricate carving creates a textured pattern of lightness over his otherwise dark and mysterious photographs. The technique allows Yeldham to explore history and mythology in the landscape and imbue his works with elements of both the real and the imagined. It also allows him to reference the passing of time as well as the weather and destruction that the natural environment endures on a daily basis.
This is a disappointing first solo exhibition in Victoria by internationally renowned Australian photojournalist Trent Parke, the main body of the exhibition made up of his “internationally celebrated series, consisting of anonymous portraits taken on the streets of Adelaide.” (Wall text from the exhibition)
Seriously, who writes this stuff?
Sure, Parke is Australia’s only member of the Magnum photo agency but I have been commenting on photography for many years now, and have never heard of this series before, neither locally and definitely not internationally.
From the ironic title, The camera is god, critiquing the all seeing eye of the camera, to the work itself – a large grid of black and white digital prints from film negatives, the images taken when Parke, “fixed his camera on a tripod and set it to take multiple shots (up to 30 shots in eight-second bursts) when the pedestrian lights changed.” Parke then extracted, “individual portraits from these photographs of street traffic, Parke allowed motion-blur and film grain to obscure the identity of his subjects” – the series feels like a university photography course exercise into the study of motion. While the installation works better from a distance, the gridded layout forming a holistic whole of ambiguous individuals, the closer you get the more the integrity of the images naturally falls apart with golf ball sized grain. Unfortunately, not all the grain is from the film negative. Some of it is digital noise, and the combination of film grain and digital pixellation does not sit well with the images. If you are going to shoot analogue film, why then destroy its characteristics by printing digitally, and introducing an entirely different element into the equation?
Photographs of anonymous people in the city have a long presence in the history of photography. They disavow what is known as the ‘civil contract of photography’1 that is, a relation between formally equal parties (the photographer and the sitter), whose equality lies in their shared participation in the act of being photographed, in what Ariella Azoulay terms, the community of ‘the governed’.2 As Daniel Palmer and Jessica Whyte note, “Photography is one of the ways in which we are able to establish a distance from power and observe its actions from a position that is not already marked as one of subjection.”3 In other words, the photographer can photograph from a position of freedom and not of surveillance and control (by state power). Of course, this does not negate the power of the photographer to choose what to photograph, who to make subjective to their whim and control… with or without permission (to photograph).
Early examples in this genre are works by Paul Strand taken between 1915-1917, close-up portraits of anonymous urban subjects. Next we have portraits of anonymous New York subway commuters taken by Walker Evans with a hidden camera between 1938-41 (see below). Other photographers include Harry Callahan and his Chicago series of 1950 and, in Australia, Bill Henson’s Untitled 1980/82 series of crowds, taken with a telephoto lens to flatten the pictorial plane.
Commenting on the work of Walker Evans, the author Max Kozloff observes in his highly recommended book, The Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900,
“From around 1938 to 1941 this ‘penitent spy and apologetic voyeur’, as he later styled himself, photographed passengers with a hidden camera, a cable release trailing down his coat sleeve to his itchy hand. This had been a devious, unsavoury thing to do, and he knew it; but the result was spectacular in its disclosure of the miscellaneous, anonymous, quotidian texture of metropolitan life, solemn or comic by turns. It was made up of figures whose collective presence he retroactively implied by experimentally sequencing his pictures, cropped and in grids. Evans did not see what his camera saw, and his subjects were oblivious to his design.”4
Sound familiar? sequencing his pictures, cropped and in grids…
The key here is an annunciation, a spiritual exposition, of the quotidian texture of metropolitan life through the photography of anonymous human beings. Human beings who have not given their permission to be photographed but who are captured anyway in the passions of life, the angst of existence, in a slightly devious way. Let’s get this straight: this series is not about the camera being god, it is about the photographer actively choosing to press the shutter release of the camera, the photographer choosing what to crop out of the image, about the photographer choosing what to print and how to arrange and sequence the work. It is about the photographer as (an absent) god … for he neither looks through the lens of the camera, nor is there at the exhibition. But he is an omnipresent, omni-prescient force, forever surveilling the field of view, dominating the subject and presenting his choice. The photograph is framed by the photographer’s (absent, but controlling) eye. It is about his ego, not the cameras, as to what is represented. Commenting on his own work, Walker Evans observes,
“A distinct point, though, is made in the lifting of these objects from their original settings. The point is that this lifting, is, in the raw, exactly what the photographer is doing with his machine, the camera, anyway, always. The photographer, the artist, “takes” a picture: symbolically he lifts an object or a combination of objects, and in so doing he makes a claim for that object or that composition, and a claim for his act of seeing in the first place. The claim is that he has rendered his object in some way transcendent, and that in each instance his vision has penetrating validity”5
Further, as Annete Kuhn notes, the eye of the camera is neutral, it sees the world as it is:
“Photographs are coded, but usually so as to appear uncoded. The truth / authenticity potential of photography is tied in with the idea that seeing is believing. Photography draws on an ideology of the visible as evidence. The eye of the camera is neutral, it sees the world as it is: we look at a photograph and see a slice of the world. To complete the circuit of recording, visibility and truth set up by the photograph, there has to be someone looking at it …”6 (My italics)
Caroline Blinder suggests that,
“… transcendental ethos is aligned with the camera’s ability to capture the real and the spiritual, the native and the universal simultaneously. Hence, Evans’s images of vernacular America, of regional architecture, objects, signs, and people become representative of a “moment of seeing” in which a secular vision of America is given sacred implications.
“The idea of reinserting a sacred purpose into the photographic project became part of the era’s [1930-40s] attempts to codify photography as a medium with far-reaching metaphoric, aesthetic, and cultural ramifications. In this context, the combination of a self-effacing aspect with a moment of total vision – “I am nothing; I see all” – in itself suggests a constant oscillation between positions behind and in front of a metaphorical camera; positions which, incidentally, also mimic and reflect the role of the critic vis-à-vis the subject of photography.”7
There is no penetrating validity to be seen here, for the series seems to have been codified (in absentia) as a form of post-human conceptualisation, undermining the 1930s attempt to codify the medium with a spiritual dimension. Unlike the photographs of Walker Evans, or Bill Henson, where I am fascinated with the object of the photographers attention (what were they thinking, where were they going, what was their life about?), in this case the object of the artist’s attention – “the transience of street life and the photographer’s own experience of being adrift in the world of light and movement” – does not carry me along for the journey, has not become existential, transcendent. It is not the ghost in the machine of the camera (its ability to capture things that humans cannot see) that is present, but the ghost in the machine of the human that becomes apparent in these images… that of an unresolved idea, a floating bit of code.
Personally, I found the rendered object not worth a second glance. The images did not, and will not, reveal themselves to you over weeks and years. Of much more interest was the single, whole image from which the detail is taken. If I had been surrounded by the light and energy of works such as the only complete image shown (see below) – say 15 of them in a darkened room – then I would have been excited, surprised, challenged and enlightened. Go with he source!
These images remain a promise unfulfilled. They could have been so much more “than the closed-off beings of our own mediations, of our own mirrors, our machines.”8
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ Azoulay, Ariella (2008), The Civil Contract of Photography (trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli), New York: Zone Books.
2/ Palmer, Daniel and Whyte, Jessica. “‘No Credible Photographic Interest’: Photography restrictions and surveillance in a time of terror,” in Philosophy of Photography Volume 1 Number 2, Intellect Limited 2010, p. 178.
3/ Ibid., p. 179.
4/ Kozloff, Max. The Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900. London: Phaidon Press, 2007, p. 149.
5/ Walker Evans quoted in Thompson, J. L. (ed.,). Walker Evans at Work. London: Thames and Hudson, 1984, p. 229 in Caroline Blinder. “”The Transparent Eyeball”: On Emerson and Walker Evans,” in Mosaic : a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. Winnipeg: Dec 2004. Vol. 37, Iss. 4; pg. 149, 15 pgs.
6/ Kuhn, Annette. The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, pp. 27-28.
7/ Blinder, Caroline. “”The Transparent Eyeball”: On Emerson and Walker Evans,” in Mosaic : a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. Winnipeg: Dec 2004. Vol. 37, Iss. 4; pg. 149, 15 pgs.
“Walker Evans once wrote a friend: “Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.” Evans’ insistence on staring as the main road to learning included making pictures of subway riders with a hidden camera, but he felt so guilty about being an unobserved observer that he withheld publication for years. This compunction still dogs many photographers but seldom stops them.”
Goldberg, Vicki. “Voyeurism, Exposed,” on the Artnet website [Online] Cited 06/02/2016
MGA provides Victorians with their first opportunity to see a significant exhibition of work by Trent Parke, the internationally renowned Australian photojournalist. Over the past two decades Parke has brought his highly poetic sensibility to traditional documentary photography. Alongside a range of Parke’s work recently purchased for the MGA collection this exhibition features his 2013 series, The camera is god (street portrait series), which puts a metaphysical spin on street photography.
During the late 1990s Trent Parke turned away from his career as a press photographer to concentrate on using the visual language of documentary photography to explore personal interests. Continuing to work in the manner of a photojournalist – venturing into the world with a 35mm film camera hanging from his neck – Parke’s artistic practice is a type of existential journey.
Trent Parke: the camera is god is the first solo exhibition of Parke’s work in Victoria, and provides an opportunity to appreciate the trajectory of his practice over the last 15 years.
At the heart of this exhibition is Parke’s The camera is god (street portrait series) of 2014. This internationally celebrated series consists of anonymous portraits, taken on the streets of Adelaide. To capture these images Parke fixed his camera on a tripod and set it to take multiple shots (up to 30 shots in eight-second bursts) when the pedestrian lights changed. Extracting individual portraits from these photographs of street traffic, Parke allowed motion-blur and film grain to obscure the identity of his subjects. As such, this series is not really about individuals, but about the transience of street life and the photographer’s own experience of being adrift in the world of light and movement.
Wall text from the exhibition
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Subway Passenger, New York 1938 Silver gelatin photograph
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Subway Passenger, New York 1938 Silver gelatin photograph
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Subway Passenger, New York 1938 Silver gelatin photograph
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Subway Passenger, New York 1938 Silver gelatin photograph
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Subway Passenger, New York 1938 Silver gelatin photograph
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Subway Passenger, New York 1938 Silver gelatin photograph
Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) Chicago 1950 Gelatin silver print 8 1/16 x 12 15/16 in. (20.48 x 32.86cm)
Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) Chicago 1950 Gelatin silver print 8 3/8 x 12 3/8 in. (21.27 x 31.43cm)
Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) Chicago 1950 Gelatin silver print 8 3/8 x 12 1/2 in. (21.27 x 31.75cm)
Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) Chicago 1950 Gelatin silver print 7 7/8 x 12 3/4 in. (20 x 32.39cm)
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1980/82 Gelatin silver chlorobromide print From a series of 220 57.5 × 53.4cm Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1980/82 Gelatin silver chlorobromide print From a series of 220 57.5 × 53.4cm Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
I have never thought of photography as a “singularity” – the singularity of photography. For me, photography has always been about possibilities, multiplicities rather than singularities.
In Kathrin Yacavone’s text below, the “singularity of photography” is defined as the relationship – the hierarchy – among valuable, perceptual and imaginative relations between the beholder and the image. It is the singularity of the individual and their response at any time to a photograph, but these responses cannot be systematically codified, in the sense that no response can ever be relied upon… certainly, no response to a photograph of a mother could be more singular than the response of a son (as claimed by Barthes Camera Lucida).
In other words, the singularity of photography is how the viewer engages and reads a photograph in a singular way at one point in time, from one “point of view.”
While this point of view is singular, it changes from moment to moment, from context to context, from different points of view. Hence, we have a multiplicity of singularities or, if you like, a multiple singularity of photography. Hasn’t it always seemed false to you in Camera Lucida where Barthes talks about his response to an image (for example, the supposed “lost” image of his mother*), he allows it to freeze in his text? Surely he would feel different later (another singularity). And yet the freezing is necessary for the arguments Barthes makes.
It continues to haunt me – much as photographs haunt our memory – why Barthes stuck with the singularity of a photograph, when at the same time he was pushing the multiplicity of readings in his other texts eg. S/Z (1970). Are we missing something really basic here? Why should a photograph be frozen and a text not?
In this exhibition, Michel Frizot defines a series of classifications (or themes, see below) that seek to organise the ambiguity and perplexity of vernacular and surprising photography. As Frizot himself puts it, “the photograph is not in its essence a transparency through which we gain access to a known reality but, on the contrary, a source of ambiguity and often, perplexity. The photographic image is a constellation of questions for the eye because it offers viewers forms and signs they have never perceived as such and which conflict with their natural vision”.
Frizot suggests questions for the eye offered through forms and signs that are in conflict with natural vision. Barthes pushes further, suggesting that it is not the forms and signs of the photograph that challenge natural vision, but a shift away from a semiology of photography to a phenomenology of photography. From guided message (forms/signs) to emotive response (imagination). Umberto Eco comments that, “Semiology shows us the universe of ideologies, arranged in codes and sub-codes, within the universe of signs, and these ideologies are reflected in our pre-constituted ways of using the language,”1 but Barthes, in works such as S/Z, stresses the multiplicity of a reading (its intertextuality). He contends that there can be no originating anchor of meaning in the possible intentions of the author, and that meaning must be actively created by the reader through a process of textual analysis.
An emotive response to a photograph is an “encounter with the represented other [is] a dialectical relationship between the specific and the general, between the personal and the universal, where the dialectic is seen in the psychologically unsettling potential of photographic images, the status of the photographic referent and the poignancy of the relation between time and image.” Thus the photograph can have a capacity for plurality of meaning which is not restrictive.
This response is based on an individuated, ‘feeling’ viewer whose encounter with the photograph is guided by desire and emotion, grounded in his or her unique experience and life history. It is to engage with the photograph in imaginative, affective, and emotional ways. Here, the codified reading is subsumed? by the emotive reading of an enlightened and fully “conscious” reader in the phenomenology of photography. Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object – a photograph for example – by the imagination, by thought. Phenomenology requires a bit to grasp – to read a phenomenologial text like Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space as its author intended requires a cultivated mindset – but a prepared reader has many pleasures.
This is one possible response by the viewer to unsettling photographs. But what of the photographer?
Les Walking (my lecturer at RMIT University for many years), used to ask “what are you pointing your camera at?”… so this would permit an imaginative journey on his part as he imagined the subject matter, what he knew of the person, and all possibilities. Sometimes everything happens at once (in photography), and sometimes we recognise the richness of where we are in photography’s ability to generate many singularities within us at rapid fire.
As a photographer we go on an imaginative journey when we take a photograph – we previsualise, snap, extend the “point” of exposure (long time exposure), double expose or do away with the camera altogether. Taking a photograph is a multiplicity before the moment of the pushing of the shutter (decisions, angles, camera, film, light, place etc..), and a multiplicity afterwards… but for that split second it is a singularity, “an encounter with the represented other” as Walter Benjamin puts it… as though time, history and memory are all focused through the lens (of the camera, of the enlarger, of the scanner) at the object – like a funnel – which then expands afterwards. At the point of “exposure” there is only ever one singularity. Multiple contexts before and after, multiple phenomena if you like, but only one outcome when the negative is exposed. Being aware of all that happens around us leads to that one singularity – the negative. That’s what photographers do, they focus that energy into a singularity.
But the resulting negative is NOT singular!
Of course, there are some things that are forever predetermined in the analogue negative, eg the depth of field, the focus, the grain. Even in the digital negative these determinations apply. But then you think, if I push this film or pull it back in development “other” things may appear. Probably the Leica manual is as good as any for what come after that – they say that when shooting a roll of film with a variety of tonal scales the exposure should be more than the meter indicated, and the development time less. In the Zone System this would be N-1. And a negative like this is what gives the greatest options with graded papers. Multiple options for printing, multiple options for interpreting a negative. I feel these multiple options have been more or less forgotten in the era of the digital print. What you see on the screen is what you aim to see in the print, which negates the multiplicity of the (digital) negative, often leading to bland and underwhelming digital prints. The pre-determination of the screen leads to an over-determination of the print.
While Minor White observed that there was a dragon in the negative that could be reached by careful printing, this locks you into looking for the “one road” in the negative. One person who didn’t was the English photographer Bill Brandt who printed first in a straight documentary style before “unlocking” the surrealist elements of his negs with very contrasty work. He was open to the multiple contexts of the point of exposure of the negative, and it is his later reprinting of his earlier work for which he has become famous.
While it comes down to only several elements when talking about the phenomena of the negative, it is our direct experience of it IN OUR IMAGINATION that, perhaps, gives the negative presence and transcendence. It is the direction of our thought towards the object of our being. And that is what makes us truly human.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
* Of course, the photograph of his mother did exist, it was just necessary for his argument that we never see it, and that he said that it did not exist.
Word count: 1,400.
1/ Eco, U. (1970). “Articulations of the Cinematic Code,” in Cinematics, 1(1), pp. 590-605
Many thankx to my mentor for his advice and thoughts on this text. Many thankx to the Fotomuseum Winterthur for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs often seem familiar and understandable, a visual common sense intimately related to our daily lives. But they can also provoke a spark of amazement or generate a more sustained perplexity and inquiry. Curated by the renowned French photo historian, Michel Frizot, Every Photograph is an Enigma interrogates this paradox. Drawing exclusively from photographs in his private collection, many of them anonymous, he presents a selection of photographic moments at once ordinary and marvellous. Frizot develops a system of classification that explores the strangeness generated by the camera lens. Taken by family members, lovers, or unheralded professional and amateur photographers, the assembled images amount to nothing less than a phenomenology of photography.
The exhibition and book are divided into eleven themes, such as:
Ambiguous assemblages The enigma of relationship The enigma of context The enigma of attentiveness Challenging the figurative order The aesthetic solution Original configurations The photographer’s options The space of the gaze The spirit of the place
The stratosphere balloon of Professor Piccard catches fire in the moment of ascending over the area of Brussels, Belgium.
Auguste Antoine Piccard (28 January 1884 – 24 March 1962) was a Swiss physicist, inventor and explorer known for his record-breaking helium-filled balloon flights, with which he studied the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Piccard was also known for his invention of the first bathyscaphe, FNRS-2, with which he made a number of unmanned dives in 1948 to explore the ocean’s depths.
“Every photograph is an enigma for the gaze: for the enigma is part of the photographic act itself. It ensues from the distance between the natural vision and the camera’s photosensitive capture process. By widening this gap, the modes of capture, the photographer’s intentions, and the reactions and involvement of the “photographer” together create new forms and perceptual requirements specific to photography. It is a question, above all, of understanding how much photographs, by transcending our visual capacities and going beyond our intuitions, also give rise to empathy and the need to project personal concerns. The element of enigma in photography bears witness, in fact, to what it is to “be human”.”
“The answer to the Sphinx’s riddle, it should be remembered, is humankind. And looking at a photograph means discovering oneself and the human species. Through the disparity and the dissonance between what it shows and what we experience, photography testifies above all, and at every moment, to what “being human” means. And the riddle, the enigma inherent in looking at a photograph is that of our presence in the world.”
Michel Frizot
Kathrin Yacavone. Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography. Bloomsbury Academic, 2012, pp. 123-124
Photographs often seem familiar and understandable, a visual common sense intimately related to our daily lives. But they can also provoke a spark of amazement or generate a more sustained perplexity and inquiry. Curated by the renowned French photo historian, Michel Frizot, Every Photograph is an Enigma interrogates this paradox. Drawing exclusively from photographs in his private collection, many of them anonymous, he presents a selection of photographic moments at once ordinary and marvellous. Frizot develops a system of classification that explores the strangeness generated by the camera lens. Taken by family members, lovers, or unheralded professional and amateur photographers, the assembled images amount to nothing less than a phenomenology of photography.
Immediately a photograph is taken it generates a distance between what the image reveals and what we have seen for ourselves only seconds before. This observation of disparity is central to the phenomenon of photography, creating a sense of indeterminacy that we might describe as the singularity of the photographic. As Frizot himself puts it, “the photograph is not in its essence a transparency through which we gain access to a known reality but, on the contrary, a source of ambiguity and often, perplexity. The photographic image is a constellation of questions for the eye because it offers viewers forms and signs they have never perceived as such and which conflict with their natural vision”. Every Photograph is an Enigma draws out the full implications of this disparity, everything which constitutes the singularity of the photographic process. This begins with the selection procedure itself: Frizot has collected the photographs over many years, with no predetermined objective, finding scraps and castoffs at flea markets and jumble sales. Abandoned photographs escape traditional standards of classification and judgement and are often the work of anonymous photographers. For Frizot, this artlessness offers ‘an extra touch of photographic naturalness which is not shrouded in conventions’. It is the work of the exhibition to reveal, and the role of the visitor to discover, this photographic supplement.
The exhibition explores the modalities of photographic capture and the out-distancing of the senses that results, above all in the relationship between photographer, subject photographed and the operations of the camera, a technical device. Recording different intensities of light on a photosensitive surface, photography is an index of states of light rather than the reality perceived by the eye. The formal consequences of photographic technique are considerable, whether determined by exposure time, framing, exhaustive detail, or the projection of three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional surface. At the same time, what are fundamentally physical processes are also determined by the split-second decisions taken by the camera operator. It is precisely this that gives rise to the puzzle of photography: the contradictions between the precision of a physical world and the decision-making of the photographer.
Every Photograph is an Enigma explores other aspects of the riddle of photography, including the complexity of the exchange with the subject of the photograph, embodied by a reciprocal glance. The ability of the camera to record human form and gesture is what lends it its quasi-magical vocation. However, that act of recording is dependent on a vast array of potentialities and constraints, including perhaps the demeanour of the participants. The photographic act transforms emotionally-charged, interpersonal experience into uncertain, interpretable signs, a distillation of affect. At the same time, those signs are also dependent on the astuteness of the eyes that scrutinise the photograph, igniting, perhaps, an empathy with others. A photograph is a fragmentary capture and the gaze of the viewer operates in similarly fragmentary bursts. A viewer’s optical capacities are decisive, interpreting, for example, the photograph’s excess of data. The enigma of photography also emerges from the inadequacies and impasses of the energetic viewer’s scrutiny. These, and many other riddles, are explored across eleven separate chapters in the exhibition, which together provide a method for specifically photographic viewing. They probe the way the photographic device is used to celebrate the subject, or the way that processes unique to photography and the photographer’s command of his or her equipment help determine the final image. A further theme investigates the way that viewers are involved in a perceptual relationship which ordinary vision has not accustomed them to, including a display of stereo images. We encounter the myriad ways that photography overwhelms our senses and the many puzzles it presents.
Every Photograph is an Enigma brings together a remarkable selection of everyday photographs, selected over many years by one of the sharpest eyes in the history photography. It offers us the opportunity of a liberated escape into a ‘pure’ photographic act stripped of artistic pretension or historical portent. As Frizot proposes, there are no hierarchies in photography – it is the activity of the gaze that reveals the richness of the image. For the eye, every photograph is an enigma.
Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by the fully-illustrated catalogue Toute photographie fait énigme/Every photography is an enigma, by Michel Frizot, in collaboration with Cédric de Veigy. Published by Éditions Hazan. English/French with a German translation of the main texts. Price 45 CHF.
Credits
The exhibition is curated by Michel Frizot and organised by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris and the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône in collaboration with Fotomuseum Winterthur.”
For many years, Michel Frizot the historian and theorist has been collecting neglected photographs which have been overlooked because they were taken by anonymous, unknown photographers, unheard-of or non-celebrated artists, throughout the entire history of photography. Avoiding “museumification” and classification, selected first of all for their capacity for surprise, these photographs are no less generous, moving and perhaps “photographic” than others. This exhibition reflects on the element of mystery in all photography.
“Because they are so familiar to us, because they are part of our visual space, photographic images seem to be immediately accessible and understandable. But everyone has experienced that sudden burst of amazement they can set off through suspended movements, the rendering of colours, unexpected coincidences or abruptly frozen expressions. If we pay attention to such features, they provoke the feeling that we are faced at once with something obvious and with a question. When we can look at a photograph as soon as we have “taken” it, we immediately, moreover, sense the distance between what the image tells us and what we have been able to see for ourselves only seconds before. The observation of this disparity, recognisable at every moment, is proper to the photographic phenomenon. We grant each photograph an element of truth but suspect its indeterminacy and sense its contradictions.
The photographic image is a constellation of questions for the eye because it offers viewers forms and signs they have never perceived as such and which conflict with their natural vision.
The enigma, the riddle, the puzzle would thus be fundamental to the photographic act itself.
Inherent in the photographic process, it results from the irreducible distance between the human senses and the camera’s light-sensitive capture: it arises from the split between visual perception and the photographic process.
For the eye, every photograph is an enigma.
Whether they are kept in archives, family albums or agencies, or dumped in the street, photographs are virtual objects which only begin to exist when they find a viewer. The selective collecting process is thus carried out “by eye” and not the eye of the connoisseur or the historian, but the paradoxical eye which goes against the tide of the canonically “good” photograph, it is a slow eye which opens itself to the pleasure of choice. The pursuit of irreplaceable strangeness. A determined eye, in search of what it does not yet know and yet perceives as the baring of the “photographic”, the liberated escape into a “pure” photographic act stripped of its eloquence. By repeating the selections, the eye discovers the unknown properties of the photographic image: it spots the elements of a puzzle to be savoured without anticipation of any solution. As a kind of practical application, when we look closely, these photographs seem more “photographic” than so many other images with more conventional features that quickly lose their interest. They reveal what escapes us in the recognition of the world, what lies beyond its photographic figures repeated over and over again.
The answer to the Sphinx’s riddle, it should be remembered, is humankind. And looking at a photograph means discovering oneself and the human species. Through the disparity and the dissonance between what it shows and what we experience, photography testifies above all, and at every moment, to what “being human” means. And the riddle, the enigma inherent in looking at a photograph is that of our presence in the world.”
Michel Frizot Extract from the book Toute photographie fait énigme / Every photograph is an enigma, Hazan, 2014
Victims of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 brutally put down by the Russians.
Addendum
According to the experts at Fortepan, an open access public resource of the Hungarian audio-visual culture, the dead men in the photograph above are very likely (~99%) not patriots, but members of the State Protection Authority, ÁVH- Államvédelmi Hatóság. The State Protection Authority was the secret police of the People’s Republic of Hungary from 1945 until 1956.
The photograph below recently found on the Fortepan website showing the above sculpture at second back left of the image.
Ismeretlen fotós. 1956. Magyarország, Budapest XIII. Jász utca 74., a Képzőművészeti Kivitelező és Iparvállalat szoboröntödéjének udvara. Sóváry János Táncoló gyerekek alkotása és a mögötte lévő Pátzay Pál Integető című alkotása Budapesten, Antal Károly Birkózók és Mikus Sándor Labdarúgók szobra a Népstadion szoborkertjében, Szomor László Kígyóölő szobra Szolnokon a vérellátónál, Kisfaludi Strobl Zsigmond Kossuth Lajost ábrázoló szobra a Hősök terén került később felállításra.
Unknown photographer. 1956 Hungary, Budapest XIII. Jász utca 74, the yard of the sculptural foundry of the Fine Art Designer and Industrial Company. János Sóváry Creation of Dancing Children and the Pátzay Pál Integető, behind the Antal Károly Birkozók and Mikus Sándor Football Sculpture in the Népstadion Sculpture Garden, The Statue of László Szomor, The Snake Statue in Szolnok, The statue of Kisfaludi Strobl Zsigmond Kossuth Lajost was later erected in the Heroes’ Square.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 or the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 (Hungarian: 1956-os forradalom or felkelés) was a nationwide revolt against the government of the Hungarian People’s Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956. Though leaderless when it first began, it was the first major threat to Soviet control since the USSR’s forces drove out Nazi Germany from its territory at the end of World War II and broke into Central and Eastern Europe.
The revolt began as a student demonstration, which attracted thousands as they marched through central Budapest to the Parliament building, calling out on the streets using a van with loudspeakers via Radio Free Europe. A student delegation, entering the radio building to try to broadcast the students’ demands, was detained. When the delegation’s release was demanded by the demonstrators outside, they were fired upon by the State Security Police (ÁVH) from within the building. One student died and was wrapped in a flag and held above the crowd. This was the start of the revolution. As the news spread, disorder and violence erupted throughout the capital.
The revolt spread quickly across Hungary and the government collapsed. Thousands organised into militias, battling the ÁVH and Soviet troops. Pro-Soviet communists and ÁVH members were often executed or imprisoned and former political prisoners were released and armed. Radical impromptu workers’ councils wrested municipal control from the ruling Hungarian Working People’s Party and demanded political changes. A new government formally disbanded the ÁVH, declared its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, and pledged to re-establish free elections. By the end of October, fighting had almost stopped and a sense of normality began to return.
After announcing a willingness to negotiate a withdrawal of Soviet forces, the Politburo changed its mind and moved to crush the revolution. On 4 November, a large Soviet force invaded Budapest and other regions of the country. The Hungarian resistance continued until 10 November. Over 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops were killed in the conflict, and 200,000 Hungarians fled as refugees. Mass arrests and denunciations continued for months thereafter. By January 1957, the new Soviet-installed government had suppressed all public opposition. These Soviet actions, while strengthening control over the Eastern Bloc, alienated many Western Marxists, leading to splits and/or considerable losses of membership for Communist Parties in the West.
Among the artists exhibited are: Emile Bernard, Edward Burne-Jones, Peter Behrens, Carlo Bugatti, Mariano For-tuny, Loïe Fuller, Emile Gallé, Paul Gauguin, Karl Gräser, Josef Hoffmann, Gustav Klimt, Fernand Khnopff, René Lalique, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Charles R. Mackintosh, Madame D’Ora, Louis Majorelle, Paula Modersohn-Becker, William Morris, Alfons Mucha, Richard Riemerschmid, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Louis C. Tiffany, Henry van de Velde.
The presentation of the work is excellent, just what one would hope for, and the works themselves are magnificent – objects that you would hope existed, but didn’t know for sure that they did.
Particularly interesting are the use of large historical photographs of the objects in use in situ, behind the actual object itself; the presence of large three-dimensional structures (such as the Erkerzimmer for the Hotel Gallia in Nice, 1894-1900) built in the gallery; and the welcome lack of “wallpaper noise” (as I call it) that has dogged recent exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria (eg. the ongoing Andy Warhol / Ai Weiwei exhibition). It is so nice to be able to contemplate these objects without the additional and unnecessary “noise” of competing wallpaper behind each object.
The work itself reflects the time from which it emanates – visual, disruptive, psychological, technical, natural, beautiful and sensual – locating “Art Nouveau in its historical context of ideas as a reform movement with all its manifold facets and extremes. Adopting a particular focus on the relationship between nature and technology, [the exhibition] illuminates the most varied disciplines, ranging far beyond the movement of arts and crafts and reaching as far as the history of medicine and the technology of film-making… The ideal of superior craft in contrast to industrial articles collides with the commercial idea of competition and the marketing strategies at that time. Therefore the exhibition project manoeuvres at the intersection of utopia and capitalism.”
One of the most vital periods of creativity in all fields in recent history.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
A Trip to the Moon – the 1902 Science Fiction Film by Georges Méliès
A Trip to the Moon (French: Le Voyage dans la Lune) is a 1902 French silent film directed by Georges Méliès. It’s considered one of the first science fiction film.
A Trip to the Moon ( Le Voyage dans la Lune) is a 1902 French adventure film directed by Georges Méliès. Inspired by a wide variety of sources, including Jules Verne’s novels From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, the film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the Moon’s surface, escape from an underground group of Selenites (lunar inhabitants), and return to Earth with a captive Selenite. It features an ensemble cast of French theatrical performers, led by Méliès himself in the main role of Professor Barbenfouillis, and is filmed in the overtly theatrical style for which Méliès became famous.A Trip to the Moon was named one of the 100 greatest films of the 20th century by The Village Voice, ranked 84th. The film remains the best-known of the hundreds of films made by Méliès, and the moment in which the capsule lands in the Moon’s eye remains one of the most iconic and frequently referenced images in the history of cinema. It is widely regarded as the earliest example of the science fiction film genre and, more generally, as one of the most influential films in cinema history.
The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG) would like to dare a quite new approach to the epoch of the Art Nouveau in its exhibition project Art Nouveau. The Great Utopia. In contrast to the period about a century ago, when Art Nouveau was le dernier cri, it can be seen today not just as a mere historical stylistic era, but can open up parallels to complex phenomena familiar to visitors from their own experience: scarcity of resources and issues of what materials to use, precarious working conditions and consumer behaviour, the trade-off between ecological and aesthetic considerations in manufacturing processes or the desire for stylishly elegant, prestigious interior furnishings. These are just a few of the aspects which emerge as central motives common to both the reform movement of the years around 1900 and for the decisions facing today’s consumers. The exhibition has therefore been chosen in order to bring out as clearly as possible in this new setting the roots of the ideas and motives which informed Art Nouveau. The new presentation still revolves, for instance, around the World Exhibition of 1900 as an international platform of modern design. Furthermore the flight away from European industrialisation and the march of technology to imagined places of yearning such as the Middle Ages or nature is highlighted.
A further aspect is the change in the way people experienced their bodies in the fashion of the rational dress reform movement and modern dance. The exhibition project will attempt to locate Art Nouveau in its historical context of ideas as a reform movement with all its manifold facets and extremes. Adopting a particular focus on the relationship between nature and technology, it illuminates the most varied disciplines, ranging far beyond the movement of arts and crafts and reaching as far as the history of medicine and the technology of film-making. The exhibits can be read as artistic positions that address technological innovation as well as theories from Karl Marx (1818-1883) to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). The ideal of superior craft in contrast to industrial articles collides with the commercial idea of competition and the marketing strategies at that time. Therefore the exhibition project manoeuvres at the intersection of utopia and capitalism. Visitors will be able to see paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, posters, books, tapestries, reform dresses, photo-graphs and films as well as scientific and historical medical apparatus and models.
Text from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg website
Albert Londe (1858-1917) was an influential French photographer, medical researcher and chronophotographer.He is remembered for his work as a medical photographer at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, funded by the Parisian authorities, as well as being a pioneer in X-ray photography. During his two decades at the Salpêtrière, Albert Londe developed into arguably the most outstanding scientific photographer of his time.
In 1878 neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot hired Londe as a medical photographer at the Salpêtrière.In 1882 Londe devised a system to photograph the physical and muscular movements of patients (including individuals experiencing epileptic seizures). This he accomplished by using a camera with nine lenses that were triggered by electromagnetic energy, and with the use of a metronome he was able to sequentially time the release of the shutters, therefore taking photos onto glass plates in quick succession. A few years later Londe developed a camera with twelve lenses for photographing movement. In 1893 Londe published the first book on medical photography, titled La photographie médicale: Application aux sciences médicales et physiologiques. In 1898 he published Traité pratique de radiographie et de radioscope: technique et applications médicales.
Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903) Vase mit Selbstbildnis | Vase with self-portrait 1889 Stoneware, engobe, copper and oxblood glaze 19.5 x 12cm Designmuseum Danmark, Kopenhagen Photo: Pernille Klemp
The goldsmiths and jewellers of the second half of the nineteenth century constantly strove to perfect and develop the techniques of enamelling for artistic purposes. Eugène Feuillâtre, who headed the Lalique enamelling workshop before opening his own workshop in 1897, specialised in enamel on silver. The dilatation of the metal and its reactions with the colouring agents made this technique difficult. But it allowed Feuillâtre to obtain the blurred, milky, pearly tones that are so characteristic of his work. Feuillâtre’s use of colours illustrates his ability to choose materials to suit the effect he wanted. He is one of the craftsmen whose talent swept artistic enamelling to a veritable apotheosis about 1900.
In the nineteenth century, Europe is shaken by the arrival of industrialisation which upsets the social organisation. This crisis is particularly felt in Germany where signs of rejection of the industrial world appear as early as 1870. Thus, in response to the urbanisation generated by a new organisation of work, Naturism appears. Attempting to flee the pollution of the cities, to create communities and “garden city” to live in harmony with nature. Those who share this view soon gather around the movement of Reform of the life (Lebensreform, 1892). The movement attracts followers of vegetarianism, naturism, spiritism, natural medicines, the Hygienism, the Theosophical Society, as well as artists.
In 1889, Franz Hartmann, German astrologer and Alfredo Pioda, a local man into progressive politics, both loving theosophical theories under strong Hindu influence, launched the idea of a “secular monastery” bringing together individuals “regardless of race, creed, sex, caste or colour. ” But nothing came of it. Eleven years later, he resurfaced with seven young men from good families, born in Germany, Holland, Slovenia and Montenegro, who landed in Ascona (Switzerland), attracted by the beauty of the place, its climate and possible telluric forces which the place would wear. The clan consists of Henri Oedenkoven (son of wealthy industrialists Antwerp), Karl Gräser (former officer of the Imperial Army, founder of the peace group Ohne Zwang, Unconstrained), his brother, the painter Gustav Gräser, Ida Hoffman (a feminist intellectual) Jeny and her sister, Lotte Hattemer (a beautiful young girl with anarchist ideas, breaking with a father who nonetheless supports herself needs) and Ferdinand Brune.
Spiritualist sects, pharmacists, nudists, philosophical circles, feminist movements, pacifists, socialists, libertarians, gurus, Theosophists, come together to form a nebula of more or less related interest, a band that will unite in a place that combines lifestyle and utopian effervescence. The hill is named Monte Verità, the Mountain of the truth. The group advocated free love, equality between men and women, they gardening scantily clad (or bare), alcohol was banned, meals consist of raw vegetables and fruits. As often, the ideal was overtaken by reality: after several months of reciprocity disagreement appears, especially between Henry Oedenkoven, who plans to open a place of cure, and the brothers Gräser. They who dedicate themselves to self-sufficiency and barter reject this conversion to money. Monte Verita knowns immediately two trends: the bourgeois dream paradise enjoying the modern comfort (water, electricity) and potentially profitable; and aspiration of returning to a liberated state of nature.
L.M.L.M. “Karl Gräser,” text translated from the La Maud La Maud website January 23, 2014 [Online] Cited 30/01/2016
Curator: Paul Martineau, Associate Curator of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum
Minor White (American, 1908-1976) Jupiter Portfolio 1975 Portfolio of 12 gelatin silver prints
~ Please click on the photograph to see a larger version of the sequence, and then click again to enlarge the photographs ~
This is such a disappointing posting… not for the quality of the work, which is exceptional, but for the lack of it.
I have been waiting for this exhibition for a very long time and asked MoPA for the press images:
1/ Nine were supplied from the Jupiter Portfolio, NOT even the whole sequence, to illustrate the exhibition 2/ The images supplied were so small as to be more than useless 3/ I then wrote to the Minor White Archive at Princeton University asking for more images. No reply
So I have scanned the images from the Jupiter Portfolio myself so that at least you can see one whole MW sequence online. You can feel the space between the images, that frisson between two disparate images (what MW calls ice/fire) that is part of ** what you should FEEL in your HEART – if you click on the small horizontal photograph below to see the sequence in larger photographs.
In the sequence we have the line of light over the sea in the first image, Devil’s Slide, San Mateo County, California (1947), which is then picked up in the line of the upper thigh and buttock in the second image Nude Foot, San Francisco (1947) with its gorgeous sensuality. Again, that line is illuminated in the third image Columbus Avenue, San Francisco (1949) by the white above the sandblaster’s head, while the heart shape arrow points back to the buttock in the previous image, perhaps subconsciously referencing White’s homosexuality. The white lettering of this image is then intensified, expanded and abstracted in the next image, Birdlime and Surf, Point Lobos, California (1951), these markings then flowing through into the lines of the telegraph pole in the infra red photograph of two barns Vicinity of Danville, New York (1955).
Transposing down a pitch, MW then turns these lines from the horizontal plane to the vertical and they descend softly into the swirling cosmos of Windowsill Daydreaming, Rochester, New York (1958), one of my favourite photographs by the artist for its indeterminate, morphic “air.” These striations and nodules of presence are then repeated in varying forms through the next four images – through peeling paint, ice crystals, rock and the darkly printed ivy and wood. These photographs move you through the elements, like a piece of music. The markings on wood in Ivy, Portland, Oregon (1964) are then echoed in the marker in the photograph Cape Breton, Nova Scotia (1970), to be finally stretched and elongated vertically in the sublime Vermont (1971).
Just imagine holding this composition, this music (“visual literacy”) in your head for nigh on 28 years before you sequenced these images, before you had them all together and you knew what you needed to say… as a human being and as an artist.
** The time between does indeed reference White’s belief that the space between the images is as important as the image itself, but it is also the ability of the images to speak to images further down the line (and time) of the sequence, and further down the line of the imagination. How seeds planted earlier in the sequence can reappear as puncture, prick, punctum, spirit, revelation even, the closer we come in meditation and a sense of quietness to the photographs. This is the joy of the art of Minor White.
To finish let me say a couple of things. As far as I can ascertain, this is about the only complete sequence of his online. It is such a pity that so great an artist, who taught photography as art to the world (and was my absolute hero when I started studying photography in 1991), should not have his work available to be seen as it should be seen, in a sequence. Free for everyone to see around the world, to study and to understand what he was trying to say with his revelatory art.
I am so over museums trying to protect what they have, instead of spreading the love and the understanding of the art. They are custodians of the art NOT the owners. Some of them should remember that…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. Minor White was always the person I most looked up to when I started photography as I tried to photograph in meditation, forming a link between myself, the object back through the camera to the film, hoping for some form of revelation in the negative and the subsequent print. MW, Paul Strand and Eugene Atget, with a bit of Stieglitz and Aaron Siskind thrown in for good measure, where my guiding stars.
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Photographs side by side cannot help being mutually affected. Transpose them, the meaning changes.”
Minor White, 1976
Minor White (American, 1908-1976) Jupiter Portfolio 1975 Portfolio of 12 gelatin silver prints
The Museum of Photographic Arts (MOPA) presents an original exhibition dedicated to the work and legacy of American photographer Minor White (1908-1976) in The Time Between: The Sequences of Minor White.
The exhibition is the first major museum examination solely focusing on White’s sequences, a unique style of presentation he refined throughout his career. As a poet, writer, educator, curator and photographer, White believed in the power of images to be transformed when positioned sequentially, creating a new whole and a new level of interpretation, said MOPA Executive Director Deborah Klochko.
“One the most important American photographers of the 20th century, White’s work is still vital and important 40 years after his death,” Klochko said. “The title of the exhibition, The Time Between, references White’s belief that the space between the images is as important as the image itself.”
Many of the images in The Time Between are considered to be White’s most iconic. The exhibition features two bound albums, three digital sequences and eight print sequences presented together for the first time as White intended. White promoted the idea of “visual literacy,” which teaches the reading of images, similar to how his sequences encourage viewers to see the images in a larger context.
Press release from MOPA
Grouping photographs was Minor White’s preferred mode of presentation, and the sequence, of all his arrangements, was his most sophisticated form of pictorial expression.
Initially the sequence was an outgrowth of White’s work in poetry. However, in the realm of photographic art, perhaps his most important inspiration was the sequences of Alfred Stieglitz begun in the 1920s. Stieglitz taught that no all photographs need function as individual or summational works, but that certain images in a structured context could serve in support of others and could create a total statement more complex and multifaceted than single works alone or loose assortments of related pictures.
In addition to the influence of Stieglitz’s sequences, White learned a great deal about laying out of photographs from Nancy Newhall at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1945-46. She had been influenced by Stieglitz’s work and by her conversations with him beginning in the late 1930s, and it was she who encouraged Minor White to meet Stieglitz.
While White was at the museum, Nancy Newhall was organising a retrospective of Edward Weston’s photographs. Her installation of this exhibition was a revelation to him. Nancy Newhall was gifted in her understanding of photographs and had a remarkable feeling for the dynamics of expression in pictorial art and an acute sensitivity for the photographer’s unique approach. Her interpretation of the iconographic elements contained in individual photographs was superb, and the way in which she could create a sympathetic ordering of such pictures was extraordinary.
Minor White’s sequences, highly structured groupings of pictures with similar formats, sometimes contain ten, twenty, or thirty photographs. They need to be studied in a state of concentration, or heightened awareness, and involve recognition of both the content and feeling, the intellectual and emotional aspects, of each image in relation to its adjacent images. However, one must read the images as an ensemble, in their cumulative assertion of a complex and inter-connected idea, to sense the import of the artist’s statement.
Describing the sequence as “a cinema of stills,” Minor White wrote, “The time between photographs is filled by the beholder, first of all from himself, then from what he can read in the implications of design, the suggestions springing from treatment, and any symbolism that might grow from within the work itself … The meaning appears in the mood they [the symbols] raise in the beholder; and the flow of the sequence eddies in the river of his associations as he passes from picture to picture.”
Reading White’s sequences depends on understanding both the symbolic and the descriptive capabilities of his photography…
“The Sequence,” from Bunnell, Peter. Minor White: The Eye That Shapes. The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1989, p. 231
Another exhibition to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) from the same source (the Victoria and Albert Museum) as the exhibition I travelled up to Sydney to review last year.
I am always ecstatic when I see her work, no more so than when I view images that I have not seen before, such as that dark, brooding slightly out of focus portrait of William Michael Rossetti (1865, below) or the profusion of delicate countenances and gazes that is May Day (1866, below).
The piercing gaze of Julia Jackson (1867, below) always astounds, as though she is speaking to you, directly, from life. The r/evolutionary English naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin (1868, below) is pictured – no, that’s the wrong word – is materialised before our eyes at the age of 59 (looking much older), through low depth of field, delicate tonality and the defining of an incredible profile that imbues his portrait with the implicit intelligence of the man. I would have loved to have known what he was thinking.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Victoria and Albert Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I write to ask you if you will… exhibit at the South Kensington Museum a set of Prints of my late series of Photographs that I intend should electrify you with delight and startle the world”
Julia Margaret Cameron to Henry Cole, 21 February 1866
“My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & Ideal & sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty.”
Julia Margaret Cameron to Sir John Herschel, 31 December 1864
Cameron devoted herself to the medium with energy and ambition. Within a month of receiving the camera she made the photograph she called her ‘first success’, a portrait of Annie Philpot, the daughter of a family staying in the Isle of Wight. Cameron later wrote of her excitement:
“I was in a transport of delight. I ran all over the house to search for gifts for the child. I felt as if she entirely had made the picture.”
From her ‘first success’ she moved on quickly to photographing family and friends. These early portraits reveal how she experimented with soft focus, dramatic lighting and close-up compositions, features that would become her signature style.
To mark the bicentenary of the birth of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), one of the most important and innovative photographers of the 19th century, the V&A will showcase more than 100 of her photographs from the Museum’s collection. The exhibition will offer a retrospective of Cameron’s work and examine her relationship with the V&A’s founding director, Sir Henry Cole, who in 1865 presented her first museum exhibition and the only one during her lifetime.
Cameron is one of the most celebrated women in the history of photography. She began her photographic career when she received her first camera as a gift from her daughter at the age of 48, and quickly and energetically devoted herself to the art of photography. Within two years she had sold and given her photographs to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) and in 1868, the Museum granted her the use of two rooms as a portrait studio, likely making her the Museum’s first ‘artist-in-residence’.
150 years after first exhibiting her work, the V&A will present highlights of Cameron’s output, including original prints acquired directly from the artist and a selection of her letters to Henry Cole. Cole’s 1865 diary, in which he records going ‘to Mrs Cameron’s… to have my portrait photographed in her style’ will be on view, along with the only surviving Cameron portrait of Cole. The exhibition will also include the first photograph to be identified of Cameron’s studio. Entitled Idylls of the Village, or Idols of the Village, it was made in about 1863 by Oscar Gustaf Rejlander, possibly in collaboration with Cameron, and depicts two women drawing water from a well in front of the ‘glazed fowl-house’ Cameron turned into her studio. The print has been newly identified and has never before been exhibited.
Best known for her powerful portraits, Cameron also posed her sitters – friends, family and servants – as characters from biblical, historical or allegorical stories. The exhibition will feature a variety of photographic subjects, which Cameron described as ‘Portraits’, ‘Madonna groups’, and ‘Fancy Subjects for Pictorial Effect’. These range from Annie, a close-up of a child’s face that Cameron called her ‘first success’, to striking portraits of members of Cameron’s intellectual and artistic circle such as poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, scientist Charles Darwin and Julia Jackson, Cameron’s niece and mother of Virginia Woolf. Also on display will be Renaissance-inspired religious arrangements and illustrations to Tennyson’s epic Arthurian poem, Idylls of the King.
Julia Margaret Cameron will be structured around four letters from Cameron to Cole, each demonstrating a different aspect of her development as an artist: her early ambition; her growing artistic confidence and innovation; her concerns as a portraitist and desire to earn money from photography; and her struggles with technical aspects of photography. This final section will offer insight into Cameron’s working methods – an arduous process which involved handling potentially hazardous chemicals. It will include a group of her most experimental photographs, recently discovered to have once belonged to her friend and artistic advisor, the painter and sculptor G.F. Watts. Cameron’s photographs were highly innovative: intentionally out-of-focus, and often including scratches, smudges and other traces of her process. In her lifetime, Cameron was criticised for her unconventional techniques, but also appreciated for the beauty of her compositions and her conviction that photography was an art form.
The exhibition is part of a nationwide celebration of Julia Margaret Cameron’s work during her bicentenary year, including the exhibition Julia Margaret Cameron: Influence and Intimacy at the Science Museum’s Media Space, which displays prints given by Cameron to the astronomer Sir John Herschel, and a series of exhibitions and events at Cameron’s former home, Dimbola Museum and Galleries, on the Isle of Wight.
If I had to nominate one period of art that is my favourite, it would be European avant-garde art between 1919-1939. The sense of renewed creativity, inventiveness, and sustained enquiry into the nature of things by artists, this texture of reality, just fascinates me. A hyper-sensory, objective sobriety, yes, but more – an opposite, apposite expression of critical, cultural opprobrium that sticks its proboscis into mental and machinic spaces.
The relations between the physical and the psychic are evidenced during this period “as a general movement and multiplicity, rather than just a series of mechanisms.” What surrounds the metaphysical body, its environment, is enacted as a performance upon the body through a “continuous set of relations, multiplicities, speeds, connections. Bodies are only distinguished by certain singularities, which are clarifications of expression drawing together certain multiplicities, under the aegis of an event.” Bodies are (en)acted upon. Conversely, “Just as bodies can be seen as machinic, so too does the machinic depend upon bodies wrought out of vibration [of energy, of ideas] by clarity of expression of events.” They are folded and refolded into each other, in a series of multiplicities and intensities – of architecture and art, of sex and gender, of flagellation and flight – so that there is a ‘synthesis of heterogeneties’, or hetero(gene)ties that evidence the DNA of our becoming, our diverse difference, our heterogeneic alterity. This folding, this vibration of energy, these clear zones of expression and performance produce this dazzling, de(gene)rate art.1
In this huge posting I have tried to sequence the machinic (the spelling auto correct keeps changing it to “mechanic” which is quite ironic) with the figurative, the painting of architecture with the architectural photograph; the photograph of the sewing machine with the painting of the Paper Machine; the distorted, etched face with the photographic war damaged face; the Modernist housing estate with the alienation of the Picture of Industry. You get the picture. One is folded into the other as performance, as vibration of energy, as (destructive, or creative) ritual of re/production. And there we have the gay lovers, the first transgender woman who dies after operations on her body, the climax – in an erotic sense – of the scar on the woman’s leg in Friedrich Seidenstücker’s Untitled (c. 1930, below) or the blood lines of the eyeball in Herbert Ploberger’s Self-Portrait with Ophthalmological Models (c. 1928-1930, below). Or the cool objectiveness of Sander’s photographs – Coal Carrier, Painter’s Wife, The Architect – against the detached titles (The Jeweller, Portrait of a Lawyer, Portrait of an Architect, name of person secondary) but outrageous colours and distortions / elongations of the painted portraits. Fascinating archetypal, subjective / objective correlation.
This is a mad, dangerous, exciting world in which these artists lived, which they mapped and depicted in all its glorious intensity. Flowering one minute, dead the next.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
1/ Some of these ideas came from Murphie, Andrew. “Computers are not theatre: the machine in the ghost in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s thought,” in Genosko, Gary (ed.,). Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. London, Routledge, 2001, pp. 1311-1312
“German Expressionism is an art which above all, celebrated, inwardness.”
“There’s no contradiction between being a Fascist and being an artist… I’m sorry but there isn’t. It happens that not very many good artists have been Nazis.”
Willie Vicarage, suffering facial wounds in the Battle of Jutland 1916 Naval Battle was one of the first men to receive facial reconstruction using plastic surgery. Doctor Harold Gillies created the “tubed pedicle” technique that used a flap of skin from the chest or forehead and swung it into place over the face. The flap remained attached but was stitched into a tube, keeping the original blood supply intact and dramatically reducing the infection rate.
This photograph is not in the exhibition, but I have included it to show an actual case study of facial reconstruction during WW1. While there were few books in Britain about the war, soldiers injuries and facial reconstruction, Otto Dix produced his seminal portfolio Der Krieg (War)(below).
“Otto Dix was born in 1891 in Untermhaus, Thuringia, the son of an ironworker. He initially trained in Gera and at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts as a painter of wall decorations and later taught himself how to paint on canvas. He volunteered as a machine-gunner during World War I and in the autumn of 1915 he was sent to the Western Front. He was at the Somme during the major allied offensive of 1916.
After the war he studied at the academies of Dresden and Dusseldorf. Together with George Grosz, he was one of the leading exponents of the artistic movement Die Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a form of social realist art which unsentimentally examined the decadence and underlying social inequality of post-war German society. With the rise of the National Socialists in 1933, Dix was dismissed from his teaching post at the Dresden Academy. He moved south to Lake Constance and was only allowed to continue practising as an artist after he agreed to relinquish overtly political subject matter in favour of landscape painting. Dix was conscripted into the army during World War II and in 1945 was captured and put into a prisoner of war camp. He returned to Dresden after the war where his paintings became more religiously reflective of his war-time experiences. He died in 1969.
Der Krieg (War) 1924 arose out of Dix’s own experiences of the horrors of war. As outlined above, he had volunteered for service in the army and fought as a machine-gunner on the Western Front. He was wounded a number of times, once almost fatally. War profoundly affected him as an individual and as an artist, and he took every opportunity, both during his active service and afterwards, to document his experiences. These experiences would become the subject matter of many of his later paintings and are central to the Der Krieg cycle.
Der Krieg itself, as a cycle of prints (51 in total), is consciously modelled on Goya’s (1746-1828) equally famous and equally devastating Los Desastres de la Guerra (The disasters of war). Los Desastres detailed Goya’s own account of the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion and the Spanish War of Independence from 1808 to 1814. Goya’s cycle of 82 etchings, which he worked on for a decade after the Spanish War of Independence were not, however, published until 1863, long after his death.
Like Los Desastres, Der Krieg uses a variety of etching techniques and does so with an equally astonishing facility. Similarly, it exploits the cumulative possibilities of a long sequence of images and mirrors Goya’s unflinching, stark realism in terms of its fundamental presentation. GH Hamilton describes Dix’s cycle as ‘perhaps the most powerful as well as the most unpleasant anti-war statements in modern art… It was truly this quality of unmitigated truth, truth to the most commonplace and vulgar experiences, as well as the ugly realities of psychological experience, that gave his work a strength and consistency attained by no other contemporary artist, not even by (George) Grosz…’ It has become a commonplace to see this cycle as an admonition against the barbarity of war. And there is no doubt that as a human document it is a powerful cautionary work. At a psychological level, however, its truth goes deeper than this. Dix was both horrified and fascinated by the experience of war…
This nightmarish, hallucinatory quality pervades all of the Der Krieg images. Paradoxically, there is also a quality of sensuousness, an almost perverse delight in the rendering of horrific detail, which indicates that there was perhaps, in Dix’s case, an almost addictive quality to the hyper-sensory input of war. In terms of the general corpus of Dix’s work, Der Krieg occupies a central place amongst the large number of paintings and works-on-paper devoted to the theme of war. The work is astonishingly powerful and, as stated above, it remains one of the most powerful indictments of war ever conceived. It is universally regarded as one of the great masterpieces of twentieth century. Dix’s oeuvre as a whole, and Der Krieg in particular, was hugely influential on a number of other twentieth century artist such as Ben Shahn, Pablo Picasso and Robert Motherwell.”
Mark Henshaw. “The Art of War: Otto Dix’s Der Krieg [War] cycle 1924,” on the National Gallery of Australia website [Online] Cited 07/01/2016
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, the first comprehensive show in the United States to explore the themes that characterize the dominant artistic trends of the Weimar Republic. Organised in association with the Museo Correr in Venice, Italy, this exhibition features nearly 200 paintings, photographs, drawings, and prints by more than 50 artists, many of whom are little known in the United States. Key figures – Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad, August Sander, and Max Beckmann – whose heterogeneous careers are essential to understanding 20th century German modernism, are presented together with lesser known artists, including Herbert Ploberger, Hans Finsler, Georg Schrimpf, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Carl Grossberg, and Aenne Biermann, among others. Special attention is devoted to the juxtaposition of painting and photography, offering the rare opportunity to examine both the similarities and differences between the movement’s diverse media.
During the 14 years of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), artists in Germany grappled with the devastating aftermath of World War I: the social, cultural, and economic effects of rapid modernisation and urbanisation; staggering unemployment and despair; shifting gender identities; and developments in technology and industry. Situated between the end of World War I and the Nazi assumption of power, Germany’s first democracy thrived as a laboratory for widespread cultural achievement, witnessing the end of Expressionism, the exuberant anti-art activities of the Dadaists, the establishment of the Bauhaus design school, and the emergence of a new realism.
This new turn to realism, best recognised by a 1925 exhibition in Mannheim, Neue Sachlichkeit (of which New Objectivity is the English translation), has at times been called Post-Expressionism, neo-naturalism, Verism, and Magic Realism. The diverse group of artists associated with this new realism was not unified by manifesto, political tendency, or geography, they shared a skepticism regarding the direction Germany society was taking in the years following World War I and an awareness of the human isolation these changes brought about.
Germany’s financial, sociopolitical, and emotional defeat in WWI took a profound toll on the nation. In contrast to their Expressionist predecessors – who had enthusiastically embraced the war before confronting its harrowing realities on the battlefield – practitioners of the New Objectivity movement were disillusioned with the complex realities of the new Germany. Digressing from Expressionism’s penchant for bold, abstract subjectivity, the Weimar Republic’s burgeoning group of artists favoured realism, precision, objective sobriety, and the appropriation of Old Master painting techniques, including a nostalgic return to portraiture and heightened attention to the appearance of surface…
Born in Munich, Hans Finsler was a gifted teacher of photography in Switzerland from the 1920s to the 1950s, where he taught students the vocabulary of modernism and its strength of vision. Finsler was also well-known for his stylish and innovative commercial work reflecting the contemporary Neue Sachlichkeit (New Vision) aesthetic of describing machinery, architecture and manufactured products with clarity and respect. His private work, however, was more profound and philosophical. He experimented tirelessly with simple and elemental forms, developing theories of motion and stillness with highlights and shadows, often using eggs as his principal subject matter. Finsler’s photographs were exhibited in the important exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart in 1929.
Carl Grossberg (German, 1894-1940) The Yellow Boiler (Der Gelbe Kessel) 1933 Oil on wood 37 x 29 in. (94 x 73.7cm) Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal, Germany Photo courtesy Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal, Germany
Carl Grossberg (German, 1894-1940) The Paper Machine (Die Papiermaschine) 1934 Oil on wood 35 7/16 x 45 11/16 in. (90 x 116cm) Private collection Photo by Benjamin Hasenclever, Munich
Wanda von Debschitz-Kunowski (German, 1870-1935) Sewing Machine (Nähmaschine) c. 1930 Photograph 7 7/16 x 5 5/16 in. (18.9 x 15.1cm) Galerie Berinson, Berlin Photo: Galerie Berinson, Berlin
Wanda von Debschitz-Kunowski was a German portrait photographer based in Munich. From 1902 through 1914, she worked at the Debschitz School, first in the metal workshop (1902-1905) and later teaching photography (1905-1914). By 1921, she had opened her own photography studio in Berlin. Her work included nudes, and dancers.
“We still don’t sufficiently appreciate the opportunity to capture the magic of material things. The structure of wood, stone, and metal can be shown with a perfection beyond the means of painting… To do justice to modern technology’s rigid linear structure… only photography is capable of that.”
So wrote Albert Renger-Patzsch in 1927 about the camera’s innate ability to depict the Industrial Age. Here he studied the materials of identically shaped, finished wooden handles and industrially produced steel heads, while also representing the flatirons as an army of tools standing at attention like bowling pins. Renger-Patzsch’s photograph celebrates the beauty of the commonplace object.
Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Albert Renger-Patzsch(German, 1897-1966)
Renger-Patzsch was born in Würzburg and began making photographs by age twelve.After military service in the First World War he studied chemistry at Dresden Technical College. In the early 1920s he worked as a press photographer for the Chicago Tribune before becoming a freelancer and, in 1925, publishing a book, The choir stalls of Cappenberg. He had his first museum exhibition in 1927. A second book followed in 1928, Die Welt ist schön (The World is Beautiful). This, his best-known book, is a collection of one hundred of his photographs in which natural forms, industrial subjects and mass-produced objects are presented with the clarity of scientific illustrations. The book’s title was chosen by his publisher; Renger-Patzsch’s preferred title for the collection was Die Dinge (“Things”).
In its sharply focused and matter-of-fact style his work exemplifies the aesthetic of The New Objectivity that flourished in the arts in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Like Edward Weston in the United States, Renger-Patzsch believed that the value of photography was in its ability to reproduce the texture of reality, and to represent the essence of an object.He wrote: “The secret of a good photograph – which, like a work of art, can have aesthetic qualities – is its realism … Let us therefore leave art to artists and endeavour to create, with the means peculiar to photography and without borrowing from art, photographs which will last because of their photographic qualities.”
Lachnit was born in the small town of Gittersee; his family moved to Dresden in 1906. He studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule Dresden under Richard Guhr, and later at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he was acquainted with and influenced by Otto Dix, Conrad Felixmüller, and Otto Griebel. He joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1924 and was active in producing various forms of Agitprop throughout the 1920s. He co-founded the “Neue Gruppe” with Hans Grundig, Otto Griebel, and Fritz Skade; successful exhibitions in Paris, Düsseldorf, Ansterdam, and Dresden followed.
After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Lachnit’s work was declared “degenerate” and confiscated by authorities. During this period he was not allowed to make art and worked as an exhibition designer. Much of his confiscated work was destroyed during the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden. His 1923 watercolours Man and Woman in the Window and “Girl at Table” were found in the 2012 Nazi loot discovery.
Hans Mertens (German, 1906-1944) Still Life with Household Appliances (Stilleben mit Hausgeräten) 1928 Oil on canvas 25 5/8 x 27 9/16 in. (65 x 70cm) Sprengel Museum Hannover Photo: bpk, Berlin/Sprengel Museum/Aline Gwose/Art Resource, NY
Hans Mertens (German, 1906-1944)
Hans Mertens (January 2, 1906 – August 18, 1944) was a German painter associated with the New Objectivity. Mertens was born in Hanover and had his artistic training there at the School of Arts and Crafts during 1925-1926. He found work as a restorer, first in the Provinzialmuseum and then in the Kestner-Museum in Hanover. He was a friend of Carl Buchheister and Kurt Schwitters.
During the 1920s, Mertens painted still lifes, landscapes, and figurative subjects in a controlled style. A Constructivist tendency is visible in his painting Card Players (1926): the imposition of geometric order onto organic forms causes the man’s hair part, shirtfront, and cards to align with an edge of a background wall. Still Life with Household Articles (1928, above) is typical of much New Objectivity painting in its dispassionate rendering of mundane objects.
Mertens remained dependent on work as a commercial artist to make a living. In 1933 he married Hanna Vogel. In 1939 he was called to military service. Many of his works were destroyed when his studio was bombed by Allied forces in 1943. In 1944 Mertens was killed in action at Albi.
Karl Völker (17 October 1889 – 28 December 1962) was a German architect and painter associated with the New Objectivity movement. He was born in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt. After an apprenticeship as an interior decorator from 1904 to 1910, he studied in 1912-1913 at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts where Richard Guhr was his teacher. His first solo exhibition was in 1918 at the Halle Kunstverein.
Völker was the director of the Halle Artists Group, founded in 1919 and associated with the Berlin November Group. In the early years of the Weimar Republic he contributed many articles and prints to newspapers of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany).
He joined the Berlin “Red Group” in 1924 and was a contributor to the journal Das Wort. His early paintings, such as Industriebild (Picture of Industry, 1923 above) are in a constructivist style. His painting Railroad Station (1924) celebrates both the station – newly built by Halle’s KPD government – and the unity of the massed workers descending the stairs.
He worked as an architect until 1933, when Hitler took power. Declared a degenerate artist by the Nazis, he was forced to support himself from 1933 to 1943 performing architectural conservation work. After military service in World War II he resumed working as an architect and painter. In 1949 he had a retrospective exhibition at the Moritzburgmuseum in Halle. He died in Halle in 1962.
Unknown photographer Karl Völker early 1930s Silver gelatin photograph
This photograph is not in the exhibition. The portrait looks like the man at left in the painting Picture of Industry (Industriebild) (c. 1924, above). Therefore, it could be a self-portrait of the artist in the painting.
“In Grosz’s Germany, everything and everybody is for sale. All human transactions, except for the class solidarity of the workers, are poisoned. The world is owned by four breeds of pig: the capitalist, the officer, the priest and the hooker, whose other form is the sociable wife. He was one of the hanging judges of art.”
~ Robert Hughes
Degenerate Art – 1993, The Nazis vs. Expressionism
This is a documentary from 1993 by David Grubin (written, produced, and directed) about the art exhibit under the Nazi regime of what they considered to be the most corrupting and corrosive examples of what they called ‘Entartete Kunst’ or ‘Degenerate Art.’ The exhibit, which opened in July of 1937, was meant to be laughed at and despised. I ran across it in a class on Modernism and Post-Modernism. The film is not generally available at the time of this writing (other than on VHS). Personally, I could think of no better backdrop for the ideas and pathos of expressionist art than Nazi Germany, shown by a great deal of actual footage (most provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – they had an exhibit of their own based on the event that same year). The music is similarly striking, including Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Wagner.
“You know, one of the, most grotesque kind of, unintended results of this… I remember seeing as a kid one of the newsreels of the liberation of the camps… I never forgot that shot of the bulldozer rolling the mass of starved corpses, the typhoid dead, the murdered, into this mass grave… and it always comes back to me strangely enough when I look at the distortion and elongation in German, in certain German expressionist pictures… as though the, uh, the aesthetic distortions of expressionism had been made real, absolute and concrete on the real suffering human body by the Nazis, you know as though this was some kind of climactic work of art which ended up mimicking what they had attempted to suppress. This is a very superficial way of looking at it, I know, because it leaves out the actual content of the suffering, but for a, a gentile boy seeing that in Australia, forty-some years ago… uh, on a grainy movie – I compare the two images and I can’t help thinking of it.”
In 1934-1935 Räderscheidt lived in Berlin. He fled to France in 1936, and settled in Paris, where his work became more colourful, curvilinear and rhythmic. He was interned by the occupation authorities in 1940, but he escaped to Switzerland. In 1949 he returned to Cologne and resumed his work, producing many paintings of horses shortly before adopting an abstract style in 1957.
Anton Räderscheidt (German, 1892-1970)
Anton Räderscheidt (October 11, 1892 – March 8, 1970) was a German painter who was a leading figure of the New Objectivity.
Räderscheidt was born in Cologne. His father was a schoolmaster who also wrote poetry. From 1910 to 1914, Räderscheidt studied at the Academy of Düsseldorf. He was severely wounded in the First World War, during which he fought at Verdun. After the war he returned to Cologne, where in 1919 he cofounded the artists’ group Stupid with other members of the local constructivist and Dada scene. The group was short-lived, as Räderscheidt was by 1920 abandoning constructivism for a magic realist style. In 1925 he participated in the Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) exhibition at the Mannheim Kunsthalle.
Many of the works Räderscheidt produced in the 1920s depict a stiffly posed, isolated couple that usually bear the features of Räderscheidt and his wife, the painter Marta Hegemann. The influence of metaphysical art is apparent in the way the mannequin-like figures stand detached from their environment and from each other. A pervasive theme is the incompatibility of the sexes, according to the art historian Dennis Crockett. Few of Räderscheidt’s works from this era survive, because most of them were either seized by the Nazis as degenerate art and destroyed, or were destroyed in Allied bombing raids. His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.
His marriage to Marta ended in 1933. In 1934-1935 he lived in Berlin. He fled to France in 1936, and settled in Paris, where his work became more colourful, curvilinear and rhythmic. He was interned by the occupation authorities in 1940, but he escaped to Switzerland. In 1949 he returned to Cologne and resumed his work, producing many paintings of horses shortly before adopting an abstract style in 1957.
Räderscheidt was to return to the themes of his earlier work in some of his paintings of the 1960s. After suffering a stroke in 1967, he had to relearn the act of painting. He produced a penetrating series of self-portraits in gouache in the final years of his life. Anton Räderscheidt died in Cologne in 1970.
During the 1920s and ’30s Mantz photographed functionalist architecture such as houses, factories, bridge constructions and motorways. The pictures are extremely detailed, and with their bold cropping and angles they profit from architecture’s geometric and modern idiom. Mantz later moved to the Netherlands where he set up a portrait studio.
A Kodak Brownie camera launched Werner Mantz’s photographic career. As an adolescent, he photographed Cologne and the surrounding landscape and later studied photography at the Bavarian State Academy in Munich. He returned to Cologne, set up a studio and began a freelance career. Mantz soon distinguished himself as an architectural photographer, receiving numerous commissions. In 1932 he moved to Maastricht, in the Netherlands near the German border. He opened a second studio there and closed the Cologne studio in 1938. Mantz received public and private commissions throughout his career and retired in 1971.
Franz Radziwill was a German painter best known for his use of haunting, dream-like imagery. The artist often depicted apocalyptic cityscapes, overcome by war, death, and extreme weather, inspired by his service in both World War I and World War II.
Radziwill spent most of his life in the North Sea resort Dangast at Varel on Jadebusen. During the period of National Socialism he had repeatedly been banned from exhibiting, three of his early works were shown in the exhibition “Entartete Kunst”.Despite the exhibition ban he was committed to Nazism and was a functionary of the Nazi Party.He addressed the tension between art and nature.
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Ficus elastic: Rubber Plant (Ficus elastic: Gummibaum) c. 1927 Gelatin silver print 18 2/5 x 13 3/4 in. (46.7 x 35cm) Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne Photo: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Fotoarchiv
Aenne Biermann(German, 1898-1933)
Biermann’s photographs of minerals transformed her practice from the early personal views of her children to the close-up, direct studies of form that would define her photographs of plants and people that followed and make her a central figure in New Objectivity photography. Thus 1926 began a period of intense productivity for Biermann that lasted until her untimely death, from liver disease, at the age of thirty-five, in 1933.
A self-taught photographer, Aenne Biermann was born Anna Sibilla Sternfeld into a wealthy mercantile family in Goch, on the Lower Rhine, where she received an education in culture and music. In 1920 she married Herbert Joseph Biermann, a prosperous textile merchant and art lover whose family was a founding member of the Jewish community in Goch; following their wedding, they moved to the progressive town of Gera. The couple soon had two children, Helga (born 1921) and Gershon (born 1923), who were the photographer’s first subjects. An avid amateur mineralogist, it was through her collection of rocks that in 1926 she met the geologist Rudolf Hundt, who commissioned her to photograph his specimens the following year for his scientific work. Her photographs of minerals transformed her practice from the early personal views of her children to the close-up, direct studies of form that would define her photographs of plants and people that followed and make her a central figure in New Objectivity photography.
Thus 1926 began a period of intense productivity for Biermann that lasted until her untimely death, from liver disease, at the age of thirty-five, in 1933. In those years, Biermann published in international photography journals and participated in numerous exhibitions, including a solo show in 1929 at the Kunstkabinett, Munich, as well as the influential exhibitions Fotografie der Gegenwart in Essen and Film und Foto in Stuttgart, the same year. This exposure led to art historian Franz Roh’s choice to feature her work in the monograph 60 Fotos: Aenne Biermann (1930), the second (and, ultimately, final) volume in his Fototek series, securing her place in the photographic discourse of the era.
New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933 is organised into five thematic sections: Life in Democracy and the Aftermath of the War examines both the polar conditions dividing Germany’s rising bourgeoisie and those who suffered most from the war’s aftereffects, including maimed war veterans, the unemployed, prostitutes, and victims of political corruption and violence; The City and the Nature of Landscape addresses the growing disparity between an increasingly industrialised urbanity and nostalgic longing for the pastoral; Still Life and Commodities highlights a new form of the traditional still life in which quotidian objects – often indicative of mass production – are staged to create object-portraits; Man and Machine looks to artists’ attempts to reconcile the transformative yet dehumanising effects of rapid industrialisation; and lastly, New Identities: Type and Portraiture showcases a new trend in portraiture in which subjects are rendered as social typecasts rather than individual subjects.
Stephanie Barron, Exhibition Curator and Senior Curator of Modern Art at LACMA, said, “Close examinations of this period still yield new insights into a complicated chapter in modern German art. With very different backgrounds, these artists – some among the most well-known artists of the century, while others are virtually unknown outside Germany – eschewed emotion, gesture, and ecstasy, and sought instead to record and unmask the world around them with a close, impersonal, restrained gaze. Together, they created a collective portrait of a society in uneasy transition, in images that are as striking today as they were in their own time.”
“Contemporary art and popular culture alike are preoccupied with documenting ‘the real,’ and it is worth taking a fresh look at how artists in the 1920s dealt with the uses of realism in a time of postwar uncertainty,” said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. “We hope that New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933 will shed new light on this important intersection of art, politics, and modernisation that marks one of the most crucial periods of the 20th century.”
Installation photograph, New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, showing photographs by August Sander.
Installation photograph, New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, showing Aenne Biermann, Woman with Monocle (Dame mit Monokel), c. 1928 at left, with photographs by Friedrich Seidenstücker (right top) and Franz Roh (right bottom)
Exhibition themes
New Objectivity is divided into five sections that address the competing and, at times, conflicting approaches that the adherents to this new realism applied to the turbulent and ever-changing Weimar years.
The first section, Life in the Democracy and the Aftermath of the War, highlights the disparity between victims of the Weimar Republic and the growing bourgeoisie that benefited from the deprivation of that period. Artists such as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, August Sander, and Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, portrayed urban landscapes highlighting postwar outcasts and their environs: the unemployed, disfigured, victims of violence, and prostitutes are set amid backdrops of bordellos, street corners and other scenes fraught with menace. In contrast, the Weimar Republic’s burgeoning upper class was often depicted as corrupt and ruthless. Davringhausen’s The Profiteer (1920-1921), for example, caricatures a common social type of the early Weimar era: the exploitative businessman making his fortune during the period of hyperinflation. Davringhausen places his profiteer on the top floor of a skyscraper in a long, narrow room filled with windows that appear to be left open, as if there may be the danger of falling out. The brick red walls add to the psychological intensity of the hyper-modern space, in which the well-dressed businessman sits at his desk, enjoying a glass of wine and a cigar as he stares out dispassionately, avoiding the viewer’s gaze.
In The City and the Nature of Landscape, artists respond to the tensions caused by the effects of industrialisation, which bled from cities into rural areas. As factories and jobs proliferated, Germany experienced a mass migration of its population from the countryside to urban areas. The notion of the city became associated with the future while the rural was nostalgically regarded as the past, and those who experienced the transition of migration were subject to feelings of displacement. The complex relationship between the urban and rural reflected the disparate conditions of the Weimar Republic. In addition to artists such as Leonhard Schmidt, Gustav Wunderwald, Erich Wegner, Georg Scholz, and Anton Räderscheidt, this section features Arthur Köster, whose photographs of architect Otto Haesler’s Georgsgarten Siedlung represented architectural spaces using high-contrast lighting and experimental framing. In St. Georgs-Garten Siedlung, Architekt Otto Haesler, Köster’s human subjects, dwarfed by the buildings’ geometric rigour and frozen in the composition’s overriding sense of stillness, suggest an apprehension toward the new, modernised Germany; meanwhile, his images portraying the green spaces of Georgsgarten Siedlung distill nature through the lens of industry.
Still Life and Commodities proposes a new form of the still life, meticulously staged compositions that might be called object-portraits. Zeroing in on disparate, banal objects of everyday life, these images represent things as markers of modernity and mass production. This section sees a recurring motif of cacti and rubber plants – “exotic” plants that were common in households at the time – and includes work by Aenne Biermann, Georg Scholz, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and Finsler, among others.
Man and Machine, the penultimate section of New Objectivity, highlights artists’ attention to the Weimar Republic’s advancements in technology and industry. While some were skeptical about the lack of humanity found within networks of new machinery, others acknowledged the transformative power of technologies and sought new ways of conceiving man’s relationship to industry. Photography plays a key role in this section, not only commenting on its newly accepted position as an art form, but also serving as a key influence for painters such as Carl Grossberg, who executed paintings of factories with photographic precision as seen in Paper Machine (1934). Additionally, some artists, such as Renger-Patzch, attempted to bridge the psychological divide between the natural and the industrial by drawing structural parallels between machinery and botany.
The final section of New Objectivity is dedicated to New Identities: Type and Portraiture, which examines the way artists including Beckmann, Dix, Schad, and their peers turned to portraiture. While diverse in approach, the portraits featured numerous commonalities, including social typecasting, unsentimental renderings, and self-portraiture. Dominating these portraits are depictions of other artists, writers, and performers, the working class, and marginalsed members of society as well as newly established types specific to the period, such as the war veteran and the “new woman.” One of the most iconic images to derive from this new trend informal realism is Max Beckmann’s Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927) in which he wears a smoking jacket and its class connotations like a costume and stares brazenly at the viewer. Another of the most important practitioners of this new portraiture is August Sander, who photographed his many subjects in somber, unexpressive poses, which he then arranged according to profession. The faces captured in his unfinished series – his subjects are only rarely identified by name – form an indelible archive of Weimar society.
Text from the LACMA press release
Die Insel (The Island), L-R: June 1928, July 1930, April 1931 Schwules Museum, Berlin Photo by Nana Bahlmann
Die Freundin (The Girlfriend), September 1932, and Liebende Frauen (Women in Love), 1929 Spinnboden Berlin Photo by Nana Bahlmann
Niels Hoyer (editor) Lili Elbe. Ein Mensch wechseit sein Geschlecht (Man into Woman The First Sex Change) 1932 Los Angeles County Museum of Art Photo by Nana Bahlmann
Lili Elbe (Danish, 1882-1931)
Lili Ilse Elvenes, better known as Lili Elbe (28 December 1882 – 13 September 1931), was a Danish transgender woman and one of the first identifiable recipients of sex reassignment surgery.Elbe was born Einar Magnus Andreas Wegenerand was a successful artist under that name. She also presented as Lili, sometimes spelled Lily, and was publicly introduced as Einar’s sister. After transitioning, however, she made a legal name change to Lili Ilse Elvenesand stopped painting.
Elbe met Gerda Gottlieb at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen,and they married in 1904, when Gottlieb was 19 and Wegener was 22.The two of them worked as illustrators, with Elbe specialising in landscape paintings, while Gottlieb illustrated books and fashion magazines. They both travelled through Italy and France, eventually settling in Paris in 1912, where Elbe could live openly as a woman, and Gottlieb a lesbian.Elbe received the Neuhausens prize in 1907 and exhibited at Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling (the Artists Fall Exhibition), at the Vejle Art Museum, and in the Saloon and Salon d’Automme in Paris. She is represented at Vejle Art Museum in Denmark.
Elbe started dressing in women’s clothes one day filling in for Gottlieb’s absentee model; she was asked to wear stockings and heels so her legs could substitute for those of the model. Elbe felt surprisingly comfortable in the clothing.Over time, Gottlieb became famous for her paintings of beautiful women with haunting almond-shaped eyes dressed in chic fashions. In 1913, the unsuspecting public was shocked to discover that the model who had inspired Gottlieb’s depictions of petites femmes fatales was in fact Gottlieb’s spouse, “Elbe”.
In 1930, Elbe went to Germany for sex reassignment surgery, which was experimental at the time. A series of four operations was carried out over a period of two years.The first surgery, removal of the testicles, was made under the supervision of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin.The rest of Elbe’s surgeries were carried out by Kurt Warnekros, a doctor at the Dresden Municipal Women’s Clinic.The second operation was to implant an ovary onto her abdominal musculature, the third to remove the penis and the scrotum,and the fourth to transplant a uterus and construct a vaginal canal. At the time of Elbe’s last surgery, her case was already a sensation in newspapers of Denmark and Germany. A Danish court invalidated the Wegeners’ marriage in October 1930,and Elbe managed to get her sex and name legally changed, including receiving a passport as Lili Ilse Elvenes…
In June 1931, Elbe had her fourth operation, which consisted of a uterus transplant and the construction of a vagina, both of which were new and experimental procedures at that time.She died three months after the surgery due to heart paralysis caused by the uterus transplant.
Der Eigene (The Unique) 1925 Schwules Museum, Berlin Photo by Nana Bahlmann
Der Eigene was one of the first gay journals in the world, published from 1896 to 1932 by Adolf Brand in Berlin. Brand contributed many poems and articles; other contributors included writers Benedict Friedlaender, Hanns Heinz Ewers, Erich Mühsam, Kurt Hiller, Ernst Burchard, John Henry Mackay, Theodor Lessing, Klaus Mann, and Thomas Mann, as well as artists Wilhelm von Gloeden, Fidus, and Sascha Schneider. The journal may have had an average of around 1500 subscribers per issue during its run, but the exact numbers are uncertain.
Christian Schad (August 21, 1894 – February 25, 1982) was a German painter associated with Dada and the New Objectivity movement. Considered as a group, Schad’s portraits form an extraordinary record of life in Vienna and Berlin in the years following World War I.
Schad’s art was not condemned by the Nazis in the way that the work of Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and many other artists of the New Objectivity movement was; this may have been because of his lack of commercial success. He became interested in Eastern philosophy around 1930, and his artistic production declined precipitously.After the crash of the New York stock market in 1929, Schad could no longer rely on his father’s financial support, and he largely stopped painting in the early 1930s. In 1937, unknown to him, the Museum of Modern Art showed three Schadographs, given by Tristan Tzara, in a show about Dada and Surrealism. The same year, Nazis included Schad in Great German Art, their antidote to the Degenerate Art show.
Schad lived in obscurity in Germany through the war and after it. After the destruction of his studio in 1943 Schad moved to Aschaffenburg. The city commissioned him to copy Matthias Grünewald’s Virgin and Child (Stuppach, parish church), a project on which he worked until 1947. Schad continued to paint in the 1950s in Magic Realist style and returned in the 1960s to experiments with photograms.Schad’s reputation did not begin to recover until the 1960s, when a couple of shows in Europe dovetailed with the rise of Photorealism.
Meeting of Fetishists and Maniacal Flagellants (1921) is a group fantasy of clothed males, half-naked women, old men masturbating and young women with knee-high boots flashing what Mick Jagger once called “far away eyes”.
Rudolf Schlichter (German, 1890-1955)
Rudolf Schlichter (or Rudolph Schlichter) (December 6, 1890 – May 3, 1955) was a German painter and one of the most important representatives of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement.
Schlichter was born in Calw, Württemberg. After an apprenticeship as an enamel painter at a Pforzheim factory he attended the School of Arts and Crafts in Stuttgart. He subsequently studied under Hans Thoma and Wilhelm Trübner at the Academy in Karlsruhe. Called for military service in World War I, he carried out a hunger strike to secure early release, and in 1919 he moved to Berlin where he joined the Communist Party of Germany and the “November” group. He took part in a Dada fair in 1920 and also worked as an illustrator for several periodicals.
A major work from this period is his Dada Roof Studio, a watercolour showing an assortment of figures on an urban rooftop. Around a table sit a woman and two men in top hats. One of the men has a prosthetic hand and the other, also missing a hand, appears on closer scrutiny to be mannequin. Two other figures in gas masks may also be mannequins. A child holds a pail and a woman wearing high button shoes (for which Schlichter displayed a marked fetish) stands on a pedestal, gesturing inexplicably.
In 1925 Schlichter participated in the “Neue Sachlichkeit” exhibit at the Mannheim Kunsthalle. His work from this period is realistic, a good example being the Portrait of Margot (1924) now in the Berlin Märkisches Museum. It depicts a prostitute who often modelled for Schlichter, standing on a deserted street and holding a cigarette.
When Adolf Hitler took power, bringing to an end the Weimar period, his activities were greatly curtailed. In 1935 he returned to Stuttgart, and four years later to Munich. In 1937 his works were seized as degenerate art, and in 1939 the Nazi authorities banned him from exhibiting. His studio was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1942.
At the war’s end, Schlichter resumed exhibiting works. His works from this period were surrealistic in character. He died in Munich in 1955.
Gert Wollheim (German, 1894-1974) Untitled (Couple) (Ohne Titel [Paar]) 1926 Oil on canvas 39 1/2 x 29 1/2 in. (100.3 x 74.9cm) The Jewish Museum, New York, gift of Charlotte Levite in memory of Julius Nassau, 1990-1930 Photo: The Jewish Museum, New York/Art Resource, NY by John Parnell
Gert Wollheim (German, 1894-1974)
Immediately after Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 his works were declared degenerate art and many were destroyed.He fled to France and became active in the Resistance. He was one of the co-founders of the artists’ federation, the Union des Artistes Allemandes Libres, an organisation of exiled German artists founded in Paris in autumn 1937.In that same year, he became the companion of the dancer Tatjana Barbakoff. Meanwhile, in Munich, three of his pictures were displayed in the defamatory Nazi exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in 1937.
From Paris, he fled to Saarbrücken and later to Switzerland. He was arrested in 1939 and held in a series of labor camps in France (Vierzon, Ruchard, Gurs and Septfonds) until his escape in 1942, after which he and his wife hid in the Pyrénées with the help of a peasant woman.At war’s end in 1945 he returned to France, and in 1947 moved to New York and became an American citizen. He died in New York in 1974.
Homosexuality was invented in Germany? While this might at first sound like a rather preposterous proposition, the idea of an identity based on a fixed sexual orientation did indeed originate in Germany. The public discourse and political movement supporting this idea also started in Germany, in Berlin in particular, and not, as one might assume, in London or New York. As Robert Beachy describes in his recent groundbreaking book Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (2014), even the term HOMOSEXUALITÄT itself was a German invention, first appearing in a German language pamphlet in 1869. Although the origins of the movement date back to the 19th century, it was during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), with its new social and democratic freedoms, that gay life experienced its unprecedented heyday. Despite the fact that sexual acts between men (women were simply not addressed) were still criminalized by Paragraph 175 of the penal code, homosexual men and women were able to express their identity more visibly than ever before. By the mid-1920s, around fifty thousand gays and lesbians lived in Berlin. With its countless nightclubs and meeting points for homosexuals, bisexuals, or transvestites, the city became a true “Eldorado” for this growing and vibrant community.
Our exhibition, New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933 (on view until January 18, 2016), devotes a whole section to these new social identities of the Weimar Republic. Here you will find stunning paintings and photographs depicting the so-called New Woman, with her bob, monocle, cigarette, and overall masculine demeanor, next to striking renderings of even more androgynous types, whose gender identity is ambiguous and even inscrutable at times. Look at Gert Wollheim’s Couple (1926, above), for instance, who might have come straight out of the popular nightclub Eldorado. With its transvestite hostesses, the infamous establishment attracted an illustrious crowd from all over Europe and featured performances by the likes of Marlene Dietrich. A contemporary visitor described the clientele of the famous cabaret as follows: “… you had lesbians looking like beautiful women, lesbians dressed exactly like men and looking like men. You had men dressed like women so you couldn’t possibly recognise they were men (…) Then you would see couples dancing and wouldn’t know anymore what it was.”
Or look at Christian Schad’s extraordinary Boys in Love (1929, above). This exquisite silverpoint drawing is a rare rendering of male homosexuality. The tenderness of the embrace is astonishing and congruent with the delicate subject matter. The loving intimacy between men so sensitively represented here seems even more provocative than a more explicit depiction of homosexual acts.
To illustrate the vast and far-reaching discourse surrounding the new identities of the Weimar Republic and to introduce the main protagonists defining and steering the movement, we are presenting books, magazines, and other ephemeral objects alongside the artworks. The vitrines in the exhibition include publications by the influential physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, a pioneer and principal advocate of homosexual and transgender rights. The so-called “Einstein of Sex” founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, the first gay-rights organisation and gathered more than five thousand signatures to overturn Paragraph 175. His prolific empirical research resulted in the publication of several anthologies examining gender and sexual identity and in the founding of the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, a museum, clinic, meeting point, and research centre. There, in 1930, the first sex reassignment surgery in history was performed on Lili Elbe (previously Einar Wegener). This process is chronicled in the book Man into Woman, also displayed in the exhibition and the basis for the film The Danish Girl directed by Tom Hooper, which is currently playing in theatres across America.
Shining a light on the various publications – over thirty at the time – for homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, and transvestites, a selection of the most important gay and lesbian magazines is also presented in these vitrines. They include Der Eigene (The Unique), the first gay journal in the world. Published from 1896 until 1932 by Adolf Brand, it featured texts about politics and homosexual rights, literature, art, and culture, as well as aesthetic nude photography. Der Eigene was followed by many other gay magazines like Friedrich Radzuweit’s Die Insel (The Island). Surprisingly, these publications were displayed publicly and sold at newsstands alongside other mainstream papers. They included advertisements and announcements for various kinds of nightspots and meeting points, catering to the respective preferences of their readers.
Throughout the 1920s, Radzuweit, who was also an important homosexual rights activist and author, established a publishing network for gay and lesbian magazines. In 1924 he issued Die Freundin (The Girlfriend: Journal for Ideal Friendship between Women), the first lesbian magazine, for instance, and later Das dritte Geschlecht (The Third Gender). After his death in 1932, his son Martin took over the business. Other lesbian magazines presented here are Liebende Frauen (Women in Love), and Frauenliebe (Women Love).
With Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, the vibrant movement came to an abrupt and brutal end. The Nazis immediately raided Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research and burned its archives. Wisely, Hirschfeld had not returned from a speaking tour and remained in exile until his death in 1935. Gay publications and organisations were banned and homosexuals were incarcerated, sent to concentration camps, or murdered; the Nazis eradicated the achievements and memories of this pioneering movement in Germany. We are happy to bring it back to life here in our exhibition at LACMA.
Georg Schrimpf (13 February 1889 – 19 April 1938) was a German painter and graphic artist. Along with Otto Dix, George Grosz and Christian Schad, Schrimpf is broadly acknowledged as a main representative of the art movement Neue Sachlichkeit (usually translated New Objectivity), which developed, in Weimar Germany, from 1919 to 1933, as an outgrowth of Expressionism. Schrimpf was listed as a producer of Degenerate Art by the German National Socialist government in the 1930s.
Friedrich Seidenstücker (German, 1882-1966) Untitled c. 1930 Vintage print 6 15/16 x 5 1/16 in. (17.6 x 12.9cm) Galerie Berinson, Berlin Photo: Galerie Berinson, Berlin
Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966) is noted for his atmospheric photographs of everyday life in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Thanks to his compassionate studies of animals, he has an almost legendary reputation among animal and zoo lovers, and his haunting pictures of Berlin in ruins are a precious source of material for historians. His images seem to be spontaneous, sympathetic examples of the kind of photography that excels at capturing the moment. They are free of any exaggeration or extravagance, and display a sense of humour rarely found in photography. His work is buoyed by a fundamental optimism, yet it does not ignore the harshness, poverty, and suffering that prevailed at that time.
“We have to lay our hearts bare, to the cries of people who have been lied to.”
~ Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann (German, 1884-1950)
Unlike several of his avant-garde contemporaries, Beckmann rejected non-representational painting; instead, he took up and advanced the tradition of figurative painting. He greatly admired not only Cézanne and Van Gogh, but also Blake, Rembrandt, and Rubens, as well as Northern European artists of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, such as Bosch, Bruegel, and Matthias Grünewald. His style and method of composition are partially rooted in the imagery of medieval stained glass.
Engaging with the genres of portraiture, landscape, still life, and history painting, his diverse body of work created a very personal but authentic version of modernism, one with a healthy deference to traditional forms. Beckmann reinvented the religious triptych and expanded this archetype of medieval painting into an allegory of contemporary humanity.
From his beginnings in the fin de siècle to the period after World War II, Beckmann reflected an era of radical changes in both art and history in his work. Many of Beckmann’s paintings express the agonies of Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Some of his imagery refers to the decadent glamor of the Weimar Republic’s cabaret culture, but from the 1930s on, his works often contain mythologized references to the brutalities of the Nazis. Beyond these immediate concerns, his subjects and symbols assume a larger meaning, voicing universal themes of terror, redemption, and the mysteries of eternity and fate.
Sander’s Face of our Time was published in 1929. It contains a selection of 60 portraits from his series People of the 20th Century, and is introduced by an essay by Alfred Döblin titled “On Faces, Pictures, and their Truth.” Under the Nazi regime, his work and personal life were greatly constrained. His son Erich, who was a member of the left wing Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP), was arrested in 1934 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, where he died in 1944, shortly before the end of his sentence. Sander’s book Face of our Time was seized in 1936 and the photographic plates destroyed. Around 1942, during World War II, he left Cologne and moved to a rural area, allowing him to save most of his negatives. His studio was destroyed in a 1944 bombing raid. Thirty thousand of Sander’s roughly forty-thousand negatives survived the war, only to perish in an accidental fire in Cologne in 1946. Sander practically ceased to work as a photographer after World War II. He died in Cologne in 1964.
Wilhelm Schnarrenberger (June 30, 1892 – April 12, 1966) was a German painter associated with the New Objectivity. He was born in Buchen. From 1911 to 1916 he studied at the Munich School of Arts and Crafts. He had his first solo exhibition in 1916 at Hans Goltz’ gallery in Munich. In that same year he began a period of military service.
By 1920 he had returned to Munich, where he contributed illustrations to magazines such as Simplicissimus and Wieland. In 1921 he was made a professor of commercial art at the Karlsruhe Academy and joined the “Rih” group of artists that included Karl Hubbuch, Rudolph Schlichter, and Georg Scholz. At about this time, he published a series of lithographs of meticulously rendered landscape scenes.
The influence of Henri Rousseau is evident in Schnarrenberger’s work of the early 1920s. Paintings such as Old Men Going for a Walk (1922) adopt a deliberately naive approach to composition and the depiction of the figures. By 1924, when Schnarrenberger painted The Friends, his work fully exemplified the New Objectivity style in its sharp-edged, dispassionate rendering of a prosaic contemporary scene. According to art historian Sergiusz Michalski, “Schnarrenberger almost demonstratively refrains from portraying an emotional link between the persons in the picture.”
In 1925 Schnarrenberger’s paintings were included in the Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) exhibition organised by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub at the Kunsthalle in Mannheim. By 1929, Schnarrenberger had begun to paint in a looser style. His work met with official disfavour during the Nazi era: In 1933 he was dismissed from his teaching job, and in 1937 he was declared a degenerate artist. From 1938 until 1947 he lived in Lenzkirch. In 1947 he regained his position as a professor the Karlsruhe Academy, and he relocated to Karlsruhe in 1948. In 1955 he began exhibiting with the Baden-Wurttemberg Federation of Artists. He was awarded the Hans Thoma State Prize [de] in 1962. Schnarrenberger died in Karlsruhe in 1966.
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Woman with Monocle (Dame mit Monokel) c. 1928 Gelatin silver print 7 1/4 x 5 1/5 in. (18.4 x 13cm) Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne Photo: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Fotoarchiv
Jeanne Mammen (21 November 1890 – 22 April 1976) was a German painter and illustrator of the Weimar period. Her work is associated with the New Objectivity and Symbolism movements. She is best known for her depictions of strong, sensual women and Berlin city life.
Perhaps the best-known work from Davringhausen’s New Objectivity period is Der Schieber (The Black-Marketeer), a Magic realist painting of 1920-1921, which is in the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf im Ehrenhof. Painted in acidulous colours, it depicts a glowering businessman seated at a desk in a modern office suite that foreshortens dramatically behind him. Although Davringhausen rarely presented social criticism in his work, in Der Schieber “the artist created the classic pictorial symbol of the period of inflation that was commencing.”
Rushing through a dimly lit gallery I remember stumbling upon my first, larger than life, full length Goya portrait in the Louvre, a portrait of a women in a pale blue dress. It literally stopped me in my tracks, the visceral affect was so powerful. There was a certain tactility to the painting, a presence to the figure that produced this emotive response. And the light that emanated from the painting. I think my jaw dropped to the floor.
Goya can be cutting when he wants to be, as in the pompous portrait of the buffoon Ferdinand VII in Court Dress (1814-1815, below); he can be precise and reserved as in Don Valentín Bellvís de Moncada y Pizarro (around 1795, below) where the eyes are the key to the portrait; he can be strong and forthright as in the muscular portrait of Martín Zapater (1797, below); or he can be inscrutably honest Self Portrait before an Easel (1792-1795, below) and loving Mariano Goya y Goicoechea (the artist’s grandson) (1827, below). But above all, he is human.
The richness and combination of colours, the sense of space that surrounds the sitter (with their mainly contextless backgrounds and the isolation of the figure in pictorial space), their power – both personal and political – and the certain wariness, weariness and insouciance of their expressions… are just a marvel to behold. It’s as though the sitters had just stopped for a moment to ponder their lives. Almost as though they had conjured or envisaged their own visage, as if from a dream.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Francisco de Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) Portrait of the Count of Floridablanca 1783 Oil on canvas 262cm (103.1 in). Width: 166cm (65.4 in). Colección del Banco de España, Madrid
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) is one of Spain’s most celebrated artists. He was an incisive social commentator, considered (even during his own lifetime) as a supremely gifted painter who took the genre of portraiture to new heights. Goya saw beyond the appearances of those who sat before him, subtly revealing their character and psychology within his portraits.
Born before Mozart and Casanova, and surviving Napoleon, Goya’s life spanned more than 80 years during which he witnessed a series of dramatic events that changed the course of European history. Goya: The Portraits will trace the artist’s career, from his early beginnings at the court in Madrid to his appointment as First Court Painter to Charles IV, and as favourite portraitist of the Spanish aristocracy. It will explore the difficult period under Joseph Bonaparte’s rule and the accession to the throne of Ferdinand VII, before concluding with his final years of self-imposed exile in France. Exhibition curator Dr Xavier Bray says:
“The aim of this exhibition is to reappraise Goya’s status as one of the greatest portrait painters in art history. His innovative and unconventional approach took the art of portraiture to new heights through his ability to reveal the inner life of his sitters, even in his grandest and most memorable formal portraits.”
This landmark exhibition will bring to Trafalgar Square more than 60 of Goya’s most outstanding portraits from both public and private collections around the world. These include works that are rarely lent, and some which have never been exhibited publicly before, having remained in possession of the descendants of the sitters. The exhibition will show the variety of media Goya used for his portraits; from life-size paintings on canvas, to the miniatures on copper and his fine black and red chalk drawings. Organised chronologically and thematically, we will for the first time be able to engage with Goya’s technical, stylistic, and psychological development as a portraitist.
From São Paulo to New York, and Mexico to Stockholm, private and institutional lenders have been outstandingly generous, including 10 exceptional loans from the Museo del Prado, Madrid. One of the stars of the show will undoubtedly be the iconic Duchess of Alba (The Hispanic Society of America Museum & Library) which has only once left the United States and has never travelled to Britain. Painted in 1797, this portrait of Goya’s close friend and patron shows the Duchess dressed as a ‘maja’, in a black costume and ‘mantilla’ pointing imperiously at the ground where the words ‘Solo Goya’ (‘Only Goya’) are inscribed.
Other patrons who assisted Goya on his upward trajectory to become First Court Painter, as Velázquez had done more than 150 years before him, are well represented: these include The Count of Floridablanca (Banco de España, Madrid) and The Duke and Duchess of Osuna and their Children (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid) – both key and influential patrons. The immense group portrait of The Family of the Infante Don Luis de Borbón (Magnani-Rocca Foundation, Parma), will be reunited with some of the other portraits Goya painted of the Infante’s young family who were living in exile from the Spanish court.
Other highlights will include the charismatic portrait of Don Valentin Bellvís de Moncada y Pizarro (Fondo Cultural Villar Mir, Madrid) which is unpublished and has never been seen before in public, and the rarely exhibited Countess-Duchess Benavente (Private Collection, Spain). The recently conserved 1798 portrait of Government official Francisco de Saavedra (Courtauld Gallery, London) will be exhibited for the first time in more than 50 years alongside its pendant painted in the same year, showing his friend and colleague Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (Museo del Prado, Madrid).
The Countess of Altamira and her daughter, María Agustina, which has never been lent internationally from the Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, will come to Europe for the very first time to be reunited with her husband The Count of Altamira (Banco de España, Madrid) and their son Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), wearing a fashionably expensive red costume and playing with a pet magpie (which holds the painter’s calling card in its beak). It was shortly after completing his imposing portrait of the Countess, wearing a shimmering embroidered silk gown and shown with an introspective expression, that Goya was appointed court painter to Charles IV, King of Spain.
It was in his royal portraits in particular that Goya managed to combine his insightful observation and technical refinement to create unique, memorable portraits; in these he condensed the various aspects of his sitter’s personality into a subtle look or gesture, which often did not flatter his sitters. Charles III in Hunting Dress (Duquesa del Arco) stands in a pose directly inspired by Velázquez’s hunting portraits of the Spanish royal family in the previous century, but the candid portrayal of a weather-beaten face with its marked wrinkles and a somewhat ironic gesture is unique to Goya, clearly revealing to us the personality of the King – an enlightened man, a lover of nature and his people, who wished to be approached as ‘Charles before King’. Similarly, in the portrait of Ferdinand VII (Museo del Prado, Madrid) we can imagine Goya’s mistrust of the pompous and selfish monarch who abolished the constitution and reintroduced the Spanish Inquisition.
In contrast to the formality of his royal portraits, the exhibition also features more personal works by Goya, including a number of self-portraits in different media, and depictions of his friends and family. 47 years lie between the first Self Portrait (about 1773, Museo Goya, Colección Ibercaja, Zaragoza) in the show, completed when Goya was in his late 20s, and the last, the poignant Self Portrait with Doctor Arrieta (1820, The Minneapolis Institute of Art) painted after an illness from which he almost died when he was 74 years old. There will also be a chance to ‘meet’ the people who were closest to Goya; his wife Josefa Bayeu (Abelló Collection, Madrid), his son Javier Goya (Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Private Collection; Museo de Bellas Artes, Zaragoza) and his best friend and life-long correspondent Martin Zapater (Bilboko Art Eder Museoa / Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao). The exhibition also includes the last work Goya ever painted, of his only, beloved grandson Mariano Goya (Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas) – painted just months before Goya’s death on 16 April, 1828, this portrait is a testament to the genius, skill, and unfaltering creativity of an artist who persevered with his craft to his very last days.
Press release from the National Gallery website
Installation photographs of the exhibition Goya: The Portraits at the National Gallery, London
Francisco de Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) Portrait of Don Francisco de Saavedra 1798 The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London
The Spanish politician Francisco de Saavedra was noted for his integrity. In late 1798 Saavedra and his great friend and ally, Gaspar de Jovellanos, were appointed to the two highest political offices in Spain: Minister of Finance and Minister of State. Jovellanos was one of Goya’s most consistent supporters, and the two men commissioned a pair of portraits from him.
The two pictures are closely related. In each, the sitter faces to the right, and sits on a round-backed chair beside a table. But while Jovellanos is thoughtful, Saavedra seems about to leave his paper-strewn desk having decided on a course of action. The simplicity of the background may be influenced by Goya’s knowledge of eighteenth-century English portraiture. It could, however, have been chosen by Saavedra, who was known for the well ordered and ‘English’ character of his household.
The exhibition Goya: The Portraits includes around 70 works unquestionably by his hand, provides us with a unique opportunity to look more closely at Portrait of Doña Isabel de Porcel and ask the question: is she really by Goya? This Room 1 display will present historical information surrounding the portrait and its acquisition by the National Gallery in 1896, together with technical evidence, including an X-ray image which reveals an earlier portrait painted underneath.
Who was Doña Isabel de Porcel?
The sitter has long been identified as Doña Isabel Lobo de Porcel on account of an inscription on the back of the original canvas. Goya exhibited a portrait of Doña Isabel Lobo de Porcel in Madrid in 1805, and this has traditionally been linked to the National Gallery painting. Isabel married Antonio Porcel (Secretary of State for Spain’s American Colonies) in 1802 and the couple had four children. Isabel died in 1842, surviving her husband by 10 years. Antonio, who was a political associate of Goya’s friend and patron Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (whose portrait can be seen in Goya: The Portraits), was also painted by Goya in 1806, but his portrait was destroyed by fire in 1953.
The National Gallery’s purchase of Portrait of Doña Isabel de Porcel
The National Gallery bought Portrait of Doña Isabel de Porcel in June 1896 for just over £404. It was among the first pictures by the artist – and the very first portrait by Goya – to enter the National Gallery collection, having made its first Goya purchases(A Picnic and A Scene from ‘The Forcibly Bewitched’) the previous month. The portrait was no longer owned by the sitter’s descendants when the Gallery acquired it, having been sold by the Porcel y Zayas family from Granada, in whose possession it had apparently remained until around 1887, to Don Isidro de Urzáiz Garro (d. 1894). It was from the latter’s heir, Andrés de Urzáiz (1866-1912), that the Gallery acquired the portrait about 10 years later.
A question of attribution
The glamorous sitter is shown wearing a black lace ‘mantilla’, a traditional headdress which became fashionable among the Spanish aristocracy in the late 18th century. Although painted with tremendous flair, the picture’s brushwork – when compared with Goya’s other portraits – lacks his customary subtlety in describing transparencies and textures. Isabel is extremely charismatic but we struggle to grasp her psychological state – something in which Goya invariably excelled.
The hidden portrait
When an X-ray image was made of thePortrait of Doña Isabel de Porcel during conservation treatment in 1980, another portrait was unexpectedly found underneath. The head and striped jacket of the underlying figure are clearly visible in the X-ray, and Doña Isabel de Porcel was painted directly on top of the initial portrait, without first hiding it with new priming. Although perhaps surprising, this is not unique in Goya’s work. During the period of political upheaval in Spain at the turn of the 19th century, Goya – and other artists – had to be resourceful and adapt to circumstance, recycling canvases as their patrons fell in and out of political favour. Doña Isabel de Porcel must have been painted soon after the underlying portrait, since no dirt is visible between the paint layers of the two figures. A clearer image of the underlying portrait has recently been obtained by using an X-ray fluorescence scanning spectrometer, a cutting-edge piece of analytical technology on loan to the National Gallery through collaboration with Delft University of Technology, which maps the chemical elements in the paint.
Letizia Treves, National Gallery Curator of Italian and Spanish Paintings 1600-1800, says:
“Goya is one of the most admired and imitated painters in the history of art. Pastiches and forgeries of his works proliferated on the European and American art market in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The technical studies and provenance information regarding the Portrait of Doña Isabel de Porcel are inconclusive so far as Goya’s authorship is concerned, and the attributional status of the painting rests largely on perceptions of quality and on how close it comes to works that are indisputably by the artist – something we all have a unique opportunity to explore during the exhibition Goya: The Portraits. If it is a pastiche, it has been carried out with such impressive skill that its long-standing attribution to Goya has convinced several generations of specialists and gallery visitors.”
Curator of Coney Island exhibition: Dr Robin Jaffee Frank
Samuel S. Carr (American, 1837-1908) Beach Scene c. 1879 Oil on canvas 12 x 20 in. (30.5 x 50.8cm) Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Bequest of Annie Swan Coburn (Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn)
The first posting of 2016, and it is a doozy – a multimedia extravaganza of sight and sound showcasing exhibitions that focus on that eclectic playground, Coney Island.
Featuring images supplied by the gallery – plus videos, other art work featured in the exhibitions and texts that I sourced myself – this posting documents “the luridness of the sideshow acts, the drunk sailors, the amorous couples and the scantily dressed bathers who were so much a part of the allure and menace of Coney Island.” I spent many hours scouring the internet, undertaking research and cleaning poor quality images to bring this selection to you.
The exhibition is divided into five sections, and I have attempted to keep the posting in this chronological order.
~ Down at Coney Isle, 1861-1894 ~ The World’s Greatest Playground, 1895-1929 ~ The Nickel Empire, 1930-1939 ~ A Coney Island of the Mind, 1940-1961 ~ Requiem for a Dream, 1962-2008
There are some interesting art works in both exhibitions. The correspondence between elephant / handler and mural is delightful in Edgar S. Thomson’s Coney Island (1897, below), while Joseph Stella’s Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913-1914, below) is a revelation to me, considering the date of production and the portrayal of contemporary life which is akin to our own. Walker Evans’ Couple at Coney Island, New York (1928, below) seems staged and confused in its pictorial construction, not one of his better photographs, while Edward J. Kelty’s photographs of sideshow revues including a “coloured revue” are interesting for their social context and formalism.
Paul Cadmus’ satirical view of American vacationers Coney Island (1934, below) is a riot of colour, movement and social commentary, including references to homosexuality and Hitler, while his friend Reginald Marsh’s effusive Coney Island paintings play with “reimagined bathers and sideshow audiences in poses derived from Michelangelo and Rubens” packed into compressed, collage like spaces. Particular favourites are photographs by Garry Winograd, Bruce Davidson, Diane Arbus and Robert Frank. Surprise of the posting are the black and white photographs of Morris Engel.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Brooklyn Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Strobridge Lithographing Company The great Forepaugh & Sells Brothers shows combined. Terrific flights over ponderous elephants by a company of twenty five splendid artists in a great contest for valuable prizes, introducing high, long distance, layout, twisting, single and double somersault leapers, enlivened by mirth provoking comedy surprises. c. 1899 Promotional poster for Forepaugh & Sells Brothers circus Colour lithograph poster
“The mixed-media exhibit captures Coney Island’s campy, trippy aesthetic with a hodgepodge of photographs by the likes of Walker Evans, Weegee, Bruce Davidson, and Diane Arbus (since Coney Island was basically tailor-made for a Diane Arbus photo shoot). Also on view are pastoral seascapes from the 1800s; sideshow posters galore; a turn-of-the-century gambling wheel and carousel animals presented like sculpture; film stills from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream; and a modernist abstract composition by Frank Stella. With red and yellow stripes around a blue square, Stella distills the sand and sea and sun into a primary-colored flag for Brooklyn’s most famous destination.
In these pictures, Coney Island serves as a microcosm of American mass culture as a whole, and the chronology of 140 art objects here chart major societal shifts, from the dawn of the Great Depression to desegregation. “The modern American mass-culture industry was born at Coney Island, and the constant novelty of the resort made it a seductively liberating subject for artists,” Dr Robin Jaffee Frank, curator of the exhibit, which Wadsworth Athenaeum helped organize, said in a statement. “What these artists saw from 1861 to 2008 at Coney Island, and the varied ways in which they chose to portray it, mirrored the aspirations and disappointments of the era and the country. Taken together, these tableaux of wonder and menace, hope and despair, dreams and nightmares become metaphors for the collective soul of a nation.”
Strobridge Lithographing Company The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth /The Great Coney Island Water Carnival /Remarkable Head-Foremost Dives from Enormous Heights into Shallow Depths of Water 1898 Colour lithograph poster 30 1/6 x 38 3/4 in. (76.6 x 98.4 cm) Cincinnati Art Museum; Gift of the Strobridge Lithographing Company
Strobridge Lithographing Company Beach and boardwalk scenes, Coney Island c. 1898 Colour lithograph foldout poster approx. 21 feet long
George Bradford Brainerd (American, 1845-1887) Bathers, Steel Pier, Coney Island c. 1880-1885, printed 1940s Gelatin silver photograph 7 5/8 x 12 in. (19.4 x 30.5cm) Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum
Edgar S. Thomson (American, active 1890s-1900s) Coney Island 1897 Gelatin dry glass plate negative 4 x 5 in. (10.2 x 12.7cm) Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection Photo: Althea Morin, Brooklyn Museum
Edgar S. Thomson (American, active 1890s-1900s) Coney Island (detail) 1897 Gelatin dry glass plate negative 4 x 5 in. (10.2 x 12.7cm) Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection Photo: Althea Morin, Brooklyn Museum
William Merritt Chase (American, 1849-1916) Landscape, near Coney Island c. 1886 Oil on panel 8 1/8 x 12 5/8 in. (20.6 x 32cm) The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, New York; Gift of Mary H. Beeman to the Pruyn Family Collection
Joseph Stella (American born Italy, 1877-1946) Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras 1913-1914 Oil on canvas 77 by 84 3/4 inches Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.
“In 1913, to celebrate Mardi Gras, Joseph Stella took a bus ride to Coney Island that changed his life. The Italian immigrant painter remembered that up until this point he had been “struggling … working along the lines of the old masters, seeking to portray a civilization long since dead.” He continued:
“Arriving at the Island I was instantly struck by the dazzling array of lights. It seemed as if they were in conflict. I was struck with the thought that here was what I had been unconsciously seeking for so many years… On the spot was born the idea for my first truly great picture.” (Joseph Stella, “I Knew Him When (1924),” in Barbara Haskell, ed., Joseph Stella, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1994, p. 206)
The result of Stella’s revelation, the enormous oil painting Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913-1914), was the inspiration for the traveling exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008…
If the broken planes and neon coloring of Stella’s painting suggest the exhilaration of contemporary life, they also express dislocation and alienation. Stella himself spoke of the “dangerous pleasures” of Coney Island, implying that its unleashing of desires could provoke anxiety (Joseph Stella, “Autobiographical Notes (1946),” in Barbara Haskell, ed., Joseph Stella, p. 213). And yet for all of the dynamism of Stella’s aesthetic, his painting’s sweeping arabesques are checked by the rectangle of the picture plane, and its decorative unity distances the disruptive power of its discordant subjects. The contained anarchy of Stella’s painting is the perfect metaphor for Coney Island’s manipulation and control of the unruly masses, who, at the end of the day, go back to their homes and their ordered existence.
Looking closely at Battle of Lights we might be able to make out fragments of actual rides and even shapes that suggest people, but Stella’s abstraction obscures the luridness of the sideshow acts, the drunk sailors, the amorous couples and the scantily dressed bathers who were so much a part of the allure and menace of Coney Island.”
Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.
Irving Underhill (American, 1872-1960) Luna Park and Surf Avenue, Coney Island 1912 Gelatin dry glass plate negative Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection Photo: Althea Morin, Brooklyn Museum
Irving Underhill (American, 1872-1960) Luna Park and Surf Avenue, Coney Island (detail) 1912 Gelatin dry glass plate negative Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection Photo: Althea Morin, Brooklyn Museum
Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle (director) Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton (actors) Coney Island 1917 25 mins – short, comedy
The 5th film starring the duo of Buster Keaton & Fatty Arbuckle, who also directed. Taking place at the Coney Island amusement park of New York City, it’s notable as the only film where Buster Keaton is seen laughing as this is before he developed his “Great Stoneface” persona.
Gambling Wheel 1900-1920 Wood, glass, metal 65 x 14 in. (165.1 x 35.6cm) Collection of The New-York Historical Society; Purchase
Charles Carmel (American born Russia, 1865-1931) Carousel Horse with Raised Head, Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York c. 1914 Paint on wood, jewels, glass eyes, horsehair tail 62 x 58 x 14 in. (157.5 x 147.3 x 36.6cm) Collection of American Folk Art Museum, New York; Gift of Laura Harding
Born in Russia in 1865, Charles Carmel and his young bride immigrated to the U.S. in 1883 and lived in Brooklyn for most of their lives. Charles was a perfectionist in his work and a disciplinarian with his family. Their home was located close to Prospect Park and its stable of riding horses, which served as a source of inspiration for Charles’ carousel horse carving work. It is generally accepted that Charles Carmel carved carousel horses from 1905 to 1920, and sold his work to all of the major carousel manufacturers of the time including Dolle, Borelli, Murphy, and Mangels.
In 1911 Charles invested most of his money in a newly constructed carousel that he intended to operate on Coney Island. The day before the park was to open, a fire totally destroyed the amusement park along with the uninsured carousel. This was a devastating financial blow to the Carmel family. Later his health deteriorated due to diabetes and arthritis until Charles closed his shop and carved a few hours a day at home, filling orders. Charles died in 1933 of cancer, but his legacy lives on with the exquisite carousel animals that he produced throughout his life.
Text from the Gesa Carousel of Dreams website [Online] Cited 01/01/2016. No longer available online
Anonymous artist Looping the Loop, Coney Island 1901-1910 Postcard Private Collection
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Couple at Coney Island, New York 1928 Gelatin silver print 8 x 5 13/16 inches The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Ford Motor Company Collection. Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967) X-ray of Ajax, “The Sword Swallower” 1928 20 x 20 inches Collection of Ken Harck
Paul Cadmus (American, 1904-1999) Coney Island 1934 Oil on canvas 32 7/16 x 36 5/16 inches Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gift of Peter Paanakker
Paul Cadmus’s “Coney Island” takes a satirical view of American vacationers. The fleshy members of the human pyramid seem carefree and frivolous in light of the ominous rise to power of the Nazi Party in Germany (Hitler’s face can be seen printed on the magazine resting on the sleeping man’s chest at the bottom of the painting).
“… Paul Cadmus, who shared Marsh’s use of old-master forms and techniques but not his heterosexuality, filled his beach painting with purposely ugly women and mostly beautiful men. The main action in Cadmus’s Coney Island (1934) is the human pyramid of men and women at its center. And yet the Adonis who lies on his stomach in the foreground has no interest in this heterosexual game. Instead, he looks off at another muscular youth farther down the beach. For Marsh, Cadmus and their fellow Coney Island artists, the chance to gaze unabashedly at the body of a stranger was one of the great pleasures of the milieu.
… traditional figuration, like that of Cadmus and Marsh, is so dominant that the exhibition arguably offers an alternate history of American art – one in which the modernist painting of Milton Avery or Frank Stella seems like a sideshow. Breaking out of the canon of modernism, “Coney Island” puts new focus on neglected realist painters like Harry Roseland, Robert Riggs, George Tooker and a particular favorite of mine, Henry Koerner.”
Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.
Curator notes
Coney Island was the first painting Cadmus made after he ceased working for the federally sponsored Public Works of Art Project. It is typical of his paintings of the period in both theme and form. Cadmus viewed the prosaic activity of bathing on a beach in devastatingly satirical terms. Poking fun at the bathers’ carefree pleasures, Cadmus accumulated an odd assortment of bulging, burnt bodies. The bathers are oblivious to their ridiculous appearance and uncouth behaviour. Swarming the beach, their bodies are strangely intertwined, their faces smiling inanely. Everything is exaggerated, the color verging on the garish to intensify their grossness. In the 1930s Cadmus used oil paint almost as if it were a graphic medium, consequently Coney Island looks more like a tinted drawing than a painting. His small, exacting brushstrokes impart a flickering quality to the surface, which intensifies the impression that the figures are in constant motion. Cadmus actually began to sketch the scene on Martha’s Vineyard, before he visited Coney Island. He was attracted to the Brooklyn beach because it offered him the opportunity to delineate the human figure with as little clothing as possible. Moreover, he considered the beach scene to be a classical subject. His treatment, however, is rather baroque.
As was his friend Reginald Marsh, Cadmus was attracted to the elaborate compositions of old master paintings. Coney Island, with its seminude figures arranged in complex groupings, their bodies twisted and in constant motion, was for Cadmus the twentieth-century version of a baroque allegorical composition. Cadmus claimed that his intent was not to be sensational, but when the painting was exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s second biennial, it suffered the same hostile reception as did his earlier The Fleet’s In!. The Coney Island Showmen’s League, a local trade group, denounced the painting as offensive and inaccurate and threatened a libel suit if the painting was not removed from the exhibition. According to the artist’s incomplete records, it seems that the painting was rejected from several annual exhibitions to which it was submitted soon after it was shown at the Whitney biennial, probably because of the controversy it stirred. In 1935 Cadmus produced an etching from a photograph of the painting in the hope that it would reach a larger public. In the etching the image is reversed but otherwise differs only in a few minor details.
Exhibition Label, 1997
Cadmus was one of the most controversial American artists of the 1930s. His satirical perspective made people uncomfortable, and consequently reviewers sometimes questioned the decency of his rollicking scenes of New York City life. Coney Island, with its amusement park and beach on the south shore of Brooklyn, was a favourite destination of working-class people. Rather than glamorise labourers enjoying their day off, Cadmus poked fun at these beachgoers and their bulging, entangled bodies. They seem oblivious to their sunburnt flesh and the silliness of their activities. Coney Island met a particularly hostile reception when it was first exhibited. A businessman organisation associated with the amusement park denounced the painting as offensive, resulting in its rejection from subsequent exhibitions. Cadmus’s meticulous painting technique – pigments applied with thin, pencil like strokes – enabled him to delineate minute detail. For example, the viewer can read the headline about Hitler in the newspaper held by the reclining man in the foreground. This subtle reference to the horrifying political developments abroad underscores the inanities of the beachgoers. Carved in wood, this simple frame was rubbed with pigment rather than gilded, a treatment that came into fashion during World War I, as gold became scarce.
Text from the LACMA website [Online] Cited 01/01/2016.
Reginald Marsh (American, 1898-1954) Pip and Flip 1932 Tempera on paper mounted on canvas 48 1/4 x 48 1/4 in. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago Daniel J. Terra Collection
“Such bodies were the great subjects of Reginald Marsh. Instead of Stella’s spirals of lights abstracted and seen from a distance, Marsh’s George C. Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park (1936) gives us a close-up view of the Human Roulette Wheel where young women are spun into all kinds of unladylike postures. For the Yale-educated Marsh, Coney Island was a chance to go “slumming,” to mingle with the lower classes on the beach and in the amusement parks. Hostile to modernism and abstract art, he reimagined bathers and sideshow audiences in poses derived from Michelangelo and Rubens. And yet, like Stella, Marsh overpacked his Coney Island paintings so that every inch is activated and in motion like a carnival ride. The highly compressed space of a Marsh painting like Pip and Flip (1932, above), with its collage-like play of rectangular billboards advertising human-oddity sideshows, would be unthinkable without the precedent of Cubism that he supposedly detested.”
Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.
Human Roulette Wheel at Steeplechase Park, Coney Island, early 1900s
Reginald Marsh (American, 1898-1954) George Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park 1936 Oil and egg tempera on linen mounted on fiberboard 30 1/8 x 40 1/8 in. (76.5 x 101.8cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation
Steeplechase Mechanical Horse Ride at Steeplechase Park, Coney Island, early 1900s
The spirit of Coney Island comes alive with Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008 on view at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition traces the evolution of the Coney Island phenomenon from tourist destination during the Civil War to the World’s Greatest Playground to a site of nostalgia. Covering a period of 150 years, the exhibition features 140 objects, including paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, posters, artefacts, carousel animals, ephemera, and film clips. Also on view is Forever Coney, 42 photographs from the Brooklyn Museum collection.
An extraordinary array of artists have viewed Coney Island as a microcosm of the American experience and used their works to investigate the area as both a place and an idea. Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland offers up early depictions of “the people’s beach” by Impressionists William Merritt Chase and John Henry Twachtman; modernist depictions of the amusement park by Joseph Stella; Depression-era scenes of cheap thrills by Reginald Marsh; photographs by Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Weegee, and Bruce Davidson; and contemporary works by Daze and Swoon.
“The modern American mass-culture industry was born at Coney Island, and the constant novelty of the resort made it a seductively liberating subject for artists,” said Dr Robin Jaffee Frank, exhibition curator. “What these artists saw from 1861 to 2008 at Coney Island, and the varied ways in which they chose to portray it, mirrored the aspirations and disappointments of the era and the country. Taken together, these tableaux of wonder and menace, hope and despair, dreams and nightmares become metaphors for the collective soul of a nation.”
Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008 is organised by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. The Brooklyn presentation is organised by Connie H. Choi, Assistant Curator, Arts of the Americas and Europe, Brooklyn Museum. A fully illustrated 304-page catalogue, co-published by Yale University Press and the Wadsworth Athenaeum, incorporates the first continuous visual analysis of great works of art about Coney Island by Dr Frank as well as essays by distinguished cultural historians.
Forever Coney
As one of America’s first seaside resorts, Coney Island has attracted adventurous visitors and undergone multiple transformations, inspiring photographers since the mid-nineteenth century. Forever Coney: Photographs from the Brooklyn Museum Collection features forty-two images that celebrate the people and places that make up Coney Island. The earliest works, taken by photographers such as George Bradford Brainerd and Irving Underhill, document the resort from the post-Civil War period through the turn of the twentieth century. Later artists such as Harry Lapow and Stephen Salmieri have photographed the many personalities that have passed through the site.
The photographers included in this exhibition are George Bradford Brainerd, Lynn Hyman Butler, Anita Chernewski, Victor Friedman, Kim Iacono, Sidney Kerner, Harry Lapow, Nathan Lerner, Jack Lessinger, H.S. Lewis, John L. Murphy, Ben Ross, Stephen Salmieri, Edgar S. Thomson, Arthur Tress, Irving Underhill, Breading G. Way, Eugene Wemlinger, and Harvey R. Zipkin. Forever Coney: Photographs from the Brooklyn Museum Collection is organized by Connie H. Choi, Assistant Curator of American Art, Brooklyn Museum. It is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008.
Morris Engel (American, 1918-2005) Mother with Children 1938 Gelatin silver print 8 x 10 inches Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive, New York
Nieman Studios, Inc., Chicago Shackles the Great 1940 Sideshow banner 118 x 108 inches Collection of Ken Harck
Quito, Human Octopus 1940 Sideshow banner 140 x 117 inches Collection of Ken Harck
Steeplechase Funny Face Nd Painted metal 23 inches Collection of Ken Harck
Henry Koerner (American born Austria, 1915-1991) The Barker’s Booth 1948-1949 Oil on Masonite 26 x 40 1/2 in. (66 x 102.9cm) Collection of Alice A. Grossman
George Tooker (American, 1920-2011) Coney Island 1948 Egg tempera on gesso panel 19 1/4 x 26 1/4 inches Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis
George Tooker’s thought-provoking “Coney Island” places traditional beach goers in a Pietà tableau.
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) Coney Island Beach 1940 Gelatin silver print 8 1/8 x 10 inches The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
Looking at Weegee’s photograph, it is easy to be carried away with longing for what seems like a simpler and happier time. Undoubtedly, the picture’s sense of naïve jubilation was part of its appeal for Red Grooms, who essentially copied the image in paint for Weegee 1940 (1998-1999). And yet, like much at Coney Island, Weegee’s photograph is an illusion. Taken when Europe was already at war and the Depression had not yet ended, its merriment was only a momentary respite.
Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.
Unknown artist Modern Venus of 1947 Coney Island, 1947 Gelatin silver photograph 10 3/4 x 13 7/8 in. (27.3 x 35.2cm) Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection Photo: Christine Gant, Brooklyn Museum
Unknown artist Modern Venus of 1947 (detail) Coney Island, 1947 Gelatin silver photograph 10 3/4 x 13 7/8 in. (27.3 x 35.2cm) Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection Photo: Christine Gant, Brooklyn Museum
Morris Engel (American, 1918-2005) Under the Boardwalk, Coney Island [Production still from Little Fugitive] 1953 Gelatin silver print 8 x 10 inches Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive, New York
Raymond Abrashkin (as “Ray Ashley”), Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin (directors) Little Fugitive 1953
Joey, a young boy, runs away to Coney Island after he is tricked into believing he has killed his older brother. Joey collects glass bottles and turns them into money, which he uses to ride the rides.
“Little Fugitive (1953), one of the most beautiful films featured in the exhibition, conveys the feeling of moving through the enormous crowds in Weegee’s photograph. The creation of two master still photographers, Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin, and writer Ray Ashley, the film tells the story of Joey, a seven-year-old boy who runs away to Coney Island. But if Joey initially exalts in the freedom of being lost in the crowd, he feels abandoned when the amusement park closes down. Robert Frank’s photograph from the same year of a man asleep on a deserted beach with the Parachute Tower at his back [see below] echoes the film’s invocation of the resort’s fleeting joys. When Coney Island empties out it reveals the superficiality and pathos of the fantasies it evokes. In 1894, even before the big amusement parks were built, Stephen Crane mused about how in winter the “mammoth” hotels became “gaunt and hollow, impassively and stolidly suffering from an enormous hunger for the public.” (Stephen Crane, “Coney Island’s Failing Days,” in A Coney Island Reader, p. 69).”
Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.
Installation of views of the exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008 at the Brooklyn Museum, New York
Cyclops Head from Spook-A-Rama c. 1955 Mixed media 60 x 47 x 42 inches The Vourderis Family. Deno’s Wonder Wheel
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984) Coney Island, New York City, N.Y., 1952 Silver bromide 8 1/2 x 13 inches Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. Gift of Barbara and James L. Melcher
Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) Untitled (Cathy and Cigarette Machine), from the series Brooklyn Gang 1959, printed later Gelatin silver print Image: 8 3/8 x 12 5/8 Sheet: 11 x 14 inches Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. The Heinz Family Fund
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) The House of Horrors 1961 Gelatin silver print 14 1/2 x 14 inches Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
“As its carnival rides and sideshows became increasingly dated in the 1960s, Coney Island was unable to maintain even the phony thrills that Miller derided in the 1930s. In Diane Arbus’s The House of Horrors (1961), the fake skeleton and the cartoon ape mask aren’t as scary as the ride’s sorry state and the impression that something terrible has driven all the people away. (The 1970 low-budget slasher film Carnival of Blood, not included in the exhibition, brilliantly uses this seediness to create a sense of uncanny doom.) In Arnold Mesches’s painting Anomie 1991: Winged Victory (1991), the creaky rides mingle with images of war, turning dreamland into an apocalyptic nightmare.”
Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Couple Arguing, Coney Island, N.Y., 1960 Vintage gelatin silver print Image: 8 1/2 x 6 5/8 inches Sheet: 14 x 11 inches Collection Thomas H. Lee and Ann Tenenbaum
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) Coney Island July 4, 1958 15 5/8 x 11 9/16 inches Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Robert Frank Collection. Gift of the Richard Florsheim Art Fund and an Anonymous Donor
Frank Stella (American, b. 1936) Coney Island 1958 Oil on canvas 85 1/4 x 78 3/4 inches Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. Gift of Larom B. Munson, B.A. 1951
Harry Lapow began frequenting Coney Island to capture quirks of the beach and boardwalk after receiving a Ciroflex camera on his forty-third birthday. He was intrigued by the camera’s ability to isolate details and fleeting moments of everyday life. Here, a toddler’s crossed legs appear above the head of a buried woman whose eyes are covered by a floral towel. In cropping this beach sighting, Lapow crafts a surprising juxtaposition, forming an unlikely dynamic between the lively child and the masked adult.
Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) Untitled July 4, 1962 Gelatin silver print 11 x 14 inches Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
Daze (American, b. 1962) Coney Island Pier 1995 Oil on canvas 60 x 80 in. (152.4 x 203.2cm) Collection of the artist
Daze (American, b. 1962) Kiddyland Spirits 1995 Oil on canvas 42 x 71 inches Collection of the artist
Requiem for a Dream, production still, directed by Darren Aronofsky, 2000
Marie Roberts (American, b. 1954) A Congress of Curious Peoples 2005 Acrylic on unstretched canvas 84 x 120 in. (213.4 x 304.8cm) Collection of Liz and Marc Hartzman
Swoon Coney, Early Evening 2005 Linoleum print on Mylar Variable; overall: 213 x 39 x 113 inches Brooklyn Museum. Healy Purchase Fund B, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, and Designated Purchase Fund
Swoon’s “Coney, Early Evening” suspends youthful figures intertwined throughout the iconic tracks of a Coney Island roller coaster.
Co-curators: Rock Hushka, Chief Curator, Tacoma Art Museum and Dr. Jonathan D. Katz
Living and breathing
This is the biggest exhibition on art relating to HIV/AIDS since the seminal exhibition Art in the Age of AIDSat the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra in 1995, which I was a part of.
I was lucky to survive the initial wave of HIV/AIDS infections. The Centers for Disease Control issued its first statement about a cluster of 19 cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma (a rare skin cancer most common in elderly men from southern Italy) and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in young, gay men in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in July 1981… and I had my first HIV test in London in 1983. In those days, as the wall text from the exhibition spells out above, you had to wait 16 days to get the result of a blood test. I vividly remember sitting outside a doctor’s office knowing that when I went in, if he said yes you have it, it was a death sentence. In those early days, there was no treatment. You were going to die. I only survived by luck. Many of my friends and lovers didn’t.
“Art reflects and reacts to social, cultural, and political climates, and in the past 30 years, HIV and AIDS has been a constant presence,” says exhibition co-curator Rock Hushka. “So many of us recall friends, family, and partners we have lost and the terror of the early years of the crisis, while younger people are just learning this story. We seek to create a deeper understanding of the legacy of HIV / AIDS in contemporary American art, and encourage our visitors to see their experiences in these works.” (Press release)
This deep understanding can be supplemented by this posting. I spent many hours securing more images than were sent to me in the press pack, because I think it is really important to have as great a cross-section as possible of work online from this exhibition, as a record of this time and space in the ongoing HIV / AIDS story.
In terms of the art, I find the earlier narratives are much more powerful and focused than the contemporary work. One of the most moving of these, and one that I have never seen before, is Keith Haring’s Altar Piece (1990, cast 1996, below). Can you imagine being an artist, being Haring, working on the wax mould in hospital being treated for AIDS-related illness, thinking that this could possibly be the last art work that you would ever complete. That you would never see it produced. And then to make something that is so compassionate, so beautiful that it is almost beyond belief… my heart is full of admiration and, like the crowd in the triptych, I am washed with tears.
By comparison, some of the contemporary works seem to have become mere graphic symbolism (leaves, milk and flowers) rather than engaging activism. For example, Tino Rodriguez’s Eternal Lovers (2010, below) – while referencing his Mexican heritage through skull imagery from Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead – is not about loss with presence but loss without presence: a febrile graphic activity that is pure decoration. Other works such as Derek Jackson’s Perfect Kiss (2007, below) or LADZ’s Eden #31 (2012, below) enact only the most tenuous link to HIV/AIDS and only when it is spelled out in text. Again, while not denying the pain of the death of her mother, her persecution when growing up or the problems with living with HIV, Kia Labeija’s 24 (Mourning Sickness; Kia and Mommy; In my room) (2014, below) propositions us with a women photographed in deadpan photography style as glamorous mother with vivid pink lipstick or a Beyonce music star in sequin dress and 6 inch heels. Only in the last photograph is there any hint of vulnerability and, funnily enough, it is the only photograph that I care about and engage with.
In all of these works the key word is enact, for these works are performances of gender and sexuality conceptualised for the viewer, where living with HIV/AIDS is shown to us at a distance. Instead of ACTing up, unleashing the power of the oppressed, artists are now acting out in this (supposed) post-death HIV/AIDS climate. Look at me, I can be whoever I want to be (and still have HIV). Nothing wrong with that I hear you say, and you would be completely right… if only the art commenting on this post-death resurrection of the author, was memorable.
While 1,218,400 persons aged 13 years and older are living with HIV infection in the USA and an estimated 47, 352 people were diagnosed with the disease in 2013, people are still dying by the thousands in America (an estimated 13,712 people died in 2012 of an AIDS related disease – source Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website).
This is not pretty pink lipstick and sequin dresses, this is 13 thousand people a year still DYING from this disease.
Just think about that for a while.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Tacoma Art Museum, Mark I. Chester and Steven Miller for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
ACT UP NY/Gran Fury (active New York, New York, 1987-1995) Let the Record Show… 1987/recreated 2015 Mixed media installation, dimensions variable Courtesy of Gran Fury and the New Museum, New York Photo courtesy of the artists
In 1987, the New Museum’s curator William Olander invited ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) to create a work about AIDS. ACT UP, a diverse, nonpartisan, grassroots organisation, responded with Let the Record Show… providing information about the crisis.
At the time, the only visual presence of AIDS activism was the Silence=Death stickers. Let the Record Show… recreated here in full for the first time, included an LED reader board with statistics about the unfolding medical and political crisis, the neon pink triangle with “Silence=Death,” a photomural from the Nuremberg trials, and photographs of contemporary public figures with their statements about AIDS.
Using the 1986 graphics from the Silence=Death Project, ACT UP appropriated the pink triangle from the badges assigned to gay prisoners in Nazi Germany during World War II. The artists combined this historic symbol of powerlessness along with the photomural of the Nuremberg courtroom to make an explicit comparison between the severity of the AIDS crisis and government inaction and the Holocaust.
The complicated installation asked whether simple silence in a crisis is as culpable as actively encouraging one. The anonymous collective Gran Fury formed as a committee of ACT UP, as a result of Olander’s invitation. Gran Fury continued to make provocative and important works about the AIDS crisis.
For the installation of Let the Record Show… at the New Museum, quotes were cast in concrete under the photograph of the irresponsible speaker:
“The logical outcome of testing is a quarantine of those infected.” Jesse Helms, U.S. Senator
“It is patriotic to have the AIDS test and be negative.” Cory Servass, Presidential AIDS Commission
“We used to hate faggots on an emotional basis. Now we have a good reason.” Anonymous Surgeon
“AIDS is God’s judgment of a society that does not live by His rules.” Jerry Falwell, Televangelist
“Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm to protect common needle users, and on the buttocks to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.” William F. Buckley, Columnist
” …” Ronald Reagan, President of the United States
ACT UP NY/Gran Fury (active New York, New York, 1987-1995) Let the Record Show… (detail) 1987/recreated 2015 Mixed media installation, dimensions variable Courtesy of Gran Fury and the New Museum, New York Photo courtesy of the artists
Carrie Yamaoka (American, born Glen Cove, New York, 1957) Steal This Book #2 1991 Unique chemically altered gelatin silver print Courtesy of the artist
Carrie Yamaoka takes inspiration from Abbie Hoffman’s iconic Steal This Book, a counterculture manual for social revolution. By photographing a page spread and then obliterating all of the words except “slaughter” and “history,” Yamaoka rejects any passive understanding of history. As an activist and artist, Yamaoka will use any means necessary to affect change. Steal This Book #2 may be considered as referring to Yamaoka’s experience as an AIDS activist and her desire to reshape our understanding of our relations with HIV.
Jerome Caja (American, 1958-1995) Bozo Fucks Death 1988 Nail polish on plastic tray Collection of Ed Frank and Sarah Ratchye
One of Jerome Caja’s alter egos was the clown Bozo. Here Caja aggressively turns the tables on death and seeks to gain some control and power over the inevitable, even if only a transgressive, psychological fantasy.
Working with collaborator Professor Silvio Barandun, Niki de Saint Phalle wrote and illustrated AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands for young adults. Using her characteristically colourful and joyous style, de Saint Phalle offers unusually straightforward information about the transmission of HIV from unprotected sex and unclean needles in intravenous drug use. She also uses the same frank approach to assuring her readers that casual contact from flowers, doorknobs, and toilet seats does not transmit AIDS, notions that were not widely understood in the early years of the AIDS crisis.
Jenny Holzer (American, born Gallipolis, Ohio, 1950) Untitled (In a Dream You Saw a Way To Survive and You Were Full of Joy) 1983-1985 Packaged latex condoms with printed text, each is 2 x 2 inches Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, Anonymous gift, 2001
Jenny Holzer (American, born Gallipolis, Ohio, 1950) Untitled (Expiring for Love Is Beautiful but Stupid) 1983-1985 Packaged latex condoms with printed text, each is 2 x 2 inches Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, Anonymous gift, 2001
Art AIDS America aims to abolish the silence about the pervasive presence of HIV / AIDS in American art and open meaningful and respectful dialogues about our experiences with the ongoing epidemic. For too long, we have considered art about AIDS as a tragic, closed chapter in the history of American art. This exhibition demonstrates the deep and continued impact of the AIDS crisis on American art from the early 1980s and continuing to today.
For more than thirty years, artists have actively responded with exquisite sensitivity to HIV / AIDS. They have adopted a broad spectrum of styles and messages from politically activist to quietly mournful art that nonetheless thrums with political content. Through poignant portraits, some artists brought much needed attention to personal suffering and loss from the AIDS crisis. Others employed abstraction and coded imagery to reveal the social and political factors that exacerbated the spread of HIV / AIDS. Artists also widely appropriated various art historical traditions to speak about the devastating impact of the epidemic. Art AIDS America offers an overview of how these various approaches redirected the course of American art from postmodern “art for art’s sake” formulas to art practice that highlights the personal experience and expertise of the artist.
Since the first reports of mysterious illnesses in the early 1980s, HIV and AIDS have touched nearly every American in some way, and operated as an undeniable (though often unacknowledged) force in shaping politics, medicine, and culture. Art AIDS America presents the full spectrum of artistic responses to AIDS, from the politically outspoken to the quietly mournful. HIV and AIDS are not just past-tense problems. As we persist in the struggle with HIV/AIDS, these artworks remind us of humanity’s resilience, responsibility, and history. The legacy of the AIDS crisis and our new relationships with the virus continue to inform contemporary art and American culture.
Text from the Tacoma Art Museum website
Keith Haring (American, 1958-1990) Apocalypse I 1988 From the series Apocalypse, 1988 Silkscreen, Edition of 90 Courtesy of the Keith Haring Foundation
In their first collaboration, Keith Haring illustrated William S. Burroughs’ dystopic poem Apocalypse by mixing references to advertising, art history, and Catholic theology. Haring included his “devil sperm,” the black, horned symbol he created to give shape to HIV and its reign of death and terror.
Burroughs introduced the chaos unfolding:
“The final Apocalypse is when every man sees what he sees, feels what he feels, and hears what he hears. The creatures of all your dreams and nightmares are right here, right now, solid as they ever were or ever will be, electric vitality of careening subways faster faster faster stations flash by in a blur.”
Keith Haring (American, 1958-1990) Apocalypse III 1988 From the series Apocalypse, 1988 Silkscreen, Edition of 90 Courtesy of the Keith Haring Foundation
Grassroots Activism
Artists provided the early warnings of the AIDS crisis with their artworks deployed at the street level. Posters, stickers, T-shirts and other projects made it impossible to ignore messages about AIDS. These activist artists were informed by earlier precedents of feminist art and artists working on issues of identity politics. Communities coalesced around the calls to action.
The most prominent group to address the AIDS crisis was the anonymous artist collective Gran Fury in New York, a committee of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The collective used techniques and ideas from advertising, marketing, and the art world to raise awareness and affect political change. Their bold graphic style and refined text continues to influence politically-themed art.
Gran Fury and other activists changed how Americans thought about AIDS. The political and social pressure instigated by their actions and artworks played important roles in changing the approval process for AIDS drugs and treatment protocols. Women’s health issues were brought to the forefront. As a result, American society positively changed their opinions about HIV / AIDS when they had correct information.
Memento Mori
The AIDS crisis compelled contemporary American artists to address death with urgency. Artists witnessed a plague sweep through their communities and wipe out their friends, colleagues, and lovers. They used art to express their rage and terror when AIDS had no effective treatment. Their artwork provided a vitally important way to mourn their losses and share their sorrow.
Artists looked back to European and American artistic traditions of memento mori, Latin for “Remember that you must die,” to share their experiences, feelings, and stories. They adapted symbols like skulls and flowers to depict the fragility and fleeting nature of life.
Artists in this section shifted the intent of memento mori away from concepts of death and the afterlife. They refocused on the preciousness and precariousness of life, without forgetting the political and social realities behind the massive wave of death. Nayland Blake’s clock marks the passing of so many individuals with a call to action. David Wojnarowicz rages against the senseless death of Peter Hujar. Bill Jacobson and Karen Finley give form to the fragility of memory. Latino folk traditions connect the living and the dead in the paintings of Tino Rodriguez and Thomas Woodruff.
Poetic Postmodernism
In the early 1980s, American art was dominated by a new, postmodern theory. It held that meaning belongs not to the artist who made the work but to their audiences who interpret the works. Called “the death of the author,” the theory was named after a 1967 essay by the French postmodernist thinker Roland Barthes.
As AIDS actually caused the death of thousands of authors and artists by the late 1980s, this metaphor became a terrifying reality. At the same time, a powerful Christian conservative movement aggressively politicised AIDS. Using homophobia and fear of the disease, these politicians passed Federal laws that made it illegal to “promote, encourage, or condone homosexual sexual activities or the intravenous use of illegal drugs” in an AIDS awareness and education bill.
The ramifications for artists and art exhibitions were equally prohibitive. Federal laws were passed that made it impossible for museums to receive government support if an exhibition included obscene content, which was understood to mean gay themes among others, including AIDS-specific art. In this climate, artists knew that overt political content would result in censorship. So they developed a new way to smuggle political meaning into art.
In his research for Art AIDS America, Jonathan David Katz named this new approach “poetic postmodernism.” Artists used the postmodern theory “death of the author” to camouflage their own personal, expressive meanings. Many of the works in this exhibition have the same title format, the word “untitled” followed by a more specific description in parentheses such as in “Untitled” (Water), Untitled (Hujar Dead), or Untitled (Corrupt HIV Activism). The first term, “untitled,” signals the prevailing postmodernist idea that all meanings come from the audience. But the phrase inside the parentheses reveals clues to the artist’s associations and intentions. Because recognition of AIDS content was a product of the viewer’s thought and not the artist’s explicit claim, such works could be shown in museums without fear of being censored under the new laws.
Andres Serrano (American, b. 1950) Milk/Blood 1989, printed 2015 Chromogenic colour print Exhibition print Courtesy of the artist
Milk/Blood recall the pure, flat colour of hard edged abstract painters such as Ellsworth Kelly. But the simple saturated colour fields in Serrano’s photograph bear the evocative title Milk / Blood, the two main body fluids that transmit HIV. Serrano appropriates the formal language of modernism for political purposes, a means of potentially slipping AIDS consciousness into a museum context without fear of exclusion or censure. As with HIV infection itself, the photograph underscores how our key sense, vision, is unreliable in the face of AIDS.
Andres Serrano (American, b. 1950) Blood and Semen III 1990 Chromogenic colour print, edition 1 of 4 40 × 60 inches Courtesy of the artist Photo courtesy of the artist
Like his Milk/Blood in this exhibition, Blood and Semen III also appears to be a rigorously formal composition, this time evoking the gestural appearance of an abstract expressionist painting. Again, the title references two body fluids that transmit HIV. As examples of poetic postmodernism, Serrano activates meaning in Blood and Semen III and Milk / Blood using formal arrangements and references to earlier artistic styles to inform his photographs with personal and potentially political content.
After an extensive period working in Europe memorialising the Holocaust, Shimon Attie returned to San Francisco in 1996 and began his series Untitled Memory. Attie projected old photographs of his friends and lovers onto places with special meaning to him, including this room of a former apartment. His photographs of these projections became personal studies of loss and melancholy.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992) Untitled (Hujar Dead) 1988-89 Black and white photograph, acrylic, text and collage on Massonite Collect of Steven Johnson and Walter Sudol Courtesy Second Ward Foundation
Wojnarowicz was briefly lovers with and then became a close friend of the famous photographer Peter Hujar, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1987. Untitled (Hujar Dead) incorporates still images from a film by Wojnarowicz of Hujar’s lifeless body on his hospital bed. Wojnarowicz then overprinted the text of one of his famous “rants.” In these politically-charged performances and texts, he laid blame for the AIDS crisis squarely on the conservative right-wing demagogues who politicised the disease and continually spewed homophobic rhetoric which only exacerbated the crisis.
Tino Rodriguez (Mexican-American born Guadalajara, Mexico, b. 1965) Eternal Lovers 2010 Oil on wood Private collection
Tino Rodriguez (Mexican-American, born Guadalajara, Mexico, b. 1965) Eternal Lovers (detail) 2010 Oil on wood Private collection
Tino Rodriguez’s Eternal Lovers incorporates aspects of his Mexican heritage, and especially the tradition of skull imagery from Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. This family-oriented celebration of ancestors brings the living and dead into affectionate proximity. Rodriguez here exuberantly conflates familiar American oppositions such as death and life, growth and decay, and even good and evil. Inherently androgynous, the gender of the skulls remains unknown as does their cause of death. But as in the Dia de los Muertos celebration itself, Rodriguez’s image supplants horror with humour and loss with presence, offering the triumph of love and memory over death in the age of AIDS.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992) Untitled (Buffalo) 1988-1989 Vintage gelatin silver print, signed on verso Collection of Michael Sodomick
For Untitled (Buffalo), David Wojnarowicz simply photographed a diorama in a museum in Washington, DC. This image of buffalo being herded off a cliff served as a chilling metaphor of the politics of AIDS in the US in the late 1980s. Rather than an illustration of traditional Native American hunting techniques, Wojnarowicz eloquently expressed his rage, desperation, and helplessness through the great symbol of American identity. His shifting and layering of meaning onto this symbol is a classic example of poetic postmodernism.
One example of how artists hid their message is David Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (Buffalo). It’s a diorama of a buffalo fall, a traditional method of harvesting large numbers of buffalo by chasing herds off cliffs. The buffalo are made from plastic. Wojnarowicz photographed the diorama and cropped it. “This is appropriation,” Hushka said. “He used it as this extraordinarily eloquent cry about the state of American politics at the time.” Katz added, “It’s telling that even an artist of Wojnarowicz’s activist fervour engaged in a metaphor that only cohered in the mind’s eye. You needed to be attentive to what it might be saying to read it. There’s nothing specifically AIDS about it.”
Spiritual Forces
Because of the overwhelming number of deaths, the unspeakable losses, and the constant presence of disease, it should not be surprising that artists also turned to issues of spirituality. Yet, the art history of AIDS often neglects this important aspect. Across the United States, faith communities tended to the spiritual needs of people with AIDS and provided critical services for them. These communities continue to support people living with HIV.
The AIDS crisis exposed deep division within many spiritual traditions. Artists such as Jerome Caja, Robert Gober, and Barbara Kruger expressed discomfort and displeasure in how some religious ideologies oppressed gays and lesbians and worsened the AIDS crisis. Others made inspiring works within long-established traditions like Keith Haring’s altar piece. In other artworks, artists created symbols for the dignity of people suffering from AIDS, ranging from Christian saints and Biblical texts to imagery inspired by Buddhism and healing traditions from India.
This altar piece by Keith Haring is the last work the artist completed. He worked on the wax mould while he was hospitalised for AIDS-related illnesses. The triptych format echoes traditional Roman Catholic altar pieces. The image of the crying mother holding an infant speaks to the inconsolable losses from AIDS. The mother’s tears fall on the crowds, seeking solace and mercy from the AIDS epidemic.
Barbara Kruger (American, born Newark, New Jersey, 1945) Untitled (It’s our pleasure to disgust you) 1991 Photographic silkscreen on vinyl The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Eric and Nannette Brill
Despite provocative imagery and text, Barbara Kruger intends no specific meaning to her artworks. Rather, Kruger wants to demonstrate how the reader generates meaning each time the text is read. She activates ambiguity and political charge with the phrase “It’s our pleasure to disgust you.” Kruger underscores the gulf between and image and its possible meanings, an issue brought into high relief in the culture wars promoted by religious conservatives, during the period when this work was made.
The work may be interpreted as evidence that artists like Kruger were deliberately insensitive to cultural norms. Alternatively, it could be read as proof that artworks were deliberately manipulated for political purpose by others. Because AIDS was framed in political terms from its earliest moment, Kruger’s Untitled (It’s our pleasure to disgust you) reflects the complexity and deliberate uses of language about AIDS.
Robert Gober (American, born Wallingford, Connecticut, 1954) Drains 1990 Cast pewter Edition of 8, with 2 artist’s proofs, artist’s proof 1 of 2 Collection of the artist
Robert Gober’s Drains is meticulously handcrafted to resemble a mass-produced consumer good. Because we think about drains primarily as a tool to remove waste often associated with personal hygiene and cleaning, connections to HIV/AIDS are obvious. By placing the sculpture in an unexpected position on a gallery wall, Gober seeks to generate unanswerable, metaphorical questions about the functions of a drain and the unknown space behind it. The cruciform shape at the back of the drain recalls his childhood and his complicated relationship with Catholicism.
Izhar Patkin (American born Israel, b. 1955) Unveiling of a Modern Chastity 1981 Rubber paste, latex theatrical wounds, and printing ink on a stretched linen canvas Courtesy of the artist
Izhar Patkin painted Unveiling of a Modern Chastity one year before there was any public announcement about a new disease striking formerly healthy young men. This is the earliest work in the exhibition, and, in retrospect, one of the earliest AIDS paintings ever. Troubled by the sight of a group of such young men with similar dark purple skin lesions waiting in his dermatologist’s office, he presciently titled the work to reflect what he felt might be a forthcoming change in sexual culture. The painting’s skin-like surface erupts in what looks like Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions.
Patkin’s heavily textured surface and use of artificial wounds was his effort to destroy minimalism and other traditions of pure abstraction. He wanted to expose the inability of modernist art to contain pressing social and contextual significance.
DID YOU KNOW? The Centers for Disease Control issued its first statement about a cluster of 19 cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma (a rare skin cancer most common in elderly men from southern Italy) and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in young, gay men in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in July 1981.
Albert J. Winn (American, 1947-2014) Akedah 1995 Gelatin silver print 171/2 × 21 3/4 inches Courtesy of Scott R. Portnoff Photo courtesy of the Estate of Albert J. Winn
In the artist’s own words: “Every month, because of my illness, I need to undergo a blood test. During the process, a tourniquet is bound tightly about my upper arm. At times when I’ve been on a study protocol for an experimental medicine, I’ve had my blood drawn every day. Having my blood drawn has become a ritual in what sometimes seems is a new religious practice, an AIDS ritual.
“Over time, I’ve transformed this ritual in relation to my Judaism. I wonder if like Isaac, I am being sacrificed. This time to science. I pray that an angel will intercede and spare my life. When my arm is bound with a tourniquet and the veins bulge, I am reminded that I am bound to my illness. I look at the rubber strap and see tefillin. Sometimes the impression of the leather straps from the tefillin are still visible on my skin by the time the tourniquet is wrapped around my arm. The binding of the tefillin is a reminder of being bound to my heritage. The straps also make my veins bulge. Except for the needle stick the binding feels the same.”
Art AIDS America at the Tacoma Art Museum
Politics, sex, religion, loss, and beauty – all of the topics that you can’t talk about over dinner but can at a museum – are open for discussion in Art AIDS America, an exhibition that reveals for the first time how the AIDS crisis forever changed American art. Since the first reports of mysterious illnesses in the early 1980s, HIV and AIDS have touched nearly every American in some way, and operated as an undeniable (though often unacknowledged) force in shaping politics, medicine, and culture. Art AIDS America presents the full spectrum of artistic responses to AIDS, from the politically outspoken to the quietly mournful.
Art AIDS America is a story of resilience and beauty revealed through art, and the community that gathered to bring hope and change. While recognising and honouring loss and grief, it refutes the narrative that AIDS is only a tragic tangent in American art, exploring how artists’ responses to the crisis and its legacy continue to inform contemporary American art. These artworks offer a vibrant representation of community, caring, creativity and activism. And, Art AIDS America will serve as a vivid reminder that the crisis is not over; HIV infections are increasing. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 1.2 million Americans are living with HIV.
A decade in the making, this exhibition is co-curated by TAM’s Chief Curator, Rock Hushka, and Jonathan D. Katz, PhD, Director, Visual Studies Doctoral Program, University at Buffalo.
“AIDS fundamentally changed American art, remaking its communicative strategies, its market, its emotional pitch and – not least – its political possibilities. But we’ve repressed the role of AIDS in the making of contemporary American culture, as we’ve repressed the role of AIDS in every other aspect of our lives. This exhibition underscores how powerfully a plague that is still with us has changed us,” says Katz. “Art AIDS America creates spaces for mourning and loss, yes, but also for anger and for joy, for political resistance and for humor, for horror, and for eroticism.”
The exhibition assembles 125 significant works in a wide range of media. The artists are diverse, including the internationally acclaimed such as Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Martin Wong, and those not yet as widely celebrated such as Luis Cruz Azaceta, Chloe Dzubilo, Derek Jackson, Kia Labeija, and Joey Terrill. The works date from 1981 to today, and some, like Catherine Opie’s photographs of the 1986 AIDS / ARC vigil in San Francisco, will be on public view for the first time.
“Art reflects and reacts to social, cultural, and political climates, and in the past 30 years, HIV and AIDS has been a constant presence,” says Hushka. “So many of us recall friends, family, and partners we have lost and the terror of the early years of the crisis, while younger people are just learning this story. We seek to create a deeper understanding of the legacy of HIV / AIDS in contemporary American art, and encourage our visitors to see their experiences in these works.”
Works in the exhibition will generally fall into two categories: art with a clear tie to AIDS, and art that requires the viewer to look beyond the surface to understand its connection to HIV / AIDS. Some artists addressed the AIDS crisis through activist works, community projects, graphics, and direct political statements. For example, the collective ACT UP NY / Gran Fury’s installation Let the Record Show… sears the words of public officials whose actions inflamed the crisis, including the silence of President Ronald Reagan, who would not speak publicly about AIDS until 1987. Other artists use camouflage, coding, misdirection, symbols, or other covert strategies to address the social, political, and physical impacts of HIV. An example is Robert Sherer’s beautifully rendered Sweet Williams, a basket of cut flowers, painted in HIV-negative and HIV-positive blood, about the untimely deaths of so many young men. The exhibition will be organised roughly by works created pre- and post-cocktail (in this case, ‘cocktail’ refers to the combination of drugs and therapies used to manage HIV and prevent the development of AIDS).
“Tacoma Art Museum is a safe space where people are able to address important and challenging issues. We are proud to present Art AIDS America. It is fitting that the exhibition debuts in Tacoma, the city that established the nation’s first government-sanctioned needle exchange program in a proactive approach toward controlling the spread of AIDS,” said Stephanie Stebich, TAM’s Executive Director. “TAM also has the scholarship to support this exhibition through our chief curator Rock Hushka and the exhibition’s co-curator Dr. Jonathan D. Katz, who also co-curated the award-winning Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, which we brought to TAM in 2012.”
The Art AIDS America catalogue is a significant component of the exhibition, with 15 contributors, nearly 300 pages, and more than 200 illustrations. It is published in association with the University of Washington Press of Seattle and London and designed by Marquand Books, Seattle. Art AIDS America is organised by TAM in partnership with the Bronx Museum of the Arts and will tour nationally. See it first at TAM, on view October 3, 2015 through January 10, 2016. The exhibition will then travel to Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw State University, GA; and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY.
Press release from the Tacoma Art Museum website
Bill Jacobson (American, b. 1955) Interim Portrait #373 1992 Chromogenic colour print 24 × 20 inches Courtesy of the artist Photo courtesy of the artist
Alon Reininger (American born Tel Aviv, Israel, b. 1947) Ken Meeks, PWA 1985 Archival pigment print Courtesy of Contact Press Images, New York
Mark I. Chester (American, born Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1950) Robert Chesley – ks portraits with harddick & superman spandex, #1-#6 from the series Diary of a Thought Criminal 1989, printed 2015 Pigment print Courtesy of the artist
Mark I. Chester gives us the first portrait of a sexually active person with AIDS. Robert Chesley (1943-1990) was a playwright, theatre critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and music composer. Perhaps his most celebrated play was Jerker, or The Helping Hand: A Pornographic Elegy with Redeeming Social Value and a Hymn to the Queer Men of San Francisco in Twenty Telephone Calls, Many of Them Dirty. At a time when many gay men had come to associate their own sexuality with death, the artist showed Chesley as a vibrant, active person with AIDS, intended as a rebuke to the routine AIDS portraits of mortally ill people. With this series, Chester rewrote the late-1980s codes for representing gay male sexuality from sexlessness and death towards a renewed embrace of life and its pleasure.
Steven Miller (American, b. 1968) Robert from the series Milky 2004 Inkjet print Edition 2 of 10 Tacoma Art Museum, Museum purchase with funds from Curtis Man
For his series Milky, photographer Steven Miller asked his friends if he could photograph them as he poured milk over their heads. These portraits capture the different reactions to the sensation and convey a sense of discomfort from being drenched by fluids like milk. Miller likens these two aspects to a symbolic infection of HIV. For many gay artists of his generation, HIV looms as a constant presence, and body fluids remain deeply ingrained as transmitters of the virus.
Portraiture
Artists used portraits to directly convey the devastating effects of the crisis on individuals. Even if we do not know the subject, portraits remind us that someone we know was likely affected by AIDS. Because the science about the retrovirus was new and extremely complicated and frightening, such portraits humanised the disease so it could be understood through personal stories.
Early portraits brought attention to the physical symptoms of AIDS such as the deep purple lesions of the skin cancer Kaposi’s sarcoma and the devastating weakness caused by AIDS-related wasting syndrome. Artists soon refocused on portraits of defiant individuals living with HIV. Refusing to show people as victims of an incurable disease, these portraits depicted fighters and survivors.
From pure abstract representations to straightforward photographic likenesses, portraits continue to illuminate how individuals respond to and overcome even the most complex aspects of HIV/AIDS such as stigma, racism, sexism, and poverty.
The Legacy of the AIDS Crisis
HIV is no longer an immediate life-or-death issue facing American artists, but one that quietly and continually persists in intriguing ways. The legacy of the AIDS crisis can be traced either through the motifs and influences of earlier artists or by understanding the psychological trauma and challenges that result from living in a world with HIV.
Artworks made after antiretroviral medicines became available in the mid-1990s beg the questions: If HIV is undetectable in a body and all but invisible in society, why should visibility in art be any different? How do you identify HIV if an artist is unwilling to speak about it but doesn’t live a moment of his or her intimate life without being aware of its near-certain presence?
Artists such as John Arsenault, Kalup Linzy, Patte Loper, and Donald Moffett bring their personal histories as activists and care givers into their artwork. They also use their art to express the discomfort and complexities of living in a world with the constant presence of HIV.
Works of art should be read with empathy and compassion to understand the fullness and richness of the artist’s experience. We need to remind ourselves of the stresses, anxieties, fears, and realities caused by the burden of HIV. To honor these artists’ experiences, we must insist that HIV inform at least part of the meaning of their work. This will ensure an understanding of their art as part of an art history of deep social engagement and connection.
Julie Tolentino (American, b. 1964) THE SKY REMAINS THE SAME: Tolentino Archives Ron Athey’s Self-Obliteration #1 2008 Chromogenic colour print Edition 1 of 5 Documentation courtesy of Leon Mostovoy Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles
Section 1 (left): The work begins with Athey’s solo performance of Self-Obliteration #1 while Tolentino, from a nearby platform, aims to capture his performance movements and affect (a reading of tones, gestures, and movements) as an archival action.
This work involves a long blond wig pierced onto the scalp with hidden needles. The needles are removed, causing blood to stream and pool onto two panes of glass. Ultimately, these glass pieces are positioned to encase the individual body.
Section 2 (center and right): Tolentino and Athey “repeat” his performance, a true impossibility in the live form – displaying a disrupted mirroring of the other.
Like a low current running throughout the work, THE SKY REMAINS THE SAME‘s tension opens to the spectator’s subjectivity. A range of issues are activated: Athey’s openly HIV positive status; the actions performed on a differently-gendered person of colour; and the intimate act of bleeding. This becomes entangled with Tolentino’s practice, history of activism and advocacy, caregiving and artist-to-artist relations as a living archive.
Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961) Ron Athey/The Sick Man (from Deliverance) 2000 Polaroid Private collection
This work by Catherine Opie, taken with the world’s largest polaroid camera, was made in collaboration with the performance artist Ron Athey. Athey achieved both fame and censure as an HIV positive performance artist whose work involved physical and psychic trials, along with, on occasion, blood.
Clearly a response to AIDS, the pose of Ron Athey/The Sick Man recalls the traditional iconography of the Pieta, in which the Virgin Mary supports the body of the dead Christ. Athey is held by his performance partner Darryl Carlton (a.k.a. Divinity Fudge), two heavily tattooed men in place of the holy family. The implications of self-sacrifice and transcendence through pain and suffering animate both the original scene and this more contemporary incarnation. Opie situated the figures in a beautiful, richly saturated black space. She offers a contemporary allegory of the excluded sufferer whose exile and death can be laid at the feet of those who consider themselves pious.
Eric Rhein (American, b. 1961) Life Altering Spencer from Leaves 2013 Wire and paper Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Purchased as the gift of Louis Wiley, Jr. (PA 1963) in Memory of Paul Monette (PA 1963) and his partner Roger Horwitz
Eric Rhein began The Leaf Project in 1996 to raise awareness around HIV/AIDS and chose to memorialise his friends who had died of AIDS-related causes. He selected the leaf motif to honour the individuality of each person, while also evoking the countless leaves shed by trees in autumn. Life Altering Spencer honours AIDS activist Spencer Cox (1968-2012), a member of ACT UP, Treatment Action Group, and the Food and Drug Administration’s Anti-Viral Advisory Committee. In this capacity, Cox and others became experts on drug trials and approval, successfully lobbying to hasten the approval time for new HIV medications. Cox and his group thus changed the course of medicine in America – the first non-physicians to do so – and, not coincidentally, these new treatments saved the life of artist Eric Rhein.
fierce pussy (formed New York, New York, 1991) For the Record 2013 Two offset prints on newsprint, two panels, installed: 22⅝ x 70 inches Courtesy of the artists Photo courtesy of the artists
The collaborative group fierce pussy created this work for the organisation Visual AIDS in New York City. Playing off Gran Fury’s 1987 Let the Record Show… and evoking postmodern text based art, fierce pussy asks that we remember the thousands of people who died of HIV-related causes before antiretroviral drugs became available to control the virus. They insist that we continue the work to end HIV/AIDS despite these new drugs.
The horse with no rider at the centre of the composition represents individuals on the reservation who have died of AIDS-related causes. Using the 19th-century tradition of ledger drawing, with a riderless horse as symbolic of a warrior who fell in battle, Haukaas weaves together the complicated issues of stigma surrounding HIV / AIDS and the Native American experience with the disease.
Robert Sherer (American, b. 1957) Sweet Williams 2013 HIV- and HIV+ blood on paper Courtesy of the artist
The title Sweet Williams comes from Robert Sherer’s childhood. His grandmother, an avid gardener, often asked him to help gather flowers from her garden and instructed, “Now, honey, cut down the most beautiful ones first.” Upon reflection, Sherer realised that AIDS was deeply correlated to beauty and sexual attraction. He remembers his many handsome friends and acquaintances who died too early – the Williams, the Billys, the Wills, the Willies – memorialising them in an image drawn in HIV negative and positive blood. Of all his colleague friends, two of whom were named William, only Sherer is still alive.
Joey Terrill (American, b. 1955) Still-Life with Forget-Me-Nots and One Week’s Dose of Truvada 2012 Mixed media on canvas Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Foundation purchase
Long-time Latino queer rights and AIDS activist Joey Terrill makes paintings that resemble the work of such well-known pop artists as Tom Wesselmann. Departing from Wesselmann’s 1960s pop still-life paintings, Terrill subverts the genre through his many queer references, not least the regular inclusion of the HIV medication Truvada. In these his appropriations of the American dream, Terrill shows himself to be a political activist – a role he has inhabited since the 1970s.
Terrill’s addition of the forget-me-nots at the centre of the composition pays homage to his artistic hero David Wojnarowicz. He also alludes to the daily routine of the antiviral medicine Truvada and pointedly questions why changes in the social and political realms have allowed this to be a normal part of so many people’s lives.
Derek Jackson (American, b. 1972) Perfect Kiss 2007 Slideshow with found music and original still imagery Courtesy of the artist
Derek Jackson enacts a series of “hookups” in which his sexual activity should necessarily raise issues of HIV. Although not explicitly mentioned, HIV is evoked by the lyrics of his soundtrack. Jackson relies on New Order’s 1987 hit Perfect Kiss to equate unsafe sex with a suicide. The lyrics of the chorus plead with a suicidal friend, “I know, you know, you believe in a land of love.” Jackson’s hookups demonstrate how self-esteem, mutual respect, and communication are necessary to avoid becoming HIV positive.
LADZ (John Arsenault and Adrian Gilliland) John Arsenault, b. 1971 Adrian Gilliland, b. 1980 Eden #31 2012 Chromogenic colour print Courtesy of the artists
LADZ coined their name after a humorous autocorrect of “ladies” while texting on their smart phones. The artist group finds virtually abandoned industrial spaces where they enact elaborate scenarios reflecting the complexities of life in Los Angeles. The heightened sexual tension combined with the boxing gloves provides a glimpse into the daily navigation of sexual activity and HIV.
Kalup Linzy (American, born Stuckey, Florida, 1977) Lollypop 2006 Single-channel video 3 minutes, 24 seconds Collection of Driek and Michael Zirinsky
Kalup Linzy and his friend, artist Shaun Leonardo, lip sync the 1933 Hunter & Jenkins tune. Laden with the sexual innuendo of the song’s lyrics, Linzy attempts to coax treats from Leonardo. The artist playfully raises issues of gender and performance.
Given the high rates of HIV infection of men of colour who have sex with men particularly in urban centres, a viewer should keep in mind that individuals like Linzy continually navigate HIV in all their sexual encounters. Unlike a generation ago, young men and women have come to have a different relationship with HIV and no longer fear the virus as a death sentence. Empathy toward their experiences is key to understanding how they cope and survive.
Deborah Kass painted Still Here as part of a group of paintings called Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times, beginning in 2006. A response to the ongoing foreign wars and domestic political issues after the second election of George W. Bush, Kass underscored the gulf between the literal and metaphorical significance of the phrases she painted. Still Here comes from the Stephen Sondheim musical Follies in which a faded film star recalls how she persevered. The song opens “Good times and bum times, I’ve seen them all, and, my dear, I’m still here.”
The sentiment of the song speaks to the resilience of the many people who lived through the AIDS crisis and those who continue the struggle against the virus and social injustice. Kass’s title may also recall Still/Here, a dance about perseverance, dying, and HIV by the HIV positive choreographer Bill T. Jones.
Kia Labeija (American, b. 1990) 24 (Mourning Sickness; Kia and Mommy; In my room) 2014 Inkjet prints 13 × 19 inches Courtesy of the artist
Artist and performer Kia Labeija was born HIV positive. She struggled with HIV throughout her childhood, including the side effects of the medications, the stigma associated with the disease, and the death of her mother. In her three photographs titled 24, she celebrates coming to terms with the disease and her new-found role as advocate and spokesperson for AIDS awareness. The title also commemorates her 24th birthday and her home on the 24th floor of a Manhattan apartment building.
Tacoma Art Museum 1701 Pacific Avenue Tacoma, WA 98402
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