Curator: Dr. Valerie Paley, who was then the New-York Historical Society Historian and Vice President for Scholarly Programs
Unknown artist Bill Cunningham Photographing Three Models at New York County Court House c. 1968-1976 Gelatin silver photograph New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham
Now this is more like it!
If you want fabulousness with flair, and a dash of savoir-faire; if you want architecture with fashion, history with panache, you need look no further. Camp, kitsch, OTT but with poise, aplomb, grace and sophistication – here is the artist for the job. Oh, what fun he and his muse Editta Sherman must have had with this project.
But behind it all is a damn good photographer, with a great eye for composition. Look at the hat, the building and the “attitude” of the hands in Guggenheim Museum (c. 1968-1976, below). This is how you make people smile and think (about the city, conservation and creativity), not with some overblown frippery like the photographs of Lagerfeld in the last posting.
It’s a pity the press images were initially so poor. I had to spend hours cleaning up the images they were so badly scratched to present them to you in a viewable state. Be that as it may, these are a joy, I love them…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the New York Historical Society for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016) Gothic bridge in Central Park (designed 1860) c. 1968-1976 Gelatin silver photograph New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham
Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016) Editta Sherman on the Train to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden c. 1972 Gelatin silver photograph New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham
Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016) Guggenheim Museum (built 1959) c. 1968-1976 Gelatin silver photograph New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham
This spring, the New-York Historical Society presents a special exhibition celebrating the creative intersection of fashion and architecture through the lens of a visionary photographer. Bill Cunningham: Facades, on view from March 14 through June 15, 2014, explores the legendary photographer’s project documenting the architectural riches and fashion history of New York City.
Beginning in 1968, Bill Cunningham scoured the city’s thrift stores, auctions and street fairs for vintage clothing and scouted architectural sites on his bicycle. The result was a photographic essay entitled Facades (completed in 1976), which paired models – most particularly his muse, fellow photographer Editta Sherman – posed in period costumes at historic New York settings.
Nearly four decades after Cunningham donated 88 gelatin silver prints from the series to the New-York Historical Society in 1976, approximately 80 original and enlarged images from this whimsical and bold work are being reconsidered in a special exhibition curated by Dr. Valerie Paley, New-York Historical Society Historian and Vice President for Scholarly Programs. The exhibition offers a unique perspective on both the city’s distant past and the particular time in which the images were created, examining Cunningham’s project as part of the larger cultural zeitgeist in late 1960s-70s New York City, an era when historic preservation and urban issues loomed large.
“We are thrilled to feature these important photographs by New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham, who captured an uncertain moment in our city’s history, when New York seemed on the brink of losing its place of privilege as a capital of the world. Cunningham’s vivid sense of New York’s illustrious past and his unfettered optimism about its future make the photographs among the most dramatic and important documentation of the city’s social history,” said Louise Mirrer, President and CEO of the New-York Historical Society. “The exhibition is especially timely, as Mrs. Editta Sherman, Bill Cunningham’s muse for his project and the famed ‘duchess of Carnegie Hall,’ passed away last November 2013 at the age of 101. Mrs. Sherman’s indomitable spirit, humour and creativity are powerfully felt through the photographic images. We are gratified that many of her family members will be with us for our opening exhibition event.”
Over eight years, Bill Cunningham collected more than 500 outfits and photographed more than 1,800 locations for the Facades project, jotting down historical commentary on the versos of each print. The selection of 80 images on view evoke the exuberance of Cunningham and Sherman’s treasure hunt and their pride for the city they called home. Cunningham’s images are contextualised with reproductions of original architectural drawings from New-York Historical’s collection.
During the years that Cunningham worked on Facades, New York City was in a municipal financial crisis that wreaked havoc on daily existence, with crime, drugs, and garbage seemingly taking over the city. However, the 1970s also was an era of immense creativity, when artists and musicians experimented with new forms of expression. While Cunningham’s photographs offer an unsullied version of the tough cityscape during this chaotic time, his vision was part of a larger movement towards preserving the historic heritage of the built environment to improve the quality of urban life.
Most images in Facades feel timeless, such as Gothic Bridge (designed 1860), featuring Editta Sherman strolling through a windswept Central Park, framed by the wrought-iron curves of a classic bridge. However, at least one will offer a peek behind the scenes of the project. Cunningham and Sherman often traveled to locations by public transportation to avoid wrinkling the costumes, and Editta Sherman on the Train to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden (c. 1972) captures the jarring juxtaposition of Sherman sitting primly in a graffiti-covered subway car.
Other exhibition highlights include Sherman dressed in a man’s Revolutionary War-era hat, powdered wig, overcoat and breeches at St. Paul’s Chapel and Churchyard (built c. 1766-1796), the oldest surviving church in Manhattan, where George Washington worshipped. In Federal Hall (built c. 1842), Cunningham paired the Parthenon-like architectural details of the building with a Grecian-style, 1910s pleated Fortuny gown. For Grand Central Terminal (built c. 1903-1913), Cunningham drew on his millinery background to create a voluminous feathered hat that echoes the spirit of the “crown of the Terminal,” the ornate rooftop sculpture with monumental figures of Mercury, Minerva, and Hercules.
Bill Cunningham (1929-2016) was a fashion photographer for the New York Times, known for his candid street photography. Cunningham moved to New York in 1948, initially working in advertising and soon striking out on his own to make hats under the name “William J.” After serving a tour in the U.S. Army, he returned to New York and began writing for the Chicago Tribune. While working at the Tribune and Women’s Wear Daily, he began taking photographs of fashion on the streets of New York. The Times first published a group of his impromptu pictures in December 1978, which soon became a regular series. In 2008 Cunningham was awarded the title chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. He is the subject of the award-winning documentary film Bill Cunningham New York (2010). Bill Cunningham and Editta Sherman were neighbours in the Carnegie Hall Studios, a legendary artists’ residence atop the concert hall, for 60 years.
Press release from the New York Historical Society website
Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016) St. Paul’s Chapel and Churchyard (built c. 1766-96) c. 1968-1976 Gelatin silver photograph New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham
Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016) Grand Central Terminal (built c. 1903-1913) c. 1968-1976 Gelatin silver photograph New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham
Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016) Federal Hall (built c. 1842, costume c. 1910) c. 1968-1976 Gelatin silver photograph New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham
Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016) Bowery Savings Bank (built c. 1920) c. 1968-1976 Gelatin silver photograph New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham
Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016) Club 21 (founded c. 1920s; costume c. 1940) c. 1968-1976 Gelatin silver photograph New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham
Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016) Associated Press Building at Rockefeller Center (built c. 1939) c. 1968-1976 Gelatin silver photograph New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham
Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016) Paris Theater (built 1947) c. 1968-1976 Gelatin silver photograph New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham
Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016) General Motors Building c. 1968-1976 Gelatin silver photograph New-York Historical Society, Gift of Bill Cunningham
The New York Historical Society
 170 Central Park West at Richard Gilder Way (77th Street) Phone: (212) 873-3400
Curators: Professor Hubertus Gaßner and Luisa Pauline Fink
Installation view of Feuerbach’s Muses – Lagerfeld’s Models at Hamburger Kunsthalle
Don’t give up your day job
From the sublime (Feuerbach) to the downright awful (Lagerfeld).
From gorgeous, sensitive portrait paintings of women, full of detail and texture, colour and stillness to what I would term soft-cock porn. Fashion influenced, hyper airbrushed faces; Saint Sebastian poses referencing classical ideals of male beauty (done so much more authentically and grittily by Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden), all staged in sylvan settings. Then printed onto silver- and gold-coloured fabric. Can’t wait to see that…
Not absolutely fabulous, just absolutely hideous.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Hamburger Kunsthalle for allowing me to publish the art work and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of Feuerbach’s Muses – Lagerfeld’s Models at Hamburger Kunsthalle
Iphigenia (Greek mythology) the daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon; Agamemnon was obliged to offer her as a sacrifice to Artemis when the Greek fleet was becalmed on its way to Troy; Artemis rescued her and she later became a priestess.
From February 2014 the Hamburger Kunsthalle is presenting an unusual double exhibition on beauty, eroticism and the adoration of muses and models that brings together paintings by Anselm Feuerbach and hit her to unseen photographs by Karl Lagerfeld. In a similar way both Feuerbach and Lagerfeld seek an actualisation of an ideal of timeless beauty founded in the ancient world. The exhibition examines the cult of beauty, which stylises the model to an icon. Over forty works by Feuerbach, most of them from the years 1860-70, will be on show. They are loans from the Feuerbachhaus Speyer and from numerous German, Swiss and Austrian museums ad private collections. Karl Lagerfeld has created a series of around sixty black-and-white photographs specially for the exhibition. Mostly in large formats, they have been printed in a complex procedure onto silver- and gold-coloured fabric.
Anselm Feuerbach (1829-80) one of the most important German painters of the late nineteenth century, lived in Rome from 1856 onwards. The city, with its magnificent architecture and heroic surrounding landscape, was a place of yearning that seemed eligible like no other to revive the classical ideal of ancient times. Feuerbach devoted himself to antique subject matter, which he filled with imagination and personal feeling. This is most excitingly shown in the series of unique portraits, begun in 1860, which portray Feuerbach’s model and muse, Anna Risi, known as Nanna. Feuerbach painted Nana in a wide variety of roles and sensitively staged settings that reveal an almost cultic veneration for his model. When Nanna left Feuerbach in 1865, she was followed by Lucia Brunacci. Similarly to Nanna she matched the classical ideal of beauty of the time, with her Greek profile and thick dark hair. Lucia inspired Feuerbach to impressive portrayals of mythological themes that form the highpoint of his ouevre.
‘Happy is he whom the muses love’, wrote the Greek poet Hesiod, and so the muses are a symbol of the higher power that is needed, according to the ancients, to be creative. The photographic series Modern Mythology (2013) by Karl Lagerfeld, explores the love story of Daphnis and Chloe, and shows models such as Baptiste Giabiconi and Bianca Balti, who have accompanied Lagerfeld in his work for several years. The story, by the poet Longus, tells of a boy and a girl who grow up without parents among shepherds and over the years develop a strong affection for one another. The narration has been taken up many times since the Renaissance. Lagerfeld’s photographs belong to a series of works by Pierre Bonnard, François Boucher or Aristide Maillol which present the ancient text as a symbol of the idyllic life. Karl Lagerfeld’s stagings were shot against the picturesque natural background of the South of France, and are the actualisation of an ancient theme.
The exhibition is accompanied by two publications: the catalogue on Anselm Feuerbach is published jointly with the Museum Wiesbaden and introduces Feuerbach’s paintings and drawings from an art-historical perspective; the second book combines Karl Lagerfeld’s photographs and Longus’s mythological narrative of Daphnis and Chloe in a bibliophile volume that will be elaborately produced by the publisher Gerhard Steidl.
Curators: Professor Hubertus Gaßner and Luisa Pauline Fink
Press release from the Hamburger Kunsthalle website
Some familiar images that were also seen in the posting Wols’ Photography: Images Regained are complimented by 5 new ones. The two portraits of the artist Max Ernst are eerie (is that a suitable word for a portrait that is strong and unsettling?) and perceptive, Wols responsive to the status of his sitter as a pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Martin-Gropius-Bau for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Germaine Émilie Krebs (1903-1993), known as Alix Barton and later as “Madame Grès”, relaunched her design house under the name Grès in Paris in 1942. Prior to this, she worked as “Alix” or “Alix Grès” during the 1930s. Formally trained as a sculptress, she produced haute couture designs for an array of fashionable women, including the Duchess of Windsor, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Dolores del RÃo. Her signature was cut-outs on gowns that made exposed skin part of the design, yet still had a classical, sophisticated feel. She was renowned for being the last of the haute couture houses to establish a ready-to-wear line, which she called a “prostitution”.
The name Grès was a partial anagram of her husband’s first name and alias. He was Serge Czerefkov, a Russian painter, who left her soon after the house’s creation. Grès enjoyed years of critical successes but, after Grès herself sold the business in the 1980s to Yagi Tsucho, a Japanese company, it faltered. In 2012, the last Grès store in Paris was closed.
Wolfgang Schulze, known as Wols, was born in Berlin in 1913. As a painter and graphic artist he is considered to have been an important trailblazer of Art Informel. For the first time the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin is presenting the largely unknown photographic oeuvre of Wols. These works foreshadow his development in the direction of non-representational art.
Wols grew up in Dresden, where he had an early encounter with photography as a profession through his attendance at a course in the studio of the Dresden photographer Genja Jonas. In 1932, after a brief sojourn in the milieu of the Berlin Bauhaus – then in the process of breaking up – the young Wols set off for Paris to realise his artistic ambitions.
At the same time he produced striking multiple black-and-white portraits of personalities such as Max Ernst, Nicole Boubant or Roger Blin. Over the years Wols’ imagery became increasingly radical. The representational motifs gradually acquired a more abstract dimension and forced the viewer to see the objects represented in a new light. In particular, an extraordinary set of photograms confirms his interest in replacing representational motifs with non-representational ones. Transferred to painting, this trend would later make him a pioneer of Art Informel.
Immediately after the outbreak of the Second World War Wols spent over a year in various internment camps in the south of France. In this period he turned more to watercolours, most of which were lost while he was fleeing from the Nazis.
Living in straitened circumstances Wols fought a losing battle with alcoholism and poor health. In 1951, as a result of his weakened physical condition, he died of food poisoning in Paris at the early age of 38. After his death, Wols’ work was displayed at the first three documenta exhibitions in Kassel (1955, 1959, 1964) and, in 1958, at the Venice Biennale. On 27 May 2014 he would have been 101.
Undergoing treatment for alcoholism, he moved to the country at Champigny-sur-Marne in June 1951. His early death later that year from food poisoning helped foster the legendary reputation that grew up around him soon afterwards. His paintings helped pioneer Art informel and Tachism, which dominated European art during and after the 1950s as a European counterpart to American Abstract Expressionism. Influenced by the writings of the philosopher Lao Tzu throughout his life, Wols also wrote poems and aphorisms that expressed his aesthetic and philosophical ideas.”
The Chanel Legend exhibition dates: 28th February – 18th May, 2014 New Women exhibition dates:Â 28th February – 27th July, 2014
Yva (German, 1900-1944) Silk stockings Nd Silver gelatin print Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Yva (26 January 1900 – 31 December 1944) was the professional pseudonym of Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon who was a German Jewish photographer renowned for her dreamlike, multiple exposed images. She became a leading photographer in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. When the Nazi Party came to power, she was forced into working as a radiographer. She was deported by the Gestapo in 1942 and murdered, probably in the Majdanek concentration camp during World War II.
Do you feel like a new woman?
Do you feel like a god?
You, in the oft mentioned (ten times in the accompanying texts) LBD (Little Black Dress) or Chanel Suit (ten times as well)
It’s like the ten commandments.
And ~ on we go… say after me,
“Sashay! Shantay!”
PS some of the photos ain’t half bad tho!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
‘Sleeping with the Enemy, Coco Chanel and the Secret War’ written by Hal Vaughan further solidifies the consistencies of the French intelligence documents released by describing Coco as a “vicious anti-Semite” who praised Hitler.
World War II, specifically the Nazi seizure of all Jewish-owned property and business enterprises, provided Chanel with the opportunity to gain the full monetary fortune generated by Parfums Chanel and its most profitable product, Chanel No. 5. The directors of Parfums Chanel, the Wertheimers, were Jewish. Chanel used her position as an “Aryan” to petition German officials to legalise her claim to sole ownership.
“On 5 May 1941, she wrote to the government administrator charged with ruling on the disposition of Jewish financial assets. Her grounds for proprietary ownership were based on the claim that Parfums Chanel “is still the property of Jews” and had been legally “abandoned” by the owners”. …
During the period directly following the end of World War II, the business world watched with interest and some apprehension the ongoing legal wrestle for control of Parfums Chanel. Interested parties in the proceedings were cognisant that Chanel’s Nazi affiliations during wartime, if made public knowledge, would seriously threaten the reputation and status of the Chanel brand. Forbes magazine summarised the dilemma faced by the Wertheimers: [it is Pierre Wertheimer’s worry] how “a legal fight might illuminate Chanel’s wartime activities and wreck her image – and his business.”
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Self-Portrait with silver ball 1931 Silver gelatin print Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Aenne Biermann (March 8, 1898 – January 14, 1933), born Anna Sibilla Sternfeld, was a German photographer of Ashkenazi origin. She was one of the major proponents of New Objectivity, a significant art movement that developed in Germany in the 1920s.
Major exhibitions of her work include the Munich Kunstkabinett, the Deutscher Werkbund and the exhibition of Folkwang Museum in 1929. Other important exhibitions include the exhibition entitled Das Lichtbild held in Munich in 1930 and the 1931 exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts (French: Palais des Beaux Arts) in Brussels.
Horst P. Horst (German-American, 1906-1999) Coco Chanel 1937 Silver gelatin print Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Horst P. Horst (German-American, 1906-1999)
Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann (August 14, 1906 – November 18, 1999), who chose to be known as Horst P. Horst, was a German-American fashion photographer. …
Horst is best known for his photographs of women and fashion, but is also recognised for his photographs of interior architecture, still lifes, especially ones including plants, and environmental portraits. One of the great iconic photos of the Twentieth-Century is “The Mainbocher Corset” with its erotically charged mystery, captured by Horst in Vogue‘s Paris studio in 1939. Designers like Donna Karan continue to use the timeless beauty of “The Mainbocher Corset” as an inspiration for their outerwear collections today. His work frequently reflects his interest in surrealism and his regard of the ancient Greek ideal of physical beauty.
His method of work typically entailed careful preparation for the shoot, with the lighting and studio props (of which he used many) arranged in advance. His instructions to models are remembered as being brief and to the point. His published work uses lighting to pick out the subject; he frequently used four spotlights, often one of them pointing down from the ceiling. Only rarely do his photos include shadows falling on the background of the set. Horst rarely, if ever, used filters. While most of his work is in black & white, much of his colour photography includes largely monochromatic settings to set off a colourful fashion. Horst’s colour photography did include documentation of society interior design, well noted in the volume Horst Interiors. He photographed a number of interiors designed by Robert Denning and Vincent Fourcade of Denning & Fourcade and often visited their homes in Manhattan and Long Island. After making the photograph, Horst generally left it up to others to develop, print, crop, and edit his work.
One of his most famous portraits is of Marlene Dietrich, taken in 1942. She protested the lighting that he had selected and arranged, but he used it anyway. Dietrich liked the results and subsequently used a photo from the session in her own publicity.
Boris Lipnitzki (1887-1971) was a Ukrainian-born French photographer of the arts; ballet, fashion, cinema, visual art, writing and music.
Haim Efime Boris Lipnitzki (or Lipnitzky) was born into a Jewish family in Oster, in Chernihiv Province of the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) on 4 February 1887. He died in Paris on 6 July 1971, aged 84, and is buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery.
In the 1920s Coco Chanel chiefly influenced the type of the “new woman”. She established skirts that reached just below the knee, encouraged women to wear trousers and represents functional ladies wear. In the photographs by among others Yva, Franz Roth, Lotte Jacobi and Hein Gorny presented here, women show legs in silk stockings, wear cropped hair, drive motorbikes or automobiles and play tennis or go into baths. In this period women begin to take charge of their lives. Being a photographer offered the opportunity to express this new notion of the self in images and in life. The special display of the Photography Department coincides with the exhibition The Chanel Legend.
The Chanel Legend
Coco Chanel (1883-1971) is one of the most eminent couturières of the twentieth century. She already appears as an advocate of simple, comfortable clothes in the years just after 1910, thus helping to pave the way for a style which has retained its major importance in the fashion world till today. Such outstanding fashion classics as the “little black dress”, the Chanel Suit and the Chanel handbag are inseparably linked with her person. Since her start-up in 1913, Chanel has built up an international and, till the present day, astoundingly successful fashion empire. It is not until 1983, in the shape of Karl Lagerfeld, that a personality with anything like her charisma and influence becomes her successor. Coco – her real name was Gabrielle – Chanel launched her perfume Chanel N° 5, whose overwhelming commercial success guaranteed her a financial independence which was to last all her life, at the beginning of the 1920s. She combined fashion jewellery and genuine gemstones with surefooted confidence and had herself portraited by celebrity photographers such as Man Ray or Horst P. Horst.
The Chanel Legend investigates why it is that the person of Coco Chanel and the brand she established have attracted such huge attention up to and including the present. It will turn the spotlight both on the fashion designer’s biography and the image which she created for herself, as well as the brilliant achievement of Karl Lagerfeld (b. 1933) in combining this legacy with the fluctuating currents of contemporary taste since 1983. The exhibition shows a total of more than 200 objects from eminent collections, including women’s suits, accessoires, jewellery, advertising graphic, historical photographs and over 75 fashion magazines spanning a period from 1920 to1971. Besides more than 54 original garments, among them 38 created by Coco Chanel, and some 50 jewellery creations, over 35 adaptions of the Chanel classics can be seen for the first time, which in their own individual way give us a new appreciation of the “Chanel Legend”.
The exhibition approaches the “Chanel Legend” in three chapters. The first documents, with 38 original garments, accessoires and more than 50 items of fashion jewellery from the period between 1925 and 1971 the fashion designer’s oeuvre. Designs for evening and day wear and the perfume Chanel N° 5, of which an original flacon is on show, belong to Chanel’s pre-Second World War creative phase. After her return to Paris in 1954, Chanel continued to lead her firm up to her death in 1971. The exhibition shows, among other items from this period, some 10 garments which Chanel designed for the actress and singer Marlene Dietrich, including day wear and garments for representative occasions. On top of this, a large quantity of pieces of fashion jewellery can be seen, supplemented by original photographs.
The second chapter throws light on the Chanel classics, which have retained their fascination till today. Thus historical original examples of the Chanel Suit are juxtaposed with some 20 different adaptations of it, including models from other fashion houses, unknown ateliers and garment manufacturers. The procession of “lookalikes” and “distant cousins” by no means comes to an end with Chanel’s lifetime, but integrates aspects of contemporary fashion. A selection of the endless variations on the theme of the “little black dress” from the 1920s till the present will also be on show, some of them by designers such as Yves Saint Laurent, Max Heyman and Issey Miyake or Nina Ricci. They should by no means be seen as just copies of Chanel models. The short black dress was in keeping with the modern, dynamic lifestyle of the 1920s. Later the “little black dress” is an indispensable requisite in every woman’s wardrobe and, in the Fifties and Sixties, the epitome of Parisian chic.
In the third section, the focus is on Karl Lagerfeld’s creations for the House of Chanel. He succeeded in modernising the brand without sacrificing the features which were typical for it. The exhibition shows in particular items which quote the Chanel classics, or pay homage to his revered predecessor in some of their details. This selection, too, is complemented by fashion jewellery. The development comes full circle here, since Lagerfeld’s present winter collection for 2013-14 playfully quotes references to Coco Chanel’s legendary initial phase in the 1920s. More than 100 historical fashion magazines spanning a period from 1920 to 1971 can also be seen in the exhibition, including an issue of the American Vogue dated 1st October 1926 in which the “little black dress” is shown. Magazines were the most important medium for the propagation and reception of Chanel’s fashion. Visitors can leaf through them on the tablet computers provided.
Press release from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg website
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Portrait of Anneliese Schiesser 1929 Silver gelatin print Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg
Hein Gorny (German, 1904-1967) Portrait of a Woman c. 1930/1972 Silver gelatin print, Reprint ofHeinrich Riebesehl Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg
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Hein Gorny (German, 1904-1967)
Hein Gorny (1904-1967) was a highly versatile photographer. Self-taught, he had extensive, in-depth knowledge of photographic techniques and was specialised both in photographic and darkroom processes. He photographed a broad range of subject matter, including portraits, architecture, and animals as well as images used in industrial, commercial, and illustrational contexts. In addition he created experimental photographs, primarily working with macrophotography. Advertising photography was the field in which Hein Gorny carried out numerous commissions and was most well-known. He was primarily active in Hanover and Berlin. Hein Gorny is described by Heinrich Riebesehl as a “pioneer of modern commercial photography” in a catalogue published in conjunction with the Spectrum Photogalerie’s inaugural exhibition of 1972. He was masterful in his groundbreaking ability to fuse the photographic spirit of his time with the demands of advertising photography.
“Especially in his early work, the joy of experimentation and the openness to everything new and unusual is clearly visible. His positive attitude towards life, his carefree, almost exuberant way of using the medium of photography made him – consciously or unconsciously – adopt the taste of the times.”
~ Heinrich Riebeseh
Atelier Benda/d’Ora The actress Marlene Dietrich with beret 1927 Silver gelatin print Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Madame D’Ora / Dora Philippine Kallmus (Austrian, 1881-1963) The fashion designer Coco Chanel About 1927 Silver gelatin print Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Dora Philippine Kallmus (Austrian, 1881-1963)
Dora Philippine Kallmus (20 March 1881 – 28 October 1963), also known as Madame D’Ora or Madame d’Ora, was an Austrian fashion and portrait photographer.
She became interested in the photography field while assisting the son of the painter Hans Makart, and in 1905 she was the first woman to be admitted to theory courses at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (Graphic Training Institute). That same year she became a member of the Association of Austrian photographers. At that time she was also the first woman allowed to study theory at the Graphischen Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, which in 1908 granted women access to other courses in photography.
In 1907, she established her own studio with Arthur Benda in Vienna called the Atelier d’Ora or Madame D’Ora-Benda. The name was based on the pseudonym “Madame d’Ora”, which she used professionally. D’ora and Benda operated a summer studio from 1921 to 1926 in Karlsbad, Germany, and opened another gallery in Paris in 1925. She was represented by Schostal Photo Agency (Agentur Schostal) and it was her intervention that saved the agency’s owner after his arrest by the Nazis, enabling him to flee to Paris from Vienna.
Her subjects included Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Tamara de Lempicka, Alban Berg, Maurice Chevalier, Colette, and other dancers, actors, painters, and writers.
Roger Schall was a photographer during the interwar period, a contemporary of Brassaï. He excelled in photojournalism, in which he was one of the pioneers, as well as in the photographic disciplines of fashion and portraits. In the early 30s, the “revolution” Leica and Rolleiflex allowed him to fulfill his passion for images taken on the spot. Paris was his main exploration ground, where the night allowed him to capture and expose with strength and delicacy the particular shapes of a city made of diversities.
Text from the Artsper website [Online] Cited 25/03/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
During World War II, Schall secretly documented the Nazi occupation of Paris. He also produced fashion photography for the fetish clothing company Diana Slip.
Gabrielle Chanel, who grew up in humble circumstances, opened her first Couture Salon in Paris in 1913, after she had already set up in business in 1908 as a modiste. In 1919 she moved to the Rue Cambon 31, which is still the address of the House of Chanel today. Coco Chanel’s first creative phase ended with the outbreak of war in 1939. Her fashion house stayed shut for 15 years before she dared a comeback in 1954, at the age of 70. The exhibition shows creations by Chanel from both periods. The “little black dress” becomes her trademark. Further models of day and evening wear show to what extent the fashion designer had her finger on the pulse of her time, and at the same time bear witness to the high quality of her models both in design and execution. In the 1950s and 1960s it is her women’s suits which cause a furore, first and foremost the “Chanel Suit”, which she first presented at a fashion show in 1957. Her celebrated quilted handbag, launched in February 1955 and called, simply, “2.55”, has long since attained the status of a classic and is a must in every collection of the luxury label. Her collections were always supplemented by matching fashion jewellery. Till today, Coco Chanel appears as an enigmatic and fascinating personality, and has been the theme of many films and books. Fierce controversy also surrounds her links to decision-makers of the Third Reich too, however, up to the present day.
The “little black dress” and suits by Chanel – their reception
he reception of Coco Chanel’s fashion and her style is already very widespread in her lifetime. A comparison with other contemporary couturiers reveals that Coco Chanel operated a very tolerant policy as regards the copyright for her models: The fashion designer allowed her models to be copied up to a certain point with her consent. For her, it was an acknowledgement of her eminence if women all over the world dressed in her style – an aspect whose influence on the “Chanel Legend” should not be underestimated, and which is investigated in this exhibition for the first time. In October 1926, the American Vogue magazine described a short black dress by Chanel as “The Chanel Ford – the frock that all the world will wear”. This drew a parallel between Chanel’s dress in its universality and modernity and one of the most important inventions of the time and prophesied a great future for it.
This is the birth of the “little black dress”. And although Chanel was not the first couturier to design simple black dresses for day wear it nevertheless remains inseparably linked with her name. Even the perhaps most celebrated “little black dress”, that worn by Audrey Hepburn in the film classic “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, is often wrongly attributed to Chanel. The exhibition traces the development of the fashion classic from the 1920s till today. Another model which has gone down as an icon in fashion history is the “Chanel Suit” with its boxy, collarless jacket and often contrasting braided edgings. The term “Chanel Suit” is even quoted as a reference in the Duden. The exhibition shown here also document the fact that Coco Chanel produced a whole range of women’s suits which were adapted by other fashion houses or even home dressmakers. It is mostly no longer possible today to reconstruct whether individual models were made under licence or whether they were freely interpreted or simply copied. Irrespective of this, however, it is certain that all these models also made their contribution to the “Chanel Legend”.
Press release from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg website
Exhibition dates:Â 29th November, 2013 – 21st April, 2014
Curator: Dr. Ulrich Pohlmann, head of the museum’s photography collection, in collaboration with the publisher Andreas Landshoff
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) The Bicyclers Published in Junior Bazaar August 1946
Another artist who was lucky to escape Europe in the first years of the Second World War.
I would like to see the whole exhibition.
At the moment I can’t make a judgement on his work for I have not seen enough of it, but on the evidence of the images presented in this posting, I am not entirely convinced.
However, the photograph of Lauren Bacall in 1945 is ravishing…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Münchner Stadtmuseum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) Model Cora Hemmet on the Grand Versailles Staircase 1934-1938 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) Max Ernst at Peggy Guggenheim’s home, New York, fall 1942 1942 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) Max Ernst at Peggy Guggenheim’s home, New York, fall 1942 1942 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) Photographer Irving Penn 1948 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) Albert Einstein c. 1950 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) Robert Frank with his wife Mary and his daughter Andrea, New York 1956 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) The striped parasol, model Jan Rylander 1957 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection Archiv Hermann Landshoff
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) Children in a Spanish village 1957 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection
In the spring of 2012, the Münchner Stadtmuseum’s Photography Collection received a sensational addition to its archives. The complete artistic estate of German-American photographer Hermann Landshoff (1905-1986), featuring 3,600 original prints from between 1927 to 1970, were generously donated to the museum on behalf of the family by Andreas Landshoff.
Landshoff grew up in Munich-Solln as the son of a well-to-do Jewish family that was very much involved in the city’s art, literature and music scenes. His father, Ludwig Landshoff, was an internationally acclaimed musicologist and composer who was director and head of Munich’s Bach Society from 1917 to 1928. His mother, Philippine Wiesengrund, was a singer with the Royal Court Opera, while his sister Ruth Landshoff, better known by her married name of Vollmer, would become one of the founders of the conceptual art movement in the United States. In addition, writers such as Thomas Mann, Christian Morgenstern, Joachim Ringelnatz, Rainer Maria Rilke, Karl Wolfskehl and Franziska zu Reventlow were frequent visitors to his parents’ home. Another family member, the author Ruth Landshoff-Yorck, was the muse of Otto Umbehr and Paul Citroen and ran an art salon in Berlin that had a reputation as one of the most exciting meeting places for avant-garde artists in the whole of the Weimar Republic.
Other more distant relations of the family included important figures from the world of publishing such as Samuel Fischer, the founder of the S. Fischer Verlag publishing house, and Fritz H. Landshoff, who, from 1933, ran the Querido publishing house in Amsterdam which would become the most important forum for German exile literature, publishing novels by authors including Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Hermann Kesten, Joseph Roth, Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Anna Seghers, Ernst Toller and Arnold Zweig.
Even in his early years, Hermann Landshoff attracted attention with his cartoons and a photo reportage on Albert Einstein that was published in the Münchner Illustrierte Zeitung magazine. After training at Munich’s Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts), he became a member of the circle of well-known typographer and book illustrator Fritz Helmuth Ehmcke. It was here that Landshoff met the Nuremberg illustrator Richard Lindner alongside whom he would subsequently work as part of the creative team at the Knorr & Hirth publishing house. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Landshoff was forced to emigrate, initially settling in Paris where he worked as a fashion photographer. Between 1936 and 1939, his images were published in the popular Femina magazine and in the French edition of Vogue. He was then forced to flee France and, after an eventful journey spanning 1940 and 1941, he eventually pitched up in New York. Landshoff soon became one of the most fascinating fashion photographers to collaborate with legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch for fashion magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Junior Bazaar and latterly also Mademoiselle. He developed his own style as a fashion photographer, portraying the models in life-like everyday situations. American fashion photographer Richard Avedon considered himself to have been profoundly inspired by Landshoff, even being moved to claim that ‘I owe everything to Landshoff’.
Finally, we also have Hermann Landshoff to thank for a unique cycle of around 70 portraits of different photographers that he created between 1942 and 1960. These striking images feature old masters like Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Andreas Feininger or WeeGee alongside young, up-and-coming photographers still at the start of their careers, such as Robert Frank, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. This pantheon of eminent photographers occupies a unique place in the history of the medium.
Other collections of images tackle the urban architecture and people of New York, focusing particularly on those on the fringes of society. The exhibition also includes several portraits of prominent physicists such as Albert Einstein as well as some of the Los Alamos scientists such as Robert Oppenheimer and his cousin Rolf Landshoff involved in building the world’s first nuclear bomb. The exhibition will show a selection of more than 250 of Landshoff’s fascinating photographs for the first time, with subjects drawn from across the entire spectrum of his work, from fashion to portraits and architecture.
Press release from the Münchner Stadtmuseum website
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) Tennis balls with models Wanda Delafield and Peggy Lloyd c. 1945 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) Model Beth Wilson at Rip Van Winkle Bridge spanning the Hudson River, New York 1946 1946 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) Self-portrait, New York c. 1942 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) Actress Lauren Bacall, New York, 1945 1945 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) On the roof of Saks Fifth Avenue Building, New York, 1942 1942 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) Walker Evans, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) Horst P. Horst, New York 1948 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection
Hermann Landshoff (American-German, 1905-1986) Model in front of “The Large Glass” by Marcel Duchamp, Philadelphia Museum of Art 1954 Gelatin silver print Münchner Stadtmuseum Photography Collection
Münchner Stadtmuseum St. Jakobs Platz 1 80331 München Phone: +49-(0)89-233-22370
Curators: Susan Van Wyk, Senior Curator of Photography at the NGV, and Paola Di Trocchio, Assistant Curator of Fashion and Textiles at the NGV
Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
Model Dinarzade in a Dress by Poiret 1924
Gelatin silver photograph
Image used under fair use for the purpose of art criticism
This is a sublime exhibition, teaming with fabulous frocks and beautiful, classical, evanescent photographs. The exhibition was in my top nine magnificent Melbourne exhibitions that featured on Art Blart last year. Elegant, sophisticated and oozing quality, this exhibition has been a sure fire winner for the NGV. This review will concentrate on the photographs by Edward Steichen. See my previous posting on the exhibition including installation photographs.
High Society
Edward Steichen (1879-1973) was a painter and champion of art photography who initially worked in the soft focus, Pictorialist style prevalent at the beginning of the 20th century. He was an artist who worked closely with Alfred Stieglitz on the influential quarterly art journal Camera Work, designing the cover and the Art Nouveau-style typeface especially for the internationally focused publication. Stieglitz, and by extension Camera Work, lived to promote photography as an art form and to challenge the norms of how art may be defined.1 In the early years Camera Work only published photography, but in later years the journal increasingly featured reproductions of and articles on modern painting, drawing and aesthetics.
“This change was brought about by a similar transformation at Stieglitz’s New York gallery, which had been known as the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession until 1908. That year he changed the name of the gallery to “291”, and he began showing avant-garde modern artists such as Auguste Rodin and Henri Matisse along with photographers. The positive responses he received at the gallery encouraged Stieglitz to broaden the scope of Camera Work as well, although he decided against any name change for the journal.”2
” …introduced the work of a young photographer, Paul Strand, whose photographic vision was indicative of the aesthetic changes now at the heart of Camera Work’s demise. Strand shunned the soft focus and symbolic content of the Pictorialists and instead strived to create a new vision that found beauty in the clear lines and forms of ordinary objects. By publishing Strand’s work Stieglitz was hastening the end of the aesthetic vision he had championed for so long. Nine months later, in June 1917, what was to be the final issue of Camera Work appeared. It was devoted almost entirely to Strand’s photographs.”5
Steichen’s photographs from 1923-1924 are pared back, Modernist photographs that evidence the beginning of his later photographic style. Madame Nadine Vera wearing a crêpe evening gown by Chanel (1924) has a plain background of some wooden studio panels; Model Dinarzade in a Dress by Poiret (1924, above) has fabric hanging behind while Crêpe de chine dress by Lanvin (1924) has three doors casually put together to form the backdrop to the model. All three photographs show beautiful tonality and lighting in the full length capture of the models with hints of browns and yellows in the prints. The figure is isolated in the studio space simply and elegantly. The model is being studied. Steichen’s models are immersed in suffused light but the form of the photograph is different from that of Pictorialism, for the models themselves are pin sharp, as though stepping out into the world. These early photographs are fascinating to study, for they lay the ground work for what is to follow. These three images inform the viewer as to the experimentation that Steichen was undertaking to get to a starting point for the complex and atmospheric studio lighting that he would later employ.
Gradually, Steichen’s images become more confident and assured and take on a patina of beauty, style and grace. In his close-up portraits there is an isolation of the face against out of focus backgrounds with the use of profiles, arms and elbows as framing devices, for example Actress Sylvia Sidney (1929) and Actress Clara Bow (1928, above). In his longer-length portraits there is an isolation of figures against a white or black ground, as in Marion Morehouse in a dress by Louise Boulanger (1929) and Actresses Norma and Constance Talmadge (1927). Males usually have a heavy darkness to them while the females are more luminously lit. In the male portraits the hands dominate. The hands in the male photographs belong to the male as part of the portrait whereas in the early photographs of women they are only models, there at his command, and the hands are almost invisible. Only in the later photographs of high society women are the hands of females fully represented. What can be observed is that the figure is usually isolated against an out of focus background, with deep, dark shadows and soft luxurious light, low depth of field and feminine profiles.
In commercial terms (and we must remember that this is how the artist made his living for these photographs were seen as his commercial work at the time), Steichen’s photographs fulfilled his brief: the portrayal of shimmer and sparkle, geometric Art Deco style, the drama and theatrical lighting of the talkies, and the spectacle of the liberated modern women. She in turn was influenced by the prevalent cultural conditions: smoking, jazz, prohibition, automobiles, trains, dancing, fast living, gold (King Tuts tomb was discovered in 1922) and African and Japanese art. Appealing to the new leisure classes, publications such as Vogue and Vanity Fair offered a glimpse of a longed for paradise to the burgeoning middle-classes with their photographs of the rich and famous, the glamour and the costumes – the social groups that hold the most power actually exposing their own status on paper through these magazines.
As John McDonald notes, “Steichen uses every trick at his disposal to convey a particular kind of image,”7 an image that uses increasingly elaborate studio lighting and disparate indoor and outdoor locations. But by the early 1930s the work becomes quite formulaic with its use of low depth of field, profiles, angles of arms or chairs and geometric shapes. The figure is tightly controlled – either cropped close in or set amongst ambiguously filled sets and shaped backgrounds. There is a sameness and repetitiveness about the work as one image bleeds into another. In fact, after that early period of experimentation, there is basically no change to his mature style from the years 1925-1937 and this makes for a long twelve years for an artist of his talent. He found his mother load and he stuck to it.
Steichen’s photographs of the rich and famous are “pictures” taken by one who mingled with the elite, one who enjoyed the trappings of fame and high society. As Robert Nelson notes in his review of the exhibition, “Steichen’s talents were never incompatible with the conspicuous snobbery of his age, for which it would never have occurred to him to proffer an apology. Having arrived himself, he naturally admires gentry-by-ambition and crowns it with the smugness that it enjoys.”8 Ouch! Nelson goes on to observe, “Much of the work is statuesque and formidable in its composition, lighting and symbolic rigour,” while at the same time portraying a world that is completely artificial in which nothing is real and everything is a pose.9 And we, the viewer and reader, are voyeurs of this hedonistic world.
On close reading, the photographs flatten out into a studied set of stylistic manoeuvres, a form where style stands in for a quality of visual perception.10 As Steichen seeks to “clinch the image” the syntax of his photographs (the system of organisation used in putting lines together to form pictures) becomes imitative. This leads to evanescent photographs, images that soon pass out of sight, memory, or existence; images that slip for the mind as quickly as one sees them. There is little sense of dislocation in the images, only “in his ability to distance himself from a subject, analysing his or her foibles with a cool, practiced eye,”11 and in the distance of the scene from the reality of everyday life. Each photograph becomes a microcosm of vanity, celebrity and fashion. Steichen ticks all the boxes (and he made all the boxes that he ticked) but the photographs usually don’t fulfil any new demands that the situation generates. He restricts his field of view to one that he creates and controls within certain narrowly defined boundaries, usually using passive people who are at his command. In his orientation to the world the photographs are not ‘things as they are’ but things as they are constructed to be (seen) – a form of social capital, social fascism, even.12
Only when Steichen is challenged by an active “personality” does he raise his game. This is when the modernist, emotive, visually rhapsodic AND MEMORABLE photographs take hold in this exhibition.
The great breakthrough with Greta Garbo (1929, below), mass of black with face surmounting, hair pulled back by hands “the woman came out full beauty on her magnificent face” Steichen said; Actress Gloria Swanson (1924, below) like some prowling, wide-eyed animal hidden behind a black lace veil, “a predatory femme fatale concealing her ambitions behind a mask of beauty”13; Marlene Dietrich (1934, below) nestled into the glorious curve of an armchair, lace-covered hand open, inviting; and Actress Loretta Young (1931) active, not passive, in which Steichen humanises his sitter. For me, these are the glorious images – not the men, not the fashion photographs, but these strong, independent women.
“An interested image-maker takes available resources for meaning (visual grammars, fabrication techniques and focal points of attention), undertakes an act of designing (the process of image-making), and in so doing re-images the world in a way that it has never quite been seen before.”14 Initially, in the early experimentation, this is what Steichen did; he achieves it again in the photographs of Garbo, Swanson, Dietrich and Young.
As for the other photographs we feel an overall suffused glow of beauty and glamour – we admire their scale and intensity, the deep blacks and velvety whites, and wonder at the light and assemblage of elements – but they do not have the power and engagement of the best, most challenging work. In these photographs of vibrant women the viewer finally starts to feel the spirit of the face, the spirit of the person captured in an instant. And that is a rare and beautiful thing.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Word count: 1,883
Footnotes
1/ Whelan, Richard. Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography. NY: Little, Brown, 1995, pp. 189-223 2/ Anon. “Camera Work,” on Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 15/02/2014 3/ Anon. “291,” on Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 15/02/2014 4/ “Camera Work,” op. cit., 5/ Hoffman, Katherine. Stieglitz : A Beginning Light. New Haven: Yale University Press Studio, 2004, pp. 213–222 cited in “Camera Work,” op. cit., 6/ McDonald, John. “Edward Steichen & Art Deco Fashion” on John McDonald website February 1, 2014 [Online] Cited 15/02/2014 7/ Ibid., 8/ Nelson, Robert. “An age of elegance captured forever,” in The Age newspaper Wednesday November 6th, 2013, p. 54 9/ Ibid., 10/ Rewording of a sentence by Sleigh, Tom. “Too Much of the Air: Tomas Tranströmer,” 2005, on the Poets.org website [Online] Cited 15/02/2014. No longer available online 11/ McDonald, op. cit., 12/ “In sociology, social capital is the expected collective or economic benefits derived from the preferential treatment and cooperation between individuals and groups. Although different social sciences emphasise different aspects of social capital, they tend to share the core idea “that social networks have value”.” Anon. “Social capital,” on Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 15/02/2014 “Social fascism was a theory supported by the Communist International (Comintern) during the early 1930s, which held that social democracy was a variant of fascism because, in addition to a shared corporatist economic model, it stood in the way of a complete and final transition to communism.” Anon. “Social fascism,” on Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 15/02/2014 13/ McDonald, op. cit., 14/ Anon. “The Image of Transformation: Properties of Consequence,” on The Image website [Online] Cited 15/02/2014. No longer available online
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Steichen’s portrait of Gloria Swanson has taken on iconic masterpiece status overtime. Created in 1924, just as the first feature-length sound movies were emerging – effectively truncating the actress’s brilliant silent-film career – this image caught the essential Gloria Swanson: haunting and inscrutable, forever veiled in the whisper of a distant era. Steichen’s photograph has elements of turn-of-the-century Pictorialism (moody and delicate, the subject seeming to peer from the darkness, as if from jungle foliage), yet it also projects modernist boldness, with its pin-sharp precision and graphic severity.
Anonymous. “Gloria Swanson by Edward Steichen,” on the Iconic Photos website October 5th, 2009 [Online] Cited 11/02/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Maurice Mouvet was one of the most famous and successful dance teams around the early 1910’s and lead the way for many performers that would follow… Maurice was born in New York but as a young lad moved to Paris with his father and knew he wanted to be a dancer as a young boy. He had his first professional dance at the Noveau Cirque in Paris, France at age 15. Mouvet’s best partners were Florence Walton and Leonora (Leona) Hughes.
Marion Morehouse (1906-1969), was a fashion model who rose to prominence in the late 20s and early 30s, sitting for Vanity Fair and Vogue photographer Edward Steichen. The pair created some strikingly modernist photographs. According to Steichen Morehouse was:
“The greatest fashion model I ever photographed … When she put on the clothes that were to be photographed, she transformed herself into a woman who really would wear that gown … whatever the outfit was.”
She was also a favourite of Cecil Beaton and French Vogue’s Baron George Hoyningen-Huene. Morehouse was of Choctaw Indian ancestry, with brown eyes and an angular frame. After her modelling career ended, she took up photography herself. Later she became the third wife of author and painter E.E Cummings. When Cummings met Marion Morehouse in 1932, he was in the middle of a painful split from his second wife, Anne Barton. Although it is not clear whether the two were ever formally married, Morehouse lived with Cummings in a common-law marriage until his death in 1962. Morehouse died on May 18, 1969.
Text from the Photographs, film, literature & quotes from the bygone era website [Online] Cited 10/02/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
France’s most popular milliner Madame Agnes was born in France in the late 1800’s, she retired in 1949, and died a short while later. She was famous for cutting the brims of her hats while they were worn by her customers. Madame Agnes styled hats which were both abstract and unique. An illustration from 1927 depicts Madame Agnes’ Congo inspired hats with a model wearing a slave collar. As the 20’s moved into the 30’s, the hats became smaller and away from the face. In December 1935 she introduced hats with large straw brims which were mounted on flowered madras handkerchiefs. Madame Agnes was inspired by a matador’s hat when she created a small dinner hat for Spring 1936. It was sewn of black maline with heavy white silk fringe. The fringe was mounted on each side of the hat’s top. In mid-1946 she created a soft beige beret of felt which featured a line that was broken just above the right eyebrow, where a soft quill was inserted.
Text from the Photographs, film, literature & quotes from the bygone era website [Online] Cited 10/02/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Elizabeth “Lee” Miller, Lady Penrose (April 23, 1907 – July 21, 1977) was an American photographer. Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907, she was a successful fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris, where she became an established fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she became an acclaimed war correspondent for Vogue, covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.
Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) was an Italian fashion designer. Along with Coco Chanel, her greatest rival, she is regarded as one of the most prominent figures in fashion between the two World Wars. Starting with knitwear, Schiaparelli’s designs were heavily influenced by Surrealists like her collaborators Salvador Dalà and Alberto Giacometti. Her clients included the heiress Daisy Fellowes and actress Mae West.
Perhaps Schiaparelli’s most important legacy was in bringing to fashion the playfulness and sense of “anything goes” of the Dada and Surrealist movements. She loved to play with juxtapositions of colours, shapes and textures, and embraced the new technologies and materials of the time. With Charles Colcombet she experimented with acrylic, cellophane, a rayon jersey called “Jersela” and a rayon with metal threads called “Fildifer” – the first time synthetic materials were used in couture. Some of these innovations were not pursued further, like her 1934 “glass” cape made from Rhodophane, a transparent plastic related to cellophane. But there were more lasting innovations; Schiaparelli created wraparound dresses decades before Diane von Furstenberg and crumpled up rayon 50 years before Issey Miyake’s pleats and crinkles. In 1930 alone she created the first evening-dress with a jacket, and the first clothes with visible zippers. In fact fastenings were something of a speciality, from a jacket buttoned with silver tambourines to one with silk-covered carrots and cauliflowers. Schiaparelli did not adapt to the changes in fashion following World War II and her business closed in 1954.
Gwili Andre (4 February 1908 – 5 February 1959) was a Danish actress who had a brief career in Hollywood films. Andre came to Hollywood in the early 1930s with the intention of establishing herself as a film star. She appeared in the 1932 RKO Studio films Roar of the Dragon and Secrets of the French Police and began to attract attention for her striking good looks. These films provided her with starring roles playing against such established actors as Richard Dix, ZaSu Pitts and Frank Morgan, and RKO began using her glamorous looks to promote her.
A widespread publicity campaign ensured that her name and face became well known to the American public, but her next role in No Other Woman (1933), opposite Irene Dunne, was not the success the studio expected. Over the next few years she was relegated to supporting roles which included the Joan Crawford picture A Woman’s Face (1941). Her final role was a minor part in one of the popular Falcon series, The Falcon’s Brother in 1942.
The prize is open to promising photographers or artists using photography, of all nationalities, who have already enjoyed their first exhibitions and publications. There is no imposed theme or preference for any particular photographic genre or technique. Applications are open from February 3 to April 25, 2014.
Considering the nature of Blumenfeld’s political collages such as Grauenfresse / Hitler, Holland, 1933 and Minotaur / Dictator I would say that the artist was very, very lucky to escape to America in 1941.
Let us remember all those that were not so fortunate…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“In 1940 Blumenfeld was interned as a German Jew in France, first in Montbard, then in Loriol, Le Vernet, and Catus. He made a daring escape with his family in 1941, returning via Casablanca to New York, where he subsequently lived and worked until his death.” (press release)
Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) Minotaur / Dictator [Minotaure / Dictateur] The Minotaur or The Dictator Paris, c. 1937 Vintage gelatin silver print Collection Yvette Blumenfeld Georges Deeton / Art+Commerce, New York, Gallery Kicken Berlin, Berlin
Jews were eventually banned from the professions, show business, teaching, the civil service and journalism. After an intense propaganda campaign, Jewish businesses were ‘aryanised’ by Vichy’s Commission for Jewish Affairs and their property was confiscated. More than 40,000 refugee Jews were held in concentration camps under French control, and 3,000 died of poor treatment during the winters of 1940 and 1941. The writer Arthur Koestler, who was held at Le Vernet near the Spanish frontier, said conditions were worse than in the notorious German camp, Dachau.
During 1941 anti-Semitic legislation, applicable in both zones, was tightened. French police carried out the first mass arrests in Paris in May 1941 when 3,747 men were interned. Two more sweeps took place before the first deportation train provided by French state railways left for Germany under French guard on 12 March 1942. On 16 July 1942, French police arrested 12,884 Jews, including 4,501 children and 5,802 women, in Paris during what became known as La Grande Rafle (‘the big round-up’). Most were temporarily interned in a sports stadium, in conditions witnessed by a Paris lawyer, Georges Wellers.
‘All those wretched people lived five horrifying days in the enormous interior filled with deafening noise … among the screams and cries of people who had gone mad, or the injured who tried to kill themselves’, he recalled. Within days, detainees were being sent to Germany in cattle-wagons, and some became the first Jews to die in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Vichy crimes
Many historians consider that an even worse crime was committed in Vichy-controlled southern France, where the Germans had no say. In August 1942, gendarmes were sent to hunt down foreign refugees. Families were seized in their houses or captured after manhunts across the countryside. About 11,000 Jews were transported to Drancy in the Paris suburbs, the main transit centre for Auschwitz. Children as young as three were separated from their mothers – gendarmes used batons and hoses – before being sent to Germany under French guard, after weeks of maltreatment.
During 1942, officials sent 41,951 Jews to Germany, although the deportations came to a temporary halt when some religious leaders warned Vichy against possible public reaction. Afterwards, arrests were carried out more discreetly. In 1943 and 1944, the regime deported 31,899 people – the last train left in August 1944, as Allied troops entered Paris. Out of the total of 75,721 deportees, contained in a register drawn up by a Jewish organisation, fewer than 2,000 survived.
Revolt and aftermath
The number of dead would have been far higher if the Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, had not ordered troops in France to defy German-French plans for mass round ups in Italian-occupied south-eastern France. Thousands were smuggled into Italy after Italian generals said that ‘no country can ask Italy, cradle of Christianity and law, to be associated with these (Nazi) acts’. After the Italian surrender in September 1943, arrests in the area restarted, but by then French public opinion had changed. Escape lines to Switzerland and Spain had been set up, and thousands of families risked death to shelter Jews. Since the war, Israel has given medals to 2,000 French people, including several priests, in recognition of this, and of the fact that about 250,000 Jews survived in France.
But the most significant step forward was the trial in 1997 of Maurice Papon, 89, for crimes concerning the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux. He had served as a cabinet minister after the war, before losing a 16-year legal battle to avoid trial. He was released from jail because of poor health, but his ten-year prison sentence has been interpreted as official recognition of French complicity in the Holocaust, although there are still those who continue to defend his actions.
Since the trial, France has opened up hidden archives and offered compensation to survivors – and ensured that schools, where history manuals used not to mention France’s part in the deportations, now have compulsory lessons on Vichy persecution. While anti-Semitism is still a social problem in France, there is no official discrimination, and today’s 600,000-strong Jewish community is represented at every level of the establishment, including in the Catholic Church, where the Archbishop of Paris is Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger.
Extract from Paul Webster. “The Vichy Policy on Jewish Deportation,” on the BBC History website, 17/02/2011 [Online] Cited 23/01/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Erwin Blumenfeld’s life and work impressively document the socio-political context of artistic development between the two World Wars, while highlighting the individual consequences of emigration. The exhibition devoted to Erwin Blumenfeld’s multi-layered Å“uvre brings together over 300 works and documents from the late 1910s to the 1960s, and encompasses the various media explored by the artist throughout his career: drawings, photographs, montages and collages.
This exhibition traces his visual creativity and encompasses the early drawings, the collages and montages, which mostly stem from the early 1920s, the beginnings of his portrait art in Holland, the first black and white fashion photographs of the Paris period, the masterful colour photography created in New York and the urban photos taken toward the end of his life.
The retrospective also showcases his drawings, many of which have never been shown before, as well as his early collages and photomontages, shedding fascinating light on the evolution of his photographic oeuvre and revealing the full extent of his creative genius. The now classic motifs of his experimental black-and-white photographs can be seen alongside his numerous self-portraits and portraits of famous and little-known people, as well as his fashion and advertising work.
In the first years of his career, he worked only in black and white, but as soon as it became technically possible he enthusiastically used colour. He transferred his experiences with black-and-white photography to colour; applying them to the field of fashion, he developed a particularly original repertoire of forms. The female body became Erwin Blumenfeld’s principal subject. In his initial portrait work, then the nudes he produced while living in Paris and, later on, his fashion photography, he sought to bring out the unknown, hidden nature of his subjects; the object of his quest was not realism, but the mystery of reality
“Bringing together over three hundred works and documents dating from the late 1910s to the 1960s, this exhibition, the first in France to showcase the multilayered aspects of Erwin Blumenfeld’s oeuvre, encompasses the various media explored by the artist throughout his career: drawing, photography, montage, and collage.
Not until 1960 did Blumenfeld return to Berlin for a visit. He devoted the following years to finishing his autobiography, begun in the 1950s. The work was completed in 1969 with the help of his assistant Marina Schinz, but was only published in 1975, initially in French translation, then in the original German in 1976. His book My One Hundred Best Photos was also released posthumously, in 1979.
Drawings, Montages, and Collages
Between 1916 and 1933 Erwin Blumenfeld produced a fairly limited number of drawings and montages. As a young man he was very interested in literature, writing poems and short stories. And as early as 1915 he mentioned that he was interested in writing an autobiography. Almost all of his montages and collages include drawings and snippets of language. He plays with written and printed words and typography, juxtaposing names, concepts, and places to create ironic commentaries and provocative titles. His collages typically combine drawing, language, and cut-outs of original or printed photographs. He also often used letter stationery to form a background, leaving bare spaces. In 1918 Blumenfeld made the acquaintance of the Dadaist George Grosz; two years later he and Paul Citroen wrote to Francis Picabia in the name of the Hollandse Dadacentrale, but neither was present at the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920. That same year, Blumenfeld began using the pseudonyms Erwin Bloomfeld and Jan Bloomfield, as documented in his Dadaist publications and in some of his collages. The drawings in the present exhibition, most of which have never been shown in public, were produced in Berlin and the Netherlands. Only a handful of them are dated. They are quick sketches from life or from imagination, rough cartoons and acid caricatures, in pencil, ink, watercolour, or coloured pencil – whatever was to hand. Blumenfeld was clearly fascinated by the quality and immediacy of drawing as a medium, and, as these works reveal, it certainly stimulated his playful side.
Self-Portraits
Blumenfeld took his first photographs as a schoolboy, using himself as one of his first subjects. The earliest date from the 1910s, but he continued taking self-portraits to the end of his life. The young man with the dreamy gaze turned into the louche bohemian with a cigarette, then the carefully staged photographer experimenting with his camera. His self-portraits are not the product of excessive vanity, but rather playful experiments, with and without masks, models, and other grotesque objects such as a calf’s head, all used to create witty images.
Portraits
Blumenfeld’s first steps in professional photography were in portraiture. He started “learning by doing” in the early 1920s in Amsterdam, where he had opened the ladies handbag store Fox Leather Company. This is where he took portraits of customers, using a darkroom in the back of the store. Comparison of the contact sheets from the time with the blow-ups taken from them clearly shows, right from the outset, the importance in Blumenfeld’s work of the finishing in the lab. The final images display extremely tight framing, high levels of contrast, and lighting that creates dramatic, even devilish, effects. When he arrived in Paris in 1936 his first photographs were portraits, featuring among others Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault. Although he quickly entered the Paris fashion scene, he retained a strong interest in portraiture throughout the remainder of his life.
Nudes
Blumenfeld’s earliest, highly narrative nudes date from his time in the Netherlands, but the subject only became a passion during his Paris years from 1936 on, when he discovered the work of French avant-garde photographers. His admiration for them is particularly evident in his nude photographs, as is the influence of Man Ray’s work. The bodies of the women in these images were surfaces onto which he projected his artistic imagination. He cut them up, solarised them, and transformed them into abstract imagery through the play of light and shadow. The faces of his nudes from the 1930s are only rarely visible, the women remaining somewhat mysterious entities. The nudes Blumenfeld produced in the 1950s after he had settled in New York tended to be more concrete, illustrative works.
Architecture
The black-and-white architectural photographs that Erwin Blumenfeld took in the 1930s feature buildings and urban spaces from various experimental and abstract perspectives. The Eiffel Tower, for instance, is captured in sharp reliefs of light and shade, while the photographs of Rouen Cathedral are intended to draw the viewer’s visual attention to the building’s specific forms. Blumenfeld expresses his artistic vision and his knowledge of Gothic architecture by focusing on the abstraction of details. During the 1950s and 1960s Blumenfeld used a 35mm camera for cityscapes. The exhibition showcases three of these colour slide projects for the first time. They feature New York, Paris, and Berlin – three places that made a mark on his art and also shaped his career.
The Dictator
In 1933, according to his autobiography, Blumenfeld reacted to Hitler’s rise to power in Germany with a photomontage. This outstanding piece of work, probably his most famous photograph, symbolises and anticipates the dictator’s dehumanisation. Following on from the political themes in some of his early collages, he here combined different negatives – a skull and a portrait of Hitler – to make a single print. In one of these montages he included a swastika, while in a different portrait “bleeding eyes” were added later on the surface. Later on, in Paris, he photographed a calf’s head, using this subject to compose different images. One in which he placed the animal’s head on a woman’s torso was titled The Minotaure or The Dictator. This image, which does not refer to a specific figure, is obviously intended to be allegorical. In 1941 Blumenfeld was able to escape from the Nazis with his family to New York.
Fashion
Blumenfeld’s move to Paris in 1936 marked the beginning of his career as a fashion photographer, although he had already had contacts with magazines in Paris while living in Amsterdam. The work that appeared in French publications in the late 1930s raised Blumenfeld’s profile as a modernist photographer and brought him to the attention of the famous British photographer Cecil Beaton, who visited him in his studio in 1938 and helped him sign his first contract with the French edition of Vogue. When Blumenfeld made his first trip to New York following his sensational set of fashion photographs on the Eiffel Tower, he came home with a new contract as Paris fashion correspondent for Harper’s Bazaar. He was only able to file his reports for a year before he was interned in various prison camps across France. In 1941 he was able to escape from German-occupied France to New York with his family. In the first half of the 1950s, he drew on his experiments in black-and-white photography to develop an exceptionally original artistic repertoire, reflected in his use of colour and his fashion work.
Ute Eskildsen Curator of the exhibition Translated from German by Susan Pickford
Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) Three Graces (1947), New York 1947
Leslie Petersen appears here in a triple variation inspired by Botticelli’s Primavera. The photograph, was intended to show off a gown by Cadwallader. The final image is made of two shots. The two on the right are similar but with different degrees of sharpness. The pose on the left is different.
Audrey Hepburn is wearing a hat designed by Blumenfeld and made by Mister Fred, one of New York’s most talented milliners. Blumenfeld here uses a system of mirrors showing the front and back of the hat and allowing infinite repetition of the motif.
A model, a red cross: fashion and current affairs superimposed. The background to this humanitarian appeal is the liberation of the concentration camps and the aid brought to prisoners of war. Blumenfeld reinterprets these humanitarian signs just as he blurs those of fashion.
Curator: Ingo Taubhorn, with additional cabinet exhibition curation by Dr. Sabine Schnakenberg
PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART WORK OF FEMALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN
Many thankx to House of Photography at Deichtorhallen Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
House of Photography at Deichtorhallen Hamburg announces an exhibition of the legendary photographer Guy Bourdin (1928-1991), on view from November 1, 2013 – January 26, 2014. This most comprehensive exhibition to date is both an overview of the essential components of Guy Bourdin’s oeuvre and an introduction to unveiling works from his personal archives which have never been seen before. This is the first time that both his works as a painter and his notes on films are being shown at an exhibition. B&W shots dating from the 1950s are also included, showing portraits of artists and views of the city of Paris as well as Polaroids, sketches and texts. The exhibition examines Guy Bourdin’s oeuvre, but moreover, it provides insight into the complex working processes of the photographer’s mind and aims to establish his status as a visionaire image maker.
Guy Bourdin’s career spanned more than forty years during which time he worked for the world’s leading fashion houses and magazines. With the eye of a painter, Guy Bourdin created images that contained fascinating stories, compositions, both in B&W and in colours. He was among the 1st to create images with narratives, telling stories and shows that the image is more important than the product which is displayed. Using fashion photography as his medium, he sent out his message, one that was difficult to decode, exploring the realms between the absurd and the sublime. Famed for his suggestive narratives and surreal aesthetics, he radically broke conventions of commercial photography with a relentless perfectionism and sharp humour.
During the 1950s, Guy Bourdin launched his career with fashion assignments for Vogue Paris working in B&W. It’s nearly unknown, that half of the oeuvre of Guy Bourdin is black-and-white and as amazingly powerful as his colour works. He developed colour photography to its maximum effect, creating dramatic accents with intense colour saturation and textures in his compositions. Guy Bourdin used the format of the double spread magazine page in the most inventive way. He tailored his compositions to the constraints of the printed page both conceptually and graphically, and the mirror motif so central in his work finds its formal counterpart in the doubleness of the magazine spread. Layout and design become powerful metaphors for the photographic medium, engaging the eye and with it, the mind. While on the one hand employing formal elements of composition, Guy Bourdin, on the other hand, sought to transcend the reality of the photographic medium with surreal twists to the apparent subject of his images and his unconventional manipulation of the picture plane. Given total creative freedom and with uncompromising artistic ethic, Guy Bourdin captured the imagination of a whole generation at the late 1970s, recognised as the highest note in his career.
Guy Bourdin was an image maker, a perfectionist. He knew how to grab the attention of the viewer and left nothing to chance. He created impeccable sets, or when not shooting in his studio rue des Ecouffes in le Marais, in undistinguished bedrooms, on the beach, in nature, or in urban landscapes. The unusual dramas that unfold in these seemingly everyday scenes and ordinary encounters pique our subconscious and invite our imagination. Moreover, he developed a technic using hyper real colours, meticulous compositions of cropped elements such as low skies with high grounds and the interplay of light and shadows as well as the unique make-up of the models.
“Guy Bourdin irreverently swept away all the standards of beauty, conventional morals and product portrayals in one fell swoop. Around the female body he constructed visual disruptions, the outrageous, the hair-raising, the indiscreet, the ugly, the doomed, the fragmentary and the absent, torsos and death – all the tension and the entire gamut of what lies beyond the aesthetic and the moral,” explains the exhibition’s curator Ingo Taubhorn. Bourdin investigates in minute detail the variables of fashion photography, from brash posing to subtle performances and from complex settings to novel and disturbing notions of images.
Guy Bourdin’s imagery not only changed the course of fashion photography but influenced a host of contemporary artists, photographers and filmmakers. It is without question, that Guy Bourdin’s work for Vogue and his highly acclaimed print advertising for Charles Jourdan in the 1970s are now being seen in the appropriate context of contemporary art.
Press release from House of Photography at Deichtorhallen Hamburg
Darron Davies (Australian) Encased 2012 Archival Pigment Print on Photo Rag 80 x 80cm / edition of 6
Here’s my pick of the nine best local exhibitions which featured on the Art Blart art and cultural memory archive in 2013 (plus a favourite of the year from Hobart). Enjoy!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Review: Terraria by Darron Davies at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne
This is the first “magical” exhibition of photography that I have seen in Melbourne this year. Comprising just seven moderately large Archival Pigment Print on Photo Rag images mounted in white frames, this exhibition swept me off my feet. The photographs are beautiful, subtle, nuanced evocations to the fragility and enduring nature of life…
A sense of day / dreaming is possible when looking at these images. Interior / exterior, size / scale, ego / self are not fixed but fluid, like the condensation that runs down the inside of these environments (much like blood circulates our body). This allows the viewer’s mind to roam at will, to ponder the mysteries of our short, improbable, joyous life. The poetic titles add to this introspective reflection. I came away from viewing these magical, self sustaining vessels with an incredibly happy glow, more aware of my own body and its relationship to the world than before I had entered Darron Davies enveloping, terrarium world.
Darron Davies (Australian) The Red Shard 2012 Archival Pigment Print on Photo Rag 80 x 80cm / edition of 6
Presently, contemporary photography is able to reveal intangible, constructed vistas that live outside the realm of the scientific. A photograph becomes a perspective on the world, an orientation to the world based on human agency. An image-maker takes resources for meaning (a visual language, how the image is made and what it is about), undertakes a design process (the process of image-making), and in so doing re-images the world in a way that it has never quite been seen before.
These ideas are what a fascinating exhibition titled Confounding: Contemporary Photography, at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne investigates. In the confounding of contemporary photography we are no longer witnessing a lived reality but a break down of binaries such as sacred and profane, public and private, natural and artificial, real and dreamed environments as artists present their subjective visions of imagined, created worlds. Each image presents the viewerwith a conundrum that investigates the relationship between photographs and the “real” world they supposedly record. How do these photographs make you feel about this constructed, confounding world? These fields of existence?
This is a tough, stimulating exhibition of late works by Louise Bourgeois at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. All the main themes of the artist’s work explored over many years are represented in these late works: memory, emotion, anxiety, family, relationships, childhood, pain, desire and eroticism are all present as are female subjectivity and sexuality, expressed through the body…
Bourgeois’ work gives me an overall feeling of immersion in a world view, one that transcends the pain and speaks truth to power. Bourgeois confronted the emotion, memory or barrier to communication that generated her mood and the work. She observed, “My art is an exorcism. My sculpture allows me to re-experience fear, to give it a physicality, so that I am able to hack away at it.” By weaving, stitching and sewing Bourgeois threaded the past through the present and enacted, through artistic performance, a process of repair and reconstruction, giving meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. I have not been so lucky. My mother refuses to discuss the past, will not even come close to the subject for the pain is so great for her. I am left with a heaviness of heart, dealing with the demons of the past that constantly lurk in the memory of childhood, that insistently impinge on the man I am today. Louise Bourgeois’ sculptures brought it all flooding back as the work of only a great artist can, forcing me to become an ethical witness to her past, my past. A must see exhibition this summer in Melbourne.
A stunning, eloquent and conceptually complex exhibition buy Petrina Hicks at Helen Gory Galerie…
I am just going to add that the photograph Venus (2013, below) is one of the most beautiful photographs that I have seen “in the flesh” (so to speak) for a long while. Hicks control over the ‘presence’ of the image, her control over the presence within the image is immaculate. To observe how she modulates the colour shift from blush of pink within the conch shell, to colour of skin, to colour of background is an absolute joy to behold. The pastel colours of skin and background only serve to illuminate the richness of the pink within the shell as a form of immaculate conception (an openness of the mind and of the body). I don’t really care who is looking at this photograph (not another sexualised male gaze!) the form is just beauty itself. I totally fell in love with this work.
Forget the neo-feminist readings, one string of text came to mind: The high fidelity of a fetishistic fecundity.
Petrina Hicks (Australian, b. 1972) Venus 2013 Pigment print, Edition of 8 100 x 100cm
Petrina Hicks (Australian, b. 1972) Enigma 2013 Pigment print, Edition of 8 100 x 100cm
5/ Exhibition: Density by Andrew Follows at Anita Traverso Gallery, Richmond
I include this in my list of magnificent photographic exhibitions for the year not because I curated it, but because of the conceptualisation, the unique quality of the images and the tenacity of a visually impaired artist to produce such memorable work.
A wonderful exhibition by vision impaired photographer Andrew Follows at Anita Traverso Gallery, Richmond. It has been a real pleasure to mentor Andrew over the past year and to see the fruits of our labour is incredibly satisfying. The images are strong, elemental, atmospheric, immersive. Due to the nature of Andrew’s tunnel vision there are hardly any traditional vanishing points within the images, instead the ‘plane of existence’ envelops you and draws you in.
Density n.
The degree of optical opacity of a medium or material, as of a photographic negative;
Thickness of consistency;
Complexity of structure or content.
Andrew Follows (Australian, d. 2019) Number 31, Eltham 2013 Digital photograph on archival cotton rag 130 cm x 86.5cm
Andrew Follows (Australian, d. 2019 Green, Montsalvat 2013 Digital photograph on archival cotton rag 130 cm x 86.5 cm
This is a fascinating National Gallery of Australia exhibition about the work of Australian photographer Carol Jerrems at Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill – in part both memorable, intimate, informative, beautiful, uplifting and disappointing…
The pity is that she died so young for what this exhibition brought home to me was that here was an artist still defining, refining her subject matter. She never had to time to develop a mature style, a mature narrative as an artist (1975-1976 seems to be the high point as far as this exhibition goes). This is the great regret about the work of Carol Jerrems. Yes, there is some mediocre work in this exhibition, stuff that really doesn’t work at all (such as the brothel photographs), experimental work, individual and collective images that really don’t impinge on your consciousness. But there are also the miraculous photographs (and for a young photographer she had a lot of those), the ones that stay with you forever. The right up there, knock you out of the ball park photographs and those you cannot simply take away from the world. They live on in the world forever.
Does Jerrems deserve to be promoted as a legend, a ‘premier’ of Australian photography as some people are doing? Probably not on the evidence of this exhibition but my god, those top dozen or so images are something truly special to behold. Their ‘presence’ alone – their physicality in the world, their impact on you as you stand before them – guarantees that Jerrems will forever remain in the very top echelons of Australian photographers of all time not as a legend, but as a women of incredible strength, intelligence, passion, determination and vision.
What a gorgeous exhibition. It’s about time Melbourne had a bit of style put back into the National Gallery of Victoria, and this exhibition hits it out of the park. Not only are the photographs absolutely fabulous but the frocks are absolutely frocking as well. Well done to the NGV for teaming the photographs with the fashion and for a great install (makes a change to see 2D and 3D done so well together). Elegant, sophisticated and oozing quality, this is a sure fire winner….
Installation photograph of the exhibition Edward Steichen & Art Deco Fashion at NGV International
Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) is generating an enviable reputation for holding vibrant, intellectually stimulating group exhibitions on specific ideas, concepts and topics. This exhibition is no exception. It is one of the best exhibitions I have seen in Melbourne this year. Accompanied by a strong catalogue with three excellent essays by Thierry de Duve, Dr Rex Butler and Patrice Sharkey, this is a must see exhibition for any Melbourne art aficionado before it closes.
“This transition is a flash, a boundary where this becomes that, not then, not that – falling in love, jumping of a bridge. Alive : dead; presence : absence; purpose : play; mastery : exhaustion; logos : silence; worldly : transcendent. Not this, not that. It is an impossible presence, present – a moment of unalienated production that we know exists but we cannot define it, place it. How can we know love? We can speak of it in a before and after sense but it is always a past moment that we recognise.”
Dr Marcus Bunyan. Made Ready: A Philosophy of Moments. December 2013
Jeff Koons (American, b. 1955) Balloon dog (Red) 1995 designed Porcelain, ed. 1113/2300 11.3 x 26.3 cm diameter National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Andrew Liversidge (Australian, b. 1979) IN MY MIND I KNOW WHAT I THINK BUT THAT’S ONLY BASED ON MY EXPERIENCE 2009 10,000 $1 coins (AUD) 30 x 30 x 30cm Courtesy of the artist and The Commercial Gallery, Sydney Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Claudia Terstappen (Australian born Germany, b. 1959) Cabbage trees (Queensland, Australia) 2002 From the series Our ancestors 1990- Gelatin silver print 29 x 29cm Courtesy of the artist
Claudia Terstappen (Australian born Germany, b. 1959) Zion Park (USA) 1996 From the series Sacred land of the Navajo Indians 1990- Gelatin silver print 37 x 37cm Courtesy of the artist
Without doubt this is the best pure photography exhibition I have seen this year in Melbourne. The exhibition is stimulating and enervating, the image making of the highest order in its aesthetic beauty and visual complexity. The artist explores intangible spaces which define our physical and spiritual relationship with the un/known world…
In Terstappen’s work there is no fixed image and no single purpose, a single meaning, or one singular existence that the images propose. They transcend claims about the world arising from, for example, natural or scientific attitudes or theories of the ontological nature of the world. As the artist visualises, records the feeling of the facts, such complex and balanced images let the mind of the viewer wander in the landscape. In their fecundity the viewer is enveloped in that situation of not knowing. There is the feeling of the landscape, a sensitivity to being “lost” in the landscape, in the shadow of ‘Other’, enhanced through the modality of the printing. Dreamworld vs analytical / descriptive, there is the enigma of the landscape and its spiritual places. Yes, the sublime, but more an invocation, a plea to the gods for understanding. This phenomenological prayer allows the artist to envelop herself and the viewer in the profundity – the great depth, intensity and emotion – of the landscape. To be ‘present’ in the the untrammelled places of the world as (divine) experience…
I say to you that this is the most sophisticated reading of the landscape that I have seen in a long time – not just in Australia but from around the world. This is such a joy of an exhibition to see that you leave feeling engaged and uplifted. Being in the gallery on your own is a privilege that is hard to describe: to see (and feel!) landscape photography of the highest order and by an Australian artist as well.
The claiming of things The touching of things The digging of land The tagging of place The taking over of the world
Tag and capture. Tag and capture. Shop, dig, spray, destroy.
An ironic critique of the pastoral, neo/colonial world, tagged and captured in the 21st century.
Excellent work. The construction, sensibility and humour of the videos is outstanding. I also responded to the two works Tag and capture and Shopping for butterfly (both 2013, below).
Joan Ross (Australian, b. 1961) Tag and capture 2013 Hand painted pigment print on cotton rag paper 50 x 47cm (image size) Edition of 3
Joan Ross (Australian, b. 1961) Shopping for butterfly 2013 Hand painted pigment print on cotton rag paper 51.5 x 50cm (image size) Edition of 3
![Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880) 'Studienkopf zur Stuttgarter Iphigenie [Study of a Head for Stuttgart Iphigenia]' 1870](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/feuerbach_studienkopf-web.jpg "Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880) 'Studienkopf zur Stuttgarter Iphigenie [Study of a Head for Stuttgart Iphigenia]' 1870")
![Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880) 'Poesie, Zweite Fassung [Poetry, Second Version]' 1863](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/feuerbach_poesie-web.jpg "Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880) 'Poesie, Zweite Fassung [Poetry, Second Version]' 1863")
![Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880) 'Lucrezia Borgia, Bildnis einer Römerin in weißer Tunika und rotem Mantel [Lucrezia Borgia, Portrait of a roman in white tunic and red cloak]' 1864/1865](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/feuerbach_borgia-web.jpg "Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880) 'Lucrezia Borgia, Bildnis einer Römerin in weißer Tunika und rotem Mantel [Lucrezia Borgia, Portrait of a roman in white tunic and red cloak]' 1864/1865")
![Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880) 'Das Urteil des Paris [The Judgement of Paris]' 1870](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/feuerbach_paris-web.jpg "Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880) 'Das Urteil des Paris [The Judgement of Paris]' 1870")
![Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880) 'Ruhende Nymphe [Resting Nymph]' 1870](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/feuerbach_nymphe-web.jpg "Anselm Feuerbach (German, 1829-1880) 'Ruhende Nymphe [Resting Nymph]' 1870")
![Wols (German, 1913-1951) 'Untitled [Still life - dining table]' 1937 from the exhibition 'Wols Photographer. The Guarded Look' at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, March - June, 2014](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/wols_09_esstisch-web.jpg "Wols (German, 1913-1951) 'Untitled [Still life - dining table]' 1937 from the exhibition 'Wols Photographer. The Guarded Look' at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, March - June, 2014")
![Wols (German, 1913-1951) 'Untitled [Pavilion de l'Elegance - Creating a home with Alix (Germaine Krebs)]' 1937](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/wols_05_pavillon_de_l_elegance_2-web.jpg "Wols (German, 1913-1951) 'Untitled [Pavilion de l'Elegance - Creating a home with Alix (Germaine Krebs)]' 1937")
![Wols (German, 1913-1951) 'Untitled [Swiss Pavilion - Wire Figure]' 1937](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/wols_04_pavillon_drahtfigurine-web.jpg "Wols (German, 1913-1951) 'Untitled [Swiss Pavilion - Wire Figure]' 1937")
![Wols (German, 1913-1951) 'Untitled [Paris - Flea Market]' Autumn 1932 - October 1933 / January 1935 to 1936](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/wols_08_flohmarkt-web.jpg "Wols (German, 1913-1951) 'Untitled [Paris - Flea Market]' Autumn 1932 - October 1933 / January 1935 to 1936")
![Wols (German, 1913-1951) 'Untitled [Paris - Palisade]' Fall 1932 - October 1933 / January 1935 - August 1939](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/wols_07_paris_palisade.jpg "Wols (German, 1913-1951) 'Untitled [Paris - Palisade]' Fall 1932 - October 1933 / January 1935 - August 1939")
![Wols (German, 1913-1951) 'Untitled [Paris - Eiffel Tower]' 1937](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/wols_03_eiffelturm-web.jpg "Wols (German, 1913-1951) 'Untitled [Paris - Eiffel Tower]' 1937")
![Wols (German, 1913-1951) 'Untitled [Still Life - Grapefruit]' 1938 - August 1939](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/wols_06_pampelmuse-web.jpg "Wols (German, 1913-1951) 'Untitled [Still Life - Grapefruit]' 1938 - August 1939")
![Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) 'Minotaur / Dictator' [Minotaure / Dictateur] The Minotaur or The Dictator Paris, c. 1937 from the exhibition 'Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) Photographs, drawings and photomontages' at Jeu de Paume, Paris, October 2013 - January 2014](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/eblumenfeld14-web.jpg "Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) 'Minotaur / Dictator' [Minotaure / Dictateur] The Minotaur or The Dictator Paris, c. 1937 from the exhibition 'Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) Photographs, drawings and photomontages' at Jeu de Paume, Paris, October 2013 - January 2014")
![Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) 'Marguerite von Sivers sur le toit du studio 9, rue Delambre' [Marguerite von Sivers on the roof of Blumenfeld’s studio at 9, rue Delambre] Paris, 1937](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/eblumenfeld10-web.jpg "Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) 'Marguerite von Sivers sur le toit du studio 9, rue Delambre' [Marguerite von Sivers on the roof of Blumenfeld’s studio at 9, rue Delambre] Paris, 1937")
![Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) 'Untitled [Natalia Pasco]' 1942](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/eblumenfeld12-web.jpg "Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) 'Untitled [Natalia Pasco]' 1942")
![Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) 'Voile mouillé' [Wet veil] Paris, 1937](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/eblumenfeld09-web.jpg "Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) 'Voile mouillé' [Wet veil] Paris, 1937")
![Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) 'In hoc signo vinces [in this sign you will conquer]' 1967](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/in-hoc-signo-vinces-in-this-sign-you-will-conquer-1967-web.jpg "Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) 'In hoc signo vinces [in this sign you will conquer]' 1967")
![Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) 'Untitled [Homme agenouillé avec tour]' [Kneeling man with tower] 1920](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/eblumenfeld02-web.jpg "Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) 'Untitled [Homme agenouillé avec tour]' [Kneeling man with tower] 1920")
![Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) 'Do your part for the Red Cross' [Soutenez la Croix-Rouge] 1945](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/blumenfeld_1-web.jpg "Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) 'Do your part for the Red Cross' [Soutenez la Croix-Rouge] 1945")
![Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) Variant of the photograph published in Life Magazine entitled "The Picasso Girl" [The young woman of Picasso] (model: Lisette) c. 1941-1942](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/eblumenfeld15-web1.jpg "Erwin Blumenfeld (American-German, 1897-1969) Variant of the photograph published in Life Magazine entitled \"The Picasso Girl\" [The young woman of Picasso] (model: Lisette) c. 1941-1942")
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