Grant Mudford (Australian, b. 1944) El Paso, Texas 1976 Vintage gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Joseph Bellows Gallery
Let There Be Light
For so long I have wanted to do a posting on the Australian photographer Grant Mudford (b. 1944) and finally the time is here. Mudford has lived in the United States of America since his final move to the Los Angeles area in mid-1977 but I still think of him as Australian.
Between 1974 – 1977 he undertook an intensive program of travel and work in the United States before his final move. In 1977 he had major exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; and Light Gallery, New York and is represented in major collections such as The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra which holds sixty six of his photographs in their collection.
Mudford’s mature style – capturing in beautiful, minimalist black and white photographs the essence and reality of the built landscape envisioned without people, usually working with common, generally uncelebrated subject-matter – emerged at a time that was parallel to that of the groundbreaking exhibition of contemporary landscape photography New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape held at the George Eastman House’s International Museum of Photography, October 1975 – February 1976.
This important exhibition proposed a new way of looking at the American landscape, a concept that was historically grounded in the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) – new order – movement of Germany in the 1920s, developed further and most importantly by the German artists Bernd and Hiller Becher in the late 1960s – early 1970s.
The New Topographics photographers (including the Bechers) “documented built and natural landscapes in America, often capturing the tension between natural scenery and the mundane structures of post-war America: parking lots, suburban homes, crumbling coal mines. The photographs, stark and documentary, are often devoid of human presence. William Jenkins [curator of the New Topographics exhibition] described the images as “neutral” in style, “reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion, and opinion”.1
As I have argued elsewhere I believe that the photographs of the Bechers and alike are just as much about the beauty of the subject as they are their topographic state.
“Despite protestations to the contrary (appeals to the objectivity of the image, eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion; the rigorous frontality of the individual images giving them the simplicity of diagrams, while their density of detail offers encyclopaedic richness) these are subjective images for all their objective desire. The paradox is the more a photographer strives for objectivity, the more ego drops away, the more the work becomes their own: subjective, beautiful, emotive.”2
At least Mudford is honest enough to own up to desiring beauty. “I am deeply interested in the relationship between man-made structures and the landscape,” says Mudford. “Photography allows me to capture that intersection, where design meets nature, light, and texture. I strive to create images that reflect both beauty and complexity.” (Text from the Joseph Bellows website)
Evidence of the development of his later mature style can be seen in photographs taken in Australia such as Jenolan (1972, below) and Woolloomooloo (Stop sign) (1973, below) which already contain a minimalist, paired back, topographic yet beautiful aesthetic. But it was his move to Los Angeles, and above all the LIGHT and TEXTURE of the new world, that seem to have brought forth the best within this artist.
While, as Foucault observes, texts “are caught up in a system of references to … other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network … Its unity is variable and relative”3 – in other words there is a close relationship between the work of Mudford and the New Topographics movement – his work is very much his own.
There is a crispiness, frontality and seeming simplicity to Mudford’s photographs and yet also almost a painterly aspect, that belies the complexity of these well resolved and beautiful images. He captures “the emotional resonance of a moment, whether it be the play of light on a building’s surface or the dynamic contrasts found in nature.” (Text from the Joseph Bellows website) And unlike the huge photographs of Dawoud Bey in an upcoming posting – which seem to me completely at odds with the spirit of the subject being captured – Mudford’s 16 x 20 inches photographs allow the viewer to focus on the images inherent qualities of beauty, nature, light and texture.
Finally, it is beyond me why Grant Mudford has not received greater recognition in the country of his birth. Forget that he has lived for years in the United States of America, Mudford is a magnificent photographer par excellence and his worldwide achievement should be celebrated at a national level. Perhaps it is time that a gallery such as the National Gallery of Australia or the Museum of Australian Photography should put on a major retrospective of this artist’s work… before it is too late!
We are loosing too many great photographers from this era already.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape was a groundbreaking exhibition of contemporary landscape photography held at the George Eastman House’s International Museum of Photography (Rochester, New York) from October 1975 to February 1976. The show, curated by William Jenkins, had a lasting impact on aesthetic and conceptual approaches to American landscape photography. The New Topographics photographers, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, and Stephen Shore, documented built and natural landscapes in America, often capturing the tension between natural scenery and the mundane structures of post-war America: parking lots, suburban homes, crumbling coal mines. The photographs, stark and documentary, are often devoid of human presence. Jenkins described the images as “neutral” in style, “reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion, and opinion”.
3/ Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences.New York: Vintage, 1973 quoted in Thumlert, Kurt. Intervisuality, Visual Culture, and Education. [Online] Cited 10/08/2006. www.forkbeds.com/visual-pedagogy.htm (link no longer active)
Many thankx to Joseph Bellows Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Photographs reveal unexpected mysteries within the familiarities of our existence. We over familiarise ourselves with our surroundings and after become unaware and insensitive to the forces of the essence or reality before us. It is that essence or reality which I strive to photograph.”
Grant Mudford quoted in Graham Howe (ed.,). New Photography Australia. Paddington, N.S.W.: Australian Centre for Photography, 1974, p. 8
“I think it is incredibly difficult to define a building with photographs. Space and spatial relationships within and around a building are not fully experienced from photographs. The photograph imposes its own sense of these relationships, which to me are abstract representations having little to do with architecture or reality. So what I am interested in are the photographic manifestations of what buildings and structures can present when specifically scrutinised as a photograph. To extend this transformation, I prefer to work with common, generally uncelebrated subject-matter”
Grant Mudford in Archetype Magazine Spring 1981 quoted in Reimund Zunde. Photography: An Approach For Secondary Schools. Education Department of Victoria, Curriculum Services Unite, in association with the Secondary Art/Craft Standing Committee, 1982
Grant Mudford (Australian, b. 1944) Jenolan 1972 Gelatin silver print 34.5 h x 38.8 w cm National Gallery of Australia Gift of the artist, 1985
Grant Mudford (Australian, b. 1944) Woolloomooloo (Stop sign) 1973 Gelatin silver print 34.5 h x 38.4 w cm National Gallery of Australia Gift of the artist, 1985
Grant Mudford (Australian, b. 1944) Houston, Texas 1975 Gelatin silver print 33.8 h x 49.8 w cm National Gallery of Australia Gift of the Phillip Morris Arts Grant 1982
Graham Howe (ed.,). New Photography Australia. Paddington, N.S.W.: Australian Centre for Photography, 1974, p. 8.
Reimund Zunde. Photography: An Approach For Secondary Schools. Education Department of Victoria, Curriculum Services Unite, in association with the Secondary Art/Craft Standing Committee, 1982
Renowned photographer Grant Mudford had made his mark in the art world with a distinctive vision, capturing anonymous structures with a profound sense of space, light, texture and form. With a career spanning several decades, Mudford’s work remains a testament to his unique ability to meld the art of photography with the subtle intricacies of design, nature, and human influence.
Mudford’s photographic style is known for its dramatic compositions and meticulous attention to detail. Whether focusing on the clean lines of modern architecture or the rugged textures of natural landscapes, his work consistently transcends traditional photographic boundaries. His images invite viewers to engage with the built environment and the natural world in new and thought-provoking ways.
His work has been described by Keith Davis in An American Century of Photography as “an appreciation for both the alienations and incongruities of the urban landscape.”
“I am deeply interested in the relationship between man-made structures and the landscape,” says Mudford. “Photography allows me to capture that intersection, where design meets nature, light, and texture. I strive to create images that reflect both beauty and complexity.”
Mudford’s approach to photography is marked by his commitment to capturing the emotional resonance of a moment, whether it be the play of light on a building’s surface or the dynamic contrasts found in nature. His work not only documents his subjects but also engages viewers in a deeper conversation about the spaces they inhabit.
Mudford’s photographs have been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions since the mid 1970’s; beginning this history with a solo show at the notable Light Gallery. His photographs are in numerous private and public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the George Eastman House, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, and the National Museum of American Art. In 2014, Mudford received the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award. His photographs have been featured in publications such as Architectural Digest, The New York Times, and Artforum, solidifying his place as one of the most respected photographers of his generation.
Grant Mudford’s photography is more than just an aesthetic experience; it is an invitation to reconsider how we perceive the world around us. His lens captures what is often overlooked – the powerful simplicity of everyday structures and the quiet majesty of the natural world. Through his work, Mudford encourages viewers to find beauty in both the grand and the subtle, offering a fresh perspective on the environments we encounter.
Text from the Joseph Bellows Gallery website
Grant Mudford (Australian, b. 1944) Los Angeles, CA 1977 Vintage gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches
Grant Mudford (Australian, b. 1944) Los Angeles, CA 1976 Vintage gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches
Grant Mudford (Australian, b. 1944) Irvine, CA 1976 Vintage gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches
Grant Mudford (Australian, b. 1944) Los Angeles, CA 1976 Vintage gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches
Grant Mudford (Australian, b. 1944) Los Angeles, CA 1977 Vintage gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches
Grant Mudford
b. 1944
Grant Mudford (b. 1944) is a Sydney-born, Los Angeles-based photographer renowned for his large-format, abstract depictions of the urban landscape and built environment. Mudford developed an interest in photography as a child, and turned the laundry into a darkroom at the age of ten. For several years in his teens he photographed children on Santa Claus’ lap at Christmas. After studying architecture at the University of NSW for two years from 1964-1964, he chose to focus on photography, opening his own studio. In the 1960s and early 1970s he photographed for a range of advertising, fashion and theatre clients, as well as working as a cinematographer on short films. Mudford held his first solo show at Bonython Gallery in Sydney in 1972 and shortly after received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts, enabling him to travel throughout the USA and Mexico between 1975 and 1977. He then settled in Los Angeles, where he worked for various American and international publications including Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, the LA Times and the New York Times. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles commissioned him as photographer for the exhibition and book, Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture (1991). Mudford’s work is in many American and international collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art Gallery of NSW and National Gallery of Australia.
So many words, so much verbiage about the work of American artist Saul Leiter (1923-2013).
I’d rather not add to that noise.
It is well to reinforce the meaning of an image with text but it is not necessary.
Just be aware …. of the beauty of the image and your feelings towards it.
Lucidly, appreciate the integrity of the image.
Nothing more but certainly nothing less.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. It’s wonderful to see the earlier black and white work, breadcrumb trail of the colour work to come.
Many thankx to Foam for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Photographs are often treated as important moments, but really they are fragments and souvenirs of an unfinished world.”
Saul Leiter
“I may be old-fashioned. But I believe there is such a thing as a search for beauty – a delight in the nice things in the world. And I don’t think one should have to apologise for it.”
Saul Leiter, In No Great Hurry, 2013
“His photos feel – as Akiko Atake puts it – like “quiet stolen glimpses”; moments plucked from the everyday and preserved in the eye of Leiter’s camera.”
“I’ve always felt a closeness to Japan in Leiter’s work; the photographs in the snow; the women under their umbrellas; the improbable perspectives and revolutionary compositions reminiscent of Japanese woodblocks, ukiyo-e; the presence of the seasons and the verticality of the compositions evoking Japanese scroll paintings, kakajiku; the beauty he found in cracks and broken surfaces, in the unfinished, the worn out, the imperfect – the endurance of the elements and the effects of time. There is a “mono no aware”* beauty to his photographs, in the color work especially – an acute awareness of the beauty of the transient, of the ephemeral, which might explain, in part, their magical and poetic essence.”
“Leiter was destined to become a rabbi like his father, but moved to New York to be a painter, then choosing photography – which appalled his father. Beginning in 1948, Leiter using an Argus C3 camera, then a Leica and a Rolleiflex
In the 2012 documentary, In No Great Hurry, Saul Leiter said: “There are the things that are out in the open, and there are the things that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has more to do with what is hidden.” These tender and graceful depictions of “the things that are hidden” – images that Leiter rarely showed – retain their essential mystery, defying interpretation.”
* mono no aware = a Japanese concept that describes a poignant awareness of the transient nature of existence, a sensitivity to the beauty of things that are fleeting, and a gentle sadness at their passing
Leiter’s love of beauty, Bonnard, Japan, Buddhism, Ukiyo-e prints, Japanese scroll paintings, “ma” (space), kyūdō, haiku.
“The unorthodox and seemingly disproportionate compositions… the emphasis on shapes; the presence of calligraphy; unusual viewpoints and perspectives, everyday subject matter; the ubiquity of women; and a fondness for the ordinary and the ephemeral”
~ Leiter’s complex and impressionistic photographs are as much about evoking an atmosphere as nailing the decisive moment.
~ Leiter was a keen observer as life unfolded before him, somehow finding a way to reliably pluck a sublime split-second out of a mundane moment. ‘I like to take things that are very common and to find something in them,’ he once said.
~ Photographs are often considered important moments, but according to Leiter they are tiny fragments of an unfinished world. Such is his own world: little fragments of images juxtaposed and conjoined, amassing and forming vast, ever-expanding fields.
~ He photographed that which obstructs, hides, encloses, and thus reveals new depths of reality.
~ Everything is a matter of balance, exactitude and humility in the works of this man, who nonetheless accorded great importance to imperfection.
Foam is proud to present a major retrospective exhibition of the celebrated American artist Saul Leiter (1923-2013). Leiter is seen as one of the most important photographers of the 1950’s in the United States and a pioneer of colour photography. This exhibition brings together over 200 works, consisting of photography, both black-and-white and colour, as well as his abstract paintings. His eclectic oeuvre reveals a practice using shadow, light, and reflections to craft layered compositions.
About the artist
Saul Leiter (1923-2013) began painting and photographing in his teenage years, gaining an early recognition for his paintings. After moving to New York in 1946, he turned to photography as a profession while continuing to paint. His abstract forms and groundbreaking compositions possess a painterly quality that distinguishes them from the works of other photographers of that era. His work significantly contributed to the emergence of what is now known as the New York School of photography.
In 1957, he began working for major publications like Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, balancing his commercial success with his personal passion for street photography in his Manhattan neighbourhood. Leiter’s groundbreaking work in colour photography gained widespread acclaim with the release of his first book, Early Colour (2006). By the time of his death in 2013, Leiter had achieved international recognition, with his work featured in numerous museum exhibitions and publications worldwide.
Text from the Foam website
Installation views of the exhibition Saul Leiter – An Unfinished World at Foam, Amsterdam
Saul Leiter remained dedicated to painting throughout his career, producing many gouaches (opaque watercolours), which were essential to his artistic expression. While most of his works are abstract, with large areas of colour, some feature playful lines that suggest landscapes or figures. His expressive use of colour is distinctive, often favouring muted tones like soft violets, mauves, and faded ochres or yellows. Although Leiter is best known for his photography, his paintings reflect a similarly poetic and intimate vision of the world.
Text from the Foam Facebook page
Installation view of the exhibition Saul Leiter – An Unfinished World at Foam, Amsterdam showing Leiter’s photograph The Pull (c. 1960, below)
Leiter was a keen observer as life unfolded before him, somehow finding a way to reliably pluck a sublime split-second out of a mundane moment. ‘I like to take things that are very common and to find something in them,’ he once said.
Installation view of the exhibition Saul Leiter – An Unfinished World at Foam, Amsterdam showing Leiter’s photograph
Foam is proud to present a major retrospective exhibition of the celebrated American artist Saul Leiter (1923-2013). Leiter is seen as one of the most important photographers of the 1950’s in the United States, and a pioneer of colour photography. This exhibition brings together over 200 works, consisting of photography, both black-and-white and colour, as well as his abstract paintings. His eclectic oeuvre reveals a practice using shadow, light, and reflections to craft layered compositions. For nearly sixty years, Leiter photographed daily, capturing everyday moments of New York City life. With various techniques and mediums, and the use of telephoto lenses, Leiter would enhance the painterly quality of his images and transform seemingly mundane street scenes into visual poetry. New York, a symbol of modernity in the 1950s, became the backdrop for Leiter’s aesthetic discoveries.
By shooting in the rain and snow, and using windows and other reflective surfaces, he created abstract images. A red umbrella, a green traffic light, or the yellow flash of a passing taxi add an unexpected play of colour to his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer to work in colour. The use of aged or damaged film allowed him to include surprising compositions with shifts in light and colour. Once lost to obscurity, his work was rediscovered in the mid 2010s for its ground-breaking role in the emergence of colour photography.
By shooting in the rain and snow, and using windows and other reflective surfaces, he created abstract images. A red umbrella, a green traffic light, or the yellow flash of a passing taxi add an unexpected play of colour to his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer to work in colour. The use of aged or damaged film allowed him to include surprising compositions with shifts in light and colour. Once lost to obscurity, his work was rediscovered in the mid 2010s for its ground-breaking role in the emergence of colour photography.
Leiter was a self-taught photographer whose strong sense of curiosity made him a lifelong student. He maintained his experimental and spontaneous approach throughout his career, which is evident in both his street photography and fashion work.
Upon his death in 2013, Leiter left behind a remarkable collection of approximately 15,000 black-and-white prints, at least 40,000 colour slides, a similar number of black-and-white negatives and over 4000 paintings, only a handful of which have been seen publicly. The exhibition An Unfinished World offers visitors the chance to admire the endless poetry of Saul Leiter’s artistic practice through his paintings, photography and unique view on the world around him.
“This ambidextrous painter and photographer recognised no limits. If, in the silence of his studio, his movement inscribed on paper imperceptible little rhythmic abbreviations, like an everyday exercise, his gaze penetrated the tumult of the city, challenging what draws the eye and scrutinising what is not seen.”
“If only we give them just a little more attention, these voices also tell us that the images are fragments containing enigmas, and that they journey through time and endure, intact, despite the darkness that may prevail in the world.”
“For nearly sixty years, Leiter photographed daily, capturing everyday moments of New York City life. With various techniques and mediums, and the use of telephoto lenses, Leiter would enhance the painterly quality of his images and transform seemingly mundane street scenes into visual poetry. New York, a symbol of modernity in the 1950s, became the backdrop for Leiter’s aesthetic discoveries. By shooting in the rain and snow, and using windows and other reflective surfaces, he created abstract images. A red umbrella, a green traffic light, or the yellow flash of a passing taxi add an unexpected play of color to his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer to work in color. The use of aged or damaged film allowed him to include surprising compositions with shifts in light and color.”
Curators: Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar, Hujar’s close friend the artist and master printer Gary Schneider, with Raven Row’s director Alex Sainsbury
And then there is Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987).
Using contextless backgrounds and simple settings, Hujar’s non-judgmental portraits of friends and lovers rely on the slight twist of the head, the drop of a shadow, the photographer’s look and subjects pose, performance, that curves and bends reality into a presence that is magnetic, magical, eternal.
Hujar’s direct, intimate photographs, suggestive of both love and loss, proffer a mirror to strength and determination / to friendship / to love. His pictures gather, together, a feeling for the freedom of people and places, that essence of being true to yourself (getting to the bone as Harrison Adams puts it). A direct connection between the photographer and subject captured by the camera revealed to the world.
You might have guessed I am in love with his photographs.
Thus, it is a great delight to post on this exhibition at Raven Row in London which looks to be an absolute delight, Hujar’s photographs simply and beautifully presented in the space.
His images reveal themselves over time, expounding his love of life and his intimate and free engagement with the world around him.
That is Hujar’s music, his signature.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Harrison Adams. Photography in the First Person: Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin and Sally Mann (Dissertation). Yale University, 2018 quoted on the “Peter Hujar” Wikipedia page Nd [Online] Cited 14/03/2025
Further postings on this incredible artist on Art Blart can be found at
Many thankx to Raven Row for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
One aspect of this intimate quality was Hujar’s ability to connect with his sitters. One of his models was quoted after an unsuccessful session as saying:
“We couldn’t ‘reveal’. As an actor you have to reveal. And Hujar’s big thing was that you had to reveal. I know that now, but I didn’t know it at the time. In other words, blistering, blazing honesty directed towards the lens. No pissing about. No posing. No putting anything on. No camping around. Just flat, real who-you-are…You must strip down all the nonsense until you get to the bone. That’s what Peter wanted and that was his great, great talent and skill.”
This is the first exhibition to take on the full breadth of Peter Hujar’s later photography. Hujar was a central figure in the downtown scene of 1970s and early 80s New York, but at his death in 1987 from AIDS-related pneumonia his work was largely unknown to a broader art world. Now it is widely admired for its austere elegance and emotional charge. Hujar’s principal concern was with forms of portraiture – of his friends and denizens of the downtown scene, whom he encountered on the street, shot in his apartment studio or sought out backstage. He also turned his attention to animals, whom he photographed with particular empathy, as well as to architectural, landscape and street photography.
Eyes Open in the Dark concentrates on his later work, when his emergence from a debilitating depression in 1976 brought about a new expansiveness. The exhibition also reveals the darkening tone of his photography in the early 1980s, as the AIDS crisis devastated his community, and his work entered into dialogue with the younger artist David Wojnarowicz. Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark is curated by Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar, and Hujar’s close friend, the artist and master printer Gary Schneider, with Raven Row’s director Alex Sainsbury. As well as lifetime prints it will include prints of little-known works specially prepared by Gary Schneider, working closely with the artist’s Estate.
Stephen Lloyd Varble (American, 1946-1984) was a notorious American performance artist, playwright, and fashion designer in lower Manhattan during the 1970s. His work challenged mainstream conceptions of gender and exposed the materialism of the established, institutionalised world.
This is the first exhibition to take on the full breadth of Peter Hujar’s later photography. Hujar was a central figure in the downtown scene of 1970s and early 80s New York, but at his death in 1987 from AIDS-related pneumonia his work was largely unknown to a broader art world. Now it is widely admired for its austere elegance and emotional charge.
Hujar’s principal concern was with forms of portraiture – of his friends and denizens of the downtown scene, whom he encountered on the street, shot in his apartment studio or sought out backstage. He also turned his attention to animals, whom he photographed with particular empathy, as well as to architectural, landscape and street photography. Eyes Open in the Dark concentrates on his later work, when his emergence from a debilitating depression in 1976 brought about a new expansiveness. The exhibition also reveals the darkening tone of his photography in the early 1980s, as the AIDS crisis devastated his community, and his work entered into dialogue with the younger artist David Wojnarowicz.
Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark is curated by Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar, and Hujar’s close friend, the artist and master printer Gary Schneider, with Raven Row’s director Alex Sainsbury. As well as lifetime prints it will include prints of little-known works specially prepared by Gary Schneider, working closely with the artist’s Estate.
The exhibition is free to attend and open Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 6pm, no booking required. Please note that some images in this exhibition feature explicit sexual content.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992) Untitled 1989 From Sex Series (for Marion Scemama) 1988-1989 Gelatin silver print
One of Wojnarowicz’s most remarkable pieces here is the “Sex Series (for Marion Scemama),” a miracle of technical prowess and visual intensity. Wojnarowicz began it in 1988, a year after the photographer Peter Hujar, his close friend and former lover, died of AIDS. These photomontages combine stock photographs with circular insets salvaged from Hujar’s porn collection [among other insets of, for example, police, medical, money, religion and life], which he’d thrown away after his diagnosis.
Much of Wojnarowicz’s work is about sex in an age of death. During the AIDS crisis, sexual activity, particularly that of gay men, was demonized. Resisting the dogma and censorship of the Right’s conservatism and the Left’s moralism alike, the “Sex Series” vibrates with anxious and desirous energy, a mood amplified by the eerie reversal of the printing process, in which light and dark have been inverted to create a near negative.
There are some haunting photographs in this posting on the work of American photographer Deborah Turbeville but unfortunately I can make little comment on her work.
Despite trawling through numerous sites looking at her images – there is not much online – and more importantly having not seen the exhibition, I find that I have no real handle on the photographic series.
A couple of photographs from the Passport, Comme des Garçons, Block Island and Unseen Versailles series, plus a few photocollage which investigate the nature of photography and its fragility in this posting doesn’t allow me to understand the full sweep of her artistic work… which is a great pity.
The only way to really understand and feel Turbeville’s work is to visit The Photographers’ Gallery and immerse yourself in the artist’s world. Unfortunately I cannot do that.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“When I’m making photographs, I think of films”
Deborah Turbeville, 1985
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage – Exhibition Trailer – The Photographers’ Gallery
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage highlights the work of a truly innovative, American fashion photographer, Deborah Turbeville (1932-2013) who transformed fashion imagery into avant-garde art. Her signature dreamlike and melancholic style became recognisable with her earliest works in the 1970s: enigmatic female figures, cloudy skies, wintry nature and abandoned, decaying surroundings. She deliberately distanced herself from the typical glamourous, polished aesthetic that dominated fashion at the time.
An interview on the exhibition Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage with Nathalie Herschdorfer, Exhibition Curator, and Karen McQuaid, Senior Curator, The Photographers’ Gallery.
Deborah Turbeville’s signature dreamlike and melancholic style became recognisable with her earliest works in the 1970s: enigmatic female figures, cloudy skies, wintry nature and abandoned, decaying surroundings. She deliberately distanced herself from the typical glamourous, polished aesthetic that dominated fashion at the time.
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage presents Turbeville’s trailblazing photographic explorations, from fashion photos to her very personal work. Bringing together unique pieces, the exhibition reveals Turbeville’s highly personal artistic universe, which has been credited with transforming fashion imagery into avant-garde art.
She experimented with the developing process, from the darkroom to the studio table. She ripped, cut and tore her photographs; manipulated, pinned and glued them together to create unique hybrid objects. Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is a new appreciation of Turbeville’s ground-breaking contribution to the history of photography.
Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website
Unseen Versailles
Jacqueline Onassis commissioned Turbeville to photograph the Palace of Versailles during her tenure as an editor at the American publishing house Doubleday. With help from Onassis she gained access to the labyrinth of hidden chambers and antechambers which were off limits to tourists. She photographed barren rooms, Baroque furniture covered with sheets, broken statues, and curtains thick with dust. The curator of the estate initially blocked the introduction of props, but Onassis eventually gained her permission to bring in models in period costumes. Unseen Versailles won the American Book Award in 1982 and enabled Turbeville to find a readership outside fashion magazines.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation views of the exhibition Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage at The Photographers’ Gallery, London
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage at The Photographers’ Gallery, London (until 23 February 2025), celebrates Turbeville’s trailblazing photographic explorations, from fashion photos to her very personal work. To coincide with the exhibition, we’re looking at some of her photographic series in more detail, starting with the Passport series!
Turbeville’s Passport series of collages, which accompanied a novella she wrote with the same name, demonstrates her very cinematic, narrative approach to photography.
Fixed to wrinkled brown paper with unusually large T-pins, the series heavily features portrait photographs. The gelatin silver prints all have slightly varying hues of black and white; their torn edges overlap, each revealing a different fragment. The torn sections of women’s faces stand out against grainy backgrounds, like a ghostly white sky. Turbeville selected images, largely from her archives, showing repeated shots positioned together, repurposing her work to create new experimental compositions that felt cinematic in style. Alongside the images, fragments of her unpublished novella are cut out and pasted, so that the series can be read narratively as well as visually.
Unlike many of her contemporaries, Turbeville considered photography to be more than just a means of pictorial representation. Curious about the materials and nature of photography, she was inescapably interested in its fragility. Her photocollages suggested new possibilities for photography, which had, until then, cleaved very closely to reality. Collage became a form of manual work which allowed her to create three-dimensional objects and a chance to gather up her own images and give them new depth. She embraced the visible imperfections in a handmade, narrative style that gives her work a unique stylistic voice.
Text from The Photographers’ Gallery Instagram page
For her second spread in Vogue Magazine, Deborah Turbeville photographed designers with their models and muses in a February 1975 editorial titled “European Fashion: The Movers”. Here, she captured the British doyenne of dressmaking, Jean Muir, with her friends modelling her designs.
Deborah Turbeville is remembered today as a pioneering figure in fashion photography, known for her melancholic, dreamlike imagery that diverged from conventional standards. Born in 1932 in Stoneham, Massachusetts, USA, she initially pursued acting before being discovered by fashion designer Claire McCardell, who employed her as an assistant and model. Through McCardell, Turbeville met Diana Vreeland, then editor of Harper’s Bazaar, which launched her editorial career. However, she soon lost interest in conventional editorial work, turning instead to photography as an outlet for artistic expression and experimentation.
In the 1960s, after buying her first camera, Turbeville began early experimentation in photography. Her creative direction was refined through a workshop with photographer Richard Avedon and art director Marvin Israel. Moving from fashion editing to photography, she worked for magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, though she always insisted she was not a traditional fashion photographer. Rather, she used fashion within her work to tell emotionally charged stories, setting herself apart from the industry’s glamorous norms.
One of her most iconic works is the Bathhouse series for Vogue in 1975, featuring models posed in a dilapidated bathhouse. The images conveyed vulnerability, decay and isolation, starkly contrasting with the glossy fashion photography of the time. Although controversial, the series exemplified Turbeville’s atmospheric aesthetic – soft focus, grainy textures and muted tones. She often distressed her photographs to give them an aged appearance, blurring the lines between fashion photography and fine art.
Turbeville’s work rejected the conventions of fashion industry ideals, choosing instead to explore themes of memory, loss and feminine vulnerability. Her approach stood in contrast to contemporaries like Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, whose images typically celebrated female sensuality. In contrast, Turbeville’s subjects appeared introspective and distant, encouraging viewers to engage with them on a deeper, emotional level.
In 1981, Turbeville was commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to photograph the abandoned rooms of the Palace of Versailles, which resulted in the book Unseen Versailles. The images of faded grandeur reflected her fascination with decay and received critical acclaim, winning an American Book Award.
Her body of work extended beyond fashion to other notable publications, including Studio St. Petersburg, The Voyage of the Virgin Maria Candelaria, and Newport Remembered. Throughout her career, she consistently merged fashion with fine art, creating images defined more by atmosphere and emotion than style alone.
Her photocollages show her experimental approach to constructing compositions. Her photographs are just one element among several. She builds up mysterious narratives through overlapping layers of pinned, ripped, cut, creased and taped images, found objects and printed texts. These layers are built up on heavy brown paper – a complete departure from the glossy white pages of fashion magazines. Her Passport series of collages, which accompanied a novella she wrote with the same name, demonstrates her very cinematic, narrative approach to photography.
Turbeville’s influence on future generations of photographers is significant. She opened doors for more experimental, avant-garde approaches to fashion photography, transforming it from a commercial medium into a space for artistic exploration. Her rejection of industry norms allowed her to create a distinctive visual language that continues to inspire photographers and artists today.
Turbeville once remarked that she was more interested in creating “atmosphere and mood” than simply photographing clothes, a sentiment that underpinned her career. By embracing imperfection, decay and the passage of time, she redefined fashion photography as more than a vehicle for selling clothes.
Turbeville’s career represents a turning point in fashion photography. Her dreamlike, melancholic style and innovative approach broke industry conventions, transforming fashion photography into a medium for personal and artistic expression. Her legacy continues to inspire, and her influence remains enduring long after her death in 2013.
“Fashion takes itself more seriously than I do. I’m not really a fashion photographer.”
Deborah Turbeville in The New Yorker
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage opens at The Photographers’ Gallery this Autumn, from 9 October 2024 – 23 February 2025. Presenting the work of the truly innovative American photographer, Deborah Turbeville (1932-2013), the exhibition will feature a selection of her personal vintage photocollages and editorial work.
Deborah Turbeville revolutionised the world of fashion photography, transforming it from its commercial clean standard into an art form. Turbeville deliberately distanced herself from the typical glamorous, polished aesthetic that dominated fashion at the time. Her signature dreamlike and melancholic style became recognisable with her earliest works in the 1970s: enigmatic female figures, cloudy skies, wintry nature and abandoned, decaying surroundings.
Turbeville’s work for the fashion industry launched her career, which lasted over four decades. Between 1975 and 2013, her photographs were published in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and New York Times Magazine. She also worked for fashion houses including Comme des Garçons, Guy Laroche, Charles Jourdan, Calvin Klein, Emanuel Ungaro and Valentino. At a time when fashion photography was dominated by men, Turbeville chose a path that ran counter to that of her male peers, like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin.
Soft focus and overexposure brought a surreal and dusty tone to her black, white and sepia-toned work. Her models resemble ghostly apparitions as they wander through deserted buildings and landscapes. The exhibition includes her most controversial photograph, Bath House, New York City, 1975, part of a swimsuit photoshoot for Vogue, which featured five models, slouching and stretching in an abandoned bathhouse. The picture was so unlike the traditional fashion imagery of the time it prompted a public outcry.
Turbeville was undeterred and continued to produce images with an element of decay, saying “the idea of disintegration is really the core of my work.”
Other works on show include images from Turbeville’s 1981 American Book Award-winning series Unseen Versailles, and her first photocollage magazine, Maquillage (1975).
Turbeville’s experimentation extended from the darkroom to the studio table as she unpicked the developing process. She ripped, cut and tore her photographs; manipulated, pinned and glued them. Her handmade collages are hybrid objects – as much diaries as book maquettes, sketchbooks as photographic novels – all from a pre-digital age.
Describing her work, she said “I destroy the image after I’ve made it, obliterate it a little so you never have it completely there.”
Turbeville developed a highly personal artistic universe, which has been credited with transforming fashion imagery into avant-garde art. Although she did not achieve the same recognition as her male counterparts in her lifetime. Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is a new opportunity to consider and celebrate Turbeville’s ground-breaking contribution to the history of photography.
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is organised by The Photographers’ Gallery, produced by Photo Elysée in collaboration with MUUS Collection. The exhibition is curated by Nathalie Herschdorfer, Director of Photo Elysée, and Karen McQuaid, Senior Curator at The Photographers’ Gallery.
The accompanying catalogue Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is published by Thames & Hudson and available at The Photographers’ Gallery’s bookshop at £55.
Deborah Turbeville short biography
Deborah Turbeville was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts, USA in 1932. She moved to New York with ambitions to study drama when she was 19. Instead she was discovered by the fashion designer Claire McCardell, who hired Turbeville as an assistant and house model. While working for McCardell, she met Diana Vreeland, the famed editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Their introduction led to Turbeville being offered a job as an editor at the magazine.
Disinterested in her editorial work at Harper’s Bazaar and later at Mademoiselle, she began experimenting with photography in the 1960s. She took part in a workshop led by Richard Avedon and art director Marvin Israel in 1966. From there, she began her photographic career, mainly working for magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Mirabella.
In 1981, Turbeville was commissioned by Jaqueline Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday, to photograph disused rooms in the Palace of Versailles. The book, Unseen Versailles, won an American Book Award, for its rare look into the Palace’s off-limits decaying grandeur.
Turbeville published many books of her photography, including Studio St. Petersburg, The Voyage of the Virgin Maria Candelaria and Newport Remembered. Posthumous publications include Comme des Garçons 1981, a series of photographs she took during the 1980s in collaboration with the fashion house and its designer, Rei Kawakubo.
Turbeville died in 2013, having left an indelible mark on the world of photography. Her work is collected by major institutions worldwide, including the National Portrait Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Short biography: Aline Meyer Liebman (1879-1966). Born in Los Angeles, Aline Meyer Liebman studied at the Art Students League in New York and received the support of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. By the 1930s she had already become a consolidated artist and was the subject of a solo show at Walker Galleries in 1936. Meyer Liebman was also known for her work as a collector of art and photography. She acquired works by O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Max Ernst, among others. Liebman kept a broad circle of relationships with key people in the New York art world, such as Peggy Guggenheim, who included her work Painted Dream (1935) in Exhibition by 31 Women. Other notable facets include her political and philanthropic work: aside from supporting President Roosevelt, she became a member of the New York League of Women Voters and designed a poster for the organization in 1944.
While it is fantastic to see this “recreation” (many of the original art works are unknown or missing and others have been substituted by the same artist in their place) of Peggy Guggenheim’s 1943 Exhibition by 31 Women “organised in her New York gallery ‘Art of This Century’, one of the first exhibitions in the United States to showcase works exclusively by European and American women,” I am conflicted by this exhibition. Conflicted, conflicted, conflicted.
Wealthy white women uses influence and money to promote women artists when no one else would, a patron reinforcing female participation introducing “well-established figures within the artistic landscape as well as emerging talent.” But I have a feeling that this group of female artists was part of an elite cohort – a privileged, internalist, internationalist, undoubtedly incestuous (in terms of knowing each other) clique of humans that knew the right people, especially through their connections with male artists.
As ever with the art world, it’s not what you know it’s who you know. Which artist has the ear of which curator; which artist is “fashionable” at the moment; and which artist is supported by which patron and gallery. It’s all about connections, and these women, whether emerging or established, had those connections. They were part of an educated elite that was at one and the same time, both exclusive and excluding (no Black American or Asian artists here… think of the times!)
And while the relationship between art and bourgeois life central to an earlier ideal of culture (the artist and their patron) has changed since the Second World War and the playing field has become much more egalitarian, my cynicism and socialism still rails at those with power and how they withhold their largesse. You only have to look at the photograph of Peggy Guggenheim in the entrance hall of her eighteenth century Venetian palace or the naming of so many galleries in art museums after wealthy patrons to understand what I mean.
What did it mean for these women artists, at what level was it a recognition of their undoubted skill as artists, when so many largely vanished without trace?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Fundación MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The idea of the artist as central member of a spiritual elite embodying an alternative to Philistine commercialism, or even pointing the way to humankind’s salvation, has powered a variety of movements as different as Aestheticism, Realism, Dada, De Stijl, and Russian Constructivism. This was the conception of culture that crystallized in the notion of the avant-garde, whose “function” – in Clement Greenberg’s classic formulation of 1939 – was “to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence.”[1]
Greenberg’s text touchingly reveals the double sense of the idea of culture, as both redeeming force of the existing system and as a sort of critique by enactment of an alternative set of values. In this conception, the essence of art, incarnated in the avant-garde, is its alienation from the norms of bourgeois society (hence, in the case of modernist abstraction, its abandonment of going systems of representation). On the other hand, Greenberg acknowledged that “No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income” and even that “in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold. The paradox is real.”[2]
This paradox is nothing but the place of culture in capitalist society, in its most concentrated form. Given the distinctive social character of art objects, as handmade luxury goods in a world dominated by mechanized mass production, they offer both their producers and their consumers an experience outside the “everyday life” of the market. Expressive, in its very freedom from monetary considerations, of the power of money and of the access to free time made possible by money, art is a token and a perk of social distinction for those who own and even for those who merely appreciate it. The artist, as producer of this token, shares in the distinction, though (for the most part) not in the wealth that supports the social practice of art as a whole. It was the very separation of the world of cultural production from the norm of capitalist investment and production that made it potentially so valuable. By means of critique, culture cleanses modern society of the sin of commercialism, allowing its dominating classes to see themselves as worthy inheritors of the position of the aristocracy they displaced.
The picture I have sketched here, hardly a novel one, evidently owes a great deal to Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of what he calls “the field of cultural production.” That analysis reveals in particular the close relation between, on the one hand, the social antagonism between the producers of culture and the upper-class consumers from whom they are separated by style of life and self-conception as well as degree of social power, and, on the other, the fact that “the cult of art and the artist… is one of the necessary components of the bourgeois ‘art of living,’ to which it brings a ‘supplément d’âme,’ its spiritualistic point of honor.”[3] This cultural system, evolved during the nineteenth century, survived until well into the twentieth. But the last twenty years have seen the acceleration of a process of change, whose origin is traceable to the end of the Second World War.[4] What changed was not the centrality of the “cult of art” to the bourgeois “art of living” but the felt antipathy between art and bourgeois life central to the earlier ideal of culture.
Paul Mattick. “After the Gold Rush,” on the American Society for Aesthetics website 2010 [Online] Cited 12/12/2024
1/ C. Greenberg, “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” in idem, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 5. 2/ Ibid., p. 8 3/ P. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 44. 4/ For an in-depth discussion, see Katy Siegel, Since ’45: American Art in the Age of Extremes (London: Reaktion, 2016)
Installation view of the exhibition 31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim at Fundación MAPFRE showing at left, Milena Pavlovic-Barilli’s Juno and Vulcan (1936, below); at second left, Leonora Carrington’s The Horses of Lord Candlestick (1938, below); and at right, Buffie Johnson’s The Middle Way / The Great Mother Rules the Sky (Astor Mural) (1949-1959, below)
In 1943, the renowned art collector Peggy Guggenheim organised in her New York gallery ‘Art of This Century’, one of the first exhibitions in the United States to showcase works exclusively by European and American women, titled Exhibition by 31 Women. The show was conceived by Guggenheim in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp, and the artists were selected by a jury whose members included André Breton, Max Ernst and Duchamp himself. Guggenheim, as the sole woman on the jury, was in a privileged position to provide a female perspective in the selection process.
These women, many of whom were associated with Surrealism or abstraction, maintained an ambiguous position within both trends. Often, they employed these styles to reformulate and challenge them, preserving their independence and shedding light on the patriarchal assumptions underlying these artistic movements.
31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim presents a curated selection and reinterpretation of that initiative, including all the artists featured in the original show. With this exhibition, the Foundation aims not only to honor Peggy Guggenheim’s significant role as one of the foremost patrons and collectors of the 20th century, but also shift the narrative away from viewing these women primarily through their connections with male artists. Instead, it highlights the networks of collaboration, solidarity, and friendship they established among themselves.
Short biography: Sonja Sekula (1918-1963). Born in Lucerne from a Hungarian father and a Swiss mother, Sonja Sekula emigrated to New York in 1936, where her father had moved their family business. In 1938 she attempted suicide for the first time and from that point onward began suffering from mental health issues. Through her well-connected family, Sekula was able to meet André Breton and other European Surrealists in the early 1940s. In mid-decade, she travelled to Mexico and came into contact with Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington. Later, she traversed the northeastern United States, discovering the imagery of Native American people. The primitivist symbols in her canvases are interwoven with decorative patterns, intense colours, and a juxtaposition of viewpoints. At the time, Sekula’s work was well received by critics, some suggesting that there was a hidden symbolism related to her homosexuality. Aside from including her painting Composition at Exhibition by 31 Women, Peggy Guggenheim dedicated a solo exhibition to Sekula’s work in 1946. Two years later Sonja Sekula joined the Betty Parsons Gallery, which would host five solo exhibitions between 1948 and 1957. In 1951, a day after the opening of her third exhibition, she suffered a nervous breakdown. The artist spent the following years coming in and out of mental health clinics in the United States and Switzerland. In 1963 she committed suicide in her Zurich studio.
Short biography: Louise Nevelson (1899-1988). Born in Ukraine, Louise Nevelson emigrated to the United States with her family at the age of six. After studying in Germany under Hans Hofmann, she settled in New York, where she met Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Nevelson collaborated on one of Rivera’s murals while receiving lessons from George Grosz and Chaim Gross. Her first terracotta works – painted in black and often subject to the application of a form of engraving – reveal the influence of Central American art that she had come to know through Kahlo and Rivera. Furthermore, Louise Nevelson participated in the association American Abstract Artists (AAA) and was often in the company of Frederick Kiesler and Peggy Guggenheim, who selected her work Column for Exhibition by 31 Women. In the 1950s she began to accumulate a large collection of wooden fragments, which would give rise to her most characteristic working method. First, she painted each piece black, white, or gold. Later, she piled and stored the fragments. Finally, she assembled the pieces in large abstract constructions. In 1956 she began to use milk cartons and wood to produce small embedded reliefs, combining them to create increasingly large ensembles. Her work received much critical acclaim after her participation in the Moon Garden Plus exhibition in New York, in 1958.
Highlight
Fundación MAPFRE presents 31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim, featuring works by thirty-one artists who participated in Exhibition by 31 Women, a show organised in 1943 by Peggy Guggenheim at her Art of This Century gallery in New York. Most of these creators, who came from Europe and the United States, were linked to the Surrealist movement or to abstraction, and included both well-established figures within the artistic landscape as well as emerging talent.
The exhibition highlights Peggy Guggenheim’s important role as a patron, addressing the context in which the artists she became associated with at her New York gallery developed their work, as well as the networks of collaboration that were established between them.
KEYS
Art Also Belongs to Women
In her famous article of 1971, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists”, Linda Nochlin stated: “In the field of art history, the white Western male viewpoint, has been unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian.” This text finally advocated the role played by many women who had been dismissed on the basis of their gender throughout the history of art and have only recently begun to occupy the place they deserve – along with writers, mathematicians, philosophers, etc. The artists featured in 31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim, such as Frida Kahlo, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Valentine Hugo, and Dorothea Taning, could easily figure in Nochlin’s list, which included figures such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffmann, Safo, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Emily Dickinson.
Surrealism
Surrealism, a term coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917, refers to the movement led by André Breton, who defined it as “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought.” Rooted in Dadaism and Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis, Surrealists expressed themselves through writing, photography, performance, painting, collage, and music. Although Surrealism in principle advocated gender equality and supported the work of women artists, in practice women were considered almost as objects, rather than creative subjects.
Peggy Guggenheim
Patron and art lover, Peggy Guggenheim (New York, 1898 – Padova, 1979) was one of the most important collectors and promoters of avant-garde art of the 20th century. The daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman, and niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, founder of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, she decided to move to Europe in 1921. In Paris she established relationships with Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, and Djuna Barnes, among others. Later, she settled in London, where she opened her first gallery in 1938. Under the name Guggenheim Jeune, the gallery featured works by Vasili Kandinsky and Yves Tanguy. Prior to the Nazi occupation of France, Guggenheim returned to Paris and acquired some of the most important works in her collection, which she managed to take with her when she fled to the United States.
In 1942, once she had settled in New York, Guggenheim opened the Art of This Century Gallery on West 57th street. Aside from displaying her own collection, the space became a platform for young artists, among which were the women who took part in Exhibition by 31 Women.
THE EXHIBITION
In 1943 the renowned collector Peggy Guggenheim organised one of the first exhibitions dedicated exclusively to the work of European and North American women artists at her New York gallery Art of This Century. Titled Exhibition by 31 Women, the show was conceived by Guggenheim in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp. The selection of artists was carried out by a jury whose members included André Breton, Max Ernst, and Duchamp himself. As the only woman in the jury, Guggenheim was able to contribute a female perspective to the process. In the press release, the gallerist herself presented the exhibition as a “testimony to the fact that the creative ability of women is by no means restricted to the decorative vein, as could be deduced from the history of art by women throughout the ages.” Her objective was to present the work of these creators as independent artists, distancing them from the traditional roles they had been given as muses or models.
The list of works published for the exhibition did not contain photographs, only titles, which were often quite unspecific, such as “still life” or “composition”. With the exception of a few cases, it is difficult to ascertain which works were on display at 31 Women.
31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim presents a selection and a reinterpretation of The 31 Women Collection repository; a collection created by the North American producer and collector Jenna Segal in 2020, featuring works by the same artists who participated in the historic exhibition of 1943.
Through this exhibition, Fundación MAPFRE aims to disseminate the work and vision conceived by Peggy Guggenheim at her New York Gallery, further breaking with the narrative that has often valued the contributions of women artists in terms of their relationships with male artists, while focusing more specifically on the networks of collaboration, solidarity, and friendship that were established between them. Associated mostly with Surrealism or abstraction, these women used said languages in an effort to reformulate and question them, maintaining their independence and highlighting the patriarchal precepts such movements were based on.
All of the works on display – close to forty – belong to The 31 Women Collection. Likewise, the exhibition also features photographs, publications, and other pieces; contextualising and complementing the show’s approximation to the scene of North American women artists of the time. Along with the exceptional loan from The 31 Women Collection, the exhibition is also supported by the Vitra Design Museum, the Lafuente Archive, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Documentation Center.
The exhibition discourse is articulated in different sections, the first of which introduces the viewer to the work carried out by Peggy Guggenheim at her Art of This Century gallery, and in particular her support of women artists of the time. The following sections pose an approximation to some of the main thematic axes and strategies explored by the creators featured in Exhibition by 31 Women, who sought to assert their independence and avoid clichés associated with the label “female artist” that were commonplace in the world of art at the time.
Art of This Century
In 1942 Peggy Guggenheim opened the Art of This Century gallery on the top floor of a building on West 57th Street in New York. Determined to create a space that would generate expectation, she hired the Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, who designed custom furniture – one piece being featured in this exhibition – and projected a groundbreaking exhibition device to stimulate interactions between viewers and artworks.
The space had a profound impact on the artistic scene through a program of solo exhibitions that Guggenheim dedicated to numerous artists who would later become some of the most renowned creators of their time. The gallery also became an essential meeting point for European and North American avant-gardes. Among the most important initiatives developed by Guggenheim at her gallery were her support and promotion of the work of women artists, not only through group exhibitions, such as Exhibition by 31 Women and later The Women (1945), but also through the solo shows dedicated to some of the participants in said exhibitions, such as Sonja Sekula or Irene Rice Pereira.
The “Self” as Art
The role played by self-representation in the work of these artists was fundamental in their claim for independence and in their efforts to assert their identity versus traditional art historiography, in which women – when mentioned – appeared as secondary figures relegated to the roles of muses, wives, or companions of their male counterparts. Furthermore, in order to construct identities that were different to those assigned to them and escape from the gender roles imposed by the patriarchal society of the time, they adopted a number of languages that included autobiographical components, costumes, performances, and self-portraiture. This can be observed in works such as Woman in Armor I, by Leonor Fini, or Untitled (Self-Portrait), by Dorothea Tanning, for example.
In their quest to escape from social expectations and gender roles, self-representation became one of the creative strategies most widely adopted by women artists in the first half of the 20th century. Through elaborate costumes and extravagant make-up, which they wore in their daily lives or during improvised performances, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Leonor Fini constructed alternate identities that allowed them to elude the rigid female behavioral models determined by bourgeois ideology. Likewise, Hedda Sterne, Dorothea Tanning, and Meret Oppenheim spoke of their interest in blurring the boundaries of conventionally constructed identities through doubling, masquerades, and the confusion of reality against its reflection, which can be observed in their self-portraits. Similarly, Gypsy Rose Lee reinvented the genre of striptease – traditionally linked to popular culture – by challenging the contemporary understanding of the pose and of female nudes.
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Leonora Carrington completed their self-creation work with the writing of their autobiographies, which seamlessly combined reality and invention. Writing novels about themselves allowed these artists to reflect on aspects of their past that might have been considered lurid – for instance, becoming the victim of rape by a group of men in Madrid as Carrington recounted in Down Below – or imagining alternative narratives of their lives. In similar fashion, Leonor Fini frequently took photographs of herself posing in black feather wigs and other props through which she fabricated imaginary personalities. Both Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Gypsy Rose Lee, who had worked as dancers and strippers in burlesque shows and as professional models in art schools, were very aware of the need to take control of their own image, subverting the passive role that muses and female models still played within the avant-garde.
Gypsy Rose Lee (American, 1911-1970) Gypsy Rose Lee images for Tru-Vue stereoscope film: Striptease Stereoview #1306 Burlesque (detail) 1933 Vintage Tru-Vue 16 pictures in film (13 of Gypsy Rose Lee) The 31 Women Collection
Gypsy Rose Lee began performing as a stripper in burlesque shows and went on to appear in Broadway theaters. Her stripteases were greatly successful, allowing her to transform the genre. The fact that she talked while striping was truly groundbreaking and enabled her to draw attention away from the mere act of stripping, while presenting herself as a modern and entertaining woman. Likewise, her enunciation was unlike street slang: she recited with an outlandish high-class accent and incorporated phrases in French.
Short biography: Gypsy Rose Lee (1911-1970). Born under the name Rose Luise Hovick into a working-class family that performed in vaudeville theaters in Seattle, Washington, Gypsy Rose Lee began to work as a stripper in burlesque shows at the age of sixteen and went on to perform at important Broadway theaters. Her acts were enormously popular at the time, granting the genre respect and transforming it into something beyond the act of stripping. She began to collect works of art in the 1940s. Among such purchases were works by Max Ernst. This opened the doors to meetings with Peggy Guggenheim, who at that time was married to the German painter and would host the encounters at her house. In Exhibition by 31 Women, she exhibited a collage titled Self-Portrait. In 1957 Gypsy Rose Lee published her autobiography, culminating the life-long self-promotion and self-invention work that drove her entire career.
In this self-portrait from the early 1940s, Dorothea Tanning experimented with the limits of reality and representation. In a style akin to fashion figurines that often appeared in women’s magazines of the time, the artist portrayed herself in a room full of empty canvases. Her naked legs are reflected onto a framed glass that is pointed at the viewer, creating an impossible interplay of mirrors and altering the relationship between reality and reflection; inside and out.
Short biography: Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012). Born in a small town in Illinois, where she lived a solitary childhood, Dorothea Tanning developed an interest in dreams and fantasy since she was a child. After visiting Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936) at MoMA, she felt attracted to Surrealism and travelled to Paris three years later with the objective of coming into contact with said group. Although she was forced to cut her stay short due to the outbreak of the war, the paintings she created upon her return to New York are proof of her strong Surrealist bias. In 1942, following the advice of gallerist Julien Levy, Max Ernst visited her studio and selected the works Birthday and Children’s Game for Exhibition by 31 Women. The visit also signified the beginning of a relationship between Tanning and Ernst, who separated from Peggy Guggenheim and married the artist in 1946. From the 1930s to the late 90s Tanning developed a prolific career. Her paintings, ballet designs, soft sculptures, and literary works reflect some of her recurring obsessions: the subversion of the bourgeoise domestic space, metamorphosis, the power of imagination, the gothic novel, and non-conventional images of girls and feminine figures.
The autobiographical component of this work has been linked to the closed umbrella, which lies uselessly at the center of the image and represents the loneliness felt by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven at a point when she had been abandoned by those who supported her both emotionally and financially. The treading foot that appears on the left of the composition symbolizes the passing of the years. The title of the work also expands on this notion, which is a direct interpellation to her friend and patron Berenice Abbott. On the other hand, the silhouette of the urinal alludes to the famous readymade by Marcel Duchamp, a work that a number of recent studies have attributed to Freytag-Loringhoven.
Short biography: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927). Born in Germany under the name Else Plötz, she became known as Else Endell, Else Greve, and finally Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven through her numerous marriages over the course of several decades; evidence of her early interest in constructing herself as a character. At the age of eighteen she settled in Berlin, where she began to study art and worked as a variety artist and model. In 1913 she emigrated to New York and joined the Dadaist circle that gathered around the collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg. Elsa von Freytag’s work spanned several genres: poetry, autobiography, art, and artistic self-representation. Aside from producing sculptures with found elements, she used materials rescued from the streets and objects stolen from department stores to create costumes that she wore at Greenwich Village balls and during her walks through New York, combining them with striking make-up, extravagant hairdos, and other decorations. One of the objects she created with fragments from plumbing materials was on display at Exhibition by 31 Women. In 1923 she returned to Berlin and shortly after settled in Paris, where she scraped a living with the help of friends like Berenice Abbott and Djuna Barnes. She died under uncertain circumstances in 1927. Very few of her performances where documented and her work remained invisible to a great extent until the early 21st century. Some research suggests that she was the author of the famous readymade Fountain, considered one of Marcel Duchamp’s key works.
Strangely Familiar
In 1919 Freud coined the term unheimlich – which roughly translates into English as “ominous” or “uncanny”, and into French as “unsettling strangeness”. This aesthetic category, which is verging on beautiful, was adopted by the Surrealist movement and generally alludes to things that are familiar and attractive, but simultaneously produce a sense of unease and rejection. This is the underlying feeling in Gray Day (Sand Dunes), by Aline Meyer Liebman, or in the still lives by Meraud Guinness Guevara and Meret Oppenheim, which portray decontextualised familiar objects, provoking a sense of unease that is hard to explain. This sensation is accentuated in Spanish Customs by Dorothea Tanning and in Kay Sage’s The Fourteen Daggers, in which two mysterious figures covered in fabric seem to ascend a staircase to the sky.
Hence, Aline Meyer Liebman’s yellowish dunes are striking for their anthropomorphic forms, the Connecticut night sky appears as a fantastic explosion of flowers and stars in Jacqueline Lamba’s painting, and the viewer is unsettled by the incongruent characters and scenes that disrupt the peacefulness in Hazel McKinley and Pegeen Vail’s colourful landscapes. Furthermore, familiar objects seem to have lost their usual meaning in the puzzling dreamlike still lives by Meraud Guinness Guevara, Anne Harvey, Meret Oppenheim, and Gypsy Rose Lee, while Eyre de Lanux and Evelyn Wild’s rug designs combine primitivist and avant-garde elements that question the ideals of purity associated with modern domestic interiors. Kay Sage and Dorothea Tanning’s paintings are particularly unnerving as they transform the bourgeois house into a strange territory inhabited by ghostly figures and elongated shadows.
Produced in 1972, this piece is a reinterpretation of one of Meret Oppenheim’s most renowned works, Déjeuner en Fourrure, which was on display for the first time in 1936 – the year it was produced – at an exhibition dedicated to Surrealist objects. The work garnered much recognition and was selected by Peggy Guggenheim for Exhibition by 31 Women. Dipleased by always seeing her name associated with this work, the artist wanted to make an ironic version of her infamous mug, recreating it with cheap materials: a perfect kitsch souvenir of the iconic work.
Short biography: Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985). Born in Berlin into a family of the liberal bourgeoisie, Meret Oppenheim studied at Rudolf Steiner’s school in Basel. Between 1932 and 1937 she spent much of her time in Paris, where she became close to the Surrealist movement. The photographs in which she posed for Man Ray and the enormous success of her objects – in particular Déjeuner en Fourrure [Breakfast with Furs] from 1936, acquired by MoMA and also on display at Exhibition by 31 Women – make her a Surrealist muse of sorts. Later, she expressed her irritation at seeing her name associated solely to that work and to Surrealism. In 1937 Oppenheim returned to Basel, where she battled depression and produced very little until 1954, when she resumed her artistic work with great impetus. Myths, dreams, literary sources, Jung’s psychoanalysis, gender roles, and social stereotyping were interwoven within her work, which also incorporated magical objects, poems, photographs, theatre costumes, and textile designs.
In the mid-1940s, Jacqueline Lamba and the North American Surrealist artist David Hare took a trip together through the western United States, where they came into contact with the cosmology and art of the indigenous peoples of North America. The typical brown colours of Amerindian fabrics dominate the palette of this canvas, in which Lamba portrayed the surroundings of her house in Roxbury and captured the unexpected reality that lies hidden behind a seemingly mundane landscape.
Short biography: Jacqueline Lamba (1910-1993). Born in France, Jacqueline Lamba spent her early years in Egypt, where her father – an engineer – passed away in a car accident in 1914. She returned to Paris with her mother and attended the École de l’Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs. After the passing of her mother in 1927 Lamba survived with the meager wages she earned from her design work. Fascinated by André Breton’s Communicating Vessels, she began an intense and difficult romantic relationship with him. The couple married shortly after and had a daughter named Aube. Jacqueline Lamba always lamented being more recognised as Breton’s muse than for her collages, cadavre exquis, objects, and paintings, which would soon be on display at Surrealist exhibitions. In 1938 she travelled to Mexico with her husband. The couple was hosted by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, whom she established a profound relationship with. Thanks to the patronage of Peggy Guggenheim, Lamba and Breton settled in New York in 1941 as they fled from the Nazis. Lamba exhibited her work at the inaugural show of the Art of This Century Gallery and participated in Exhibition by 31 Women. In 1944 she divorced Breton and began a relationship with David Hare. They settled in Connecticut in 1948 and had a son. Lamba lost interest in Surrealism and veered toward abstraction, focusing on the mythologies of indigenous populations from Mexico and the United Sates. In 1954, after separating from Hare, she returned to Paris and destroyed much of her prior work. She later confessed that she had first tried to please Breton and then Hare with her paintings, ensuring that she would only paint to please herself from that point onward. In 1967 the most comprehensive exhibition dedicated to her work in her lifetime was hosted at the Musée Picasso in Antibes.
The conversion of domestic space into unusual territory reached its pinnacle in works such as this one. Sage imagined a bizarre interior space that opens up to a door behind which lies a staircase leading to the sky. The scene is inhabited by two ghostly figures covered in fabric that cast elongated shadows on the ground and accentuate the air of mystery. The motif of the open door reappears in Dorothea Tanning’s oil painting Spanish Customs, also on display in this room.
Short biography: Kay Sage (1898-1963). Born under the name Katherine Linn Sage into a wealth family from Albany, Kay Sage spent most of her childhood travelling through Europe with her mother, who had divorced her father in 1908. Although she never received a formal education, she went on to study at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D. C. and at the British Academy in Rome, where she settled in 1920. Aside from coming into contact with the local artistic scene, Sage met Prince Ranieri di San Faustino, whom she married in 1925. During their ten years as a married couple, Sage dedicated little time to art. In 1937 she moved to Paris, where she came into contact with the members of the Surrealist group and began a romantic relationship with the painter Yves Tanguy, whom she married in 1941. With the outbreak of World War II, the couple migrated to Connecticut, where they would reside for the following years. During that period Sage developed her own style: uninhabited landscapes intersected by austere architectural forms, shadows, and floating fabrics that are simultaneously recognisable and enigmatic. Peggy Guggenheim selected her painting from 1942 At the Appointed Time – today preserved at the Newark Museum of Art – for Exhibition by 31 Women. In 1955 Tanguy died suddenly. This event led Sage into depression. Coupled with eyesight problems, she drifted away from painting. In the late 1950s she began to produce collages and write poetry. However, in January of 1963 Sage took her own life.
Bestiaries
Many of the artists featured in this exhibition – particularly those whose works are more closely linked with Surrealism – experimented with multiple personalities, which led them to identify themselves with animals that became their alter egos. As noted by Patricia Mayayo, curator of the show, “the animals embodied the search for other mythical or imaginary worlds where they could finally be free”. Hence, the female body is transformed into an eagle, a crow, or a deer in the works of Barbara Poe-Levee Reis, Milena Pavlovic-Barilli, Julia Thecla, and Frida Kahlo, while in Leonora Carrington’s The Horses of Lord Candlestick, the horse simultaneously embodies the dreaded paternal figure and the artist herself.
Women artists close to Surrealism granted particular importance to the representation of animals. Such is the case with works by Barbara Poe-Levee Reis and Milena Pavlovic-Barilli, in which animals often inhabited fictional landscapes or mythical worlds where women could imagine themselves freed from patriarchal norms. Likewise, in works by Julia Thecla, Frida Kahlo, and Leonor Fini, the depiction of women’s bodies being transformed into crows, deer, and cats refers to an alternate reality in which humans and animals are hybridized. Djuna Barnes imagined a collection of grotesque women with animal-like traits that challenged normative understandings of the feminine in an illustrated book of poems published in 1915. Valentine Hugo was inspired by the animals of the zodiac when designing costumes for a theatrical performance that took place at the Théâtre Champs-Elysées in Paris. Lastly, in Leonora Carrington’s painting, the horse appears as a more ambivalent figure that simultaneously embodies patriarchal authority and the liberation of women.
Since the 1930s, women had a growing presence in Surrealist initiatives. For example, in 1936 Leonor Fini, Valentine Hugo, Meret Oppenheim, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp participated in the exhibition Art, Dada, Surrealism hosted at MoMA. Six years later, Leonora Carrington and Kay Sage exhibited their work at First Papers of Surrealism, organised by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp in New York . Women also collaborated on the movement’s publications, either as authors or as illustrators; an example of which includes the series of eighteen drawings that Hugo produced in 1951 for Paul Éluard’s book of poems Le Phénix. Peggy Guggenheim’s work as a patron undoubtedly helped to reinforce female participation. Many of the artists included in the exhibition of 1943 had attended the meetings between North Americans and exiled Europeans organised by the collector at her house in New York. Some of the works on display at 31 Women were reproduced in the double issue of the Surrealist magazine VVV in 1943; an acknowledgement that most likely contributed to the show’s repercussion.
Short biography: Valentine Hugo (1887-1968). Born in Boulogne-sur-Mer under the name Valentine Gross, Valentine Hugo possessed a natural talent for drawing since her childhood. She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, produced illustrations for fashion magazines, and frequently attended Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Inspired by the subject of dance, her drawings and paintings were on display at the Thèatre des Champs-Elysées in 1913. A friend of Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau, she also collaborated she also collaborated on thaeatrical sets and designs with Jean Hugo, her husband at the time. In 1926 she met André Breton – whom she would establish a short-lived romantic relationship with – and joined the circle of Surrealists. She participated in the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (MoMA, 1936), in the development of numerous cadavre exquis, and the illustration of Surrealist books. The influence of Surrealism can be perceived in her constructions, which are based on the unexpected encounter with objects and materials, as well as in the importance she grants to motifs such as dreams, night-time atmospheres, the marvelous, and ghostly apparitions. The drawing that was featured at Exhibition by 31 Women – which has since been lost – was poignantly titled Dream of 17/1/34. Hugo remained in France during the war, after which she focused on illustration, writing books of poems, and the production of theater costumes and sets.
Short biography: Leonor Fini (1907-1996). Born in Argentina into a family marked by a dominant father, Leonor Fini fled with her mother to Trieste, Italy, when she was still a young girl. Fini taught herself art. At the age of seventeen she left the family home and moved to Milan and later to Paris, where her interest in the world of dreams and the unconscious led her to come into contact with the Surrealists. Although she was not officially part of the group, she participated in important Surrealist exhibitions such as Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at MoMA in 1936. Hybrid figures such as the sphynx dominate her paintings, a motif she also explored through costumes and self-representation. The painting that was on display at Exhibition by 31 Women was in fact titled The Shepherdess of the Sphinxes. During the war she remained in Europe. Between 1944 and 1972, aside from continuing to paint, she focused intensely on the design of theatrical costumes and sets.
The painting by Pavlovic draws from various sources: Mannerist art from the 16th century, Magical Realism, and Surrealism. It also incorporates motifs and mythical figures from classical antiquity, such as the Roman goddess Juno and her son Vulcan, protagonists of this canvas. The use of diluted colours, the impression that the characters are floating in space, and the apparently incongruent combination of a wide range of elements (the eagle, the piano, the wheel, the drapery, the bouquet of flowers, and the mirror) grant this painting a dreamlike and mysterious atmosphere.
Short biography: Milena Pavlovic-Barilli (1909-1945). Born in Serbia into a family with artistic inclinations, Milena Pavlovic-Barilli studied art in Munich between 1926 and 1928. There she was introduced to painting, fashion illustration, and drawing, creating an iconography based on stylised figures and wavy lines in which the influence of Art Nouveau is combined with echoes of orient. In 1931 she settled in Paris, where she came into contact with figures of Surrealism, such as André Breton, Jean Cocteau, and Paul Valéry. Regardless, her work drifted into a style that critics considered closer to Magical Realism. Everyday life was fused with fantasy in her paintings, while space was filled with enigmatic symbols: ancient columns that levitate, veiled faces of women, winged youths painted in pale hues, all of which grants her work a supernatural feel. She lived in New York between 1939 and 1945, where she focused on fashion illustration and costume and set designs for the theater. Her paintings, populated with elongated figures in architectural environments that seem rooted in the Renaissance, reflect her admiration for Mannerism. In 1940 she exhibited her work at the Julien Levy Gallery and established ties with the group of Surrealist immigrants. Her work Insomnia (1942) – which has since been lost – was on display at Exhibition by 31 Women. Her premature death in an accident in 1945 cut her career shot. In 1962 the Milena Pavlovic-Barilli Museum opened its doors at the house where she was born. The museum includes a broad selection of her paintings, drawings, letters, and personal objects.
Short biography: Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Born into a wealthy English family, Leonora Carrington was fascinated by fairy tales and fantasy literature since she was a young girl. She studied art in Florence, Paris, and London under the guidance of Amédée Ozenfant. Her first works recreate legendary worlds populated by hybrid animal species and powerful female figures. In 1936 she discovered Surrealism during a visit to the International Surrealist Exhibition. Two years later she settled in the south of France with Max Ernst – whom she had established a relationship with – in an old house that the couple transformed into a work of total art. Carrington began to publish her first books containing short stories. In 1940, after the outbreak of the war and the arrest of Max Ernst, she fled to Madrid, where she became the victim of rape and was subsequently admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Santander; she would recount this experience in her book Down Below. After managing to migrate to New York in 1941 she participated in a number of initiatives promoted by exiled Surrealists, such as the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism and the magazine VVV. Peggy Guggenheim included two of her works The Horses of Lord Candlestick (1938, above) and the Joy of Skating (1941, below) in Exhibition by 31 Women. In 1943 Carrington settled in Mexico, where she would live until her death. She integrated into the community of exiled artists along with Kati Horna, Remedios Varo, and Benjamin Péret. Her paintings re-elaborated old themes and she delved into new ones: fantasy literature, female divinities, alchemy, magic, and Mexican mythologies.
Djuna Barnes (American, 1892-1982) The Book of Repulsive Women, 4th image in the 1st edition 1915 The 31 Women Collection
In the modern age of Taylorism and Fordism, women played a vital role in the functioning of the American system by efficiently arranging domestic life with a precision similar to that of the nation’s industry. In contrast with this mechanical monotony, Barnes imagined the “repulsive women” that appear in her poems and drawings as the antithesis of the model housewife. Some of these figures, such as the woman with donkey ears and animal-like features that can be observed in one of her illustrations, manage to question the very the boundaries of humanity.
Short biography: Djuna Barnes (1892-1982). Born in a colony of artists north of New York, Djuna Barnes studied art at the Pratt Institute and at the Art Students League. In 1915 she settled in the bohemian neighborhood of Greenwich Village, where she began her career as an artist and a writer. That same year she published The Book of Repulsive Women, a collection of poems that included her own illustrations, and began to work as a journalist. Best known for her experimental novel from 1936, Nightwood, Barnes cultivated all genres: narrative, poetry, theater, and journalism. In 1921 she moved to Paris, where she began a romantic relationship with the sculptor Thelma Wood and began to frequent the avant-garde circles of the Rive Gauche, establishing friendships with Gertrude Stein, Berenice Abbott, Natalie Clifford Barney, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Peggy Guggenheim herself. With the outbreak of World War II, she moved back to New York, where her work Portrait of Alice was put on display at Exhibition by 31 Women.
The Middle Way: Languages of Abstraction
Although many of the artists who participated in 31 Women fell within the sphere of influence of Surrealism, some of them were more inclined toward abstract languages. In the 1930s the North American art scene was dominated by social realism and regionalism. In an effort to promote abstraction, the association American Abstract Artists (AAA) was founded, an association which included members such as Suzy Frelinghuysen, Louise Nevelson, Irene Rice Pereira, and Esphyr Slobodkina. Abstraction began to progressively dominate the artistic landscape of North America and was configured in a way that highlighted the ideal of masculinity, whose epitome was Jackson Pollock. In the face of a discourse that hailed the language of expressionism as a reflection of the North American male, many of these artists opted to explore a “middle way” that could account for all of the possibilities afforded by abstraction. A great example of this can be found in The Middle Way / The Great Mother Rules the Sky (Astor Mural) by Buffie Johnson.
The association American Abstract Artists (AAA) was founded in 1936 with the objective of fostering the development of abstraction in the United States. It included members such as Suzy Frelinghuysen, Louise Nevelson, Irene Rice Pereira, and Esphyr Slobodkina. It is no coincidence that Slobodkina was one of the artists included by Ad Reinhardt in his vignette “How to Look at Modern Art in America” (1946), in which he traced the family tree of North American modern art. Other creators participated in key initiatives for the renovation of abstract practice in the United States, such as Gretchen Schoeninger, who attended the experimental art school New Bauhaus, founded by László Moholy-Nagy – a former professor at the historic German Bauhaus – in Chicago in 1947. Regardless, few artists who took part in 31 Women occupy an important place in the dominant narratives of North American abstract art. As Xenia Cage jokingly suggested in a collage produced from one of Jackson Pollock’s action paintings, perhaps the value of these artist’s works is compromised by the strong exaltation of masculinity, which at the time was characteristic of discourse. Buffie Johnson became aware of the marginalisation suffered by women in Abstract Expressionist circles early on. In the 1940s, determined to give value to female legacies, she undertook a research project on the imagery of the goddess mothers of antiquity, culminating in a book published in 1988.
The exhibition concludes with a relationship map detailing the connections established between the thirty-one artists who participated in the exhibition and Peggy Guggenheim. By highlighting the network of professional and personal links they constructed, the chart depicts the important role these artists played as agents in the art scene of the time beyond traditional conceptions of women artists as supporting characters.
Suzy Frelinghuysen (American, 1911-1988) Untitled (Brahms Abstract) 1945 Oil and collage on Masonite
Suzy Frelinghuysen was part of the group of artists known as The Park Avenue Cubists, who proposed a reinterpretation of European Cubist heritage from a North American perspective. In her works, Frelinghuysen combined the influence of Synthetic Cubism, which she expanded on through the use of blue, lavender, and rusty hues, with constant references to the world of music; a field in which the artist also excelled as an opera singer.
Short biography: Suzy Frelinghuysen (1911-1988). Born into a wealthy family from Newark, New Jersey, Suzy Frelinghuysen was part of the group of artists knowns as The Park Avenue Cubists, along with Albert Eugene Gallatin, Charles G. Shaw, and George L. K. Morris – whom she married in 1935 – who advocated for a reinterpretation of European Cubist heritage from a North American perspective. In 1937 Frelinghuysen joined the association American Abstract Artists (AAA), founded in an effort to promote the development of abstract art in the United States, whose members included Louise Nevelson, Irene Rice Pereira, and Esphyr Slobodkina. After the war she temporarily quit art to focus on music, becoming a renowned opera singer. In her work, which was included in important group shows such as Exhibition by 31 Women, the influence of Synthetic Cubism was combined with constant references to the world of music.
Esphyr Slobodkina (American born Russia, 1908-2002) Peacock Garden 1938 Oil on board
From the late 1930s, Slobodkina developed a style of her own based on the poetic combination of curved forms painted in lyrical hues. Along with the influence of Cubism and the technique of collage, the artist also demonstrated her interest in sewing and working with scraps, which she learned from her mother, a professional seamstress. One of the defining traits of her work was its interdisciplinary nature: aside from painting, Slobodkina created assemblages, produced murals, illustrated children’s books, and designed costumes and jewellery.
Short biography: Esphyr Slobodkina (1908-2002). Originally from Siberia, Esphyr Slobodkina moved to Manchuria with her family in order to escape from the Soviet Revolution. Since she was a child, she studied in the fields of art and music. In 1928 she moved to New York on her own, where she continued her studies at the National Academy of Design. From the late 1930s she developed her own style based on a combination of wavy forms in lyrical tones that, along with the influence of Cubism and collage, reflect her interest in the tradition of decorative arts from her native country. Her work stands out for its interdisciplinary nature: aside from painting, Slobodkina focused on assemblage, murals, the illustration of children’s books, and on jewelry and costume design. As one of the founders of the association American Abstract Artists (AAA), which she presided – also acting as treasurer and secretary – Slobodkina played an important role in the promotion of abstraction in the United States. Alfred H. Barr, director of MoMA, recommended her work to Peggy Guggenheim, who decided to include Memories (1942) – which has since been lost – in Exhibition by 31 Women.
Between 1949 and 1959, Buffie Johnson produced what is considered one of her most important works: a great mural intended to decorate the Astor Theater in New York. This project was a true challenge for all those who negated women’s ability to create large format paintings. Thanks to the recovery of the mural by part of the Women’s Caucus prior to the theater’s demolition in 1982, some fragments, such as the one on display in this exhibition, are today part of public and private collections.
Short biography: Buffie Johnson (1912-2006). Born in New York, Buffie Johnson studied art at the University of Los Angeles. She later spent two years in Paris, where she established a friendship with Sonia Delaunay and other painters of the Parisian avant-garde. After completing her studies at the Académie Julian, she settled in New York in 1939. Johnson began to frequent several artistic circles, such as Peggy Guggenheim’s, who invited her to participate in Exhibition by 31 Women with the painting Déjeuner sur mer (1942). Outraged by the response of a Time Magazine critic who refused to review the exhibition arguing that he had never heard of outstanding women creators, Johnson attempted to publish an article on women artists that was rejected by several art magazines. This experience entailed the first awakening of her feminist consciousness. During the 1950s her work pivoted toward Abstract Expressionism. In parallel to her artistic career, she received a grant to study the imagery of the goddess mothers of antiquity, a work she would publish in 1988. Johnson’s early interest in the matriarchal tradition, which would also be reflected in many of her paintings, was embraced by second wave feminism in the late 1960s; a movement the artist would be actively involved in.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp produced works that were marked by the dissolution of artistic hierarchies and were very much her own. She experimented with painting, dance, sculpture, tapestry design, and puppet making. Vertical-Horizontal Composition might be related to the designs that the artist produced for the Café Aubette in Strasbourg. Taeuber-Arp’s protagonism in this work of total art, conceived on the basis of a dialogue between different artistic disciplines, has nevertheless been overshadowed by Jean Arp and Theo Van Doesburg’s participation in the project.
Short biography: Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943). Born in the Alpine city of Davos, Sophie Taeuber-Arp studied in Munich and Hamburg, where she absorbed the ideals of artistic fusion from the Arts and Crafts movement. She moved to Zurich during the outbreak of World War I and became involved in the Dada movement along with her future husband Hans Arp. She taught arts and crafts at the Zurich School of Commerce – a job that would support the couple for the following years – while attending expressive dance classes under Rudolf von Laban. She developed a style of work very much of her own, marked by the dissolution of artistic hierarchies. Taeuber-Arp experimented with painting, dance, furniture design, tapestries, interior design, and the construction of puppets and assemblages. In 1929 she quit teaching and moved to a house on the outskirts of Paris with her husband. Like other creators linked to non-objective art, she reacted to the push of Surrealism by becoming involved in associations such as Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création. In 1941 the couple left Paris fleeing from the arrival of the Nazis. They stayed at Peggy Guggenheim’s house in Veyrier for a few days before heading to the south of France. They decided not to leave Europe and sought refuge in Zurich. In 1943 Taeuber-Arp died in Zurich due to accidental poisoning from a heater.
Catalogue
Along with the reproduction of works on display and other materials within the exhibition, the catalogue includes an essay by Patricia Mayayo, curator of the show and professor of Art History at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid, and a text by Lekha Hileman Waitoller, curator at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The publication also includes a succinct biography of each artist and a relationship map depicting the connections between Peggy Guggenheim and the artists featured in Exhibition by 31 Women.
Meret Oppenheim (Swiss born Germany, 1913-1985) Untitled (Helene Mayer) 1936 The 31 Women Collection
Helene Julie Mayer (1910-1953) was a German-born fencer who won the gold medal at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, and the silver medal at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. She competed for Nazi Germany in Berlin, despite having been forced to leave Germany in 1935 and resettle in the United States because she was of Jewish descent.
Hedda Sterne (American born Romania, 1910-2011) Self Portrait 1936-1939 The 31 Women Collection
Short biography: Hedda Sterne (1910-2011). Born in Bucharest, Romania, under the name Hedwig Lindenberg, Hedda Sterne came into contact with her city’s Dada and Constructivist scenes from a young age. In 1928 she moved to Vienna and later to Paris, where she continued her studies attending the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the studios of Fernand Léger and André Lhote. The following year she began to study philosophy and art history at the University of Bucharest. In 1932 she married her classmate Frederick Stern, whom she separated from a few years later. She came into contact with Parisian Surrealism through Romanian Surrealist Victor Brauner, which would greatly influence her early work. Thanks to recommendations by Brauner and Jean Arp, Peggy Guggenheim included several of Sterne’s collages in a group exhibition at her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London. In 1941 she settled in New York, in an apartment close to Guggenheim’s mansion, who invited her to participate in her meetings of “exiled Surrealists” and included her work in Exhibition by 31 Women and The Women. Sterne also participated in important Surrealist exhibitions such as First Papers of Surrealism (1942). After the war she joined the Betty Parsons gallery, taking part in the circles of Abstract Expressionism. She was the only woman present in the famous image of the North American abstraction group “The Irascibles”, published in Life Magazine in 1951. Sterne would later express her discomfort in being more famous for her presence in said photograph than for her extensive career.
Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) in the entrance hall of her eighteenth century Venetian palace. Hanging from the ceiling is a 1941 Alexander Calder mobile and behind her is a 1937 painting by Picasso titled On The Beach. The 31 Women Collection Photo: Keystone Features/Getty Images
I’ve posted on this exhibition once before when it was shown at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. While there some photographs that are the same in both postings there are new photographs to admire here. So, let’s have some fun with the text!
I started playing around with ideas in my head… and instead of the “autopsy of the spectacle” – an examination to discover the cause of the spectacle – I inverted that statement to make it the “spectacle of the autopsy”.
What immediately came to mind when I did this was the spectacle, the spectacular, painting that is Rembrandt’s early masterpiece The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632, below), that tableau – French, late 17th century (in the sense ‘picture’, figuratively ‘picturesque description’) – of figures, spectators, gathered around the corpse of the “criminal Aris Kindt (alias of Adriaan Adriaanszoon), who was convicted for armed robbery and sentenced to death by hanging.”1
Fast forward a few centuries to the “Murder is my business” photographs of Arthur Fellig (alias Weegee) and I again observe spectators gathered around the body of a corpse, either physically examining it or wilfully ignoring it (Drowning victim, Coney Island c. 1940, below), where the men “examine” the drowning victim surrounded by men that stare and the women who smiles for the camera. With the crowd behind, all are physically and metaphorically drawn in to the spectacle of the autopsy and the presence of the camera. “”Spectacle is Capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image,” explained Guy Debord in 1967. Weegee understood this well.”
In other photographs such as Body of Andrew Izzo, killed by off-duty policeman Elegio Sarro (1942, below) and Body of Dominic Didato (1936, below) Weegee’s camera becomes the spectator, standing in for us as we crane our necks to get a better view of the action. Together, the camera and the viewer, perform what could be seen as a form of “necropsy” – from the Greek words nekros (meaning “corpse”) and opsis (meaning “to view”), and together they mean “to look at the dead body with naked eyes” – that is, a macroscopic examination of a dead body.
Witness, and we do stand witness in Weegee’s photographs looking at dead bodies with naked eyes, the perspectival viewpoint of the bodies of both Andrew Izzo and Dominic Didato similar to the elongated perspective in the painting by Rembrandt, the shading of the face in that painting – the umbra mortis (shadow of death) – now supplanted by the reversed body, head shaded / covered in blood, surmounted with out flung gun and boater.
While these photographs fail “to give shape to feelings of compassion, grief, horror (as if the pictorial repetition of events were a way of understanding these events, being able to live with them)”2 finally, in the derivation of the word “autopsy” – and in the spectacular images of Weegee – we may begin to understand that these photographs are as much about us, the spectator and viewer, and our discontinuous nature (we die) as they are about the pictured bodies. For the meaning of the word autopsy – early 17th century (in the sense ‘personal observation’): from modern Latin autopsia, from Greek, from autoptos ‘self-revealed’, from autos ‘self’ + optos ‘seen’ – reveals as much about ourselves as it does the object of our attention.
Looking at mortality with naked eyes, our self-revealed, our self seen, reflected back to us in the photographs of Weegee.
Many thankx to Fundación MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Weegee knew the power of imagery to speak to larger truths about human nature and society. He captured New York as it truly was: gritty, raw, and filled with contrasts. His work turned the everyday violence and chaos of the city into art, making the mundane extraordinary. In Weegee’s own words, “I picked a story that meant something.” He had an instinct for identifying moments that held deeper significance, even if they were just snapshots of daily life in a chaotic metropolis.”
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669) The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp 1632 Oil on canvas 216.5cm × 169.5cm (85.2 in × 66.7 in) Mauritshuis, The Hague
Installation view of the exhibition Weegee. Autopsy of the Spectacle at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid showing at right Weegee’s Self-portrait, Distortion (1955, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Weegee. Autopsy of the Spectacle at Fundacion Mapfre, Madrid showing at left Weegee’s Body of Andrew Izzo, killed by off-duty policeman Elegio Sarro (1942, below); at second left, [Outline of a Murder Victim] (1942); and at right, Body of Dominic Didato, (1936, below)
Dominick Didato, aka Terry Burns, who you see above in a photo made by Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee, lies dead on a New York City street where he was gunned down today in 1936. He was killed for interfering with rackets run by Lucky Luciano. It was a low percentage play. Luciano was literally the most powerful mobster in the U.S. at the time, and as the saying goes, you come at the king, you best not miss.
Anonymous. “Urban Decay,” on the Pulp International website August 22, 2024 [Online] Cited 11/11/2024
The work of Arthur H. Fellig, known as Weegee (Zolochiv, Ukraine, 1899 – New York, 1968), is, in a sense, an enigma that this exhibition seeks to unravel. His photographs of the underworld and the fringe circles of New York nightlife in the 1930s and 1940s quickly gained wide international recognition. However, the same cannot be said for the photographs he took after settling in Hollywood in 1948: images of Californian high society and the social life of major film celebrities, whom he often portrayed in a markedly ironic or satirical manner, sometimes (as in the case of the “photocaricatures”) as a result of his later work in the laboratory. At the time, critics emphasised the radical opposition between the two periods, openly praising the former and dismissing the latter. In these photographs of his Californian experience (1948-1951), Weegee expressed his critical vision of society and culture from a perspective that anticipated the well-known cultural and social analyses of ‘the society of the spectacle’ (Guy Debord).
Weegee. Autopsy of the Spectacle aims to show the profound coherence that, beyond their stylistic and thematic differences, links these two stages, as well as to highlight the relevance of the critical perspective from which Weegee’s images expose the features and mechanisms of our time as a ‘society of the spectacle’.
Exhibition organised by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE.
The above photo shows the murder scene of a mid-level gangster named Joseph “Little Joe” La Cava, and occurred in New York City on Mulberry Street at the Feast of San Gennaro today in 1939. We’ll go out on a limb and say the festive atmosphere took a fatal hit too. Luckily, the celebration usually went for a week, so we suppose it was salvaged. La Cava was gunned down along with Rocco “Chickee” Fagio… Also interesting, cops being cops, the flatfoot closest to La Cava looks incongruously jocular as he chats with a higher-up. If this wasn’t the most unforgettable Feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy’s history it had to be close.
Anonymous. “Urban Decay,” on the Pulp International website August 22, 2024 [Online] Cited 11/11/2024
“Distraught and pale with grief, Irma Twiss Epstein, 32-year-old nurse, whose own baby died 18 months ago, is booked on a homicide charge in the death of a baby whose crying, she said, ‘drove me crazy.’ Miss Epstein, Bronx Maternity Hospital nurse, is accused of giving a powerful drug to the 20 hour-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Castro Vallee, whose only other child died after birth 11 years ago. Another infant, 4 days old, was revived by nurses and doctors after Miss Epstein was found in a hallway hysterically sobbing: ‘eyedropper, baby.’ Hospital records showed she entered service there in 1940 and after nine months took a leave of absence to have a baby. Police said she had been in Bellevue’s psychopathic ward two years ago for observation after tasking an overdose of sleeping tablets. She told police at Morrisania Station she expected to be married soon.”
PM Daily, December 23, 1940 quoted on the International Center of Photography website
A pivotal figure of American photography in the first half of the twentieth century, Arthur H. Fellig, known by his pseudonym Weegee (Zolochiv, 1899 – New York, 1968) was an immensely popular artist thanks to the news photographs he took in New York in the 1930s and 1940s. This new exhibition aims to reveal a lesser-known facet of his career: the work he did between 1948 and 1951 in Hollywood, where he focused on the “society of the spectacle”.
Key themes
High-impact photographs
Some of Weegee’s photographs were veritable “visual punches”. This is true of the pictures he took of murders, corpses, fires and prisoners during the years spent covering crimes and accidents in New York, as well as of his later work, like the series showing circus artist Egle Zacchini being fired from a cannon at a speed of 100 metres per second, or his photo-caricatures of Marilyn Monroe, President Kennedy and other prominent personalities. His images almost always had a powerful impact on viewers, making them think not only about the scene they were contemplating but also about how they were looking at it.
The society of the spectacle
First published in 1967, Society of the Spectacle is one of the most important books by the philosopher Guy Debord, founding member of the Situationist International. It paints an incisive portrait of contemporary society, presumably replaced by its represented image. Throughout the work, Debord critically exposes the theory and practice of the spectacle, explaining how it governs our experience of time, history, goods, territory and happiness. In the twenty-first century, when immediacy reigns supreme, Debord’s ideas resound as the severest, most lucid assessment of the meanness and bondage of a society – the society of the spectacle – in which we all live.
Critique of the society of the spectacle
Class consciousness and empathy for the disadvantaged permeate Weegee’s work, as he never forgot his humble beginnings. Yet his most famous images are snapshots of accidents, fires and murders, in which he underscores the idea that bystanders are also spectators of the tragedies they contemplate, watching a scene in much the same way as cinema-goers watch Hollywood films (which are not all that different to the events captured by Weegee’s camera). He also used trick photography to critique the image of actors, singers, broadcasters, politicians and other public figures.
Weegee’s “satires”, as he called them, were visionary, appearing several years before the Situationist International first posited its theories. As Clement Che roux, curator of the exhibition, has pointed out, during his first period in New York, Weegee proved that the tabloids were selling news as a spectacle, and after 1945 he exposed how the media system radically spectacularised celebrities.
Biography
Weegee was born Usher Felig on 12 June 1899 to a Jewish family in Zolochiv, now in western Ukraine. At the age of ten he travelled to the United States to be reunited with his father, and immigration officers on Ellis Island registered him as Arthur Fellig. At 14, having settled into New York’s Lower East Side, a poor neighbourhood at the time, he left school and started working to help support his family. After trying several jobs, he became an itinerant photographer. He subsequently worked for the photographers Duckett & Adler and later in the ACME Newspictures agency laboratories. In 1935, he went into business for himself as a freelance photojournalist. He began using the pseudonym Weegee around 1937, and in 1941, the year he joined the Photo League (a group of freelance photographers who firmly believed in the emancipating power of images and fought for social justice), he started signing his prints as “Weegee the Famous”. In 1943, his work was included in a group exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
In 1945 he compiled his best photos in a book titled Naked City, which was a huge critical and commercial success. In the spring of 1948 Weegee moved to Hollywood, where he worked in cinema as a technical consultant and occasionally as an actor. In addition to photographing parties, he devised several trick photography techniques and used them to caricature celebrities. After four years on the West Coast, in December 1951 he returned to New York, although he did not resume his former practice. From that moment until his death on 26 December 1968, Weegee mainly capitalised on his fame to publish more books, do lecture tours, and widely circulate his photo-caricatures in the press.
The exhibition
There is a mystery in Weegee’s work which the exhibition now on view at Fundacio n MAPFRE aims to unravel. From very early on, the artist was internationally renowned for his photographs taken in the 1930s and 1940s and printed in the New York tabloids: corpses, fires, detainees in police wagons, etc. But Weegee had another group of works which, at first glance, might seem diametrically opposed to his reportage: the photo-caricatures of public figures created in Hollywood between 1948 and 1951. Critics highlighted the opposition between these two periods, praising the former and rejecting the latter. Weegee: Autopsy of the Spectacle attempts to reconcile both bodies of work by showing that, stylistic differences aside, they are fundamentally consistent in their portrayal of the “society of the spectacle” which was taking shape in the United States at that time.
In his early years, the artist photographed lurid, violent subjects, but those shots were often deeply ironic and exposed the “spectacular” nature of the depicted events. His images were printed in newspapers, and Weegee often included spectators or fellow photographers – individuals gawking at a traffic accident or murder scene – in the fore or background of his compositions. In a consistent manner, during the second part of his career the artist mocked the Hollywood spectacle: the short-lived fame, the adoring crowds who flocked to see “celebrities”, and the banal society scene. Weegee personally edited and altered these ironic, satirical images in the lab, anticipating the theories of the Situationist International and the critique of the society of the spectacle and its commodification, and always acted in consonance with his own political convictions.
The exhibition curated by Clement Che roux, director of Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, features over one hundred photographs and a variety of documentary material. With a new perspective on Weegee’s oeuvre, the itinerary is divided into three sections and offers a sweeping overview of his work.
The spectacle of news reportage
In 1935, Weegee went into business for himself as a freelance photojournalist. Thanks to a radio tuned to the police frequency which he installed in his car – basically a mobile office where he kept everything he needed to take photos – Weegee was always one of the first to arrive at the scene of a crime, fire or traffic accident. It was the Prohibition era, and gang violence was rampant in New York. Every night for ten years, Weegee covered the city’s accidents and crimes with flash photographs and, starting in 1940, did the same for the NP Daily, a newspaper with Marxist leanings. As the artist himself confessed, “Murder is my business.”
In addition to fires and crimes, during this period Weegee also took highly expressive portraits of the individuals who emerged from police wagons after a raid. At a time when it was considered criminal for a man to wear women’s clothes, some of those detainees tried to hide their faces while others basked in the attention, exiting the vehicle as if making a stage entrance. With these images, the artist emphasised the idea that social relations and the world in general were becoming pure spectacle.
At the same time, Weegee never forgot his roots as the son of poor Jewish immigrants and was keenly aware of the living conditions of the most destitute. For this reason, he also captured homeless people and acts of racial and everyday discrimination against the underprivileged, making his photographs “genuine social documents”.
The society of spectators
“The Curious Ones” is the title of a chapter in Naked City, the compilation of Weegee’s best photographs that he published in 1945. Thanks to that book, which was a huge critical and commercial success, he began to attend New York’s important society events much more frequently, photographing them exactly as he would a crime or accident scene. This is illustrated by two images taken in New York on 22 November 1943, The Critic and In the Lobby at the Metropolitan Opera, Opening Night. The artist was particularly interested in representing human emotions and tried to prevent his subjects from altering their expressions to pose for the camera. Little by little, he began to portray the witnesses to events that happened after dark in New York City, attempting to reflect the entire range of possible human reactions to a tragedy, from astonishment to nervous laughter or tears. Other photographers who came to the same scenes also caught his interest, prompting him to reflect on the very act of taking photos.
With all this repertoire, Weegee showed how ordinary individuals became voyeurs by treating the scene of the crime as a theatrical stage. Recalling the moment in 1939 when he took the photograph Balcony Seats at a Murder, he explained, “The detectives are all over […]. To me this was drama. This was like a backdrop. I stepped back about a hundred feet. I used flash powder and I got this whole scene. The people on the fire escapes, the body, everything!”
The comedy of the spectacular
In 1967, Guy Debord wrote that “the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image” in his book Society of the Spectacle. Weegee, who understood this very well, photographed every sight that struck him as out of the ordinary. Fascinated by the makeup of crowds, he portrayed them enjoying a peaceable Sunday afternoon at the beach on Coney Island or celebrating the end of World War II in Chinatown; but he was also drawn to carnival and circus attractions and to cinemas, where he photographed movie-goers in the dark, engrossed in the film on screen.
Tired of murders and crime scenes, in 1948 Weegee moved to Hollywood and traded the direct, documentary-style photography he had practised in New York for manipulated images that required hours in the lab. During his stint in California, he turned his lens upon actors, singers, broadcasters and society figures. His vision of these individuals was not usually very flattering, photographing them from behind or in awkward situations. In some cases he would later distort the images using a kaleidoscope, photomontage or multiple exposure. Weegee created what he called “photo-caricatures”, a tradition that started among amateur photographers in the late nineteenth century and was originally known as “photographic amusements”, although he stated in his autobiography that his photo-caricatures had never been done before. Though a celebrity himself, the artist used photography to criticise the star system.
Catalogue
The exhibition, organised by Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in partnership with Fundacion MAPFRE, is accompanied by a publication titled Weegee. Autopsia del espectáculo, in which the majority of the images on display are reproduced. The catalogue contains a text by Clement Che roux, the show’s curator and director of Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, and two more essays by Cynthia Young, a curator specialised in photojournalism, and Isabelle Bonnet, a lecturer at the Sorbonne and photography expert. The writer, curator and photography lecturer David Campany has also made an important contribution to the volume, in which he compares Weegee and Stanley Kubrick based on their collaboration on Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
The original edition in French was published by Éditions Textuel with Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the Spanish-language edition has been co-published with Fundación MAPFRE.
There’s still a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer’s career seems to be split in two. First are his stories for the New York press from 1935-1945. Then, photo-caricatures of public personalities developed during his Hollywood period, between 1948 and 1951, which he continued to produce for the rest of his career. How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. This project seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent.
The spectacle is omnipresent in Weegee’s work. In the first part of his career, coinciding with the rise of the tabloid press, he was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators or other photographers in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked the Hollywood spectacular: its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds, and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle.
The News Spectacle
“News photography is my meat.” After many years as a printer for press agencies, Weegee started his own business as a photojournalist in 1935. In order to be the first to arrive at the site of a murder, fire, or traffic accident, he set up a radio in his car, tuned to the police frequency. For a decade, using a flash, he took photographs of news in New York every night.
Weegee Himself
“I have always been a doer and not a thinker.” Weegee enjoyed putting himself in front of the camera, re-enacting circumstances he was confronted with in his daily work. In the name of pedagogy, and probably a little out of narcissism and self-advertisement, he took pictures of himself writing captions for his photographs in the back of his car, in police wagons and behind bars, never without his camera.
Murder Is My Business
“I used to be an expert on murder.” From 1935 to 1945, Weegee spent his nights roaming the city looking for shocking images. Even after Prohibition, New Yorkers’ dreams were punctuated by explosion sounds caused by rival gangs settling scores. The photographer learned to create expressive images which the booming tabloids were particularly fond of.
Off Road
“Sudden death for one…, sudden shock for the other.” American culture is fascinated by twisted metal. In the 19th century, a railroad company staged public collisions between locomotives destined for the junkyard. Weegee photographed many traffic accidents, introducing the “car crash” genre, later adopted by other figures, such as Andy Warhol, J. G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, etc.
The Tragedy of Fire
“Murders and fires (my two best sellers, my bread and butter).” In the darkness of the city, like a moth to a flame, Weegee took photographs of fires. The urban landscape of New York, with its many substandard buildings, provided him with many such opportunities. The combination of fire, smoke and gushing water offered a particularly photogenic spectacle that the press adored.
On The Spot
“The Parade never ceases as the ‘pie’ Wagons unload.” When he wasn’t in the field, Weegee waited at the entrance of the police station for the prison wagon to return with its load of offenders arrested in the night. At a time when it was a criminal act for a man to dress as a woman, some tried to hide their faces, while others took the opportunity to step out of the wagon as if onto a stage.
In Flagrante Delicto
“When criminals tried to cover their faces, it was a challenge to me. I literally uncovered not only their faces, but their black souls as well.” Faced with Weegee’s scrutinising lens, defendants often tried to conceal their identities. In his autobiography, the photographer recounts the many stratagems he developed to oblige them to reveal themselves. Clearly, they didn’t always work.
Social Documents
“The people in these photographs are real.” Coming from a Jewish family who emigrated to the United States from Ukraine at the beginning of the 20th century, experiencing extreme poverty upon their arrival, Weegee was quite aware of standards of living among the underprivileged. He took photographs of ordinary forms of discrimination, people with small trades, and the homeless. His photographs can be seen, in his own words, as “veritable social documents.”
Society of the Spectators
“The Curious ones” is a chapter title from Weegee’s best-seller: Naked City. The photographer takes an interest in people who, like himself, indulge unreservedly in the act of looking. He often includes them in the scenes he photographs, framing them in close-up to create veritable portraits of on-lookers. His work is a particularly striking testimony to the society of spectators developing in the United States at the time.
Meta Photo Co.
“I have no time for messages in my pictures.” Yet Weegee often included other photographers in his compositions as if, through this mise en abyme, he was inciting people to reflect on what it meant to take a photograph. An image from 1942, published in PM’s Weekly, is a good example. Three reporters and the words “Meta Photo Co.” on a window in the background of the photograph indicate there is something to be learned here about photography itself.
The Critic
“‘What is the best picture you ever took?’ Without hesitation I answer, ‘A picture I took at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House. I consider this to be my masterpiece.'” The circumstances were contrived. Weegee went to a working-class neighbourhood to pick the woman up, then brought her to the entrance of this gala. The image illustrates the widening gap between the rich and the poor under American capitalism. It also reflects the critical power of a simple look.
Looking at Death
“I stepped back far enough to take in the whole scene: the puzzled detectives examining the body, the people on the fire escape, watching… it was like a stage setting.” Balcony seat at a murder: by including spectators in many of his images, Weegee imagines crime scenes as theatrical scenes, underscoring how American society transforms news into spectacle.
Spectators
“When I take a picture of a fire, I forget all about the burning building and I go out to the human element.” After years of tirelessly documenting events of the New York night, Weegee began taking photographs of the individuals who witnessed them. He was thus able to take portraits of groups expressing the full range of human reactions to tragedy, from surprise and tears to nervous laughter.
Out of Frame
“The curious […] ones always rushing by […] but always finding time to stop and look at.” On July 28, 1945, at 9:40 a.m., as a thick fog enveloped New York, a small plane crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building. Weegee photographed spectators trying to catch a glimpse of it. People discovering his photographs in newspapers found themselves in the same position as these observers, a voyeuristic one.
Seeing in the Dark
“It’s hard to photograph people and get natural expressions. The minute they see the camera, they ‘freeze’ up on you.” Weegee was especially interested in depicting emotions on the faces of observers. Concerned that his presence would change their reaction, he had the ingenious idea of taking their photographs in the darkness of a theatre using infrared film. The result is a series of stunning portraits of wide-eyed spectators.
She Gestures of Art
“I used the same technique […] whether it was a murder, a pickpocket, or a society ball.” Following the success of his book Naked City, Weegee was routinely invited to high society events in New York, which he took pleasure in photographing as news items. In October 1945, at the opening of an exhibition by painter Stuart Davis at the MoMA, he captured the strange gestures of the art world.
The Theatre of the Spectacular
“Spectacle is Capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image,” explained Guy Debord in 1967. Weegee understood this well. He took photographs of all that was visually uncommon: crowds at Coney Island, fairground attractions, stars, acrobats, clowns… and finally, himself. A few years before the Situationist International, he pioneered a visual form of critique of the Society of the Spectacle.
In the Company of Crowds
“And this is Coney Island on a quiet Sunday afternoon […]. A crowd of over a MILLION is usual and attracts no attention.” On a Brooklyn beach, in Times Square or in Chinatown celebrating victory over Nazi power, Weegee never missed the opportunity to photograph crowds. Beyond “mass ornament,” theorised a few years earlier by Siegfried Kracauer, he was fascinated by the ways in which the people constitute themselves as images.
The Cannonball Woman
“Punch in Pictures.” That’s how one magazine described an article on Weegee. The scoop-hunter knows better than anyone else how to produce hard-hitting images. In 1943, Weegee photographed circus performer Egle Zacchini, nicknamed Miss Victory, or The Cannonball Woman, shot out of a cannon at 360 feet per second. As war was raging in Europe, it was a strange metaphor for the role of women in the conflict.
A Circus Community
“Someday they, too, will be stars.” Weegee especially enjoyed hanging around behind the scenes of fairgrounds in the suburbs. He photographed the way a performer at Sammy’s Bar placed her money in her stocking. Elsewhere, a dwarf with a forced smile, a melancholy clown slumped in his dressing room, what remains of the parade after the crowd passes by. Many of his photographs display the ambiance of a sad party.
Photo-caricatures
“I was tired of gangsters lying dead with their guts spewed in the gutter, of women crying at tenement-house fires, of automobile accidents […]. I was off to Hollywood.” In the City of Angels, Weegee not only photographs the celebrities he meets, he delights in making caricatures of them with what he calls his “elastic lens,” now mocking the star system.
The Spyglass
“I have used the camera to provoke good old-fashioned belly laughs.” In 1963, Weegee was invited to the set of Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove. The director was a great fan of Weegee, and had begun his own career as a press photographer. On set, Weegee applied a new technique for the tubular distortion of faces, as if one were looking through the small end of a spyglass.
Trick Inventory
“Their originality was such that they sold like hot cakes.” This is how Weegee described his photo-caricatures, the first of which appeared in papers in 1947. For 20 years and up until his death in 1968, he would regularly publish these works. Around fifty of the publications are known today. There are most likely many more. In his daily work, the photo-caricature came to definitively replace the news item.
Weegee, Ouija
“I’m called Weegee which comes from Ouija.” The pseudonym Weegee refers to the name of a board used in seances to decipher messages from the beyond. Weegee liked to describe himself as a “psychic photographer”, able to predict in advance where a story will take place. On the scene, he said he photographed using his “third eye.” Whether clairvoyant or voyeur, Weegee was able to see, better than anyone else, transformations in American society.
Edo period (1615-1868) Group of Inrō 18th century Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Inrō are small, light, tightly nested boxes worn hanging from a man’s obi sash, as a Japanese kimono had no pockets. The term’s literal meaning, “seal basket,” probably refers to an early function, but later they held small amounts of medicine. Once they became fashion items, inrō were carefully selected according to the season or occasion and coordinated with the attached ojime (sliding bead) and netsuke (toggle) as well as with the kimono and obi. Moore and his team surely studied the rich motifs and sophisticated production methods of the inrō he collected.
A change of pace this weekend.
Just because… I love beautiful things; I am a collector of antiques and object d’art; and I have a wonderful standing Tiffany picture frame at home.
Roman glass, Italian Murano glass, Austrian and German glass, Arabic and Persian metalwork, glass and earthenware, Japanese lacquer, wicker, metalware and pottery, Chinese glass and porcelain. All used as inspiration by Edward C. Moore, “the creative force who led Tiffany & Co. to unparalleled originality and success during the second half of the 19th century.”
Enjoy!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All the text in the posting is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Exhibition Tour – Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co. | Met Exhibitions
Edward C. Moore (1827-1891) – the creative force who led Tiffany & Co. to unparalleled originality and success during the second half of the 19th century – amassed a vast collection of decorative arts of exceptional quality and in various media, from Greek and Roman glass and Japanese baskets to metalwork from the Islamic world. These objects were a source of inspiration for Moore, a noted silversmith in his own right, and the designers he supervised. The exhibition Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co. will feature more than 180 extraordinary examples from Moore’s personal collection, which was donated to the Museum, alongside 70 magnificent silver objects designed and created at Tiffany & Co. under his direction.
Overview
Edward C. Moore (1827-1891) – the creative force who led Tiffany & Co. to unparalleled originality and success during the second half of the 19th century – amassed a vast collection of decorative arts of exceptional quality and in various media, from Greek and Roman glass and Japanese baskets to metalwork from the Islamic world. These objects were a source of inspiration for Moore, a noted silversmith in his own right, and the designers he supervised. The exhibition Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co. will feature more than 180 extraordinary examples from Moore’s personal collection, which was donated to the Museum, alongside 70 magnificent silver objects designed and created at Tiffany & Co. under his direction. Drawn primarily from the holdings of The Met, the display will also include seldom seen examples from a dozen private and public lenders. A defining figure in the history of American silver, Moore played a pivotal role in shaping the legendary Tiffany design aesthetic and the evolution of The Met’s collection.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Edward C. Moore (American, New York 1827 – 1891 New York) Cup 1853 Silver and silver-gilt 3 3/4 x 3 1/4 x 4 3/4 in. (9.5 x 8.3 x 12.1cm); 6 oz. 14 dwt. (208.2 g) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Gift of Jerome B. Dwight, in memory of Charles Noyes de Forest and Henry Wheeler de Forest Jr., 2005 Public domain
This cup is an early example of Moore’s sophisticated design sensibilities and technical skills. While it was first thought to be the work of his father, a recently discovered sketch signed “E. C. M.” confirms the twenty-six-year-old Edward as its designer. Characteristic of his inventive eye and hand are the fluidity of the fuchsia vine and the dynamic play between the high-relief flowers and smooth, undecorated ground, which lend it a compositional coherence and show his understanding of the power of negative space. Engraved as a baby gift for Julia Brasher de Forest, sister of artist Lockwood de Forest, and marked “Moore,” the cup appears to have been a commission he considered a personal project.
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Mustard Pot c. 1879 Silver, copper, gold, patinated copper-gold alloy, patinated copper-platinum-iron alloy, and niello 3 3/16 × 2 1/2 × 2 in. (8.1 × 6.4 × 5.1cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Purchase, Friends of the American Wing Fund and Emma and Jay A. Lewis Gift, 2016 Public domain
Following the opening of Japan to the West in the 1850s and the subsequent display of Japanese art at international expositions, the Japanese taste began to captivate American consumers. In response, designers such as Edward C. Moore at New York’s Tiffany & Co. introduced a range of objects inspired by Japanese art works, including ceramics, metalwork, textiles, prints, lacquerware, and netsuke. The decoration on this mustard pot is particularly unusual and innovative. Its baluster form is completely transformed by the asymmetrical inset panels of mixed metal alloys – one of patinated copper and gold (a direct attempt to imitate Japanese Shakudō), and another of patinated copper, platinum, and iron – enclosed by scrolled “Snake Skin” borders. The mottled, multicoloured surface also evokes the swirling array of colours observed in Moore’s collection of ancient mosaic and core-formed glass. Labeled in the Tiffany & Co. Archives as “Mustard to go with Pepper 5493,” this is one of only six decorated versions produced. The Tiffany Archives also retains the Hammering & Inlaying Design drawings for this particular version (#853), which at a cost of $35 was the most expensive iteration.
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Cup and saucer c. 1881 Silver, patinated copper, patinated copper-platinum-iron alloy, and gold Cup: 2 1/8 × 2 1/2 × 1 7/8 in. (5.4 × 6.4 × 4.8cm) Saucer: 1/2 × 4 in. (1.3 × 10.2 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Purchase, Friends of the American Wing Fund and Emma and Jay A. Lewis Gift, 2016 Public domain
This cup and saucer represent a rare aspect of Tiffany & Co.’s production. As early as 1845 Tiffany & Co. was selling items they promoted as “Indian Goods,” including pipes, belts, pouches, moccasins, and “various fancy articles, made of Birch Bark.” Native American imagery and decorative vocabulary also appeared in Tiffany silver designs, particularly in works conceived by Eugene Soligny (1832-1901) and Paulding Farnham (1859-1927), two of the firm’s leading designers. Here the pattern of alternating red and black triangles is reminiscent of Navajo blankets. During the later decades of the nineteenth century, Tiffany & Co. designers drew inspiration from a diverse array of sources. They had access to the vast collection of books and objects from around the world assembled by the head of the silver division, Edward C. Moore. The decorative pattern on this cup and saucer bears striking similarity to a rendering of floor patterns in one of Moore’s books, The Basilica of San Marco in Venice. Whether referencing Navajo blankets, Venetian floors, or both, the cup and saucer are testaments to the fertile environment in which Tiffany & Co. designers and craftsmen created their innovative work.
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Cup and saucer c. 1881 Silver, patinated copper, patinated copper-platinum-iron alloy, and gold Cup: 2 1/8 × 2 1/2 × 1 7/8 in. (5.4 × 6.4 × 4.8cm) Saucer: 1/2 × 4 in. (1.3 × 10.2 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Purchase, Friends of the American Wing Fund and Emma and Jay A. Lewis Gift, 2016 Public domain
Camillo Boito (editor) Ferdinando Ongania (1842-1911) (publisher) La Basilica di San Marco in Venezia illustrata nella storia e nell’arte da scrittori veneziani: [volume 3] 1881 41.3 x 34.1 x 3cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public domain
Moore assembled an extensive library, which includes a rare, lavish fourteen-volume publication on the Basilica of San Marco in Venice. Produced between 1881 and 1888 under the direction of Italian restoration architect and art historian Camillo Boito, it documents in text and chromolithograph illustrations virtually every detail of the centuries-old basilica. The volume on view here is devoted to the mosaic floors. The image replicates multicoloured geometric patterns from borders that frame some of the floors’ rectangular fields. Their variety and rhythmic energy would have resonated with Moore’s aesthetic sensibilities. Figure IX, in the lower right, bears striking similarities to the Tiffany cup and saucer displayed nearby.
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Two cups and saucers from the Mackay Service 1878 Silver-gilt and enamel 2 1/4 × 2 × 2 3/4 in. (5.7 × 5.1 × 7cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Purchase, Cranshaw Corporation Gift, 2017 Public domain
These gilded and enamelled cups and saucers are part of one of the most renowned and lavish dinner services ever created in America.
Commissioned in 1877 by John W. (1831-1902) and Marie Louise Hungerford (1843-1928) Mackay, the dinner service for twenty-four consisted of over 1,250 pieces. A poor Irish immigrant with little education, John W. Mackay became one of the wealthiest men in America when he and three partners, James Fair, James Flood, and William O’Brien, struck a silver deposit known as “The Big Bonanza” at Nevada’s Comstock Lode in 1873. During a visit to the mine, Marie Louise asked her husband for a silver dinner service “made by the finest silversmith in the country.” Her husband responded, “You shall have it. I like the notion of eating off silver brought straight from the Comstock.” He proceeded to have a half ton of silver delivered from the mine to Tiffany & Co., where two hundred men worked for almost two years to complete the commission. After being snubbed by New York City society, the Mackays established themselves in Paris. In 1878 the service was sent to be featured in Tiffany’s award-winning display at the Paris Exposition Universelle before being delivered to the Mackay’s home at 9 Rue de Tilsitt near the Arc de Triomphe. In an era of extravagant social affairs, Mrs. Mackay’s dinners and balls were legendary. The Mackay dinner service would have been at the centre of banquets that included royalty, aristocracy, President and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant, and one of the most prominent celebrities of the day, Buffalo Bill. Identified in firm records as “Indian” in style, the Mackay service reflects the sophisticated and innovative design sensibilities of Edward C. Moore, the head of Tiffany’s silver division, and the team of designers, chasers, and craftsmen who conceived and realised this commission. The exquisite cloisonné enamelled decoration on these cups embodies Gilded Age extravagance and would have offered a dazzling finale to a meal served on a sea of elaborately chased silver wares in an “exotic” Indian and Near Eastern taste.
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Two cups and saucers from the Mackay Service 1878 Silver-gilt and enamel 2 1/4 × 2 × 2 3/4 in. (5.7 × 5.1 × 7cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Purchase, Cranshaw Corporation Gift, 2017 Public domain
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Ice Cream Dish from Mackay Service 1878 Silver, silver gilt 6 × 15 3/8 in. (15.2 × 39.1cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 2023 Public domain
This silver ice cream dish and accompanying plates are part of one of the most renowned and lavish dinner services ever created in America. Commissioned in 1877 by John W. (1831-1902) and Marie Louise Hungerford (1843-1928) Mackay, the dinner service for twenty-four consisted of over 1,250 pieces.
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Ice Cream Dish from Mackay Service 1878 Silver, silver gilt 6 × 15 3/8 in. (15.2 × 39.1cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 2023 Public domain
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Pitcher 1874-1875 Silver 9 3/8 × 7 × 8 3/8 in. (23.8 × 17.8 × 21.3cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Sansbury-Mills Fund, 2018 Public domain
This pitcher exemplifies the technical virtuosity and creativity that characterised Tiffany & Co.’s finest silver during the 1870s and 1880s. Under the direction of Edward C. Moore (1827-1891), the silver division at Tiffany & Co. produced a diverse array of exquisitely wrought and highly original work. Created in 1874 or 1875, this pitcher is an early example of Tiffany & Co.’s engagement with Near Eastern and Indian works of art. Edward C. Moore was a passionate and discerning collector of metalwork, glass, ceramics, and textiles from the Islamic world and the Indian subcontinent, and these objects had a profound impact on his creative vision and deigns. The elephant head draped with garlands and the surrounding panels of dahlias, lotus flowers, and other exotic vegetation reflect careful study of Indian and Near Eastern sources and attest to the masterful chasing skills of Eugene Soligny (1832-1901). Together with a matching pitcher that was made several years later, this pitcher was presented in 1883 by Julia Rhinelander (d. 1890) to her niece Mary Rhinelander Stewart (1859-1949) on the occasion of her wedding to Frank Spencer Witherbee (1852-1917).
This pitcher is an especially dynamic and successful example of Tiffany’s engagement with works of art from the Islamic world and the Indian subcontinent. The firm produced numerous versions of this form, most of which feature dahlias and other “Persian” motifs like those seen here. The exquisitely rendered details, particularly the elephant head, attest to the skills of Eugene Soligny, one of Tiffany’s most accomplished chasers. They also reflect ideals promoted by the silver workshop supervisor, Charles Grosjean, who urged careful consideration of the relationship between form and decoration: the pitcher’s curves define the swirling panels of ornament, and the scale and shape of the floral motifs have been carefully calibrated to complement and conform to the undulations.
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Pitcher (detail) 1874-1875 Silver 9 3/8 × 7 × 8 3/8 in. (23.8 × 17.8 × 21.3cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Sansbury-Mills Fund, 2018 Public domain
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Charles Osborne (1847-1920) (designer) Pitcher c. 1880 Silver 6 × 4 5/8 × 4 1/4 in. (15.2 × 11.7 × 10.8cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Purchase, Friends of the American Wing Fund and Emma and Jay A. Lewis Gift, 2016 Public domain
Ceramic vessels may have inspired the organic form of this pitcher, which was described in company records as “Pitcher Top thrown over.” Between 1878 and 1889, Tiffany offered variations of it in at least three decorative schemes. The crabs and crayfish scuttling across this version likely owe their lifelike detail to the designers’ careful study of living creatures alongside Japanese objects and books such as Katsushika Hokusai’s Manga. The silversmith Charles Osborne joined Tiffany around the time this pitcher was made, and similar animal forms and spirals appear on many of the designs produced during his collaboration with Moore: see, for example, the chocolate pot on view nearby, which features spirals and identical crayfish castings.
Tiffany & Co. began retailing and producing silver early in its history, quickly establishing itself as the preeminent silversmithing firm in the United States. This pitcher exemplifies the unprecedented innovation and creativity that characterised Tiffany & Co.’s work during the 1870s and 1880s. Under the direction of Edward C. Moore (1827-1891), the silver division at Tiffany & Co. produced a diverse array of exquisitely wrought and highly original silver, which in turn attracted many of the finest craftsmen and designers to the firm. Indeed, Charles Osborne (1847-1920), who is credited with designing this pitcher, left his position as the chief designer at one of Tiffany’s competitors, the Whiting Manufacturing Company, in order to learn from and work with Moore at Tiffany & Co. The silver that resulted from this mentorship and collaboration is among the finest produced during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Vase 1877 Made in New York, New York, United States Silver 8 1/8 x 4 1/4 x 4 1/4 in. (20.6 x 10.8 x 10.8cm); 14 oz. 19 dwt. (464.5 g) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. H. O. H. Frelinghuysen Gift, 1982 Public domain
Although largely inspired by Japanese art, this group of objects demonstrates that Tiffany’s designers looked to a variety of sources when creating innovative designs. Manufacturing ledgers describe the creamer and sugar bowl as having “Persian Pierced Handles,” while the splayed feet on the vase mimic those seen on a thirteenth-century Iranian brass casket in Moore’s collection. The firm’s staff also devoted significant time to studying the natural world. The silver workshop supervisor, Charles Grosjean, recorded in his diary that he visited the city’s aquarium and also purchased fish from the Fulton Market, which he then had a colleague sketch. This dedication to close observation resulted in the highly accurate depictions of sunfish, pickerel, and yellow perch on the creamer and sugar bowl and Chinese Brama fish on the vase.
The opening of Japan to the West in the 1850s and subsequent displays of Japanese art at world’s fairs inspired great demand for Japanese-style objects in the United States. Edward C. Moore, the director of Tiffany’s silver department, was an early proponent and collector of Japanese art. The decorative motifs on this vase and their asymmetrical arrangement were clearly inspired by Japanese design. Originally, the vase had a lightly pebbled ground and oxidised accents that emulated Japanese metalwork.
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Tray 1879-1880 Silver, copper, brass, gold-copper alloy, and copper-platinum-iron alloy 9 1/8 × 7/8 in., 544.3g (23.2 × 2.2cm, 17.5 oz.) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Rogers Fund, 1966 Public domain
Buoyed by the phenomenal success of their Japanese-inspired wares at the 1878 Paris Exposition, Tiffany continued producing innovative designs featuring experimental mixed-metal techniques. A note on the meticulously annotated design drawing for this tray describes the sun or moon as “inlaid red gold, not coloured,” which according to the firm’s technical manual is a combination of “American Gold” and “Fine Copper.” Analysis of the metals reveals that each detail corresponds precisely with the formulas and techniques specified in the drawing. Moore had a particular penchant for objects depicting frogs. Reportedly frogs were kept in an aquarium at the studio for designers to study, so the one leaping and catching mosquitoes here may have been modelled from life.
This lively scene, featuring a frog leaping from the water to catch a mosquito in its open mouth, was part of a series of objects created by Tiffany & Co. in a distinctive Japanese style. The imagery both engraved and rendered in relief was derived from European print sources depicting the arts of Japan and art objects made in Japan collected by Edward C. Moore, head of the silver division and creative director at Tiffany. For example, the swarm of insects depicted on this tray mirrors a small mosquito printed as a page filler in L’Art Japonais, written by Louis Gonse and published in 1883 in Paris. The copy of this publication held in the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Met was Moore’s personal copy, donated in 1891.
Along with his copy of L’Art Japonais, Moore gave his collection of more than five hundred books and two thousand objects, collected from around the world, to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1891. His collection offers ample evidence of his interest in animal imagery, particularly frogs. Indeed, it included many objects depicting frogs and toads, including several small Japanese netsuke. Furthermore, live frogs were kept in the silver studio at Tiffany for designers to study. Rendering this frog from life rather than from a print source likely led to its dynamic pose and sense of movement.
The use of multiple metals and mixed-metal alloys to animate both the frog and rising sun were inspired by Japanese metalwork and Moore’s passion for innovative metalworking techniques and virtuosic craftsmanship. Looking closely at the body of the jumping frog, yellow, pink, and silver coloured metals have been used together to give the appearance of a lifelike, textured amphibian body. XRF (x-ray fluorescence) analysis was used to identify the metals and exact composition of the alloys used on this tray. This analysis, together with Tiffany’s design drawing for this tray and a surviving technical manual – allows for an understanding of what alloys Tiffany used to render certain colours and the shorthand for these mixtures. The rising sun was to be inlaid with “red gold,” determined to be a copper-gold alloy, the frog’s body was to be cast in “Y.M.;” (yellow metal), identified as an alloy of copper and zinc. The designer did not indicate what metal would comprise the pink coloured spots along the frog’s body and legs, but analysis revealed them to be an alloy of copper, platinum, and iron, which is similar to “Metal no, 47,” which the technical manual also describes as Japanese Gold #2 and “Shakado.”
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Charles Osborne (1847-1920) (designer) Chocolate Pot 1879 Silver, patinated copper, gold, and ivory 11 5/8 × 7 × 5 1/2 in. (29.5 × 17.8 × 14cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Purchase, Louis and Virginia Clemente Foundation Inc. and Emma and Jay A. Lewis Gifts, 2017 Public domain
The luminous red surface of this vessel, evoking Asian lacquer and ceramic glazes, established a new paradigm for silverwares. Tiffany records indicate that “Chocolate Pot Big Belly” was offered in two versions, the one seen here and another in silver with copper, gold, and “yellow metal” decoration. With a wholesale cost of $175, the copper version was more than twice as expensive to produce. The firm’s technical manual documents the painstaking experimentation undertaken to achieve red surfaces. References to Japanese sources include the inlaid silver pattern on the neck, which resembles the auspicious shippō pattern, as seen in a seventeenth-century incense box earlier in this exhibition, and the applied silver and gold kirimon (paulownia-tree crest), the emblem of the Japanese government.
This chocolate pot exemplifies the unprecedented innovation and creativity that characterised Tiffany & Co.’s work during the 1870s and 80s. Under the direction of Edward C. Moore (1827-1891), Tiffany’s produced exquisitely wrought and highly original silver, which in turn attracted many of the finest craftsmen and designers to the firm. Indeed, Charles Osborne (1847-1920), who is credited with designing this chocolate pot, left his position as chief designer at one of Tiffany’s competitors, the Whiting Manufacturing Company, in order to learn from and work with Moore at Tiffany’s. The silver that resulted from this mentorship and collaboration is among the finest produced during the second half of the nineteenth century. The spiral motifs accenting the pot’s body together with the masterfully chased leaves wrapping the spout are signatures of Osborne’s work. The lifelike cast ornaments of crawfish and crabs further demonstrate technical virtuosity and inventive aesthetic sensibilities, as does the rich red colour, the result of painstaking experimentation and innovative use of electrolytic technology to achieve new surface tones and effects. Moore and Osborne were inspired by Japanese objects; however, their work is in no way imitative. This striking chocolate pot makes clear why The Connoisseur celebrates Tiffany & Co. in an 1885 article entitled “Artistic Silverware” for having “raised the making of artistic silver to a height never reached to my knowledge by silversmiths in preceding ages.”
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Vase 1879 Silver, copper, gold, and silver-copper-zinc alloy 11 1/2 × 6 3/8 in. (29.2 × 16.2cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Sansbury-Mills Fund, 2019 Public domain
An accomplished manifestation of Tiffany’s mastery of techniques to redden copper, this bold vase presents an imaginative take on East Asian art and sensibilities. Surviving design drawings reveal that each detail was carefully planned. The seemingly random splatters on the body are all meticulously noted, with an indication that they should be made with fine silver. The trompe-l’oeil effect of cascading liquid spilling over the lip of the vase and down the body references Asian bronzes in Moore’s collection. Charles Grosjean, the workshop supervisor, recorded in his diary, “E. C. M. showed me … a Bronze with ‘drip’ ornament,” which could well be the vase surrounded by waves displayed nearby. Thereafter, Grosjean proudly declared the firm’s designs with drip motifs to be great successes.
This vase exemplifies the creativity and innovation that characterised Tiffany & Co.’s work during the 1870s and 1880s. Under the direction of Edward C. Moore (1827-1891), the silver division at Tiffany & Co. produced a diverse array of exquisitely wrought and highly original work, and this vase is a bold example of their experimentation with novel techniques and Asian-inspired designs. First conceived and created in 1879, this vase was produced both in copper with silver drips, as seen here, and in silver with copper drips. Surviving drawings for the vase reveal that the seemingly random splotches on the red surface and the layered, cascading drips were meticulously planned. Notes on the drawings also specify that the fine gold was to be “inlaid by chasers,” while the copper and green gold ornament was to be “inlaid by battery,” evidence of Tiffany’s progressive engagement with innovative electrolytic processes. Inspired by the colours in Asian ceramics as well as glass and ceramics from the ancient and Islamic worlds that Moore collected and made available to his staff, Tiffany’s craftsmen worked tirelessly to produce coloured surfaces. As one of very few extant examples of Tiffany’s work with red surface treatments and the only significant object currently known that employs drip ornament inspired by Japanese works of art in Moore’s collection (see Japanese bronze vase amid waves), this vase is a rare and important illustration of the firm’s imaginative and technically sophisticated responses to Asian art.
Tiffany & Co. (1837–present) Pair of Candelabra 1884 Silver 70 1/4 × 22 1/2 in. (178.4 × 57.2cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2024 Public domain
Ideas inspired by the full range of Moore’s collections inform the design of these monumental candelabra. Tiffany records describe the form as “Roman,” and the female figures, paw feet, and baluster-shaped stand all evoke ancient Roman art. Yet the decorative scheme is also manifestly non-Western – the dense floral and vegetal composition enlivening the surface draws on East and West Asian sources as well as close study of natural specimens. Commissioned by Mary J. Morgan, one of Tiffany’s most avid and progressive patrons, these candelabra are the grandest works produced during Moore’s tenure.
These dazzling, monumental candelabra are the most ambitious and virtuosic examples of nineteenth-century American silver known. Created at Tiffany & Co. under the direction of Edward C. Moore (1827-1891), they exemplify the technical and artistic preeminence the firm had achieved by the late nineteenth century. The dynamic decoration that enlivens the almost six-foot high forms incorporates masterfully executed sinuous floral and vegetal ornament, informed by Moore’s extensive collection of works of art from Ancient Greece and Rome, Europe, East Asia, and the Islamic world that Moore’s heirs donated to The Met in 1891. The candelabra were commissioned by one of Tiffany & Co.’s most enthusiastic and progressive patrons, Mary Jane (Sexton) Morgan (1823-1885), wife of railroad, steamship, and iron magnate Charles Morgan (1795-1878). Like Moore, Morgan was an avid collector, and they appear to have been kindred spirits with respect to their passion for Asian art and innovative silver design. Upon her husband’s death, Morgan was reported to have a net worth of over five million dollars, and she set about assembling a significant collection of fine and decorative arts that ranged from paintings by Delacroix to Tiffany silver, European ceramics, and East Asian bronzes, ceramics, lacquerwares, and jades. In an era dominated by men, Morgan was a rare, pioneering collector. The Tiffany silver made for her is among the firm’s most technically and artistically innovative work, suggesting she was a sophisticated connoisseur of silver with an eye for avant-garde designs. Surviving ledger books in the Tiffany & Co. archives indicate 3050 ounces of silver were used to create these candelabra and that the cost associated with producing them was far more than any other works Tiffany had created. After Morgan’s death in 1885, her collection was sold at an auction attended by thousands. At the time, The New York Times reported: “The more the collection is viewed the greater one’s regret that she should have been taken before willing her treasures in a block to some established museum or to one to be established.”
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Designer: Designed by James Horton Whitehouse (1833-1902) Decorator: Chased by Eugene J. Soligny (1832-1901) Designer: Medallions by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (American, Dublin 1848–1907 Cornish, New Hampshire) The Bryant Vase 1876 Silver and gold 33 1/2 x 14 x 11 5/16 in. (85.1 x 35.6 x 28.7cm); Diam. 11 5/16 in. (28.7cm); 452 oz. 16 dwt. (14084.2 g) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Gift of William Cullen Bryant, 1877 Public domain
To honour the poet and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) on his eightieth birthday, a group of his friends commissioned “a commemorative Vase of original design and choice workmanship” that would “embody … the lessons of [his] literary and civic career.” Its design, which combines Renaissance Revival sensibilities with those of the Aesthetic movement, consists of a Greek vase form ornamented with symbolic imagery and motifs. The fretwork of American flora covering the body of the vase, including apple branches and blossoms, represents the beauty and wholesome quality of Bryant’s poetry, while the scenes in the oval medallions allude to his life and works. From the moment the commission was announced until well after its completion, the vase was widely publicised and celebrated. After it was presented to Bryant in 1876, Tiffany & Co. displayed it at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The following year, the vase was presented to the Metropolitan Museum, making it the first acquisition of American silver to enter the Museum’s collection.
Manufactured by Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) Designer: Designed by James Horton Whitehouse (1833-1902) Decorator: Chased by Eugene J. Soligny (1832-1901) Designer: Medallions by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (American, Dublin 1848–1907 Cornish, New Hampshire) The Bryant Vase (detail) 1876 Silver and gold 33 1/2 x 14 x 11 5/16 in. (85.1 x 35.6 x 28.7cm); Diam. 11 5/16 in. (28.7cm); 452 oz. 16 dwt. (14084.2 g) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Gift of William Cullen Bryant, 1877 Public domain
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) (manufacturer) The Magnolia Vase 1893 Silver, enamel, gold, and opals Overall: 30 7/8 x 19 1/2 in. (78.4 x 49.5cm); 838 oz. 11 dwt. (26081.6 g) Foot Diameter: 13 1/2 in. (34.3cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Gift of Mrs. Winthrop Atwill, 1899 Public domain
A triumph of enamelling that reflects Moore’s enduring legacy, this commanding vase presided over Tiffany’s celebrated display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. In keeping with the event’s theme, the anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, Tiffany touted the work’s “American” materials and design. Pueblo pottery was cited as inspiration for the shape, and Toltec or Aztec objects for the handles. The decoration references different regions – pinecones and needles symbolise the North and East, magnolias the South and West, and cacti the Southwest, while the ubiquitous goldenrod unifies the composition. The enamelled blossoms captivated visitors, and one critic declared Tiffany’s display “the greatest exhibit in point of artistic beauty and intrinsic value that any individual firm has ever shown.”
The Magnolia Vase was the centrepiece of Tiffany & Co.’s display at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago – a display Godey’s Magazine described as “the greatest exhibit in point of artistic beauty and intrinsic value, that any individual firm has ever shown.” The design of the vase was a self-conscious expression of national pride. Pueblo pottery inspired the form, while Toltec motifs embellish the handles. The vegetal ornament refers to various regions of the United States: pinecones and needles symbolise the North and East; magnolias, the South and West; and cacti, the Southwest. Representing the country as a whole is the ubiquitous goldenrod, fashioned from gold mined in the United States. The exceptional craftsmanship and innovative techniques manifested in the vase – particularly the naturalism of the enamelled magnolias – were much discussed in the contemporary press. Indeed, the work was heralded by the editor of the New York Sun as “one of the most remarkable specimens of the silversmith … art that has ever been produced anywhere.”
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) (manufacturer) The Magnolia Vase (detail) 1893 Silver, enamel, gold, and opals Overall: 30 7/8 x 19 1/2 in. (78.4 x 49.5cm); 838 oz. 11 dwt. (26081.6 g) Foot Diameter: 13 1/2 in. (34.3cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Gift of Mrs. Winthrop Atwill, 1899 Public domain
Tiffany & Co. (1837-present) John T. Curran (1859-1933) (designer) “Umbrella” Magnolia 1891 Opaque and transparent watercolour, and graphite on paper Overall: 13 7/8 x 8 5/8 in. (35.2 x 21.9cm) Design: 13 7/8 x 8 5/8 in. (35.2 x 21.9cm) Matted: 19 1/4 x 14 1/4 in. (48.9 x 36.2cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Gift of Tiffany & Co., 1985 Public domain
Introduction
Edward C. Moore was the creative force behind the magnificent and inventive silver produced at Tiffany & Co. during the second half of the nineteenth century. His is a tale of phenomenal artistry, ambition, innovation, and vision. In his drive to study and create beauty, Moore sought inspiration in diverse cultures and geographies. He amassed a vast collection of artworks from ancient Greece and Rome, Asia, Europe, and the Islamic world with the aim of educating and sparking creativity among artists and artisans in the United States, particularly those at Tiffany. He believed American design could be transformed through engagement with historical and international exemplars, and his collection not only revolutionised Tiffany’s silver but also came to influence generations of artists and craftspeople.
Moore’s commitment to education led him to designate that his collection be bequeathed to a museum. Upon his death in 1891, his family donated his more than two thousand objects and five hundred books to The Met so that they would continue to be available to all. The Museum displayed the works together in a dedicated gallery until 1942, after which they were dispersed to specialised departments that had developed in the intervening decades.
This exhibition reunites more than 180 works from Moore’s collection, presenting them alongside Tiffany silver created under his direction. The juxtapositions reveal that Moore and his team engaged with these objects in dynamic ways, producing hybrid designs with experimental techniques that endowed silver with new colours, textures, decorative vocabularies, and aesthetic sensibilities.
Early Years
Throughout his career, Edward C. Moore guided the design and manufacture of silver bearing the Tiffany mark. Trained in his family’s New York City silversmithing shop, he proved to be a gifted designer and silversmith at an early age, and in 1849 he joined his father in the partnership John C. Moore and Son. Two years later, Tiffany, Young & Ellis, the firm that would later become Tiffany & Co., secured an agreement to be the sole retail outlet for Moore silver. Edward soon took charge of the family business and served as Tiffany’s exclusive supplier; later, in 1868, his silver manufactory was transferred to Tiffany & Co. in exchange for cash and shares in the newly incorporated company.
Moore’s position afforded him opportunities to travel and access to social and artistic circles that informed his collecting. His holdings became integral to the training and working methods of Tiffany designers and silversmiths; he set up a design room where a vast array of objects and an extensive library were made available to apprentices and staff. He created a collaborative work environment, and each exquisite piece reflects the contributions of many individuals. Their work soon attracted international attention, receiving awards and accolades at world’s fairs and enjoying avid patronage in the United States and around the globe.
Tiffany silver and Greek and Roman Art
Throughout the nineteenth century, Western collectors were captivated by the art of ancient Greece and Rome. Moore amassed an impressive assemblage of Greek and Roman glass vessels and fragments as well as terracotta vases, jugs, and lamps. Much of the silver produced under his direction reflects classical sources, as seen in the symmetrical forms, figural compositions inspired by black- and red-figure Greek vases, and distinctive decorative vocabulary such as helmets, shields, and stylised plant motifs.
Moore embraced the trend of collecting ancient glass; of the approximately 650 classical objects he left to The Met, 618 of them are glass. Spanning a range of manufacturing techniques from the late sixth century BCE through the sixth century CE, the exceptional collection features core-formed, cast, blown, and mold-blown vessels and fragments. Their lustrous surfaces and rich colours fuelled Moore’s experiments with mixed metal compositions and surface treatments for silver. Although Moore and his team were on the vanguard of looking beyond the canon that had defined Euro-American art for centuries – exploring more progressive and non-Western styles – Greek and Roman art remained foundational for Tiffany designers, and classically inspired silver continued to be a mainstay of the company’s production.
Tiffany silver and European Glass
Moore had a particular passion for glass. While his collection features a broad range of art forms, the modern European works are primarily glass. The selection on view here, drawn from the larger group of 116, conveys Moore’s fascination with the variety of colours and forms that could be realised through different glass working techniques.
Ranging in date from the 1500s to the mid-nineteenth century, Moore’s European glass collection is particularly strong in Venetian and façon de Venise (Venetian style) objects. The revival of the Venetian glass industry in the 1860s aligned with his own interest in invigorating contemporary design and artistic practice. He was clearly drawn to the dynamic hot-working techniques that exploited glass’s molten state to create new forms, integrate colours, and shape energetic decorative details. While some direct parallels in vessel shape and decoration exist between the glass and the silver produced at Tiffany, this part of the collection appears to have offered inspiration on a more abstract, visceral level, encouraging Moore and his designers to transcend silver’s traditionally monochromatic palette with the use of enamels, mixed metals, and tonal surface treatments.
Tiffany silver and Arts of the Islamic World
A pioneering American collector of art from the Islamic world, Moore created designs inspired by Islamic sources from his earliest days at Tiffany. He began acquiring outstanding examples of Islamic ceramics, glass, textiles, jewellery, and metalwork at a time when there was neither a U.S. market for this art nor notable domestic interest in it. His bequest of approximately four hundred works from Islamic lands remains the largest and most comprehensive collection of material of this type to have entered The Met.
This gallery reflects the quality and diversity of the objects he collected, marked by a chronological and geographic scope that ranges from the 1100s to the 1800s and from Spain to the Middle East and India. Sinuous forms, brilliant colours, and interlaced motifs appealed to Moore and reinvigorated Tiffany’s designs with new sensibilities and artistic vocabularies. The mixed-metal wares in Moore’s collection inspired experiments with what Tiffany called “chromatically decorated” silver, inlaid with reddish copper and black niello, while the firm’s success with enamelling techniques recalls the colourful enamelled glassware and Iznik ceramics. Inventive designs identified in company records as “Moresque,” “Persian,” and “Saracenic” brought Tiffany new patrons and critical acclaim.
Tiffany silver and Arts of East Asia
The decorative arts of East Asia captured Moore’s imagination and inspired inventive flights of fancy from Tiffany designers and craftspeople. About eight hundred Japanese works of art that he collected are now at The Met, including metalwork, textiles, lacquerware, ceramics, bamboo basketry, and sword fittings, and he gave an equally varied group of more than one hundred Chinese works. A fashion for Japanese art, or “Japanism,” swept through Europe and the United States following the 1854 opening of several ports in Japan for trade with the West, and many regarded Japanese artistic practices as an exemplar for avant-garde design reform. Guided by his desire to spark creativity and innovation, Moore acquired a range of exceptional objects and relatively inexpensive collectibles from the Edo (1615-1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) periods.
Moore and his team carefully studied materials, techniques, decorative vocabularies, and compositions in East Asian art. The related silver designs incorporate novel methods for creating multicoloured alloys and mixed-metal laminates, as well as fresh combinations of imagery – and they made Tiffany an international sensation. One critic wrote in 1878 that the artists’ study of “Japanese forms and styles … has led not to imitation of those models, but to adaptations that have resulted in the creation of a new order of production.”
Legacy
Moore’s legacy of creativity and innovation endured well beyond his death in 1891, as exemplified by the famed Magnolia Vase. Toward the end of his life, he was deeply engaged in planning for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. One of his last designs would be the centrepiece of the Tiffany & Co. exhibit, a grand vase embellished with exquisitely rendered enamelled magnolia blossoms.
A newspaper account heralding the vase and Moore’s role in its design reported, “It is a triumph of the goldsmith’s art to have overcome the difficulty of representing a dull surface by means of enamel.” Moore had long been passionate about perfecting and advancing the art of enamelling, experimenting especially with ways to achieve naturalistic effects with matte enamels. After much trial and error, his staff succeeded in replicating the velvety texture of magnolia petals through the controlled use of fluoric acid fumes. In a remarkable technical feat, they managed to adhere the enamels to an undulating, convex metal surface, while enlivening the design with subtle tonal shifts in the blossoms. Guided by Moore’s protégé and successor John Curran, more than fifteen different craftspeople, including lead enamelist Godfrey Swamby, worked for nearly two years to create a tour de force that fulfilled Moore’s ambitious vision.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Roman Fragments of ancient glass Late 1st century BCE – early 1st century CE
In addition to collecting intact glass vessels, Moore acquired 410 fragments of ancient glass. These fifteen pieces from cast mosaic bowls display a delightful variety of colours, shapes, and techniques. Moore recognised the differences, though he was more likely enticed by the bright patterns and diverse hues than by their technical features. While many of the pieces are small, almost all were repolished to bring out the vibrant colours and motifs.
Glass mosaic ribbed bowl fragment Period: Early Imperial Late 1st century BCE – early 1st century CE Culture: Roman Glass; cast and tooled 1 15/16 x 1 3/16 in. (4.9 x 3cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Body fragment. Translucent cobalt blue, purple, and opaque white. Convex curving side tapering downward. Marbled mosaic pattern formed from sections of a single cane in blue ground with irregular white and purple threads and streaks; on exterior, vertical rib, tapering and becoming deeper with rounded outer edge. Polished exterior and edge along rib; pitting of surface bubbles on interior; pitting and dulling on interior; some weathering on jagged edges.
Glass mosaic ribbed bowl fragment Period: Early Imperial Late 1st century BCE – early 1st century CE Culture: Roman Glass; cast and tooled 2 3/8 x 1 7/16 in. (6.1 x 3.7cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Credit Line: Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Body fragment. Translucent honey brown, cobalt blue, and opaque white. Slightly outsplayed neck; straight side tapering downward and curving in at bottom. Ribbon mosaic pattern formed from sections of a single cane in brown ground with irregular wavy white and blue threads in parallel lines; on exterior, two broad vertical ribs, fairly widely spaced, with flattened tops and rounded outer edges. Polished interior; pitting of surface bubbles on interior; dulling and patches of creamy iridescent weathering on exterior; some weathering and chipping of jagged edges.
Glass striped mosaic bowl fragment Period: Early Imperial Late 1st century BCE – early 1st century CE Culture: Roman Glass; cast 1 9/16 x 1 1/4 in. (4 x 3.2cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Rim fragment. Translucent blue, turquoise blue, purple appearing opaque brick red, yellow, and white, with colourless glass. Applied coil rim with rounded, vertical lip; slightly convex side, curving inward at bottom. Rim in blue with white spiral thread; body decorated with bands slanting slightly from top right to bottom left, forming a pattern: yellow, colourless, yellow, blue with single spiral white thread, blue layered with white, blue, red, yellow, red, blue, blue layered with white, colourless with double spiral yellow threads, turquoise, colourless, and turquoise. Pinprick bubbles; exterior polished, with pitting of surface bubbles; creamy weathering on interior and some iridescent weathering on edges.
Glass mosaic ribbed bowl fragment Period: Early Imperial Late 1st century BCE – early 1st century CE Culture: Roman Glass; cast and tooled 1 11/16 x 2 3/16 in. (4.2 x 5.5cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Body fragment. Translucent cobalt blue, purple, and opaque white. Slightly outsplayed neck; deep, slightly convex curving side, tapering downward. Composite mosaic pattern formed from polygonal sections of a single cane in a blue ground with a circle of white rods around a white circle surrounding a purple ground with a central white rod; on exterior, two broad vertical ribs, fairly widely spaced, with flattened tops and rounded outer edges, tapering downward. Polished interior; pitting of surface bubbles and iridescent weathering in one chip on interior; dulling and iridescent weathering on exterior and jagged edges.
Glass network mosaic fragment Period: Early Imperial late 1st century BCE – early 1st century CE Culture: Roman Glass; cast 15/16 x 1 1/16 in. (2.4 x 2.7cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Rim fragment. Translucent blue, opaque yellow, and colourless. Applied coil rim with vertical rounded lip; slightly tapering side. Rim in blue with white spiral thread; body decorated with ten colourless vertical narrow canes, decorated with double spiral yellow threads. Pinprick bubbles; exterior polished, with slight pitting of surface bubbles; dulling and creamy iridescence weathering on interior; jagged, weathered edges.
Glass ribbed bowl and Glass ribbed bottle 1st century CE Culture: Roman Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Glass ribbed bowl Period: Early Imperial Mid-1st century CE Culture: Roman Glass; blown, trailed, and tooled Height: 2 9/16 in. (6.5cm) Diameter: 3 5/8 in. (9.2cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Translucent deep purple; trail in opaque white. Outsplayed rim, with cracked off and ground lip; short concave neck; broad, globular body curving in to slightly convex and thicker bottom. Thick trail applied on bottom and wound spirally eleven times up side to neck, ending in a large blob; side tooled into fourteen widely-spaced, vertical ribs. Intact, except for one chip in rim, and short sections of trail on body missing through weathering; pinprick bubbles and one glassy inclusion on interior of bottom; some pitting, dulling, and iridescence, with creamy weathering covering most of trail on exterior, little weathering on interior.
Examples of this type of glass bowl are known from many sites across the Roman Empire. Those found in the eastern provinces are generally in pale, almost colourless, transparent glass, but those found in the West are made in rich, deep colours and usually have an opaque white trail decoration.
The ribs on these blown-glass vessels appear on earlier cast-glass versions and were likely added for decorative effect. Ribbed bowls and bottles reveal how shapes and styles of blown glass quickly spread throughout the Roman Empire in the first century CE, as a result of the invention of blowing and demand for glass vessels. The bowl is typical of examples found in Italy and the western provinces, while the rarer bottle has parallels from Cyprus.
Glass ribbed bottle Period: Early Imperial 1st century CE Culture: Roman Glass; blown and tooled Height: 3 1/2 in. (8.9cm) Diameter: 3 1/4 in. (8.3cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Translucent blue. Everted rim, folded over and in; cylindrical neck, expanding downwards; pushed-in shoulder; squat, globular body; thick, slightly concave bottom. Twelve, regularly-spaced vertical ribs extending from rim down neck and body, ending above bottom, and forming projecting solid fins on side of body. Intact; pinprick bubbles; pitting, dulling, iridescence, and patches of limy encrustation and brownish weathering.
Glass perfume bottle Period: Early Imperial 1st century CE Culture: Roman Glass; blown Height: 4 1/4 in. (10.8cm) Diameter: 2 1/2 in. (6.4cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Translucent purple. Thin, everted rim; slender cylindrical neck, with slightly bulging profile and tooled indent around base; horizontal shoulder, with rounded edge; carinated body, with side to long, upper body tapering downward and lower side curving in sharply; concave bottom. Body intact, but half of rim missing, with weathered edges; some bubbles; severe pitting and brilliant iridescence.
The free-blowing technique developed by the Romans made glass bottles relatively simple and quick to produce. Moore collected some unusual examples of this common type. The brightly striped container, made by fusing together slices of various colours before the bottle was shaped by blowing, resembles cast mosaic glass. The dark iridescent vessel imitates the shape of expensive cast bottles that incorporated gold leaf.
Glass garland bowl Period: Early Imperial, Augustan Late 1st century BCE Culture: Roman Glass; cast and cut Height: 1 13/16 in. (4.6cm) Diameter: 7 1/8 in. (18.1cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Colourless, translucent purple, translucent honey yellow, translucent cobalt blue, opaque yellow, and opaque white. Vertical, angular rim; convex curving side, tapering downwards; base ring and concave bottom.
Four large segments of colourless, purple, yellow, and blue, and applied to the interior of the bowl at the centre of each segment a hanging garland, comprising an inverted V-shaped white string above a U-shaped swag made up of a mosaic pattern formed from polgonal or circular sections of four different composite canes: one in a yellow ground with a white spiral, a second in a purple ground with yellow rods, the third in a colourless ground with white lines radiating from a central yellow rod, and the fourth in a blue ground a white spiral. The four different canes are arranged in pairs side by side but the order in which they are placed differs in each swag. On interior, a single narrow horizontal groove below rim.
Intact, except for one small chip in rim; pinprick and larger bubbles; dulling, pitting of surface bubbles, faint iridescence on interior, and creamy iridescent weathering on exterior.
This cast glass bowl is a tour-de-force of ancient glass production. It comprises four separate slices of translucent glass – purple, yellow, blue, and colourless – of roughly equal size that were pressed together in an open casting mold. Each segment was then decorated with an added strip of millefiori glass representing a garland hanging from an opaque white cord. Very few vessels made of large sections or bands of differently coloured glass are known from antiquity, and this bowl is the only example that combines the technique with millefiori decoration. As such it represents the peak of the glass worker’s skill at producing cast vessels.
With its exceptional workmanship and design, this cast bowl is the most important ancient glass vessel in Moore’s collection. Few vessels with large sections of coloured glass survive from antiquity, and this is the only intact example that combines the technique with mosaic-inlay decoration. Four separate pieces of translucent glass – purple, yellow, blue, and colourless – of roughly equal size were pressed together in an open casting mold. Each segment was then embellished with mosaic glass representing a garland hanging from a white cord. Glass canes (rods) of four different colour combinations arranged in pairs form the individual swags. Bowls decorated with garlands have been found in Italy, Cyprus, and Egypt.
Situla Early 16th century Culture: Italian, Venice (Murano) Glass, enamelled and gilt Dimensions: confirmed, glass bowl only: 3 13/16 × 8 × 8 in. (9.7 × 20.3 × 20.3cm) Confirmed, as mounted, handle raised: 10 5/16 × 8 3/4 × 8 in. (26.2 × 22.2 × 20.3cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Influenced by Islamic craftsmen, Venetian glassblowers began making gilt and enamelled vessels as early as the fifteenth century. The decorative scales on this situla resulted from a multi-step process, which entailed reheating the piece a second time after the vessel was blown. The crudely finished handle is most likely not original.
Moore collected several examples of colourful enamelled glass from both the Islamic and Venetian worlds, seeking decorative inspiration for his silver production. Influenced by craftspeople from Islamic lands, Venetian glassblowers started making gilt and enamelled vessels as early as the fifteenth century. The decoration on this situla is the result of a multistep process, which entailed reheating the piece a second time in the furnace. The crudely finished handle is most likely not original.
Footed vase (Vasenpokal) c. 1570-1590 Culture: Austrian, Innsbruck Glass; blown, applied mold-blown, impressed, and milled decoration, engraved, cold-painted, and gilded 12 3/4 × 8 1/2 in. (32.4 × 21.6cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
This vase is ambitiously ornamented in the Venetian style with engraved decoration and gold, red, and green cold painting. It also shows key characteristics of pieces from the glassworks that served the Innsbruck court in the late sixteenth century. Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria secured skilled glassworkers and raw materials from Venice, famed for its thin and clear glass known as cristallo. Glass was valued for the technical artistry that transformed humble sand, soda ash, and lime into a nearly weightless, translucent object precious enough to be adorned with gold.
Glassware made outside of Venice but in the same style is known as façon de Venise. This incredibly ambitious Austrian example of a footed vase with engraved decoration and gold, red, and green cold-painting likely came from the Innsbruck court glasshouse of Archduke Ferdinand II. At the time Moore purchased this piece, it had several missing pieces and cracks, which are now restored. The cold-painting is extremely well preserved considering the inherently fragile nature of the technique.
Tankard 1716 Culture: probably South German Glass; blown, applied and marvered decoration; pewter mount 7 9/16 × 5 1/2 × 4 5/8 in. (19.2 × 14 × 11.7cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
The shape of this tankard, with its bulbous bottom and flared foot, is typical of German pewter and stoneware vessels. The lid features a crudely engraved symbol of what appears to be carpenter’s tools, suggesting that the piece served as a guild vessel, possibly for a carpenters’ association. Its charm derives from the striking contrast between the rough-hewn pewter mounts and the calligraphic trails of white glass decorating the transparent purple glass body.
Beaker Mid-19th century Culture: Italian, Venice (Murano) 3 3/8 × 2 5/8 in. (8.6 × 6.7cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
One of the great Venetian innovations in glassblowing is filigrana. Drawn-out canes of colourless, white, and coloured glass were fused together to create the patterned structure of the vessel. Moore had several examples in his collection. This small beaker of more complex canes with multiple spiralling threads, referred to as filigrana a retorti, was made in Venice.
Tray Stand Mid-14th century (after 1342) Attributed to Egypt or Syria Brass; hammered, turned, and chased, inlaid with silver, copper, and black compound Height: 10 1/4 in. (26 cm) Diameter: 9 5/8 in. (24.4 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Similar stands were widely employed in the Mamluk period to host large rounded metal trays, on which fruits and other food were displayed.
The cup motif inlaid with copper stands out among the richly decoration of this tray. It was a blazon of the cupbearer, one of the differentiated offices of the court of the Mamluk sultans. The inscription reads Husain, son of Qawsun, who was cupbearer to Muhammad b. Qalawun (al-Malik al-Nasir) (1294-1340/41). Despite having been ousted after the sultan’s death, Qawsun’s prestige must have endured, as his sons continued to use his emblem of the ringed cup set within a divided shield.
This work consists of two truncated cones soldered together with a central ring and a flared foot and rim. It belongs to a group of medieval inlaid brass works from the Islamic world that are commonly identified as tray stands, and which supported circular metal platters that displayed and served food. French collectors introduced treasures like this one to the art market in Paris beginning in the 1860-1870s. Moore was likely drawn to them for the visual effects of the inlaid mixed metalwork.
Tray Stand (detail) Mid-14th century (after 1342) Brass; hammered, turned, and chased, inlaid with silver, copper, and black compound Height: 10 1/4 in. (26 cm) Diameter: 9 5/8 in. (24.4 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
‘Umar ibn al-Hajji Jaldak (maker) Ewer with Inscription, Horsemen, and Vegetal Decoration Dated 623 AH/1226 CE Brass; inlaid with silver and black compound Height: 14 1/2 in. (36.8 cm) Width: 12 1/16 in. (30.6 cm) Diameter: 8 3/8 in. (21.3 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
This lavishly decorated object is inscribed around the neck: “Made by ‘Umar ibn al-Hajji Jaldak, the apprentice of Ahmad al-Dhaki al-Naqqash al-Mawsili in the year 623 [1226 A.D.].” Ahmad al-Mawsili, originally from Mosul in Upper Mesopotamia, was a famous metalworker who had a number of pupils.
Moore was particularly interested in lavish works made by mixing and inlaying metals, techniques that artists in the Middle East had developed to a high art centuries earlier for the upper echelons of society. Blending complex geometric and vegetal compositions with fine calligraphy or expressive imagery, they created polychromatic effects comparable to those achieved in painting. The objects here hail from three different Islamic regions around 1100-1400, when the art form flourished.
The ewer is among the earliest dated examples of a prominent school of inlaid metalwork known as “al-Mawsili” (from Mosul) that thrived during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, first in Mosul and later in centres such as Cairo and Damascus. Their work often features thin foils of precious metals inlaid on a gleaming brass body. This example includes detailed scenes of the courtly activities of an ideal ruler and interlacing medallions.
‘Umar ibn al-Hajji Jaldak (maker) Ewer with Inscription, Horsemen, and Vegetal Decoration (detail) Dated 623 AH/1226 CE Brass; inlaid with silver and black compound Height: 14 1/2 in. (36.8 cm) Width: 12 1/16 in. (30.6 cm) Diameter: 8 3/8 in. (21.3 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Inscribed Pen Box Made in early – late 14th century; altered shortly before mid-15th century Probably originally from Northern Iraq or Western Iran. Attributed to Afghanistan, probably Herat Brass; engraved and inlaid with silver, gold, and black compound Length: 11 1/2 in. (29.2cm) Height: 2 3/8 in. (6cm) Width: 2 1/2 in. (6.4cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Luxurious writing tools inlaid with precious metals reflected the literary culture of the upper classes from Cairo to Herat, including a respect for the transmission of knowledge. This pen box with its combination of techniques – filigree in relief on the lid and classical inlay on the body – made a fitting acquisition for a collector with a passion for inlaid metal.
This brass pen box was made in the late fourteenth century but significantly altered by the mid-fifteenth century. The interior decoration of a small-scale pattern of roundels with flying birds and running motifs provides a glimpse into the original decoration of the box. After the exterior surface was burnished to remove this original decoration, new patterns, including a series of interlocking medallions and cartouches and incised lotus blossoms, were set against a cross-hatched background. The inkwell and surrounding insert were added at a yet later date. The inscriptions in thuluth and naskh scripts include poetic verses and good wishes to the owner.
Inscribed Pen Box Made in early – late 14th century; altered shortly before mid-15th century Probably originally from Northern Iraq or Western Iran. Attributed to Afghanistan, probably Herat Brass; engraved and inlaid with silver, gold, and black compound Length: 11 1/2 in. (29.2cm) Height: 2 3/8 in. (6cm) Width: 2 1/2 in. (6.4cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Plate with Vegetal Decoration in a Seven-pointed Star c. 1655-1680 Made in Iran, Kirman Stonepaste; polychrome-painted under transparent glaze H. 2 1/2 in. (6.4 cm) Diam. 18 1/4 in. (46.4cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Moore collected ceramics from Iran, which during the 1870s and 1880s were shipped in great quantities to London, as well as a few pieces from the Ottoman lands (Iznik), Egypt, Syria, and Spain. The large platter from seventeenth-century Kirman, Iran, combines a central star with densely applied Chinese-inspired motifs and colours, features that Moore favoured and incorporated into his own designs.
Dish c. 1500 Spanish, Valencia Tin-glazed and luster-painted earthenware Irregular diameter: 3 1/8 × 18 7/8 in. (7.9 × 47.9cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Moore clearly appreciated lusterware, with its distinctive shiny metallic surfaces. He owned a number of pieces; this dish and other examples from Spain are among the first works he collected. Braseros typically feature radial designs filled with dense patterns, and often present a heraldic emblem – here, a rising eagle, symbol of power and royalty across the Mediterranean.
Tin-glazed earthenware, of which lusterware is one type, was developed in the Middle East in the ninth and tenth centuries to imitate the porcelains produced in China. The opaque white glaze concealed the clay body, which could range from pale buff to brick red, allowing for brilliant effects created by painting the white surface with metal oxides that fired to a range of colours. This technique, as well as the use of metallic luster – an iridescent, coppery painted glaze – spread throughout the Muslim world, arriving among the potters of Valencia in the thirteenth century. The so-called Hispano-Moresque lusterware, with its fusion of Islamic and Gothic styles and motifs, often in shaped imitating those of metal vessels, was treasured by the elite in Spain during the fifteenth century and exported to the courts of Europe. The Valencian industry declined in the late sixteenth century, as colourful Italian Renaissance maiolica gained in popularity among the fashionable and as Spanish centres were founded to produce versions of its pictorial forms. Adding to this decline was the expulsion from Valencia in 1609 of all the remaining Moriscos (Muslims converted to Christianity), though Christian potters reestablished the industry shortly thereafter.
On the front of the dish, Manises lusterware braseros were decorated with radial designs and filled with dense, regularised vegetal motifs and other patterns, all organised around a central device. On the back, they were also luster-painted, usually with larger-scale designs and often with more exuberance. Puncture holes in the rims indicate that such dishes were sometimes displayed on walls when not in use.
Footed Bowl with Eagle Emblem Mid-13th century Attributed to probably Syria Glass; dip-moulded, blown, enamelled, and gilded Height: 7 3/16 in. (18.3cm) Maximum Diameter: 8 in. (20.3cm) Diameter of Base: 5 in. (12.7cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Along with gilded examples, the most treasured glass objects in the Islamic world were enamelled ones. Developed during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Syria and Egypt under the Ayyubids and Mamluks, they were rediscovered in the 1800s and copied extensively by Western manufactories. When Moore was collecting, this vessel was already celebrated among collectors, dealers, and artists. It was displayed at the 1867 Paris Exposition together with a glass copy by renowned French glassmaker Philippe Joseph Brocard. Moore acquired it from a leading French collector and scholar of Islamic glass, Charles Schefer. After it entered The Met, the bowl was lauded as “the gem of the collection” and “the most beautiful as well as valuable” example of enamelled glass.
Vessels of this characteristic shape, a rounded bowl with a pronounced, tall foot, were sometimes called tazze and were thought to evoke Christian chalices. They became popular in the Islamic eastern Mediterranean during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a period of active exchange between the Islamic and Christian worlds. This piece is among the earliest known examples of enamelled glass. Its ornament and iconography is part of the “courtly cycle” referring to the lifestyle of the rulers and elites of medieval Islamic societies from Egypt to Anatolia.
The design features four circular medallions with a bird of prey. While no particular ruler or officer can be associated with the emblem, such birds of prey were common symbols of power, kingship, and to a certain extent, protection in both Muslim and Christian contexts. Flanking the inscription band and on the foot, rows of dogs chasing hares evoke the hunt, while a frieze of seated musicians and feasting figures replaces part of the inscription. Both the hunt and the feast pertain to the courtly cycle and evoke ideals of kingship.
Footed Bowl with Eagle Emblem (detail) Mid-13th century Attributed to probably Syria Glass; dip-moulded, blown, enamelled, and gilded Height: 7 3/16 in. (18.3cm) Maximum Diameter: 8 in. (20.3cm) Diameter of Base: 5 in. (12.7cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Mosque Lamp 14th century Probably from Egypt (Cairo) or Syria Glass; blown, enamelled, and gilded Height: 12 1/2 in. (31.8cm) Maximum Diameter: 8 13/16 in. (22.4cm) Diameter with handles: 9 1/8 in. (23.2 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Enamelled and gilded glass objects from Syria and Egypt are among the most sophisticated crafts created during the Middle Ages. This example has a characteristic shape that was used for portable lamps from Iran to Egypt. During Mamluk rule, enamelled “mosque lamps” were commissioned for many mosques, madrasas (public schools), tombs, and other buildings in the capital city of Cairo. In the nineteenth century, French individuals established in Cairo introduced treasures like these to the European market. Moore was likely intrigued by the lamp’s colours, sheen, and detailed ornamentation.
One of the conventions of Mamluk mosque lamp decoration was to execute one inscription band in blue and the other in reserve against a blue ground. On this lamp, the neck and foot repeat the phrase al‑’alim (“The Wise”), punctuated by an as yet unassigned emblem, while the body bears a formulaic dedicatory inscription but no name.
Swan-Neck Bottle (Ashkdan) Probably 19th century Attributed to Iran Glass; mold-blown, tooled Height: 15 1/8 in. (38.4 cm) Maximum Diameter: 4 7/16 in. (11.2cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
During Moore’s lifetime, European and American collectors were particularly drawn to glass made fairly recently in Iran or by the Ottomans at Beykoz in Istanbul. Moore and other collectors purchased many of these readily available and affordable wares and donated them to European and American museums. Moore’s eagerness to explore new shapes is evident in his later glass holdings. He often collected multiple examples of the same type, such as rosewater sprinklers, in different shapes and colours. Many were available for study at his Prince Street manufactory and a few directly inspired his designs.
The variety of forms and colours featured in this selection show the eclectic approach of Iranian glassmakers and their tendency to look both locally and globally for inspiration. The Qajar vessels’ shapes either follow Iranian metal and ceramic models or echo Venetian glass. For instance, the swan-neck bottle mimics Venetian glass, while the gulabpash and the ewer likely inherited their forms from long-standing design traditions in different media.
Two Rosewater Sprinklers Late 18th – 19th century Probably from Turkey, Beykoz, Istanbul Glass; blown Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Rosewater Sprinkler Late 18th – 19th century Probably from Turkey, Beykoz, Istanbul Glass; blown Height: 8 3/4 in. (22.2cm) Width: 3 3/8 in. (8.5cm) Diameter: 2 3/8 in. (6cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
This bottle is typical of the objects that were displayed in open niches in reception rooms of Ottoman-period upper-class Syrian homes.
During Moore’s lifetime, European and American collectors were particularly drawn to glass made fairly recently in Iran or by the Ottomans at Beykoz in Istanbul. Moore and other collectors purchased many of these readily available and affordable wares and donated them to European and American museums. Moore’s eagerness to explore new shapes is evident in his later glass holdings. He often collected multiple examples of the same type, such as rosewater sprinklers, in different shapes and colours. Many were available for study at his Prince Street manufactory and a few directly inspired his designs.
These two marbled Ottoman sprinklers reveal Moore’s keen eye for nuances in glassmaking techniques and patterns. In one, a mixture of red and brown opaque glass served as the base material, and the spiral marbling was created as the body was blown and turned into its distinctive onion-like form with cylindrical neck. In the other, a hot gather of greenish iridescent glass was rolled in crushed red glass and then blown into the final shape. This led to the patchy marbled pattern on the body that develops into alternating lines on the elongated neck.
Rosewater Sprinkler Late 18th – 19th century Probably from Turkey, Beykoz, Istanbul Glass; blown Height: 7 3/16 in. (18.2cm) Maximum Diameter: in. 2 13/16in. (7.2cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Jar 14th century Attributed to Syria Stonepaste; polychrome-painted under transparent glaze Height: 13 1/4 in. (33.7cm) Maximum Diameter: 9 1/4 in. (23.5cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
This pear-shaped jar is characteristic of medieval ceramics from the eastern Mediterranean. The body is dominated by a cursive inscription wishing “Lasting glory, abundant power, and good fortune.” Messages on utilitarian vessels were intended to protect the owner as well as the contents. The blue-and-white colour palette derives from Chinese porcelain, which Mamluk rulers in Egypt and Syria collected for use during festive and ceremonial occasions or for diplomatic gifts. This jar thus reflects the taste of the elite, adjusted for a broader middle-class market.
Underglaze painting in blue and black on a white stonepaste body is characteristic of Mamluk production in Syria. The main decoration on this jar is the large inscription in thuluth: “Lasting glory, increasing prosperity, and good fortune.”
Vase in the Form of a Double Gourd Second half of the 17th century Attributed to Iran Stonepaste; painted under transparent glaze Height: 5 1/2 in. (14cm) Diameter: 2 3/4 in. (7cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
In the seventeenth century, as the Ming dynasty declined in China, Iranian potters in Kirman and Nishapur increased the production of blue-and-white stonepaste ceramics for domestic use and export. Some of these wares closely follow Chinese prototypes, while others, such as this small gourd-shaped vase, show ideas developed by Chinese potters used as a catalyst for distinctive creations. One side of the vase depicts a sketchily drawn walking crane in a Chinese style, while on the other side decorative rock forms, vegetation, and other floating elements follow Iranian tradition. The result resonates with Moore’s diverse collecting interests and the hybrid designs they inspired.
Bottle Late 17th century Made in Iran Stonepaste; luster-painted on opaque blue glaze, with silver fitting Height: 11 in. (27.9cm) Maximum Diameter: 6 1/2 in. (16.5cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
An invention of the Islamic world, lusterware ceramics have distinctive shiny metallic surfaces that particularly appealed to Moore. An early inventory of the Moore collection suggests that the bottle may have been acquired from the Castellani Collection, evidence of Moore’s engagement with networks of European collectors. To compensate for breakage, a silver mount and lid with embossed decoration and niello were added to this piece at some point. While decorated in an “Islamic” style, the mount was most likely made in the West, in either Europe or North America.
Very few pieces of Iranian lusterware survive from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but this technique was revived in the seventeenth century. During this period, lusterware was produced in a relatively limited range of shapes, including elegant bottles, such as the one here, as well as dishes, bowls, cups, ewers and sand-shakers. This bottle may have been used for wine, and has a molded, pear-shaped body with a long neck, and is covered with a silver fitting and sealed with a silver top.
Bottle Late 17th century Attributed to Iran Stonepaste; luster-painted on yellow glaze ground with cobalt blue glaze Height: 15 in. (38.1cm) Maximum Diameter: 5 1/4 in. (13.3cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
This colourful lusterware bottle in yellow, ruby, and blue tones depicts myriad motifs, such as trees, flowering plants growing out of a grassy ground, birds, and lush vegetation with sinuous vines, poppy flowers, and a large iris. The combination of colours, sheen, and dense decoration aligns with Moore’s design sensibilities.
Edo period (1615-1868) Inrō with Stylised Flower Patterns in Interconnected Roundels 18th century Culture: Japan Inrō; four cases; lacquered wood with gold, silver, yellow, and red togidashimaki-e, mother-of-pearl inlay on black lacquer ground; ojime: malachite bead; netsuke: openwork (ryūsa); ivory Height: 2 7/8 in. (7.3cm) Width: 2 1/16 in. (5.2cm) Depth: 7/8 in. (2.2cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
The rare, early example in tortoiseshell was made at the beginning of the Edo period, when inrō were first developed.
Edo period (1615-1868) Inrō with Shells and Seaweeds amid Rocks and Waves 17th-18th century Culture: Japan Inrō; four cases; lacquered wood, gold and silver takamaki-e, hiramaki-e, togidashimaki-e, cutout gold foil application, silver inlay on gold ground; metal cord runners; ojime: copper with mixed-metal inlay and gilded details; netsuke: carved ivory Height: 3 1/16 in. (7.8cm) Width: 2 1/2 in. (6.3cm) Depth: 1 in. (2.5cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Meiji period (1868-1912) Inrō with Lotus and Crab (obverse); Lotus and Tadpole (reverse) Second half 19th century Culture: Japan Inrō; four cases; wood with gold and silver takamaki-e, hiramaki-e, lead, mixed-metal inlay; ojime: tadpoles in a stream; copper alloy with mixed-metal inlays; netsuke: turtle in a lotus leaf; carved ivory with gilded copper Height: 3 1/16 in. (7.7cm) Width: 1 15/16 in. (5cm) Depth: 1 in. (2.5cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Edo period (1615-1868) Inrō with Butterflies and Pampas Grass Mid-19th century Culture: Japan Inrō; three cases; lacquered wood with cherry bark, gold and silver hiramaki-e, gold and silver foil application; ojime: semiprecious stone bead; netsuke: Chinese boy (karako) with covered brazier; carved wood with red lacquer Height: 3 3/16 in. (8.1cm) Width: 1 15/16 in. (5cm) Depth: 1 in. (2.5cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Some inrō likely served as inspiration for Tiffany design elements: the butterflies here are similar to those populating a colourful silver tray nearby, while the wisteria pattern could have inspired the silver vase embellished with the same motif.
Meiji period (1868-1912) Sake Bottle (Tokkuri) Mid-19th century Porcelain with overglaze enamel, gold and silver hiramaki-e (Kyoto ware) Height: 6 in. (15.2cm) Diameter: 2 3/4 in. (15.2 × 7cm) Diameter of rim: 7/8 in. (2.2cm) Diameter of base: 2 in. (5.1cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
The small porcelain sake bottle appears to be made of wood covered in lacquer. Its dark brown glaze, mimicking a black lacquer surface, is embellished with a gold and silver “sprinkled picture” (maki-e) bird-and-flower composition. The design may be based on a traditional pattern showing a warbler on a plum tree, an auspicious symbol of the new year that refers to the “First Song of Spring” (Hatsune) chapter of The Tale of Genji. Moore and his team designed a tea and coffee set around 1870-1875, on view nearby, that incorporates a similar composition.
Meiji period (1868-1912) Tea Caddy (Natsume) Second half 19th century Culture: Japan Stoneware with polychrome overglaze enamels and gold Height: 3 in. (7.6cm) Diameter: 3 in. (7.6cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
The surface of the unusual ceramic tea caddy shows fish and crabs behind a fishing net. The net pattern may have been inspired by lacquer tea caddies. Both the technique and the playful design bear resemblances to compositions by Makuzu Kōzan, one of the master potters of the period. Fish, crabs, and lobsters often appear on Moore’s silverwares. Examples include a creamer and sugar bowl designed in 1876 and a rectangular vase made in 1877 – both featuring a scene with fish and seaweed – and a chocolate pot from 1879 decorated with a lobster.
Meiji period (1868-1912) Brush Holder (Fude-zutsu) Early 1870s Culture: Japan Cast iron with relief inlay in silver, gold and shibuichi Height: 6 3/4 in. (17.1cm) Diameter of rim: 3 3/8 in. (8.6cm) Diameter of foot: 4 in. (10.2cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
On the patinated cast-iron surface of this vessel, various metal alloys are inlaid in relief to create effects of light and colour. Moonlight seems to glisten on the web executed in shibuichi (an alloy of roughly three parts copper and one part silver) that fans out over the cylindrical form. A spider, in patinated shibuichi, scurries toward the outer edge of the web, where a dragonfly of inlaid copper alloy and silver with gilt copper eyes is caught on the other side. A Tiffany vase displayed nearby closely replicates this decorative scheme. In response to sociocultural changes in the 1870s, Japanese craftspeople began to produce fine ornamental wares like this one with a focus on the Western market.
Edo period (1615–1868) Buddhist Altar Cloth (Uchishiki) First half 19th century Culture: Japan Twill-weave silk with supplementary weft patterning 28 x 27 in. (71.12 x 68.58cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
The Buddhist altar cloth (uchishiki) serves to cover the tops of tables and altars, especially the one placed in front of the temple’s main icon. This example here is decorated with lotus flowers in a roundel surrounded by large geometric patterns (hakogata) on a dark blue ground. Lotus flowers are revered in Japan for their ability to rise from muddy waters to become beautiful blossoms, and they are commonly associated with purity and the Buddhist achievement of enlightenment.
Edo period (1615–1868) Fragment 18th century Culture: Japan Twill-weave silk with brocading in silk and supplementary weft patterning in silk (karaori) Dimensions: Overall (a): 12 1/4 x 11 1/4 in. (31.1 x 28.6cm) Overall (b): 11 x 9 1/4 in. (27.9 x 23.5cm) Overall (c): 11 x 8 1/4 in. (27.9 x 21cm) Overall (d): 11 1/2 x 2 1/4 in. (29.2 x 5.7cm) Overall (f): 31 x 11 in. (78.7 x 27.9cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
This textile fragment features a pattern with a stylised fence or lattice and moonflowers (yūgao; literally, “evening faces”) of various colours against a white ground. Originally, it may have been part of a Noh theater costume. The moonflower plays a role in chapter 4 of The Tale of Genji, “The Lady of the Evening Faces.” Collecting textile samples as a kind of visual dictionary of motifs and a resource for technical analysis was common among Western collectors in Moore’s era.
Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) Incense Box 14th century Culture: China Carved lacquer Height: 1 1/4 in. (3.2cm) Diameter: 3 3/8 in. (8.6cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
This box exemplifies a sophisticated type of Chinese carved lacquer known as tixi, a term referring to the marbled appearance of its layers. The elegant design and skilful carving distinguish the box as the work of a master, and the signature of the fourteenth-century master Yang Mao is incised on the underside. Moore’s small but carefully selected collection of Chinese lacquer reflects the designer’s refined taste for the art form.
Meiji period (1868-1912) Plate Mid-19th century Culture: Japan Copper Height: 7/8 in. (2.2cm) Diameter: 12 in. (30.5cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
During the Edo and Meiji periods, several Japanese artists experimented with trompe l’oeil effects by simulating the appearance of one material with another. This plate’s copper body is covered with enamels to create a rich, shiny surface recalling the texture of ceramics. The eggplant motif is executed in gold and silver maki-e, a lacquer technique. In addition to its unusual combination of materials, the vessel has a shape that resembles that of a Western plate. A similar inquisitiveness and interest in bringing together East and West can also be found in Moore’s methods.
Edo (1615-1868) or Meiji period (1868-1912) Basketwork Box with Ivy Mid-19th century Culture: Japan Bamboo, and lacquer, with gold and silver hiramaki-e with red lacquer accents Height: 1 1/2 in. (3.8cm) Width: 5 1/2 in. (14cm) Length: 3 7/8 in. (9.8cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
The lid of this document box features fine strips of bamboo covered in lacquer and then decorated with a stylised autumn ivy vine design. A similar ivy motif appears on a silver Tiffany teapot (combined with a dragonfly) made about 1878; an early inventory suggests that Moore may have acquired this box that year at the Paris Exposition. A box like this is also mentioned in discussions of the colours Tiffany aspired to create in the Conglomerate Vase on view nearby.
Edo (1615-1868) or Meiji period (1868-1912) Basketwork Box with Ivy Mid-19th century Culture: Japan Bamboo, and lacquer, with gold and silver hiramaki-e with red lacquer accents Height: 1 1/2 in. (3.8cm) Width: 5 1/2 in. (14cm) Length: 3 7/8 in. (9.8cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Knife Handle (Kozuka) With Lotus Motif (蓮図小柄) 19th century Culture: Japanese Copper, copper-silver alloy (shibuichi), gold Length: 3 7/8 in. (9.8cm) Width: 9/16 in. (1.4cm) Thickness: 1/4 in. (0.6cm); Wt. 1 oz. (28.3 g) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Moore amassed a study collection of nearly 150 Japanese sword fittings along with complete mounts and blades for Tiffany’s designers to consult. A selection of the sword guards (tsuba) and utility knife handles (kozuka) is presented here. Regarded as autonomous works of art, the component parts of Japanese sword mounts were often signed by makers. Embellished with a wide range of decorative techniques, they typically feature representations of the natural world as well as depictions of social customs, scenes from popular stories, and religious symbols. They served as sources of inspiration for many of Tiffany’s Japanesque mixed-metal wares, as seen throughout this gallery.
The upper plate of this kozuka is of copper and carved in high relief, representing lotus, whose leaves and seeds are highlighted in gold. The reverse is of shibuichi, polished, and decorated with file marks (yasurime).
A kozuka is a handle of a by-knife that is part of a sword mounting. It is kept in a slot on the reverse of a katana scabbard, often with a matching kōgai (hairdressing tool).
Minzan (artist) Edo (1615-1868) or Meiji period (1868-1912) Mosquito Smoker (Katori) First half 19th century Culture: Japan Earthenware with white lead glaze and polychrome overglaze enamels (Sanuki ware) Height: 11 1/8 in. (28.3cm) Diameter: 3 in. (7.6cm) Width of base: 4 1/4 in. (7.6cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Mosquito smokers were filled with plant material that was burned and then doused with water to produce insect-repelling smoke. The iris, a symbol of early summer in Japan, also refers to an episode in a famed tenth-century literary work The Tales of Ise. An inscription on the underside indicates that Moore purchased the smoker from his son William, an early dealer of Asian decorative arts.
Makuzu Kōzan I (Miyagawa Toranosuke) (Japanese, 1842-1916) Meiji period (1868–1912) Jar (Mizusashi) 1870-1880s Culture: Japan Stoneware with polychrome overglaze enamels and gold, wood lid, ivory knob (Makuzu ware) Height: 5 5/8 in. (14.3cm) Diameter: 6 1/4 in. (5.9cm) Height (with cover and finial): 7 1/2 in. (19.1cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
A star of the Moore ceramic collection, this freshwater jar features a whimsical composition with a procession of grasshoppers and a few wasps. The grasshoppers, carrying flowers as weapons or insignia, accompany an insect cage that echoes the palanquin of a high-ranking lady in a wedding procession or feudal lord’s procession. Inspired by paintings of the same subject, the theme must have appealed to Moore, who gravitated to anthropomorphic insects and animals. The Makuzu workshop exhibited a wide range of ceramics at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876.
Makuzu Kōzan I (Miyagawa Toranosuke) (Japanese, 1842-1916) Meiji period (1868–1912) Jar (Mizusashi) (detail) 1870-1880s Culture: Japan Stoneware with polychrome overglaze enamels and gold, wood lid, ivory knob (Makuzu ware) Height: 5 5/8 in. (14.3cm) Diameter: 6 1/4 in. (5.9cm) Height (with cover and finial): 7 1/2 in. (19.1cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Meiji period (1868-1912) Vase Second half 19th century Culture: Japan Copper alloy with inlaid silver and gold Height: 11 in. (27.9cm) Width (at handles): 7 1/4 in. (18.4cm) Depth: 6 in. (15.2cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
After their goods began to appear at world’s fairs, metal smiths in Japan must have realised that Westerners appreciated not only their traditional, stylised motifs but also their more naturalistic designs. At the same time, decorative patterns of flowers, plants, birds, and insects proved to suit the Victorian taste. The resulting “hybrid” sensibility of the period is well represented by this vase imitating a bamboo basket, decorated with climbing vines and gourds as well as butterflies with fine inlaid patterns.
Hayakawa Shōkosai I (Japanese, 1815–1897) Meiji period (1868–1912) Karamono-Style Flower Basket (Hanakago) c. 1870s-1880s Culture: Japan Timber bamboo and rattan Height: 19 3/4 in. (50.2cm) Diameter: 16 in. (40.6cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Shōkosai is believed to be the first master basket craftsman to sign his name to his compositions. This would also have verified that his Chinese-inspired (karamono) works were made by a Japanese individual. He concentrated mainly on tea utensils, reflecting the needs of participants in the period’s thriving sencha tea culture. Of the varied bamboo works Moore collected, most were made in the Osaka-Kyoto region around 1870-1890, in the Chinese style, and relate to the sencha tea tradition or ikebana flower arranging.
Meiji period (1868-1912) Flower Basket in the Shape of a Cicada Mid-19th century Culture: Japan Bamboo, rattan Height: 9 3/4 in. (24.8cm) Width: 7 1/2 in. (19.1cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
In Japan, the cicada represents summer. Since, depending on the species, this insect may take as long as seventeen years to develop underground before it emerges as a nymph, it has come to represent concepts such as hope for rebirth and immortality. Displayed on the pillar of the tokonoma (alcove) in the tearoom, this hanging flower basket would recall a cicada on a tree – a summer scene expressing the seasonal setting of the tea gathering.
Qing dynasty (1644-1911), Qianlong mark and period (1736-1795) Vase Mid-18th century Culture: China Glass, blown and ground Height: 5 3/4 in. (14.6cm) Diameter: 3 in. (7.6cm) Diameter of foot: 1 3/4 in. (4.4cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
Glass works made in the Qing imperial workshops in Beijing reflect both the royal taste for a substance not local to China and the dynamic technical exchange between that country and Europe. Under the direction of Jesuit missionaries, imperial glass production peaked between 1740 and 1760. The sleek octagonal shape and uniform blue tone of this vase exemplify this short but exciting era of Chinese glass production. This vessel enriched Moore’s extensive glass holdings.
Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Kangxi mark and period (1662–1722) Water coupe Late 17th century Culture: China Porcelain (Jingdezhen ware) Height: 3 1/4 in. (8.3cm) Diameter: 5 in. (12.7cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Edward C. Moore Collection, Bequest of Edward C. Moore, 1891 Public domain
The lush, pinkish-red glaze on this writing desk accessory is known as “peach bloom.” Works decorated in this way are arguably the most cherished type of imperial porcelain from the Kangxi period. In addition to being highly prized in China, peach-bloom porcelain enjoyed popularity among collectors in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its presence in Moore’s collection reflects this collecting trend.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 Phone: 212-535-7710
This exhibition attempts to reconcile the two sides of the work of American photographer Weegee (Arthur Felig, 1899-1968) – “First are his stories for the New York press from 1935-1945. Then, photo-caricatures of public personalities developed during his Hollywood period, between 1948-1951, which he continued to produce for the rest of his life” – by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is a critically coherent investigation into the omnipresence of the spectacle in modern society.
The spectacle is a central notion in the Situationist theory, developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle:
“Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation… The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity”. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord writes, “rather, it is a social relation among people, mediated by images.””1
While both halves of Weegee’s photographic work picture the spectacle, I believe that they are a different but connected order of being. Like yin and yang, Weegee’s scenes of chaos “Murder is my business” and “photo-caricatures” emerge from the same psyche but image equal opposites which both repel, attract and complement each other.
Weegee’s photographs which tell stories for the New York press are external representations or emanations captured from the world around us, whereas his later photo-caricatures of public personalities feel to me to be internalised, dream-like representations of his own feelings towards the celebrity people he observed and photographed as much as they are offer insights into their personality.2 Thus, Weegee’s photographs are an examination of a body (an autopsy) both external and internal.
Personally I don’t think that it is necessary to reconcile both halves of Weegee’s work. The bodies exist for what they are: perceptive insights into the existence and spirit of the world and the human race, spec(tac)ular images that mirror a social relation among people which don’t necessarily have to be conflated one with the other.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Debord, Guy (1994)[1967] The Society of the Spectacle, translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books), p. 4 quoted in “The Society of the Spectacle,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 10/05/2024
2/ “external exaggeration high-lights internal character and distortion offers surprising insights into personality”
“How your TV heroes look to Weegee’s magic camera” in Look magazine
Many thank to the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The curious […], they’re always in a hurry […], but they still find the time to stop and look.
Weegee
“Crime was my oyster,” Weegee wrote in his 1961 memoir, Weegee by Weegee. “I was friend and confidant to them all. The bookies, madams, gamblers, call girls, pimps, con men, burglars and jewel fencers.” … Weegee’s photos from the 1930s and ’40s defined Manhattan as a film noir nightscape of gangsters, bums, slumming swells and tenement dwellers.”
John Strausbaugh. “Crime Was Weegee’s Oyster,” on The New York Times website June 20, 2008 [Online] Cited 13/04/2024
“Weegee is not the first nor the only person to have taken interest in people watching. Not long before him, in 1937, Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed spectators at the Coronation of George VI for Ce Soir. And a quarter century prior, in 1912, Eugène Atget photographed passers-by observing a solar eclipse at Place de la Bastille. But Weegee took the idea even further. He systematised it. He made it a principle he never shied from applying at the first opportunity. It’s a way of placing things at a distance, pushing the viewers to ask themselves about the manner in which they look, making them aware of the fact that they themselves, like the people watching in the photo, are in a voyeuristic position. It’s also a critique of how American society transforms news into spectacle.”
Clément Chéroux
The specular image, then, is accompanied by anxiety-anxiety that it will “soon dissolve like a cloud.” It is the nature of visions (apparitions) to dissolve before our very eyes without disclosing their secrets, just as dream-images are quickly forgotten upon awakening.
Craig Owens. “Posing,” in Difference: On Representation and Sexuality. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985, p. 12
There’s still a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer’s career seems to be split in two. First are his stories for the New York press from 1935-1945. Then, photo-caricatures of public personalities developed during his Hollywood period, between 1948-1951, which he continued to produce for the rest of his life. How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. This project seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent.
The spectacle is omnipresent in Weegee’s work. In the first part of his career, coinciding with the rise of the tabloid press, he was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators or other photographers in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked the Hollywood spectacular, its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds, and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle.
Curator Clément Chéroux
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at left, Self-Portrait, Weegee with Speed Graphic Camera (1950, above); at second left, “Chevrolet”. Weegee in front of his typewriter, installed in the trunk of a 1938 Chevrolet, New York (c. 1943, below); at third left bottom, Weegee covering the morning line-up at police headquarters, New York(c. 1939, below); at fourth left, Self-portrait (1950,below); at fifth left, Frank Pape, Arrested for Homicide (1944, below); at sixth left, Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces (1942, below); and at eighth left, Man Arrested for Cross-Dressing, New York (Gay Deceiver) (1939, below)
Weegee Himself: “I have always been a doer and not a thinker.” Weegee enjoyed putting himself in front of the camera, re-enacting circumstances he was confronted with in his daily work. In the name of pedagogy, and probably a little out of narcissism and self-advertisement, he took pictures of himself writing captions for his photographs in the back of his car, in police wagons and behind bars, never without his camera.
Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, was a New York city freelance news photographer from the 1930s to the 1950s. Here he talks about his career and gives advice to those wanting to become news photographers.
Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at second left, Weegee’s Man Arrested for Cross-Dressing, New York (Gay Deceiver) (1939, above); and at top right, a magazine print of his photograph Untitled [Young man smoking cigarette in crashed car while waiting for ambulance, New York] (1941, below)
Off Road: “Sudden death for one… sudden shock for the other.” American culture is fascinated by twisted metal. In the 19th century, a railroad company staged public collisions between locomotives destined for the junkyard. Weegee photographed many traffic accidents introducing the “car crash” genre, later adopted by other figures, such as Andy Warhol, J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, etc.
Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at right, Weegee’s photograph Henry Rosen (left) and Harvey Stemmer (centre) cover their faces with handkerchiefs after their arrest for bribery and conspiracy to fix a US college basketball match (25 January 1945)
There’s a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer’s career seems to be split in two. One side includes his sensational photography printed in North American tabloids: corpses of gangsters lying in pools of their own blood, bodies trapped in battered vehicles, kingpins looking sinister behind the bars of prison wagons, dilapidated slums consumed by fire, and other harrowing documents on the lives of the underprivileged in New York from 1935 to 1945. Then come the festive photographs – glamorous parties, performances by entertainers, jubilant crowds, openings and premieres – to which we must add a vast array of portraits of public figures that Weegee delighted in distorting using a rich palette of tricks between 1948 and 1951, a practice he pursued until the end of his life.
How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. The exhibition Autopsy of the Spectacle seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent.
The spectacle is omnipresent in Weegee’s work. In the first part of his career, which coincides with the rise of the tabloid press, he was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators, or other photographers, in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked the Hollywood spectacular: its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle.
With a new perspective on Weegee’s oeuvre, Autopsy of the Spectacle presents the photographer’s iconic images beside lesser-known works, including images not-yet-exhibited in France.
Biography
Weegee was born Usher Fellig on June 12, 1899, to a Jewish family in Zolochiv, a small town in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today in western Ukraine. At 11 years old, he joined his father who’d emigrated to the United States. At the immigration station Ellis Island, he became Arthur Fellig. Living in the slums of the Lower East Side, he left school at 14 to earn money to support his family. After working in different professions, he became a traveling photographer, worked for photographers Duckett & Adler, then in the lab of ACME Newspictures agency.
Starting in 1935, he was self-employed as photo-reporter. Towards 1937, he began using the pseudonym Weegee, and around 1941, started marking the backs of his prints with a stamp in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy: “Weegee the Famous.” For 10 years, connected to Police radio, he took photographs, mainly at night, of crime, arrests, fires, accidents and other news items. Though the photographer most certainly had connections within the Police, without whom his work would not have been possible, he also frequented left-wing circles. He was very close to the Photo League, a group of independent photographers who firmly believed in emancipation through the image and fought for social justice. In 1945, he published his best photographs in a book entitled Naked City, which met with great success both in its reception and sales.
In the spring of 1948, he moved to Hollywood to work in cinema as a technical advisor, sometimes as an actor. He photographed the endless party and developed different photographic techniques used to create his caricatures of celebrities. In December of 1951, after four years on the West Coast, he returned to New York with no intention of resuming his former practice. Up until his death on December 26, 1968, the majority of his work involved taking advantage of his notoriety to publish other books, go on tour, and promote his photo-caricatures in newspapers.
Text from the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson website
Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at left, Performer Jimmy Armstrong (c. 1943, below); at second left, Ladies keep their money in their stockings…(1944, below); and at centre, Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn (1940, below)
“There is no cover charge nor cigarette girl, and a vending machine dispenses cigarettes. Neither is there a hat check girl. Patrons prefer to dance with their hats and coats on. But there is a lively floor show… the only saloon in the Bowery with a cabaret license.”
Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at centre left, Opening night at the Metropolitan Opera (1943); In the Lobby at the Metropolitan Opera, Opening Night (1943); and at centre right, The Critic (1943, below)
Even his most popular photograph was a set-up, says Wallis: “The Critic, which was taken in 1943, was surely staged and shows the wealthy Mrs George Washington Cavanaugh and Lady Decies arriving at the opera, greeted by a staggering drunk who seems to be mocking them and who Weegee reportedly rounded up at Sammy’s bar on the Bowery.
“This picture is a good example of how Weegee previsualized a scene, developed a punchy satirical narrative, and staged the picture. The Critic was widely reproduced at the time, and even shown at the Museum of Modern Art.”
In Weegee’s day similar culture clashes happened at Sammy’s Bowery Follies (267 Bowery, between East Houston and Stanton Streets), which from 1934 to 1970 attracted what The New York Times once described as a mixed crowd of “drunks and swells, drifters and celebrities, the rich and the forgotten.” …
Among the regulars, he wrote in his 1945 book, “Naked City,” was a woman they called Pruneface and a midget who walked the streets dressed as a penguin to promote cigarettes. When the midget got drunk, Weegee wrote, he “offered to fight any man his size in the house.”
Weegee held two book parties there. At the photography center Mr. George showed me silent-film footage taken in 1946 at the party for Weegee’s second book, “Weegee’s People.” Pretty uptown blondes and dowagers in pearls mingle with toothless crones and panhandlers, as models parade in their foundation garments, and a man with a flea circus puts his tiny performers through their paces.
John Strausbaugh. “Crime Was Weegee’s Oyster,” on The New York Times website June 20, 2008 [Online] Cited 13/04/2024
Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing his photographs in magazine layouts
Custom milliners often go to extremes. This spring, the have outdone themselves by creating 1957 version of the most exaggerated hats of the last fifty years. Here again are the flapper cloche, the slouch had Garbo wore in the ’30’s, the heavy veiling of the early 1900’s, the turban of the World War I era, the perennial mad profusion of fruit and flowers. Look had Michael A. Vaccaro photograph examples of these hats as they really are. Then camera artist Weegee turned out satirical prints, with these startling results.
Look magazine 1957
WAIT. Don’t reach for a drink. Don’t reach for your glasses. And don’t – please don’t – write us an indignant letter. What you think you see on these pages is there, all right. It’s the work of a zany photographer named Weegee (few know his first name) who has a wicked sense of caricature and an outrageous sense of humor.
The subjects were not photographed under water. Wedge simply prints his negatives through bubbles glass, wire screens, press, kaleidoscopes or whatever gives him the characterization he is after. It’s a sort of three-way-stretch technique in which Weegee is assisted by photographic color expert Mike Lavelle.
The results of Weegee’s impudent manipulation of reality are both perceptive and astonishing: Faces take on a certain ga-ga verity; external exaggeration high-lights internal character and distortion offers surprising insights into personality. Weegee calls this “Photo-Caricature.” There was a man who might have enjoyed revelations like these. His name was Bobbie Burns and he wrote in one of his poems: “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us.”
“How your TV heroes look to Weegee’s magic camera” in Look magazine
“”Modern Women Aren’t Human!’ … If You Don’t Believe It … This Man Tells Why” in the National Enquirer, 1967
There’s a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer’s career seems to be split in two. One side includes his sensational photography printed in North American tabloids: corpses of gangsters lying in pools of their own blood, bodies trapped in battered vehicles, kingpins looking sinister behind the bars of prison wagons, dilapidated slums consumed by fire, and other harrowing documents on the lives of the underprivileged in New York from 1935 to 1945. Then come the festive photographs – glamorous parties, performances by entertainers, jubilant crowds, openings and premieres – to which we must add a vast array of portraits of public figures that Weegee delighted in distorting using a rich palette of tricks between 1948 and 1951, a practice he pursued until the end of his life. How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. The exhibition Autopsy of the Spectacle seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent.
The spectacle is omnipresent in Weegee’s work. In the first part of his career, which coincides with the rise of the tabloid press, he was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators, or other photographers, in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked the Hollywood spectacular: its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle.
With a new perspective on Weegee’s oeuvre, Autopsy of the Spectacle presents the photographer’s iconic images beside lesser-known works, including images not-yet-exhibited in France.
Curator Clément Chéroux
Press release from the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation
Son of a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, Weegee knew the slums, like those children seeking coolness on the fire escape ladder. He produced “real social documents” on the living conditions of the poor.
“In Central Park the lawns were crowded before darkness with family groups,” reported the July 10, 1936 New York Times; the temperature had reached an astounding 106 degrees the day before. “On the Lower East Side traffic was seriously impeded as small armies of persons emerged from tenement houses with chairs, boxes and even beds which they set up in the streets.”
And from the Times on August 4, 1938, when the mercury hit 93 degrees:
“More than 3,000 persons slept on the sand at Coney Island and Brighton Beach to escape the heat last night, the police estimated. Ten additional patrolmen were assigned to the area to prevent molestation of the sleepers, many of whom brought blankets and sheets.”
At noon Fifth Avenue was crowded. Alfred Klausman, middle-aged office manager of a linen firm, walked across the street from his office to the bank on the corner and drew the weekly pay roll: $649.
As the genial, round-faced Klausman walked back, two men silently threaded through the crowd behind him, two strange, grey-coated creatures washed up from the depths of New York City’s criminal world. One was Anthony Esposito, 35, a long-nosed, horse-faced hoodlum who had been in & out of New York’s prisons and reformatories for 16 years, had once been deported to Italy and sneaked back in. His brother William, 29, had robbed drunks, snatched pocketbooks, done a seven-year stretch in Sing Sing. Their father had served time for forgery. Their brother was in Clinton Prison, Dannemora, N. Y. for parole violation. Their lives had been spent in squalor, petty crime, prison and torpid, hard-eyed loafing.
Klausman entered the elevator to his office. The Esposito brothers stepped in after him. Between the second and third floors they drew revolvers from their overcoat pockets, ordered the operator to stop, face the door. He heard Klausman cry “No! No! No!” – then one of the gunmen put his revolver to Klausman’s head and pulled the trigger.
They ordered the operator to take the elevator down, ducked out into the street, disappeared into B. Altman’s big department store.
Out into the street the operator yelled “Holdup! Murder!” The cry spread. Two patrolmen raced from the corner, into the store, a long way behind.
Down the crowded aisles of the store darted the Espositos, through the block-long building. At the far entrance they climbed into a cab, put a gun at the driver’s head. But Madison Avenue was jammed with traffic; they were trapped. “Get going. Make it fast. Get moving or we’ll kill you.” Back in the store panic was spreading as police with drawn revolvers moved down the aisles shouting, “Get down!” The cab stalled behind a bus. Like men leaping over a cliff, the brothers jumped out into the traffic. At sight of the two running men, waving revolvers, people flattened themselves against the buildings or ducked to the sidewalk. A taxi driver ran to Patrolman Edward Maher, directing traffic on the corner, yelled “Stick-up!” and pointed at the fleeing men. Maher raced after them, only 20 feet behind, afraid to shoot into the crowd. Motorists left their cars and joined the chase. Maher saw a clear space, shot twice, and William Esposito staggered sideways, fell face downward, one arm outstretched, one twisted under him, apparently dead.
A little crowd collected around him. Patrolman Maher held the gunman by the overcoat, started to turn him over, turned to warn the crowd away. “Back up, please,” he said, “someone’s liable to get hurt.” As he rolled William over, the gunman’s .38 came up. William Esposito pulled the trigger and Patrolman Maher slumped over, dead.
The crowd surged back, then forward. A taxi driver named Leonard Weisberg leaped on the prone gunman. He grabbed for the revolver, missed. Esposito jerked it back a few inches, fired again. Weisberg, clutching his throat, gasping for breath, fell to the sidewalk.
Esposito, still lying down, drew another gun from his overcoat pocket. Two men leaped on him. Then the crowd closed in, kicking and beating.
Anthony ran on when his brother fell. Behind him the police fired into the air. He shot a few times, wildly, apparently to clear crowds out of his way on Fifth Avenue. He ducked into Woolworth’s, bowling over the women shoppers. He plunged to the basement, put away his guns, walked up again to hide in the crowd – and met six policemen at the head of the stairs, went down with revolver butts thudding on his skull.
The Espositos went to the hospital, to the lineup, to indictment for murder. Leonard Weisberg, recovering from his throat wound, was promised a new cab of his own, and won a hero’s praise. The Nazi press gleefully played up the crime as evidence of democratic depravity.
Anonymous. “National Affairs: SLAUGHTER ON FIFTH AVENUE,” in TIME Monday, Jan. 27, 1941 on the TIME website [Online] Cited 14/04/2024
Weegee (author)
Textual, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation (editor)
January, 2024 (release)
ISBN 9782845979901
208 pages
55 euros
This book accompanies the exhibition Weegee, Autopsie du Spectacle presented from January 30, 2024 to May 19, 2024 at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation.
There is a Weegee conundrum. His photographs fall into two distinct categories. On the one hand, there are his images of news items taken in New York during the 1940s, in a documentary, direct and raw approach. And on the other, photographs of starlets, politicians and other socialites taken in Hollywood in the following decade, for which he willingly resorted with special effects. Declaring himself “bewitched by the mystery of the murders,” Weegee stood out for his ability to arrive promptly at the crime scene or to wait for the salad baskets to arrive on the steps of the police stations to capture the defendants on the spot. Nevertheless, he strives to bring onlookers, often from the working classes, into his framework, or even to be interested only in them. Made up of around a hundred photographs – the best known, but also many images never highlighted – this book shows the coherence of Weegee’s work based on a radical and incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle, borrowing from an unexpected empathy towards the disadvantaged.
Weegee (1899-1968) was an American photojournalist known for his images of a New York marked by crime. In 1941, New York’s Photo League dedicated an exhibition to him which was followed by that of MoMA in 1943. He published his first book Naked City in 1945 and his autobiography Weegee by Weegee in 1961.
Hardcover
20 x 26cm
Texts by Isabelle Bonnet, David Campany,
Clément Chéroux and Cynthia Young.
Texts in French
Translated from the French by Google Translate from the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson website
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson 79 rue des Archives
75003 Paris
There has been much written about these photographs of crossdressers at Casa Susanna and the issues surrounding them – for example, privacy of the individuals; gender roles in culture; oppression, criminalisation and anti-cross-dressing laws; how they were mainly white and from a higher socio-economic background (1950s stereotypes of white, middle-class womanhood); and celebrity adulation – to name but a few. I will let you read the text below to find out more.
What I will say is that it is a delight to see these intimate snapshot photographs of humans, being who they want to be without prejudice… “the healthy expression of fun and joy.”
“Most guests at Casa Susanna were married, and considered themselves heterosexual men who enjoyed cross-dressing, but many others later identified as transgender and lived out their lives as women, including Virginia Prince and Susanna herself.” (Wikipedia)
“Photography was essential to them,” said Michel Hurst. “Photography was proof that they existed.”
The photograph Large group in the living room with Louise Lawrence (1963, below) shows a large group of crossdressers in a New York apartment. Attached to the photograph is a note: “This is me” with an arrow pointing to a crossdresser in the photo.
I find it poignant that “This is me” possesses a double meaning: being both a photographic representation of the person and also how they would like to be seen as a crossdresser, a declamation of the freedom to express themselves in the light of day … without the fear of being arrested or institutionalised, losing their jobs and being ostracised by their families and communities.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Art Gallery of Ontario for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
For the first time, three photography collections of Casa Susanna will be brought together, including the one from Cindy Sherman, Betsy Wollheim, and the AGO, which acquired the albums previously owned by Swope and Hurst. The show delves deeper into the narratives and ideals of the community’s protagonists, illuminating their radical approach to femininity and the importance of photography in sustaining identity and ideology.
From the mid-1950s until 1969, Susanna Valenti and her wife, Marie, operated two resorts for masculine-to-feminine cross-dressers in upstate New York: the Chevalier d’Eon Bungalows and Casa Susanna. The resorts provided a safe haven for visitors to explore alternative forms of gender expression. Guests spent weekends revelling in the freedom to dress in women’s clothing and accessories – something they could not do in day-to-day life – talking, performing skits, sharing fashion and makeup tips, and photographing one another. The snapshots, taken by the participants themselves, are typically candid and full of camaraderie: groups of friends at parties, enjoying a summer afternoon, celebrating birthdays. But many also feature individuals playing different female roles, including the femme fatale and the matron, highlighting a keen awareness of image, appearance, and gender roles in the culture.
The quiet banality of these scenes belies the violence and ridicule the subjects might have faced in the world at large. At the time, laws in Canada and the U.S. criminalized queer life. In New York, for instance, if an individual wore fewer than three items of clothing of their supposed gender, they could be arrested on charges of “sexual deviancy.” For decades, anti-cross-dressing laws were a flexible tool used by police to enforce normative notions of gender. These laws have now been repealed, human rights laws have been passed, and trans visibility has increased dramatically in recent years.
Anonymous. “Casa Susanna,” on the Contact Photography Festival website, May 2016 [Online] Cited 10/03/2024
“The resort itself is secluded, way off the highway. The guests are never introduced to each other by their real names. Each gives a first name (a girl’s name of course) and that’s all. Discretion is a “must”… But to make things really fool proof, the management of the Resort maintains most cordial and friendly relations with the town’s chief of Police. He protects us!! ~ Susanna Says,” May 1960
“To take TV pictures it isn’t always necessary to stand in front of the camera making believe we are some sort of Rita Hayworth or Elizabeth Taylor… we decided to register on film the healthy expression of fun and joy that pervades a TV gathering… candid camera style… unposed and unexpected…these show the TV as she really looks to others. ~ Susanna Says,” December 1965
“Through these wonderfully intimate shots-perhaps never intended to see the light of day outside the sanctum of the “house”-Susanna and her gorgeous friends styled era-specific fashion shows and dress-up Christmas and tea parties. As gloriously primped as these documentary snaps are, it is in the more private and intimate life at Casa Susanna, where the girls sweep the front porch, cook, knit, play Scrabble, relax at the nearby lake and, of course, dress for the occasion, that the stunning insight to a very private club becomes nothing less than brilliant and awe inspiring in its pre-glam, pre-drag-pose ordinariness and nascent preening and posturing in new identities. It is not glamour for the stage but for each other, like other women who dress up to spend time with friends, flaunting their own sense of style. There is an evident pleasure of being here, at Casa Susanna, that is a liberation, a simplification of the conflicts inherent in a double life.”
Michel Hurst and Robert Swope. “About The Casa Susanna Book,” on the Simon & Schuster website Nd [Online] Cited 16/03/2024
But there was just one catch: no openly homosexual men were allowed. Living and working at a time when both gender expression and sexuality were criminalized, Tornell and Valenti restricted admittance to self-professed heterosexual men and their wives. The presence of wives signified deference to patriarchal notions of heterosexual gender roles, simultaneously averting unfounded fears of the presence of queer desires that upended the status quo. …
“Virginia Prince was a polarising figure in the queer and trans communities because she stuck to very rigid ideas of crossdressing: that you were a straight man who sometimes liked to wear women’s clothing,” says Sophie Hackett. “Her whole project was to normalise it but not everyone wanted to adhere to those dictates or the Ladies Home Journal kind of femininity that she and Susanna advocated.”
Miss Rosen. “Inside case Susanna,” on the Blind Magazine website July 12, 2023 [Online] Cited 14/03/2024
CASA SUSANNA | Trailer | AMERICAN EXPERIENCE | PBS
In the 1950s and ’60s, an underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to express their true selves and live for a few days as they had always dreamed – dressed as and living as women without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalised. Told through the memories of those who visited the house, CASA SUSANNA provides a moving look back at a secret world where the persecuted and frightened found freedom, acceptance and, often, the courage to live out of the shadows.
Casa Susanna: An Inside Look
York University Professor, Michael Gilbert, also known as Miqqi Alicia, is a life-long cross-dresser who spoke with us about Casa Susanna, a safe haven and resort for cross-dressers in upstate New York during the ’50s and ’60s.
Unknown photographer (American) Susanna in a shiny gown on the stage at the Chevalier d’Eon, Hunter, NY
1960-1963
Gelatin silver print
14 x 9cm
Collection of Cindy Sherman
From the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, a network of crossdressers found refuge in the Catskills region of New York State. Susanna with her wife Marie created safe spaces at two modest resorts for guests to freely crossdress en femme at a time of strictly defined gender roles. Guests used photography to build their femme identities and their network. These snapshots – candid, playful, and at times staged, blending family and fashion photography conventions – have since come to be known collectively as the Casa Susanna photographs.
Casa Susanna brings together for the first time three collections of photographs created by this network of crossdressers: from the AGO’s holdings, from the personal collection of artist Cindy Sherman, and from the collection of Betsy Wollheim. Seen together, these 250 images, provide insight into this historically significant crossdressing scene, allowing us to develop an understanding of this world and its connection to the lives of trans and crossdressing people today. These affirming photographs circulated among crossdressers by mail, as well as in the pages of Transvestia, a community magazine, copies of which will also be on view
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication that brings together recent research, an expansive selection of photographs, and pages of Transvestia, adding another important account of the ways photographs have served to build queer communities. Co-published by Editions Textuel, it includes essays by co-curators French photo historian, Isabelle Bonnet and AGO Curator of Photography, Sophie Hackett, as well as noted American scholar of trans history Susan Stryker.
Casa Susanna is coproduced by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Rencontres D’Arles.
“If the photographs had been revealed 50 years prior, people like Susanna Valenti, Katherine Cummings and Diana Merry-Shapiro could have been arrested or institutionalized, lost their jobs and been ostracized by their families and communities. For more than a century, cross-dressing was criminalized in the United States through statutes like “masquerade laws,” which were used to persecute many forms of gender expression in public spaces under the guise of limiting prostitution and “immoral performances” – an echo of the drag-show bans currently being passed in Tennessee and other states. …
More recently, several states have introduced laws to limit or ban drag shows as part of a wider attack on LGBTQ+ rights around the country. Nearly 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been filed in state legislatures this year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is tracking legislation across the country. An Associated Press analysis showed lawmakers have been motivated to file these bills by a handful of conservative interest groups, not constituent demand.”
“Some of these snapshots are black and white, some in colour. The photographer was often either the subject herself (using a self-timer or cable release, both relatively new at the time) or a trusted member of the community (easily obtainable in group settings). Initially, many would develop the pictures themselves rather than risk involvement of an external lab. As the Polaroid instant camera became more affordable it revolutionized photography for this community, which was a critical tool for them to image / imagine themselves for their own use or for sharing with others in their society. …
Some pictures were taken at home, or in a hotel room, with the curtains carefully drawn, to ensure privacy and create a little world where freedom was momentarily possible. They are typically deliberately posed, with a definite sense of happiness and an aura of breaking a constricting taboo. Other photographs were shot at one of the resorts, often outdoors. The joy here is quite evident, with a strong quality of relief. The pictures taken later on seem to become less performative, and show people simply being.
In constructing their female appearance and persona, the subjects here (who were almost all white) leaned heavily on 1950s stereotypes of white, middle-class womanhood. There would seem to be an irony in that they thereby leveraged a patriarchy that oppressed them. However, from my perspective, their goal (which I instinctively understand) was to externalize an inner truth in a way that was meaningful to them, that could be seen by select others, and by themselves in a mirror or in their photographs; and in this they were successful.
One display was a case containing a distinctive snapshot and a short biography for each of 18 different individuals who appear in the pictures. These are poignant reminders of the humanity of this community and the serious challenges that they faced. And it provided positive proof that my intuition from 2014 was correct, my personal sisterhood was indeed there. First, I hasten to stress that even without physical transition one can still be a woman, it is an internal identification; however, when someone assigned male at birth followed that path (especially during that era) it is very suggestive of a female gender. With that in mind, it was personally moving to find that one of the 18, whose name was Gloria, and who happened to be a millionaire, used her fortune to support women seeking (pioneering at that time) gender affirmation surgery in Mexico, before, during and afterwards; and that two others, Kate and Irène, successfully underwent the procedure.”
Jennifer Wenn is a trans-identified writer from London, Ontario, Canada.
Of particular note is the gathering of 71 transvestites at the Chevalier D’Eon Resort for Halloween 1962, held a day after the New York police unusually raided the annual National Variety Artists costume ball and 30 cross-dressed “men” were arrested. The guests at Chevalier D’Eon Resort included Virginia Prince, Katherine Cummings, Felicity Chandelle, Darrell Raynor and Gail Wilde, and psychologists Hugo Beigel and Wardell Pomeroy. Raynor, Cummings and Beigel later wrote about the event.
Both Virginia and Susanna were upset by one guest who not only did not bother to shave, he also smoked a cigar. This brought Susanna closer to Virginia’s point of view that a cultivation of ‘inner femininity’ distinguished true transvestites from drag queens and fetishists. She expressed this opinion in her column several times. Initially ‘fetishism’ had been equated with partial dressing, but FPE increasingly identified as fetishistic those who fully dressed as female but failed or didn’t bother to fashion themselves as truly feminine. A few years later Sheila Niles would propose the term ‘whole girl fetishist’.
This winter, the Art Gallery of Ontario and Rencontres D’Arles present Casa Susanna, an exhibition of snapshots taken by members of the earliest known American crossdressing network, which operated in upstate New York from the mid-1950s through the end of the 1960s. Co-curated by Sophie Hackett, the AGO’s curator of photography and Dr. Isabelle Bonnet, a photography historian and independent curator, this is the first museum exhibition dedicated to what are collectively known as the Casa Susanna photographs and features previously unseen images.
“These joyful snapshots provide insight into a historically significant crossdressing scene, allowing us to develop an understanding of this world and its connection to the lives of trans and crossdressing people today,” says Sophie Hackett, AGO Curator of Photography. “Looking at these snapshots, I am not only touched by their familial atmosphere and conviviality, but also reminded of the ways photography has been – and continues to be – used as a powerful tool for affirming personal identity and forging community.”
“At a time when trans people – and more broadly, 2SLGBTQ+ people – are attacked from many sides, I think that this exhibition and this book serve a public purpose: the story of the members of Casa Susanna, which is that of thousands of people across the world throughout the centuries, call for respect and tolerance,” says Dr. Isabelle Bonnet. “The personalities that gradually emerged during my research, notably those of Gloria, Kate, Vicky, Felicity, Gail, Susanna and Marie, filled me with admiration and I hope to pass it on to those who come to see the exhibition.”
Bringing together three collections of amateur photographs for the first time – from the AGO’s holdings, from the personal collection of artist Cindy Sherman, and from the collection of Betsy Wollheim, the exhibition tells the story of a community of men, including Wollheim’s own father, who regularly met at two upstate New York retreats organized by Susanna Valenti and her wife Marie, where they were free to safely dress as women and express their feminine identities. Organised thematically, the exhibition shines a spotlight on many of the community’s leading figures and describes how and where they came gathered and the feminine ideals they celebrated.
Snapshots of and by the community – all White, upper middle-class professionals – reveal days spent dressing up, swimming, playing cards, and generally enjoying life as women. The photographs bring to light the type of femininity they aspired to, drawn from images in their visual culture, for instance widely seen in magazines like Ladies Home Journal: traditional and appropriate, even as the crossdressers defied the strict gender prescriptions of their time. The exhibition includes copies of Transvestia magazine, a clandestine publication founded by Virginia Prince in 1960 that provided a vital forum for connection, information, and images to crossdressers across the United States and beyond. It also highlights the radical nature of this community, and the role photographs played in affirming and sustaining trans identities.
A leader in the presentation and research of vernacular photography, the AGO has acquired numerous collections showcasing historically underrepresented photographers, makers, and subjects, among them the Casa Susanna Collection. First discovered at the 26th Street flea market in New York City by furniture dealers Michel Hurst and Robert Swope in 2004, the AGO’s collection of 340 Casa Susanna photographs – acquired in 2015 – originally belonged to Susanna Valenti.
Accompanying the exhibition is a 480-page illustrated publication, edited by co-curators Sophie Hackett and Isabelle Bonnet. Bringing together recent research, an expansive selection of photographs, and pages of Transvestia, Casa Susanna was shortlisted for the Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards 2023. Published by Editions Textuel in both English and French, Casa Susanna is available at shopAGO for $73.
Isabelle Bonnet, Sophie Hackett Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968
Thames and Hudson Ltd, January 2024
480 pp softback
[This book] Brings together a wealth of research and an expansive selection of photographs to create an enduring account of America’s first known trans network, Casa Susanna.
In the 1950s and 60s, an underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to express their true selves and live for a few days as they had always dreamed – dressed as and living as women without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalised for their self-expression.
This book opens up that now-lost world. The photographs – mostly discovered by chance in a New York flea market in 2004 – chronicle the experiences of men who dressed as women, gender nonconforming people, and trans women in states of relaxation, experimentation, connection and joy. All of this was made possible by Susanna Valenti who – on her own journey toward womanhood – created Casa Susanna, a protected space where others could crossdress and live freely as women. Supplementing the images are excerpts from Transvestia, a magazine that allowed those who had been cast out by a rigidly binary society to connect in a different medium.
The people who came to Casa Susanna found a spot where they could explore and celebrate their own and each other’s femininity, as they could not do elsewhere. Their creations are also a reminder that there were, and still are, many ways to explore the boundaries of gender.
Isabelle Bonnet is an independent curator, currently completing a thesis in history / visual culture devoted to the crime scene in contemporary photography. Sophie Hackett is the Curator, Photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Susan Stryker is professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona.
Exhibition dates: 5th November 2023 – 31st March 2024
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Child of Impoverished Black Tenant Family Working on Farm, Alabama July 1936 Gelatin silver print Image: 20 x 19.2cm (7 7/8 x 7 9/16 in.) Sheet: 25.4 x 20.2cm (10 x 7 15/16 in.) Mat: 14 x 14 in. Frame (outside): 15 x 15 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
A humungous two-part posting on the work of American photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) which features over 110 of her photographs many of which were unknown to me.
Of course, the posting features the photographs for which she is rightly famous (Migrant Mother; White Angel Breadline; Nettie Featherston; Migratory cotton picker with his cotton sack slung over his shoulder rests at the scales before returning to work in the field; Once a Missouri farmer, now a Migratory Farm Laborer) but others are a surprise for the senses, especially the Irish portrait photographs.
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
During her long, prolific, and groundbreaking career, the American photographer Dorothea Lange made some of the most iconic portraits of the 20th century. Dorothea Lange: Seeing People reframes Lange’s work through the lens of portraiture, highlighting her unique ability to discover and reveal the character and resilience of those she photographed.
Featuring some 100 photographs, the exhibition addresses her innovative approaches to picturing people, emphasising her work on social issues including economic disparity, migration, poverty, and racism.
“The portrait is made more meaningful by intimacy – an intimacy shared not only by the photographer with his subject but by the audience.”
Dorothea Lange
“The power of her pictures – their ability to speak to the character and resilience of those she photographed – lies not only in her desire to effect social change, but also in her deep humanism, her abiding interest in people, and the skills and insights she learned as a portrait photographer.”
A growing desire to capture the Depression’s impact drew Lange to the White Angel Jungle, a San Francisco soup kitchen run by Lois Jordan, the “White Angel.” There Lange photographed this downtrodden man leaning on a barricade, his jaw clenched, shoulders hunched, back to the crowd, and eyes covered by the brim of his hat. Though anonymous, he drew Lange’s sympathetic eye and became a symbol of the nameless masses who faced economic hardship as the United States plunged deep into financial crisis.
In spring and summer 1934, a longshoremen’s strike gripped San Francisco and demonstrations took place throughout the city. Protesters also advocated for Japanese unions, which were being threatened by anti-labor forces in Japan. Lange wrote in her notes, “This was just before the New Deal during a time when Communists were very active. A few blocks away … soup was being distributed daily to the unemployed.”
Lange focused on a lone policeman standing before a crowd of protesters holding placards in English and Japanese. The policeman projects authority through his firm stance, crisp uniform, and shiny badge, creating a barrier between the photographer and the crowd.
In the summer of 1935, Lange traveled with Paul Taylor, working with his research team on a study of migrant labourers funded by California’s State Emergency Relief Administration. Mexican farm labourers, like this trio of cantaloupe harvesters, saw wages plummet during the Depression as thousands of westbound American migrants flooded the labour market. Angling her camera upward, Lange silhouetted the workers against a hazy sky, producing a striking group portrait. Working together solidified Lange and Taylor’s professional relationship, which developed into a romantic partnership and marriage later that same year.
Label text from the exhibition
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Once a Missouri farmer, now a Migratory Farm Laborer. San Joaquin Valley, California February 1936, printed c. 1965 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 44.6 x 39.5cm (17 9/16 x 15 9/16 in.) Mat: 26 x 22 in. Frame (outside): 27 x 23 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Although this farm labourer from Missouri seems to be alone behind the wheel of his car, he is actually seated beside his wife, in the passenger seat. Her overcoat and right arm are easily overlooked at the bottom left. By focusing only on the driver, with his gaunt features and intense gaze, Lange heightens our sense of his isolation to create an evocative portrait of a man grappling with the consequences of dislocation. The photograph also calls attention to the automobile as a means of transport and escape for some Depression-era migrants.
Label text from the exhibition
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Former Tenant Farmer on Relief Grant in the Imperial Valley, California March 1937 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 9.5 x 9cm (3 3/4 x 3 9/16 in.) Mat: 14 x 11 in. Frame (outside): 15 x 12 3/4 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Eighteen-Year-Old Mother from Oklahoma, now a California Migrant March 1937 Gelatin silver print Image: 18.9 x 24.5cm (7 7/16 x 9 5/8 in.) Sheet: 20.6 x 25.5cm (8 1/8 x 10 1/16 in.) Mat: 13 x 16 in. Frame (outside): 14 x 17 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Displaced Tenant Farmers, Goodlett, Hardeman County, Texas July 1937, printed 1950s Gelatin silver print Image: 19 x 24 cm (7 1/2 x 9 7/16 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.2 cm (8 x 9 15/16 in.) Mat: 14 x 16 in. Frame (outside): 15 x 17 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
During the 1930s, machines began to replace people in some cotton-growing regions like Hardeman County in Northeast Texas; consequently, many tenant farmers were evicted from their land. Already reckoning with severe drought and economic depression, these “tractored out” farmers were forced to seek work as day labourers, a precarious livelihood offering little security. In this picture, five displaced tenant farmers congregate outside the screened porch of a small house. Although they are united by a common plight, each man seems utterly alone, unable to find solace or support within an eroding agricultural system.
When Lange photographed her on a North Texas farm, 40-year-old Nettie Featherston was accustomed to a life of hard labor and poverty. She and her family had left Oklahoma seeking work in California when they ran out of money in Texas and found work picking cotton. Lange’s portrait reveals a gaunt survivor of the Dust Bowl, her right arm echoing the shape of the storm cloud behind her – a symbol of the difficult road ahead for migrant families looking for work. Reflecting on the photograph of herself years later, Featherston said, “It seems like … I have too much on my mind. I can just be burdened so bad, awful burdens they’ll be.”
Label text from the exhibition
Nettie Featherston
Lange met Nettie Featherston while working on that same FSA project. Like Turpen, Featherston’s family had been forced off their farm in Oklahoma. On their way to California to find work, they ran out of money and found themselves stranded in Childress, Texas.
The Featherstons sold their car for money to buy food. That left them with no way out of the dry and dusty landscape we seen behind Featherston. She looks desperate and distraught. “This county’s a hard county. They won’t help bury you here. If you die, you’re dead, that’s all,” she told Lange.
Decades later photographer and author Bill Ganzel tracked down Featherston. Then in her 80s, she still remembered how difficult that time had been. “Your kids would cry for something to eat, and you couldn’t give it. We cooked with black-eyed peas until I never wanted to ever see another black-eyed pea.”
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Arkansas mother come to California for a new start, with husband and eleven children. Now a rural rehabilitation client. Tulare County, California, from The American Country Woman November 1938, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 35.5 x 27.9cm (14 x 11 in.) Mat: 20 x 16 in. Frame (outside): 21 x 17 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) On the Plains a Hat Is More Than a Covering 1938, printed c. 1965 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 32 x 26.3cm (12 5/8 x 10 3/8 in.) Mat: 20 x 18 in. Frame (outside): 21 x 19 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Lange wrote in her field notes that a “hat is more than a covering against sun and wind … it is a badge of service … linking past and present.” This artfully cropped photograph of James Abner Turpen, a 70-year-old Texas tenant farmer, focuses on Turpen’s hand as his fingers curl around the brim of a hat. Both hand and hat are weathered, aged by time and work, and portray Turpen without showing his face.
Label text from the exhibition
James Abner Turpen
From 1936 to 1939, Lange worked for the Resettlement Administration (which later became the Farm Security Administration). In Texas she documented the impacts of mechanisation on farmers. In the town of Goodlett she met James Abner Turpen, a 70-year-old tenant farmer who was about to be “tractored out” of his farm. Realising that agricultural machines like tractors could replace many farmers, landowners would evict their tenant farmers.
Turpen’s sons had already been tractored out. In her caption, Lange recorded his distress. “What are my boys going to do?” he asked. He believed the government was partly to blame. “They’re not any up there in Congress but what are big landowners and they’re going to see that the program is in their interest.”
Lange cropped one image to focus on Turpen’s weathered hand grasping his hat. The photograph is titled On the Plains a Hat Is More Than a Covering. But curator Philip Brookman inspected the image closely and compared it with others to confirm that Turpen is the subject.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Migratory Field Worker Picking Cotton in San Joaquin Valley, California from An American Exodus November 1938, printed later Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 19 x 24cm (7 1/2 x 9 7/16 in.) Mat: 14 x 18 in. Frame (outside): 15 x 19 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
This photograph of hard stoop labor appeared in Lange and Paul Taylor’s 1939 book An American Exodus. According to Taylor’s field notes, “These pickers are paid seventy-five cents per hundred pounds of picked cotton. Strikers organising under CIO union (Congress of Industrial Organizations) are demanding one dollar. A good male picker, in good cotton, under favourable weather conditions, can pick about two hundred pounds in a day’s work.”
Label text from the exhibition
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Cotton Pickers and Farm Owners, Bakersfield, California 1938, printed c. 1950s Gelatin silver print Image: 19 x 24cm (7 1/2 x 9 7/16 in.) Sheet: 20.32 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Mat: 13 x 16 in. Frame (outside): 14 x 17 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Yazoo Delta, Mississippi from An American Exodus 1938, printed 1965 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 34.2 x 44.7cm (13 7/16 x 17 5/8 in.) Mat: 20 x 24 in. Frame (outside): 21 x 25 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Edison, Kern County, California. Young migratory mother, originally from Texas. On the day before the photograph was made, she and her husband traveled 35 miles each way to pick peas. They worked 5 hours each and together earned $2.25. They have two young children… Live in auto camp. April 11, 1940, printed 1950s Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 30.1 x 24cm (11 7/8 x 9 7/16 in.) Mount: 30.8 x 24 cm (12 1/8 x 9 7/16 in.) Mat: 20 x 16 in. Frame (outside): 21 x 17 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Children of the Weill Public School Shown in a Flag Pledge Ceremony, San Francisco, California April 1942, printed c. 1965 Gelatin silver print Image: 23.5 x 17.4 cm (9 1/4 x 6 7/8 in.) Mat: 18 x 14 in. Frame (outside): 19 x 15 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Fortune magazine commissioned Lange to document the bustling shipyards in Richmond, north of Oakland, where newly desegregated defence firms were rapidly constructing transport, cargo, and warships for the United States Navy. With its tight cropping and dynamic configuration, End of Shift focuses on the rushing legs and torsos of shipbuilders leaving a wartime facility. Lange expressed the urgency of their work in defence production without showing their individual features. The angled composition and complex interplay of light and shadow demonstrate Lange’s understanding of how modern design techniques could convey the force and energy of a group working together on a project critical to the nation’s defence.
While in Richmond, Lange photographed not only shipyard workers but also local people on the street, such as this pair of young mothers. Cradling swaddled infants, with a knee-high toddler between them, the two women personify the prosperity and growth generated by the wartime boom, which brought renewed economic stability to many Californians. Lange’s pictures from Richmond capitalise on the symbolism presented by the backdrop of expanding production. In this photograph, for example, cruciform utility poles seem to watch over the women and children like industrial guards, symbolically guiding them away from the poverty of the Depression years.
During her prolific and groundbreaking career, the American photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) made some of the most iconic portraits of the 20th century. Dorothea Lange: Seeing People examines Lange’s decades-long investigation into how portrait photography could embody the humanity of the people she depicted. It demonstrates how her photographs helped shape contemporary documentary practice by connecting everyday people with moments of history – from the Great Depression through the mid-1960s – that still resonate with our lives in the 21st century. Featuring 101 photographs, the exhibition addresses her innovative approaches to picturing people, emphasising her work on various social issues including economic disparity, migration, poverty, and racism. The exhibition is on view from November 5, 2023, through March 31, 2024, in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art.
“Throughout the course of her 50-year career, Lange created an intensely humanistic body of work that sought to transform how we see and understand people,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art. “Merging her skills as a portrait artist, a social documentary photographer, and a storyteller, she helped redefine photography through images that emphasise social issues.”
About the Exhibition
Dorothea Lange: Seeing People examines how Lange’s portraits have shaped our contemporary understanding of documentary photography as well as its importance to her vision and creative practice. Divided into six thematic sections, the exhibition features portraits ranging from her early career as a San Francisco studio photographer – the earliest work is from 1919 – and her powerful coverage of the Great Depression through expressive photographs of everyday people and communities during the 1950s and early 1960s.
Among the works on view are portraits of Indigenous people in Arizona and New Mexico from the 1920s and early 1930s; later depictions of striking labourers, migrant farmworkers, rural African Americans during the Jim Crow era, Japanese Americans denied their civil rights during World War II, and postwar baby boomers; and portraits of people in Ireland, Korea, Vietnam, Egypt, and Venezuela that Lange made in the decade before her death in 1965.
Lange began her career as a commercial studio photographer in San Francisco in 1918. Her studio became a gathering spot for artists who had serious discussions about photography and art. In 1920 she married Maynard Dixon, a painter of western subjects, who encouraged Lange to take her photography outside. She accompanied him on trips through the American Southwest, photographing rural landscapes and Dixon at work, along with the Indigenous communities he was portraying.
She started to work in the streets of San Francisco in 1933, making photographs such as White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, California (1933) that capture the effects of the Great Depression and the plight of the city’s dispossessed men and women. Lange also photographed labor organisers and protesters at May Day events around San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza: she focused on the protesters speaking, listening, or holding signs, and vowed to produce prints within 24 hours, as in May Day, San Francisco, California (1934). She also documented ensuing strikes, creating portraits of speakers and demonstrators with placards as well as photographs of the police presence in works such as Street Demonstration, San Francisco (1934). When she met the labor economist Paul Schuster Taylor in 1934, Lange began to photograph the plight of migrant farmers who had moved to California from the South and Midwest seeking new livelihoods.
From 1935 to 1943, while working for the for the US Resettlement Administration, Farm Security Administration, and War Relocation Authority, Lange focused on the resilience of Depression-era families, farmworkers, rural cooperative communities, migrant camps, and the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans in the early days of World War II. The resulting images illustrate the human and economic impact wrought across the United States by farm tenancy, racism, the legacy of slavery, climate change, and migrations. These portraits, sometimes combined with interviews, added a personal element to Lange’s stark pictures of makeshift housing and agricultural fields and cemented her documentary style.
During World War II Lange produced one of her most powerful series for the War Relocation Authority, depicting the forced incarceration of California’s Japanese Americans at Manzanar, in works on view such as Grandfather and Grandson of Japanese Ancestry at a War Relocation Authority Center, Manzanar, California (July 1942). She also photographed the shifts in California’s social fabric as its rising economy – sparked by growing defence industries – drew African Americans from the South and women into previously male-dominated and segregated businesses such as shipbuilding. In the 1950s, Lange continued to pursue stories about people and their communities for personal projects, as well as for Life magazine, that include her first photographs from Europe. Asia, South America, and North Africa.
Exhibition Publication
Published by the National Gallery of Art and distributed by Yale University Press, this 208-page illustrated volume explores Dorothea Lange’s decades-long investigation of how photography, through articulating people’s core values and their sense of self, helped to expand our current understanding of portraiture and the meaning of documentary practice. Lange’s sensitive, humane portraits of often-marginalised people galvanised public understanding of important social problems in the 20th century.
Compassion guided Lange’s early portraits of Indigenous people in Arizona and New Mexico from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as her depictions of striking workers, migrant farmers, rural African Americans during the Jim Crow era, Japanese Americans in internment camps, and the people she met while traveling in Europe, Asia, Venezuela, and Egypt. Drawing on new research, Philip Brookman, Sarah Greenough, Andrea Nelson, and Laura Wexler, examine Lange’s roots in studio portraiture and demonstrate how her influential and widely seen photographs addressed issues of identity as well as social, economic, and racial inequalities – topics that remain as relevant for our times as they were for hers.
In fall 1919 Lange met Maynard Dixon, a painter and illustrator of western subjects and one of the best-known artists in California. Early the following year, Lange and Dixon were married. Their first son, Daniel, was born in 1925 and their second, John, in 1928. This intimate portrait presents a close-up view of Dixon’s hands holding Dan in a gentle embrace, with the boy’s tiny fingers quietly resting on top of his father’s. Here Lange directed their pose to express both character and personal narrative, which recalls her training in New York portrait studios, as well as Alfred Stieglitz’s “portraits” of Georgia O’Keeffe that focused on her hands to convey her personality.
Label text from the exhibition
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands 1917 Silver-platinum print National Gallery of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Mary Ann Savage was a faithful Mormon all her life. She was a plural wife. She was a pioneer. She crossed the plains in 1856 with her family when she was six years old. Her mother pushed her little children across plain and desert in a hand-cart. A sister died along the way. “My mother wrapped her in a blanket and put her to one side.”
From Dorothea Lange Looks at the American Country Woman
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Dispossessed Arkansas farmers. These people are resettling themselves on the dump outside of Bakersfield, California from An American Exodus 1935 Gelatin silver print Image: 24.1 x 18.8cm (9 1/2 x 7 3/8 in.) Sheet: 25.3 x 20.7cm (9 15/16 x 8 1/8 in.) Mat: 16 x 14 in. Frame (outside): 17 x 15 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Black Woman Working in Field near Eutaw, Alabama 1936 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 20.5 x 13.8cm (8 1/16 x 5 7/16 in.) Mount: 21.2 x 14.5 cm (8 3/8 x 5 11/16 in.) Mat: 15 x 12 in. Frame (outside): 16 x 13 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Calipatria (vicinity), California. Native of Indiana in a migratory labor contractor’s camp. “It’s root hog or die for us folks.” February 1937 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 24.1 x 19.1 cm (9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.) Mat: 16 x 14 in. Frame (outside): 17 x 15 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Line of men inside a division office of the State Employment Service office at San Francisco, California, waiting to register for unemployment benefits January 1938, printed c. 1960s Gelatin silver print Image: 19 x 24cm (7 1/2 x 9 7/16 in.) Sheet: 25.08 x 20.32cm (9 7/8 x 8 in.) Mat: 14 x 17 in. Frame (outside): 15 x 18 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Funeral Cortege, San Joaquin Valley, California 1938, printed early 1950s Gelatin silver print Image: 20 x 19 cm (7 7/8 x 7 1/2 in.) Sheet: 25.08 x 20.32 cm (9 7/8 x 8 in.) Mat: 16 x 14 in. Frame (outside): 17 x 15 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Hitch-hiking from Joplin, Missouri, to a sawmill job in Arizona. On U.S. 66 near Weatherford, western Oklahoma August 12, 1938, printed c. 1960s Gelatin silver print Image: 24 x 19.5cm (9 7/16 x 7 11/16 in.) Sheet: 25.4 x 20.32cm (10 x 8 in.) Mat: 16 x 13 in. Frame (outside): 17 x 14 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Formerly Enslaved Woman, Alabama from The American Country Woman 1938, printed 1950s Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 20.3 x 27.9cm (8 x 11 in.) Mat: 14 x 18 in. Frame (outside): 15 x 19 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
This formerly enslaved woman, whom Lange does not name, would have witnessed several events that transformed the nation. She would have experienced the tragedy of chattel slavery in the United States and the victory for enslaved people in the South through Emancipation, as well as the ups and downs of Reconstruction, the passage of Jim Crow laws that permitted segregation, and the Great Depression. The dilapidated home, falling and standing simultaneously, suggests her own perseverance amid a lifetime of racial, gender, and class oppression.
Label text from the exhibition
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Formerly Enslaved Woman, Alabama from The American Country Woman 1938, printed c. 1955 Gelatin silver print Image: 24 x 19cm (9 7/16 x 7 1/2 in.) Sheet: 25 x 20cm (9 13/16 x 7 7/8 in.) Mat: 16 x 13 in. Frame (outside): 17 x 14 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Lange’s portraits of Depression-era people have inspired other artists, such as Elizabeth Catlett, to remember that time. In Survivor, Catlett translated the power of Lange’s photograph of a formerly enslaved woman into a linocut, an image cut into a linoleum block, inked, and then pressed onto paper, which prints it in reverse from the original.
Label text from the exhibition
Elizabeth Catlett (American, 1915-2012) Survivor 1983 Linocut National Gallery of Art Purchased as the Gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in Honor of Mary Lee Corlett
Wheeley’s Church was a congregation of Primitive Baptists, conservative practitioners located primarily in the South. Lange had a knack for building rapport with people from various religious communities and worked to gain their trust and respect to make photographs. This portrait features one church member, “Queen” Bowes, a devout widow shaded by her elaborate sunbonnet. Lange captured her stern expression, with piercing eyes and a tightly closed mouth that hid her false teeth.
Label text from the exhibition
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Scandinavian Homesteader, Great Plains, South Dakota from The American Country Woman 1939, printed 1950s Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 25.9 x 26.6cm (10 3/16 x 10 1/2 in.) Mat: 18 x 18 in. Frame (outside): 19 x 19 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Near Coolidge, Arizona. Migratory cotton picker with his cotton sack slung over his shoulder rests at the scales before returning to work in the field November 1940, printed c. 1965 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 31.5 x 41cm (12 3/8 x 16 1/8 in.) Mat: 24 x 20 in. Frame (outside): 21 x 25 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Edison, Kern County, California. Young girl looks up from her work. She picks and sacks potatoes on large-scale ranch April 11, 1940 Gelatin silver print Image: 18.7 x 24cm (7 3/8 x 9 7/16 in.) Sheet: 20.2 x 25.3 cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.) Mat: 13 x 16 in. Frame (outside): 14 x 17 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Riley Savage, son of Mary Ann Savage (pictured in the photograph nearby), was a third-generation Mormon settler whose grandmother had crossed the plains to the Utah Territory in 1856.
On assignment for Life magazine in 1954, Lange spent six weeks in Ireland with her son, Dan Dixon – her first time overseas. They stayed in Ennis, a small town in County Clare, and traveled extensively; Lange took some 2,400 photographs. Twenty-two of these were featured in Life the following year. Lange enjoyed working in Ireland and was particularly fond of this portrait of a smiling girl in a rain bonnet, which she pinned to a corkboard in her home kitchen. “Isn’t that a beautiful face?” she declared. “That’s pure Ireland.”
During a 1958 trip to Indonesia with Paul Taylor, Lange observed a practice session of traditional gamelan music and Javanese dance. In this photograph, she focused on a gesture known as Ngrayung / Nangreu. Although such gestures can carry different meanings depending on the choreography, each highly controlled movement is believed to embody an expression of the soul and requires deep concentration.
Lange joined Taylor on a trip to Venezuela, where he was consulting on agrarian reform. Here, she captured a man holding an axe in one hand and a machete in the other – blades used to clear corn stalks in the field. The presence of these sharp tools, along with the man’s torn clothing and bare feet, hint at the physical and economic vulnerability of farm labourers working on the land.
![Sophie Taeuber-Arp (Swiss, 1889-1943) and Jean (Hans) Arp (German-French, 1886-1966) 'Vertical-Horizontal Composition [Conceived by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and executed in relief by Jean Arp]' 1927-1928 / 1943-1956](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/13.jpg "Sophie Taeuber-Arp (Swiss, 1889-1943) and Jean (Hans) Arp (German-French, 1886-1966) 'Vertical-Horizontal Composition [Conceived by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and executed in relief by Jean Arp]' 1927-1928 / 1943-1956")
![Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [attributed to] 'Peggy Guggenheim poses at her Art of This Century Gallery in New York, October 22, 1942'](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/16.jpg "Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [attributed to] 'Peggy Guggenheim poses at her Art of This Century Gallery in New York, October 22, 1942'")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Fire in loft building, New York]' 1947](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/weegee-fire-in-loft-building.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Fire in loft building, New York]' 1947")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Black Buick with dead passenger pulled out of the Harlem River, New York]' February 23, 1942](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/weegee-black-buick.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Black Buick with dead passenger pulled out of the Harlem River, New York]' February 23, 1942")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[After the opera, Sammy's on the Bowery, New York]' 1943-1945](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/weegee-after-the-opera.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[After the opera, Sammy's on the Bowery, New York]' 1943-1945")
![Camillo Boito (editor) Ferdinando Ongania (1842-1911) (publisher) 'La Basilica di San Marco in Venezia illustrata nella storia e nell'arte da scrittori veneziani: [volume 3]' 1881](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/la-basilica-di-san-marco-in-venezia-illustrata.jpg "Camillo Boito (editor) Ferdinando Ongania (1842-1911) (publisher) 'La Basilica di San Marco in Venezia illustrata nella storia e nell'arte da scrittori veneziani: [volume 3]' 1881")
![Unidentified photographer. 'Untitled [Weegee covering the morning line-up at police headquarters, New York]' c. 1939](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/weegee-a.jpg "Unidentified photographer. 'Untitled [Weegee covering the morning line-up at police headquarters, New York]' c. 1939")
![Installation view of the exhibition 'Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle' at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at second left, Weegee's 'Man Arrested for Cross-Dressing, New York (Gay Deceiver)' (1939); and at top right, a magazine print of his photograph 'Untitled [Young man smoking cigarette in crashed car while waiting for ambulance, New York]' (1941)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/weegee-installation-hcb.jpg "Installation view of the exhibition 'Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle' at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at second left, Weegee's 'Man Arrested for Cross-Dressing, New York (Gay Deceiver)' (1939); and at top right, a magazine print of his photograph 'Untitled [Young man smoking cigarette in crashed car while waiting for ambulance, New York]' (1941)")
![Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Young man smoking cigarette in crashed car while waiting for ambulance, New York]' 1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/weegee-untitled-young-man-smoking-cigarette-in-crashed-car-while-waiting-for-ambulance-new-york-1941.jpg "Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Young man smoking cigarette in crashed car while waiting for ambulance, New York]' 1941")
![Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Tenement sleeping during heat spell, Lower East Side, New York]' May 23, 1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/weegee-tenement-sleeping-during-heat-spell-lower-east-side-new-york.jpg "Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Tenement sleeping during heat spell, Lower East Side, New York]' May 23, 1941")
![Weegee (American, born Ukraine (Austria), Złoczów (Zolochiv) 1899 - 1968 New York) '[Outline of a Murder Victim]' 1942](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/weegee-outline-web.jpg)
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