Exhibition: ‘Picturing the Border’ at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Exhibition dates: 21st July, 2024 – 5th January, 2025

Miguel Fernández de Castro (Mexican, b. 1986) 'Grammar of Gates' / 'Gramática de las puertas' 2019 from the exhibition 'Picturing the Border' at the Cleveland Museum of Art, July 2024 - January 2025

Miguel Fernández de Castro (Mexican, b. 1986)
Grammar of Gates / Gramática de las puertas
2019
Courtesy of the artist
© Miguel Fernández de Castro

I wrote this philosophical text as a flow of consciousness, a layered exposition of my thoughts on space, photography, identity and belonging. I hope I have done the subject justice… in freedom.

within, bridge and fissure

The struggle for identity, for culture, for nation is a struggle inscribed in space. So observes Wendy Garden.1

The spaces that bodies move in, through and over are fluid spaces, permeable spaces, fragmentary and transitory spaces. They are also spaces of displacement and distance which form a kind of ‘alienation’ which derives from the Latin alienare: to render foreign, other.2

Thus the “border” between one and the other – that fluid penumbra (a peripheral or indeterminate area or group), that oscillation of energy across the line – must be constructed to be legible and fixed by those that seek to control such spaces, through the imposition of a coded representation of space itself.3 The border wall between Mexico and America is one such imposition of a coded representation of space which, seeks to control an/other. It is a “direct translation of ideology and temporality into material and spatial culture”3 which masks as much as it represents, through a selective representation of history and memory.

Through systems of surveillance (e.g. CCTV, aerial surveillance, phone taps) and control (e.g. police, government, the judiciary), in which one reinforces the other in a never ending circle, and in the of naming of the ‘other’ (Foucault) – those with privilege embedded and thus emboldened within colonial and imperial systems seek to confirm hegemonic structures of power: for example, who can travel where, who has access adequate to health care, who is seen as an ill/legal alien. “Although Foucault rarely alludes to it in a clear-cut manner, what he describes in Discipline and Punish is the formation of the discursive regime of surveillance which is a central element in the expression of the modern state.”4

But we can counter this narrative.

In his influential book Thirdspace (Blackwell, 1996), the American postmodern political geographer and urban theorist Edward Soja (1940-2015) proposes the concept of First, Second and Thirdspace to demarcate the various spatial dimensions. Firstspace “is the ‘real’, the concrete materiality of spatial forms of the world, while Secondspace interprets this reality through imagined representations of spatiality.”5 Much early photographic practice is rooted in Firstspace, in the passive representation of an undeniable truth, the veracity of the image and its representation of the referent: this existed because it was captured by the camera.

Thirdspace on the other hand, “contains both real and imagined spaces simultaneously. Thirdspace permits an intermingling of the knowable and the unknowable, the real and the imagined by the experiences, events and political choices that are shaped by the interplay between centres and peripheries (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 31). According to Soja, Thirdspace is a place where issues of race, class and gender can be addressed simultaneously without privileging one over the other. It is a space which enables an-‘other’ way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 10). Photographic space, as a Thirdspace, is a site from which to contest the dominant ideologies of Firstspace. This has important ramifications for ‘others,’ especially those disenfranchised by colonialism.”6

Thus photographic Thirdspace as an amorphous space of both the real and imagined is the vibration of energy – doubled – the real and imagined spaces of everyday life, and the real and imagined spaces of photography through which we can contest the contexts of becoming, belonging.

These Thirdspaces of the real and imagined are not spaces of universalising totality which then would be constitutive of history or memory, but in-between spaces in which differences, memories and histories are not denied or negated, hidden, forgotten or repressed. It is not the segregation of black and white, either/or, but the grey areas in-between that interest me: those fluid zones of difference – think Tarkovsky’s film Stalker 1979, in which a guide helps a writer and a professor to infiltrate a restricted area, the Zone.

“The Thirdspace – in which “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the trans-disciplinary, everyday life and unending history”a – allows that none of these couples, such as the phenomenal and the noumenal, can be divided by an either/or attitude. “This… does not mean differences are denied, instead, it most of all means the inevitable reciprocity of any pair of definitions. In such a case both leave a mark on the other. It is a question of both-and – how each of the pair influences the other”b.”7

Both leave a mark on each other. And it is in this marking that social and political relations can be reconfigured, “in such a way as to suspect, neutralise, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect.”8 Thus, the physical aspects as well as the attitudes and habitual practices of ‘space’, the arrangements of space and the socialisation of space, “is an order that is itself always undergoing change from within through the actions and innovations of social agents. In short, all ‘space’ is social space ….”9

Following, we can say that social and spatial relationships are dialectically inter-reactive, interdependent (Soja).

“Social and spatial relationships are dialectically inter-reactive and interdependent. Cultural landscapes reflect social relations and institutions, and they shape subsequent social relations. While elites create spatial inequalities and homogeneity simultaneously through their hegemony, non-elites create counter-hegemonic landscapes which reflect their own values. Behavioural resistance to the dominant culture leads to distinctive cultural landscapes: for example, cultural resistance by Maori.

Indeed, dominant ideologies such as those which are religious, political, economic, ethnic or racial, continually define or redefine ‘deviance’ or ‘otherness’ to maintain their power and landscapes of dominance. Space and place are key factors in the definition of deviance and of order and propriety.”10

But as Wael Salah Fahmi insightfully observes, we must not fall into the idea that juxtapositions of social space are just alternating choices of “either/or” or acts of simple resistance: “But “juxtaposition” might imply alternating choices, an “either/or.” Perhaps instead we might think of Lefebvre’s image of interpenetrating spaces, one violating another, yet rising up from within the very “fundament” of the space that wishes to ignore its existence. Here, perhaps, is a spatial dialectic that does not fall into a binary opposition of simple resistance.”11

Spaces that rise up from within each other!

Change that emanates from within through the actions and innovations of social agents… human beings, artists!

Here, the thoughts of that glorious Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator Coco Fusco (b. 1960) – quoted by Jean Fisher – whose work explores gender, identity, race, and power through performance, video, interactive installations, and critical writing are particularly cogent.

“Two imperatives are set in motion: to alter the perceptions of those with privileged access to hegemonic structures of power, and to change the sense of disempowerment of those deprived of political agency. “What is more fundamentally at stake than freedom,” Fusco argues, “is power – the power to choose, the power to determine value, and the right of the more powerful to consume without guilt”: entitlements that Eurocentric cultures have assumed for themselves at the expense of others. These aims are advanced through an exploration of the relationship between the politics and practices of cultural difference and social inequity, in which intellectual, experiential, and artistic alliances are built across nationalistic and geographical boundaries …””12

As Wael Salah Fahmi notes, “spaces constantly juxtapose themselves one against the other” – in real life, in art, in photography. The media saturated world of the “total flow” of images is resistant to interpretation, yet in real life – and in this exhibition – the juxta/position (mapping of space), juxta/posing (posing for the camera) of one space against another, “of image to image calls to attention a line of conflict, either fissure or bridge.”13

The images in this posting draw our attention to fissures (George Rodriguez, Susan Meiselas, Ada Trillo) and bridges (Graciela Iturbide, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello with Colectivo Chopeke). They also possess a multivalent narrative, allowing the work to be accessible to different interpretations, meanings, and values: a new door or path opens up on the basis of very diverse needs and objectives. These images, untraceable gifts from photography itself, are marks of candour and authenticity, both descriptions of a stable object and the fleeting glance (Firstspace and Thirdspace) interacting upon each other. They are an investigation into our fluid identity and shifting place in our worlds.14

In spatial dialectics and in the nuances of contradictions we proceed onwards, paying no heed to the dangers which lie ahead, journeying on to fulfil our desires: to be seen, to be heard, in our difference and uniqueness, enacting change from within.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Word count: 1,435

PS. My friend and Melbourne artist Elizabeth Gertsakis insightfully observes, “The philosophical arguments resonate with the vacillation of the photograph meanings/non-meanings. Spaces that implode from within to further generate the unknown which even in definition become dispersed. The photography around the border/wall is beautiful as well as tortuous as well as unspoken.”

Well said Liz 🙂

Footnotes

1/ Wendy Garden. “Photographic Space and the Indian Portrait Studio,” in On Space Issue Seven, Winter 2007

2/ Rob Shields. Lefebvre, Love and Struggle. London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 40-41.

3/ Ibid., pp. 79-80.

4/ Jon Stratton. The Desirable Body. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996, p. 19

5/ Garden, Op cit.,

6/ Garden, Op cit.,

7/ A: Edward W. Soja. Thirdspace. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996, p. 57; B: Mika Hannula. “Third space – a merry-go-round of opportunity,” on the Kiasma Magazine website No. 12, Vol. 4, 2001 [Online] Cited 01/05/2016. No longer available online quoted in Marcus Bunyan. “Thirdspace,” on the Marcus Bunyan website 2021 [Online] Cited 29/11/2024

8/ Michel Foucault. “Of Other Spaces,” in Diacritics Spring 1986, p. 24

9/ Shields, Op cit., pp. 154-155

10/Alexander Trapeznik. “Introduction,” from Public History Review, Vol. 13, 2006, p. 2

11/ Wael Salah Fahmi. “Reading of Post Modern Public Spaces As Layers Of Virtual Images and Real Events,” from The 37th International Planning Congress “HONEY, I SHRUNK THE SPACE” Planning in the Information Age. Utrecht, The Netherlands, 16-20 September, 2001

12/ Jean Fisher. “Witness for the Prosecution: The Writings of Coco Fusco,” in Coco Fusco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 226-227

13/ Wael Salah Fahmi, op cit.,

14/ Marcus Bunyan. “Thirdspace,” on the Marcus Bunyan website 2021 [Online] Cited 29/11/2024

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

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather a force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there […]”

Frederick Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Edward Soja employs the concept of First, Second and Thirdspace to demarcate the various spatial dimensions. For Soja Firstspace is the ‘real’, the concrete materiality of spatial forms of the world, while Secondspace interprets this reality through imagined representations of spatiality (Soja 1996: 6). Much early photography participated in perpetuating the belief that photographic space was a Firstspace. The camera lens merely passively and objectively recorded all that was placed before it. However even in the nineteenth century, many practitioners acknowledged the ability of photographs to lie or distort reality.

For Soja, Thirdspace contains both real and imagined spaces simultaneously. Thirdspace permits an intermingling of the knowable and the unknowable, the real and the imagined by the experiences, events and political choices that are shaped by the interplay between centres and peripheries (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 31). According to Soja, Thirdspace is a place where issues of race, class and gender can be addressed simultaneously without privileging one over the other. It is a space which enables an-‘other’ way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 10). Photographic space, as a Thirdspace, is a site from which to contest the dominant ideologies of Firstspace. This has important ramifications for ‘others,’ especially those disenfranchised by colonialism. It may account for the rise of photography as the preferred medium for many artists today interested in issues of identity and the colonial gaze. …

Photographic space can create a spatial reality which allows those who access it to contest, enlarge or in someway recreate their experiences of Firstspace. It never attempts to close off subjectivity or pin identity down, but rather allows fluid and transitory experiments with other ways of being that can then be carried over and inform experiences of Firstspace.”

Wendy Garden. “Photographic Space and the Indian Portrait Studio,” in On Space Issue Seven, Winter 2007

Ronald Rael (American, b. 1971) and Virginia San Fratello (American, b. 1971) with Colectivo Chopeke
Teeter-Totter Wall
2019
Single-channel video with sound; 4:13 minutes
Courtesy Rael San Fratello/Ronald Rael & Virginia San Fratello
© Ronald Rael & Virginia San Fratello
Photo: Ronald Rael

About the exhibition

Picturing the Border presents photographs of the US-Mexico borderlands from the 1970s to the present taken by both border residents and outsiders. They range in subject matter from intimate domestic portraits, narratives of migration, and proof of political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US Border Patrol. The earliest images in this exhibition form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at present, and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s. Many serve as counter-narratives to the derogatory narratives of migration and Latino/as in the US that tend to circulate in the mass media.

Capitalising on the prevalent issues of the border today, Picturing the Border aims to spark vital conversations of what constitutes citizenship, as well as complex negotiations of personal identity as it relates to the border. The exhibition shows through these images that Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican photographers have significantly rethought what defines citizenship, nationality, family, migration, and the border beyond traditional frameworks for decades.

Text from the Cleveland Museum of Art website

George Rodriguez (American, b. 1937) 'Los Angeles police arrest a Chicano student protester in the neighbourhood of Boyle Heights' 1970 from the exhibition 'Picturing the Border' at the Cleveland Museum of Art, July 2024 - January 2025

George Rodriguez (American, b. 1937)
Los Angeles police arrest a Chicano student protester in the neighbourhood of Boyle Heights
1970
Gelatin silver print

Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948)
7.30am Arrest of undocumented worker by U.S. Border Patrol in downtown San Diego, CA
1989
From the series Crossings
Gelatin silver print
44.5 x 73.7cm
Courtesy of and © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

Photojournalism from the US-Mexico border currently emphasises stark, divisive images: walls, fences, surveillance devices, border patrols, “coyotes,” and crossing migrants. Yet some of the most compelling artwork dealing with this region attests to several generations of cross-border familial relationships, personal identities that carry markers of both countries, and hybrid cultures that meld influences from the United States, Mexico, and farther south in Latin America. This more complex work demonstrates how border residents have resisted being defined by the border and its conflicts, concentrating instead on a deterritorialised notion of home, along with a sense of self that often transcends both nationalism and gender politics.

The photographs and video works included in Picturing the Border offer a more nuanced portrayal of life in the borderlands. The exhibition positions the US-Mexico border as a cultural framework and highlights how Latinx photographers – many of whom are border residents themselves – have instead formulated alternative photographic vocabularies with regard to place, identity, and race. Photographs range in subject matter from intimate domestic portraits, extended family gatherings, and political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US border patrol. The earliest images in this exhibition form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at the present moment and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s.

The exhibition is accompanied by an important scholarly publication that brings new insights to the subject of Latinx photography and the history of the US-Mexico border. Picturing the Border has also brought about the opportunity to grow our permanent collection in this area, precipitating recent acquisitions by Laura Aguilar and the donation of an important work by Ada Trillo, who has witnessed firsthand the perils of the unbelievably extensive journey migrants have taken from Central America to the United States.

Although Cleveland is far from the southern border, stories of global migration are woven throughout the CMA’s encyclopeadic collection as well as throughout the community in Northeast Ohio. Picturing the Border puts faces on stories and brings to life the various threads that stitch together an ever-growing understanding of, and empathy for, the migrant experience.

Nadiah Rivera Fellah, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art. “Picturing the Border,” on the Cleveland Museum of Art website June 1, 2024 [Online] Cited 19/07/2024

Teddy Cruz (American born Guatemala, b. 1962) and Fonna Forman (American, b. 1968). Installation view of 'Radicalizing the Local: 60_Miles of Trans-Border Urban Conflict' 2008

Teddy Cruz (American born Guatemala, b. 1962) and Fonna Forman (American, b. 1968)
Installation view of Radicalizing the Local: 60_Miles of Trans-Border Urban Conflict
2008
Commissioned by the US Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale of 2008
Prints from a digital file; dimensions variable
© Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman
Image courtesy the Cleveland Museum of Art

Featuring more than four dozen photographs, Picturing the Border aims to spark vital conversations of what constitutes citizenship, as well as complex negotiations of personal identity as it relates to the border. Through these images the exhibition shows that Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican photographers have significantly rethought what defines citizenship, nationality, family, migration, and the border beyond traditional frameworks for decades.

Opening on July 21, 2024, in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery, this free exhibition will be on view through January 5, 2025. From intimate domestic portraits, narratives of migration, and political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US Border Patrol, this one-of-a-kind exhibition presents photographs taken by both border residents and outsiders, many of whom are Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican, and tells the story of the US-Mexico borderlands from the 1970s to the present.

“Borders have long been spaces of contention,” says Nadiah Rivera Fellah, curator of contemporary art. “The mainstream media in the United States tends to present nationalistic narratives about imminent threats at the border. This reductive and divisive narrative does not often portray the identities, languages, cultures, and social ties among communities. The photographs featured in this exhibition tell a different story that can serve as a counter-narrative and timely new perspective on life in this region.”

The earliest images in Picturing the Border form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at present and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s. In addition, they showcase artists who were ahead of their time in presenting ideas about spaces and exclusion as they relate to issues of the borderlands and Latinx identities in the United States.

Exhibition catalogue

A beautifully illustrated 134-page exhibition catalogue accompanies Picturing the Border by Nadiah Rivera Fellah, curator of contemporary art, with contributions from Natalie Scenters-Zapico.

The US-Mexico border has undergone dramatic changes over the past six decades, becoming increasingly industrialised, urbanised, and militarised, especially in the aftermath of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Mainstream and conservative news coverage has often reinforced or exacerbated such developments, characterising the border as out of control and describing migrants in derogatory terms, in the process fuelling xenophobic sentiment.

A foil to this reductive and dehumanising narrative, this presentation of Latinx photography offers more nuanced portrayals of life in the borderlands. Ranging from the 1970s to the 2020s, images by Louis Carlos Bernal, Graciela Iturbide, and Laura Aguilar, as well as emerging artists such as Ada Trillo, Guadalupe Rosales, and Miguel Fernández de Castro display alternative photographic vocabularies regarding place, identity, and race. With subject matter spanning from intimate domestic portraits and youth counterculture to border crossings and clashes involving the US Border Patrol, this richly illustrated volume also features scholarly essays and new work by fronteriza poet Natalie Scenters-Zapico, providing new insights on this fraught and misunderstood region.

Press release from the Cleveland Museum of Art

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) 'Cholos, White Fence, East Los Angeles' 1986 from the exhibition 'Picturing the Border' at the Cleveland Museum of Art, July 2024 - January 2025

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Cholos, White Fence, East Los Angeles
1986
Gelatin silver print
Framed: 57.5 x 42.2cm (22 5/8 x 16 5/8 in.)
Sheet: 35.2 x 27.7cm (13 7/8 x 10 7/8 in.)
Image: 32 x 21.9cm (12 5/8 x 8 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Leslie and Judith Schreyer and Gabri Schreyer-Hoffman in honour of Virginia Heckert
© Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide’s Cholo/as series from 1986 Los Angeles is perhaps the best encapsulation of the show’s thesis. The women in Cholos, White Fence, East Los Angeles told Iturbide that they wanted to be photographed under a mural of some mariachis. In fact, these were images of Emiliano Zapata, Benito Juárez and Pancho Villa. We might as well admire their freedom from context. After all, isn’t America all about freedom?

Dan Duray. “One Fine Show: ‘Picturing the Border’ at the Cleveland Museum of Art,” on the Observer website 09/06/2024 [Online] Cited 01/11/2024

Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942)
Rosario y Boo Boo en su casa, Los Angeles (Rosario and Boo Boo in their home, Los Angeles)
1986
Gelatin silver print

“Without the camera you see the world one way, with it, you see the world another way. Through the lens you are composing, dreaming even, with that reality, as if through the camera you are synthesising who you are… So you make your own image, interpreting.”

Graciela Iturbide

Ada Trillo (Mexican American, b. 1976)
Sleeping by the River, Tecun-Uman Guatemala
2020
Digital print
Framed: 54.4 x 79.7cm (21 7/16 x 31 3/8 in.)
Image: 50.8 x 76.2cm (20 x 30 in.)
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Artist
© Ada Trillo

As Los Angeles is located over 100 miles north of Mexico, Iturbide’s work demonstrates that while the border is a physical space, its communities defy any single geographical boundary.

This argument echoes in photos made over 1,500 miles away by photographer Ada Trillo, who grew up on the liminal lands between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In her photobook on view in the exhibition, titled La Caravana del Diablo (2022), the artist documents three journeys: two alongside migrant people in caravans attempting to cross into Mexico on their way to the US border and a third aboard La Bestia, the infamous freight train that hundreds of thousands of Central American migrants ride each year to the north of Mexico – risking injury and death in the process. Trillo’s works are primarily populated by people from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, representing deep friendships the artist formed over days and weeks of gruelling travel. …

Trillo’s works, like those of other artists in the exhibition, capture how the border forces migrants and other communities to weave their stories within a maddening architecture of violence that is both systematic and capricious. “Many of the photographers in this show were inspired by one another,” Rivera Fellah explained. “And many have used their politically engaged photographic practices as a counter-narrative to derogatory images of the border that have circulated in the media since the 1970s and 1980s.”

Kayla Aletha Welch. “Photography Show Aims to Upend Xenophobic Border Narratives,” on the Hyperallergic website July 18, 2024 [Online] Cited 01/11/2024

'Ada Trillo – La Caravana del Diablo' 2021

Ada Trillo – La Caravana del Diablo
Hardcover/Sewn bound
192 pages/30.5 x 24.8cm
Language: English
ISBN: 978-94-91525-93-3
November 2021

Every day, thousands of people leave in processions from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador via Mexico for America because of flaring violence, murder (on women) and poor economic conditions in their own country. A journey covering hundreds of kilometres, often on foot, full of fear of being arrested and sent back. Some people even ‘disappear’. Under the Trump administration, despite fierce opposition, ‘The Wall’ was built to keep these immigrants out of ‘The Northern Triangle’, making their passage into America even more perilous.

Photographer Ada Trillo considers it her mission to portray this distressing situation. In ‘La Caravana del Diablo’ she doesn’t look away but confronts us. Ada shows that each of these thousands of migrants is a human being. A human being with a family, with fear, hope and dreams.

Text from the Houston Centre for Photography website

More than three thousand kilometers of border have unified the United States and Mexico since the mid-nineteenth century. Some 8,000,000 people live, sometimes in suspense, on both shores of a division as arbitrary as it is controversial. A dividing line that has changed throughout history, affecting those who have remained on one side or the other.

This same space, mythical, liminal, polemic, has become, in the last half-century, above all, one of the most watched and controlled landscapes of the entire planet. It has also become one of the most vulnerable: millions of Mexicans, Central Americans, and many other nationalities have crossed – or tried to cross – the border.

Picturing the Border, a photographic exhibition curated by Nadiah Rivera Fellah[2] and open to the public from July 21, 2024, to January 5, 2025, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, shows other aspects of those living there. The exhibition gathers images taken between the 1970s and the present by North American and Mexican artists such as Louis Carlos Bernal, Graciela Iturbide, Laura Aguilar, Ada Trillo, Guadalupe Rosales, and Miguel Fernández de Castro. The photographs present alternative proposals for understanding and reading the border by placing the people who inhabit it in the spotlight, thus challenging fixed and stereotypical conceptions of identity and culture.

In this exhibition, as in real life, the border stands as a third space, in the same sense proposed by Homi Bhabha: that intermediate space of cultural encounters and dis-encounters from which a new site of enunciation emerges and in which the binary is deconstructed[3]. Edward Soja, in an approach similar to Bhabha’s, regarding the ‘hybridity’ of the spaces of encounters of cultures, defines the thirdspace as the place where “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure, and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.”[4] According to Gloria Anzaldúa, “the convergence [of Mexico and the United States] has created a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country”[5].

But, what do the exhibited photos tell us about this ‘third space,’ this ‘third hybrid country’ that exists between the United States and Mexico? That third country is occupied not only by illegal migration and drug trafficking – the primary approach from the media – but also by symbols deeply rooted in Mexican and border life, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Cholo culture, the use and appropriation of iconic North American products (such as cars) by Mexican Americans, the Day of the Dead celebrations. These photos open a window for us to look, with respect and wonder, at the life that goes on in private and public spaces, often in a very different way than that imagined by those of us who are not directly associated with that geography. It also reminds us of the student and labor protests and strikes that have taken place in that region.

Damaris Puñales-Alpízar. “The Border That Unites: Picturing the Border, at the Cleveland Museum of Art,” on the CANJournal website October 29, 2024 [Online] Cited 01/11/2024

[3] See: Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, New York, 1994.
[4] See: Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996, p. 57.
[5] This phrase presides over the exhibition.

Laura Aguilar (American, 1959–2018)
Yrenia Cervantes
1990
Gelatin silver print
Image: 22.9 x 30.5cm (9 x 12 in.)
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Karl B. Goldfield Trust
© Laura Aguilar Trust

Far from being a flash in the proverbial pan, the border has long incarnated questions about the arbitrary nature of insider and outsider dynamics, legality, and citizenship.

Among the works exploring these themes is the late photographer Laura Aguilar’s black-and-white portrait “Yrenia Cervantes” (1990), in which the titular Chicana muralist and artist stares at her reflection in her dresser mirror. Her bedroom is decorated in the elaborate style of an altar: It includes photos, iconography, and handmade objects. Cervantes is simultaneously of the border and beyond it – the viewer can’t easily determine to which side she belongs.

Kayla Aletha Welch. “Photography Show Aims to Upend Xenophobic Border Narratives,” on the Hyperallergic website July 18, 2024 [Online] Cited 01/11/2024

Louis Carlos Bernal (American, 1941-1993)
Albert and Lynn Morales, Silver City, New Mexico
1978

Louis Carlos Bernal (American, 1941-1993)
La Reina de mi Vida (The Queen of my life)
1983
Gelatin silver print

Louis Carlos Bernal (American, 1941–1993)
Untitled [Undocumented worker holding Huelga flag at United Farm Workers Demonstration, El Mirage, Arizona]
Negative 1978, printed 2016
Digital inkjet print
40.6 x 40.6cm (16 x 16 in.)
Collection of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Louis Carlos Bernal Archive, Courtesy of Lisa Bernal Brethour and Katrina Bernal
© Lisa Bernal Brethour and Katrina Bernal

Ricardo Valverde (American/Chicano, 1946-1998) 'Whittier Blvd' 1979 from the exhibition 'Picturing the Border' at the Cleveland Museum of Art, July 2024 - January 2025

Ricardo Valverde (American/Chicano, 1946-1998)
Whittier Blvd
1979
Gelatin silver print

Exhibition catalogue showing on the cover a photograph by Ricardo Valverde titled La Reina (The Queen) 16th September 1976

Cleveland Museum of Art
11150 East Boulevard
Cleveland, Ohio 44106

Opening hours:
Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays 10.00am – 5.00pm
Wednesdays, Fridays 10.00am – 9.00pm
Closed Mondays

Cleveland Museum of Art website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography’ at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City

Exhibition dates: 24th August – 29th December 2024

Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936) 'Poling the Marsh Hay' c. 1885 from the exhibition 'Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography' at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, August - December 2024

Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936)
Poling the Marsh Hay
c. 1885
Platinum print on paper

Id est / that is

Voluptuous = relating to or characterised by luxury or sensual pleasure

Sensual = late Middle English (in the sense ‘sensory’): from late Latin sensualis, from sensus (see sense)

Sense = various; including:

~ a reasonable or comprehensible rationale i.e. the latent and emerging Modernism inherent in Photo-Secession photographs

~ the way in which a situation [in this case the “reading” of a photograph] can be interpreted i.e. the interpretation of Photo-Secession photographs as either Pictorialist, Modernist or a combination of both

~ a keen intuitive awareness of or sensitivity to the presence or importance of something i.e. the feeling of the photographer towards the object of their attention, revealed in the print, whether that be a nude, a building, pears and an apple or the side of a white barn

~ to be aware of (something) without being able to define exactly how one knows i.e. to be able to detect, recognise, and feel that ineffable “something” that emanates from the object of (y)our attention… in the act of creativity, in the act of seeing

Bringing something to our senses

Thus, the older I get the more I appreciate the faculty of feeling, thought and meaning that is revealed in these revolutionary photographs.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Quotes on Walls

“Why, Mr. Stieglitz, you won’t insist that a photograph can possibly be a work of art – you are a fanatic!”

Luigi Palma de Cesnola, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reportedly said to Alfred Stieglitz, 1902

“The painter need not always paint with brushes, he can paint with light itself. Modern photography has brought light under control and made it as truly art-material as pigment or clay. … The photographer has demonstrated that his work need not be mechanical imitation. He can control the quality of his lines, the spacing of his masses, the depth of his tones and the harmony of his gradations. He can eliminate detail, keeping only the significant. More than this, he can reveal the secrets of personality. What is this but Art?”

Arthur Wesley Dow, 1921

“The photographer’s problem therefore, is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium… without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods. … Photography is only a new road from a different direction but moving toward the common goal, which is Life.”

Paul Strand, 1917

“Pictorial photography owes its birth to the universal dissatisfaction of artist photographers in front of the photographic errors of the straight print. Its false values, its lack of accents, its equal delineation of things important and useless, were universally recognised and deplored by a host of malcontents… I consider that, from an art point of view, the straight print of today is not a whit better than the straight print of fifteen years ago. If it was faulty then it is still faulty now.”

Robert Demachy, 1907

“Gum, diffused lenses, (ultra) glycerining, were of experimental interest once. … Most of these are of more value historically than artistically. The prints are neither painting (or its equivalents) nor photographs. Let the photographer make a perfect photograph. It will be straight and beautiful – a true photograph.”

Alfred Stieglitz, 1919

Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography celebrates an intrepid group of photographers, led by preeminent photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who fought to establish photography as fine art, coequal with painting and sculpture at the turn of the 20th century. The Photo-Secession movement took cues from European modernists – who seceded from centuries-old academic traditions – to demonstrate photographic pictures’ aesthetic, creative, and skilful value as art. An homage to Stieglitz, Photo-Secession includes some of the very images that established the appreciation of photography’s artistic merits.

The UMFA will present this exhibition concurrently with Blue Grass, Green Skies: American Impressionism and Realism from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to draw attention to the cyclical dialogue between painting and photography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this period, photographers manipulated their images at various stages of production to imitate painterly effects, while painters worked and reworked their oils to imitate the immediacy of photography, demonstrating a remarkable reciprocity between these two art forms.

Text from the Utah Museum of Fine Arts website

Installation view of the exhibition Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts showing the work of Heinrich Kühn
Image courtesy of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts

Installation view of the exhibition Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts showing at centre from left to right, Bernard Shea Horne Doorway Abstraction; Drahomir Josef Ruzicka The Arch, Pennysylvannia Station c. 1920; Arnold Genthe Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico c. 1920; William E. Dassonville The Great Highway, San Francisco c. 1905

Installation view of the exhibition Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts showing from top left to right, Edward Steichen Lotus, Mount Kisco 1915; Edward Steichen Calla Lily c. 1921; Edward Steichen Three pears and an apple c. 1921; Edward Steichen Blossom of White Fingers c. 1923

Installation view of the exhibition Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts

Installation view of the exhibition Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts showing in the display cabinet issues of the magazine Camera Work, 1903-1917. Edited by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen

The Role of Camera Work

One of the key platforms for the Photo-Secession movement was the influential journal Camera Work, edited by Stieglitz and Steichen. Published from 1903 to 1917, Camera Work featured the work of Photo-Secessionists alongside essays and critiques that championed the artistic potential of photography. The journal played a crucial role in shaping public and critical perceptions of photography, providing a space for photographers to showcase their work and engage in intellectual discourse.

Adelaide Ryder. “The Photo-Secession Movement: Pioneering Artistry in Early Photography,” on the UMFA website Nd [Online] Cited 22/10/2024

Introduction

This exhibition celebrates 26 intrepid artists at the turn of the 20th century who sought to establish photography as a fine art equal to long-established media like painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. This movement in the United States centred on the group dubbed the Photo-Secession. While each of the Photo-Secessionists had their distinctive approaches, their works are hand-crafted photographic prints of traditional artistic subjects, such as landscape, portraiture, figure study, and still life. This combination of painterly imagery and printmaking is also known as Pictorialism.

The passionate leader and tenacious advocate of the Photo-Secession was Alfred Stieglitz, who advanced the visions of the most ambitious photographers of the time, including Heinrich Kühn, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, and Clarence White. Stieglitz tirelessly promoted art photography through his exhibition space in New York City – the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession and later called simply 291 – as well as through the journals he edited – Camera Notes (1897-1903) and Camera Work (1903-1917).

This exhibition also covers the breakup of the Photo-Secession, as some photographers rejected Pictorialism while others remained staunchly committed to it. The Photo-Secession itself irrevocably split apart around 1917. Artists led by Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand switched to Straight Photography, an approach involving sharp focus and direct printing of the original shot. Artists led by Käsebier and White continued to innovate through painterly approaches using soft focus and manipulated prints.

The works in this exhibition represent some of the most influential artists and iconic images of the period as well as superb examples of a variety of photographic printing techniques, including platinum, gum-bichromate, carbon, cyanotype, and bromoil.

All works of art this exhibition are from the private collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. This exhibition is organised by art2art Circulating Exhibitions.

The Rebirth of Art Photography in Europe

In the first few decades after the invention of photography in 1839, painters played an instrumental role in the development of this new medium. Artist-photographers like D.O. Hill in Edinburgh and Gustave Le Gray in Paris exhibited their photographs alongside paintings, drawings, and prints. The novelty of the photograph led to the proliferation of portrait studios and mass-produced views of famous monuments or exotic locales for the tourist trade. By the 1860s photography was considered a bourgeois technical profession. The Kodak camera, first issued in 1888, further popularised photography with its roll film, simple controls, and reasonable cost of one dollar (about $33 today).

Even as more and more individuals could access the means to make photos, artist-photographers advocated for the status of their medium and demanded a differentiation between their work and the products of point-and-shoot cameras. In 1889 Peter Henry Emerson published the book Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, which proposed a role for landscape photographers equal to esteemed painters like Camille Corot and Jean-François Millet. Emerson’s publication was a clarion call for a new generation of artistic photographers, and Pictorialism was born.

Pictorialist photographers enthusiastically pursued their new movement, pioneering soft-focus lenses and manipulatable printing methods. Soon they were forming regional clubs across Europe and resumed exhibiting their prints as art. The photographers that formed the t in London were particularly active and influential, and Pictorialism spread to other cultural centres like Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.

Alfred Stieglitz and the American Pictorialist Movement

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, but educated largely in Germany, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) watched the flowering of European Pictorialism with a mixture of aesthetic appreciation and fierce competitiveness, writing in 1892:

“Every unbiased critic will grant that we [American photographers] are still many lengths in the rear, apparently content to remain there, inasmuch as we seem to lack the energy to strive forward – to push ahead with that American will-power which is so greatly admired by the whole civilised world.”

Energised by European Pictorialism, Stieglitz championed juried photographic salons in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He also edited a series of increasingly ambitious journals about Pictorialist photography, starting with The American Amateur Photographer in 1893, then Camera Notes in 1897, and finally Camera Work starting in 1903. He inaugurated and named the Photo-Secession movement through the landmark exhibition he curated in 1903 at the National Arts Club in New York, which comprised 162 works by 32 artists. The name “Photo-Secession” referred to European avant-garde artistic movements, and in his own words, “Photo-Secession actually means a seceding from the accepted idea of what constitutes a photograph.” Eventually European artists would also be invited to join the Photo-Secession.

In 1905 Stieglitz opened a space at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York, the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, later simply called 291. It was the first retail gallery devoted to photography. He supported the venture with his own resources and generous assistance from others, and Edward Steichen was his steadfast associate. By 1915 Stieglitz was also showing avant-garde painting and sculpture at 291, including works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Constantin Brâncuși. Thus, he sought to demonstrate the idea that all art forms were on par with and informed one another.

Close Collaborations and the Sudden End of the Photo-Secession

From 1907 to 1910 Alfred Stieglitz and Clarence White closely collaborated on photographs and a landmark photography exhibition. In 1907 they made a series of 60 nudes, Stieglitz posing the models and White focusing the camera and making most of the prints. The following year, Stieglitz devoted an entire issue of Camera Work to White. In 1910 Stieglitz and White co-curated the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at Buffalo’s Albright Gallery (now Albright Knox Gallery). This historic project that included over 600 prints is now regarded as the apex of the Photo-Secession. It was also the final monument of the movement, as each of the major Pictorialists, White included, broke away from Stieglitz in the years that followed.

Significant reasons for the end of the Photo-Secession were Stieglitz’s authoritarian personality and disdain for photographers who needed to earn a living rather than exclusively pursue art for art’s sake. Philosophical differences also explain the rupture. Stieglitz had come to believe that Pictorialism had run its course. The irony was that the Photo-Secession had established photography as fine art through images that imitated other art forms by manipulation at every stage of the process – from lens to negative to print. Their pictures to varying degrees used methods that denied the very essence of photography. Stieglitz asserted that it was time to abandon the “painterly photograph” and to champion photography as fine art with compelling pictures that were truly photographic.

Late Pictorialism and the Clarence White School

As the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz’s partner for 30 years, acknowledged, “He was either loved or hated – there wasn’t much in between.” For reasons both personal and professional, most of the leading Photo-Secessionists chose not to follow Stieglitz and Paul Strand into Straight Photography. Many clustered instead around Clarence White, who in his gentle and encouraging manner was the antithesis of Stieglitz. In 1914 White founded the Clarence White School of Photography in New York City. In 1916 White along with Gertrude Käsebier and Alvin Langdon Coburn co-founded Pictorial Photographers of America; this new society welcomed members of all backgrounds and published the new journal Photo-Graphic Art.

The Clarence White School continued to be a locus for the training of new photographers until 1940, under the guidance of White’s widow Jane White after his death in 1925. Among the most prominent students of Clarence White are Karl Struss, Anne Brigman, Laura Gilpin, and Doris Ulmann, all of whom are represented in this exhibition. Other notable pupils of White include Margaret Bourke-White, Anton Bruehl, Paul Outerbridge, and Dorothea Lange.

Straight Photography, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand

The final section of this exhibition focuses on Straight Photography and two of Alfred Stieglitz’s most notable protégés, Edward Steichen and Paul Strand. Between them, they pioneered leading branches of 20th-century American photography.

With the entry of the United States into World War I, both Steichen and Strand were drafted into the U.S. Army. Steichen was a photographer for the Army Air Service Signal Corps in Europe, and Strand was an X-ray technician in the Army Medical Corps. In the years immediately after WWI, they each turned their attention to photographing the natural world: flowers and fruit in Steichen’s case, and toadstools, grasses, and ferns in Strand’s. Both would return to photographing their gardens in the final years of their lives.

Outside the naturalist realm, Steichen and Strand’s paths diverged.

Steichen, an extrovert, pioneered modern fashion and advertising photography for the Condé Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair. Later he was named Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he organised the landmark exhibition, Family of Man, which traveled to 37 countries on six continents and was seen by an estimated nine million people.

Strand, an introvert, traveled to remote places around the world, documenting the landscape, architecture, and people, his work exuding a respect for the dignity of the labouring class, which he absorbed from his mentor, Lewis Hine. Overall, Strand’s profoundly humanist scenes of everyday life influenced a generation of socially conscious photographers who documented the 20th-century crises of the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, World War II, and more.

Heinrich Kühn

In the late 19th century, European Pictorialism was divided into two camps. On the one side were the purist photographers who, aside from a softening of the lens, opposed extensive manipulation of the negative or the print for artistic effect. On the other side were those who derided “button-pushers” and viewed the “straight” photograph as merely the raw material from which to create an artistic print through elaborate handiwork.

The leader of this latter camp was Heinrich Kühn (1866-1944). Eschewing Modernist tendencies, he chose traditional subject matter of painting from the 17th through 19th centuries: still life, figural studies, and genre scenes. His preference for gum-bichromate and bromoil printmaking techniques, which allowed for extensive manipulation, were intended to provoke the reaction in the viewer: is that really a photograph?

Born in Dresden, Kühn moved to Innsbruck, Austria, after youthful studies in science and medicine. Thanks to a sizeable inheritance, he could devote himself to artistic photography, joining both the Linked Ring in London and Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession in the United States. A trans-Atlantic correspondence with Stieglitz began in 1899 and lasted three decades. They congratulated one another on their latest triumphs and encouraged each other through professional and personal disappointments. In 1909, with Stieglitz’s assistance, Kühn organised the International Photographic Exhibition in Dresden, one of the high points of Pictorialism.

Later in life, Kühn filed multiple patents in photochemistry and camera technology related to Pictorialist photography, but none earned him any money. Tastes had changed, and the painterly photograph had become a quaint curiosity.

Gertrude Käsebier

Gertrude Käsebier (1852-1934) was 37 years old, married, and had three children by the time she began studying art at the Pratt Institute. She had originally purchased a camera to make portraits of her children, but Pratt encouraged its women students to earn a living in the arts. By 1897 she opened a one-room commercial portrait studio in New York City. Her ambition was to make “not maps of faces, but likenesses that are biographies, to bring out in each photograph the essential personality that is variously called temperament, soul, humanity.”

Recognition for Käsebier’s talent and ability came swiftly. In 1898 the painter William Merritt Chase, judging the Philadelphia Photographic Salon, called her work “as fine as anything that [Anthony] Van Dyck has ever done.” For Stieglitz, who organised her first solo show in 1899 at the Camera Club of New York, Käsebier was “beyond dispute the leading portrait photographer in this country.” That year, she sold one of her photographs for the unheard-of sum of $100 (almost $3,800 today).

However, by the time that the Brooklyn Museum honoured Käsebier with a career retrospective in 1929, Pictorialist photography had fallen so far out of fashion that the exhibition was not even reviewed in major journals.

Clarence Hudson White

Clarence Hudson White (1871-1925) was a modest, soft-spoken, entirely self-taught genius from America’s heartland. Raised in the small town of Newark, Ohio, he eked out a living as a bookkeeper for a wholesale grocer; each week he saved enough to purchase two glass plates for his camera. He specialised in gorgeously back-lit domestic interior scenes featuring his friends and members of his close-knit extended family.

White’s contributions to the 1898 Philadelphia Photographic Salon were so highly praised that, like Gertrude Käsebier, he was appointed a judge for the following year. The annual salons of the Newark Camera Club that he organised featured the nation’s preeminent Pictorialists and were the direct precursor to Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession. Indeed, the 1900 salon featured his friend and latest discovery, Edward Steichen of Milwaukee.

From 1907 onwards, both in New York City and during summers in rural Maine, White was also America’s foremost teacher of photography. Many of the leading American photographers of the 20th century studied at the Clarence White School.

Paul Strand

In 1915 Alfred Stieglitz found in the young Paul Strand (1890-1976) the leader of a remarkable new direction in photography. Strand had been a senior at the Ethical Culture High School in 1907 when he first visited Gallery 291 on a class trip with his photography teacher, Lewis Hine, whose poignant documents of immigrants and child labor were staples of the Progressive Movement. Eight years later, after thousands of hours in the darkroom at the New York Camera Club, Strand returned to 291 with a portfolio of platinum prints that pointed the way to a new era. Stieglitz deemed them “brutally direct, devoid of all flim-flam, devoid of trickery and of any ‘ism’. These photographs are the direct expression of today.” Stieglitz not only offered Strand an exhibition at 291, but also devoted the final two issues of Camera Work exclusively to him.

What was so compelling and inspiring to Stieglitz in Strand’s photography? His portfolio contained pictures of urban street life and architecture, as well as powerful close-ups of weathered New York faces (influenced by Lewis Hine), boldly composed still lifes, and shadow abstractions taken on a porch in Twin Lakes, Connecticut.

As for photography’s future, Strand and Stieglitz saw eye to eye. In his essay in Camera Work, Strand called for the universal adoption of Straight Photography “without tricks of process or manipulation.” In a provocative lecture at the Clarence White School, Strand condemned “this so-called pictorial photography, which is nothing but an evasion of everything photographic.”

Works by Emerson, Post, Evans, and Sutcliffe

Frank Meadow Sutcliffe (British, 1853-1941) 'The Water Rats' 1886 from the exhibition 'Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography' at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, August - December 2024

Frank Meadow Sutcliffe (British, 1853-1941)
The Water Rats
1886
Platinum print on paper

Sutcliffe was a member of the British photographic society the Linked Ring, which sought to make their work recognised as fine art. He operated a portrait studio in the seaside town of Whitby in North Yorkshire but is remembered for his charming, naturalistic depictions of local life. This photograph resulted in his excommunication by local clergy for its “corrupting” effects. Today this is his best-known photograph, regarded as a study of pure childhood joy.

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Poplars on a French River
c. 1900
Platinum print on paper

Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936)
Gathering Water Lilies
c. 1885
Platinum print on paper

In addition to his photographic work, Emerson wrote persuasively that photography could match – and even surpass – painting as an emotive art form. His writings were influential to the young Alfred Stieglitz, with whom he corresponded over four decades.

All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Works by Thiollier

Félix Thiollier (French, 1842-1914)
Landscape in Bugey
c. 1885
Carbon print on paper

Thiollier’s photographic career is a fairly recent discovery, highlighted in the first ever retrospective of his career at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris in 2012.

From the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Works by Kühn

Heinrich Kühn (Austrian born Germany, 1866-1944)
Nude in Morning Sun
c. 1920
Multiple bromoil transfer print on Japanese tissue paper

Heinrich Kühn (Austrian born Germany, 1866-1944)
Female torso in sunlight
c. 1920

Heinrich Kühn (Austrian born Germany, 1866-1944)
Walter at Easel
c. 1909
Gum-bichromate print on paper

Heinrich Kühn (Austrian born Germany, 1866-1944)
Still Life with Fruit and Pottery
c. 1896
Gum-bichromate print on paper with an applied watercolour wash

Kühn’s still lifes deliberately recall paintings from earlier centuries. This scene – his first published image – contains similar elements to 17th-century still-life compositions. He even included insects, which are traditional references to mortality called memento mori (reminders of death). Can you spot the housefly?

All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Portraits by Steichen

Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973)
George Frederic Watts, London
1901
Varnished platinum print on paper

This dramatic profile portrait of the English Pre-Raphaelite painter was the first in what Steichen termed his “Great Men” series. Steichen wrote about his approach to portraiture, “I aim for the expression of something psychological. I am not satisfied with the mere reproduction of features and expression.”

Published in Camera Work, 14, 1906

Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973)
The Photographer’s Best Model: George Bernard Shaw, London
1907
Platinum print on paper

Steichen was elated after his photographic sitting with Shaw, writing to Stieglitz: “Well I’ve seen and done Shaw (photographically of course). He’s the nicest kind of fellow imaginable – genial and boyish – there is a little of the sardonic about him as you see him but when you get the camera at him you are tempted with possibilities in that way. He seems to know a lot about photography and certainly skilfully bluffs you into believing he knows it all.”

Published in Camera Work, 42/43, 1913

All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Glossary of Photographic Printing Methods and Terms from the History of Photography

Gelatin Silver Print

For over a century, from the 1880s until the digital era, the gelatin silver print was the most common technique for producing black-and-white photographs. The paper is coated with a binder layer of gelatin incorporating light-sensitive silver chloride or silver bromide. The paper is exposed under a negative, either by contact-printing or through an enlarger, then chemically developed, stopped, fixed, and dried. In the process, the silver salts are reduced to metallic silver, which carries the image. The overall color of the print can be altered through toning.

Cyanotype

A sheet of paper is sensitised in a solution of potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate. After contact-printing under a negative, the iron compounds form an insoluble blue (“cyan”) dye known as Prussian blue. Apart from its occasional artistic use, the only regular use of the cyanotype was in copying architectural plans, thus called “blueprints.”

Platinum or Palladium Print

A platinum print is produced by sensitising a sheet of paper with platinum and iron salts. The sheet is then contact-printed under a negative until a faint image is visible. The print is developed in a potassium oxalate solution that dissolves unexposed iron salts and transforms the platinum salts into metallic platinum, which intensifies the image. Mercury chloride can be added to the solution to give a warmer tone. Unlike a silver print, where the image lives in a gelatin binder layer on top of the paper (akin to a watercolour), the image in a platinum print is embedded in the paper fibres (akin to an oil painting). The rich mid-tone range and matte surface made the platinum print the favoured medium for the Pictorialist photographers, from P.H. Emerson onward. When the price of platinum spiked during World War I, palladium was introduced as a more affordable (and generally warmer-toned) substitute.

Pigment Prints

The following processes are known as pigment prints, because the photographic image is carried by inks or pigments, rather than by metallic particles like silver, iron, or platinum.

Gum Bichromate Print

A sheet of paper is coated with diluted gum-arabic mixed with coloured pigment and light-sensitive potassium bichromate. During exposure under a negative, the bichromate causes the coloured gum-arabic to harden in proportion to the amount of light received. The areas not exposed to light remain soluble in water, and the print is developed by washing away the soluble areas, leaving a positive image on the paper. The prints can be exposed and reprinted numerous times with different coloured pigments, as well as manipulated by brushing away more pigmented gum during the washing stage.

Bromoil (Transfer) Print

This process does not begin with a negative, but rather with a gelatin silver print that is bleached in a solution of potassium bromide. The bleaching removes the silver-based image and selectively hardens the underlying gelatin in proportion to the image density. The sheet is then hand-coloured with an oil-based ink, which is selectively absorbed depending on the hardness of the gelatin: the softer areas contain more water, which repels the oil-based ink. An inked print is sometimes used as a kind of printing plate for transferring the image to another sheet of paper (a bromoil transfer print).

Photogravure

This is a sophisticated photomechanical process used for reproducing photographs in ink in a large edition. It is a form of intaglio printing, in which a photographic image is acid-etched into a copper plate. The relief image is then inked and printed. Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Work was largely printed in photogravure.

The Photo-Secession

This was the brief but influential artistic movement led by American Alfred Stieglitz during the years 1902–1915 that championed photography as an art form that was as aesthetic, creative, and skilful as traditional media like painting, drawing, watercolour, and printmaking. The European artistic movement Secessionism inspired the name Photo-Secession, and both movements were committed to Modernism by seceding from centuries-old academic traditions.

Pictorialism / Pictorialist

The approach to photography in which artists sought to make images that imitated the tradition of paintings through photographic prints. Pictorialist photographers used soft focus lenses and manipulated both their negatives and printing media to create their prints.

The Linked Ring

Also known as the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, this photographic society founded in 1892 in London promoted photography as a form of art and was influential for the American society of the Photo-Secession.

Straight Photography

The approach to photography in which artists use sharp focus and print directly from their negatives with minimal or no manipulation.

Camera Notes

Camera Notes was the journal of the Camera Club of New York, edited by Alfred Stieglitz from 1897 to 1902. Under Stieglitz’s editorship, the purposes of Camera Notes were “to take cognisance also of what is going on in the photographic world at large, to review new processes and consider new instruments and agents as they come into notice; in short to keep our members in touch with everything connected with the progress and elevation of photography.”

Camera Work

Camera Work was the journal about contemporary photography that Alfred Stieglitz edited and published with the assistance of Edward Steichen from 1903 to 1917. The goal of this journal “devoted largely to the interests of pictorial photography” was “to issue quarterly an illustrated publication which will appeal to the ever-increasing ranks of those who have faith in photography as a medium of individual expression, and, in addition, to make converts of many at present ignorant of its possibilities.”

This glossary has been edited from primary sources and text by Ina Schmidt-Runke, Meike Harder, and Andreas Gruber.

The Photo-Secession Movement: Pioneering Artistry in Early Photography

By Adelaide Ryder, head photographer and digital assets manager at the UMFA

The Birth of the Photo-Secession Movement

This fall the Utah Museum of Fine Arts will exhibit Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography. This exhibition of art photography from the early 20th century will be on view from August 24 to December 29, 2024. Who were the Photo-Secessionists and why was their work so pivotal to the advancement of photography as an art form?

In the mid-19th century photography was regarded as a complex technical field that only a trained professional could do. By the 1880s, however, the hand-held camera had become affordable and easy to use, and the “snapshot” became commonplace. Smaller, easier-to-use cameras and the ability to send the film off to a lab for development gave the public accessibility to the medium in a new way. This technological advancement greatly affected the professional photography business, as people began to question the skills needed to make a photograph when “anyone could push a button.”

How did photographers respond to this shift in aesthetics and business? Many searched for ways to use photography to express abstract ideas or subjective points of view, shifting from using photography to document objective likeness to illustrating subjective conditions or the subject’s inner state. This helped elevate the photographer’s status, as the expressive ability of the person behind the camera became as important as the subject. Photographers embraced symbolism and started printing with complex techniques like gum bichromate to elevate their craft above the basic snapshot. Two significant movements were born from this struggle to gain recognition as a legitimate form of artistic expression rather than simply a means of mechanical documentation: Pictorialism and the Photo-Secession.

The camera was seen as a tool, and many felt that photographs visually lacked the “artist’s hand,” an essential factor in calling something “art.” The Photo-Secession movement, founded by Alfred Stieglitz in 1902, aimed to change this perception. Stieglitz and his contemporaries believed photography deserved the same artistic consideration as painting and sculpture. They aimed to elevate photography to fine art, emphasizing the photographer’s vision and creativity over mere technical skill. Stieglitz said the Photo-Secession was founded “loosely to hold together those Americans devoted to pictorial photography in their endeavour to compel its recognition, not as a handmaiden of art, but as a distinctive medium of individual expression.” (Camera Work, no. 6, April 1904.)

The Photo-Secession movement emerged from the broader Pictorialist movement, which dominated photographic art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While both movements sought to establish photography as an art form, the Photo-Secessionists emerged with their own philosophy.

Similarities

Artistic Expression: The Photo-Secession and Pictorialism emphasized the photographer’s role as an artist rather than a mere technician. They believed that photography should convey the photographer’s vision and emotional intent.

Aesthetic Quality: Both movements valued the aesthetic quality of photographs. They often employed techniques like soft focus, manipulation of light, and careful composition to create visually striking images.

Influence of Painting: Both were heavily influenced by the aesthetics of painting, particularly Impressionism and Symbolism. They sought to create images that were painterly in style, blurring the lines between photography and traditional fine arts.

Differences

Philosophical Focus: Pictorialism focused on creating images that looked like paintings, often using elaborate darkroom techniques to achieve a painterly effect. Photo-Secession, while also influenced by painting, emphasised the photographer’s personal expression and the inherent qualities of the photographic medium, sometimes even embracing the “snapshot” aesthetic if it helped to illustrate more hidden ideas and thoughts.

Technical Innovation: The Photo-Secessionists were more open to embracing the amateur artist and experimentation in techniques and technologies, whereas the Pictorialists held on to the traditional hierarchy of the European artistic schools of the time. Photo-Secessionists saw innovation as a means to expand photography’s artistic potential.

Subject Matter: Pictorialists focused on romanticized and idealized subjects, such as landscapes, portraits, and allegorical scenes. The Photo-Secessionists, on the other hand, explored a wider range of subjects, including urban scenes, modern life, and abstract forms. They embraced art movements like Cubism and Futurism, reflecting a broader and more progressive vision of art.

Exhibition and Display: The Photo-Secessionists were disenchanted with the outdated salons and gate-keeping ways of many photo schools commonly practiced in Europe. They began publications like The American Amateur Photographer, Camera Notes, and Camera Work to help give a platform to young photographers and people practicing these new ways of image making.

Adelaide Ryder. “The Photo-Secession Movement: Pioneering Artistry in Early Photography,” on the UMFA website Nd [Online] Cited 22/10/2024

Who were the Photo-Secessionists?

Works by Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz: The Visionary Leader

Alfred Stieglitz was a driving force behind the Photo-Secession movement. His passion for photography galvanized his dedication to promoting it as an art form. He saw photography as a means of personal expression. He helped catapult the idea that image-making can happen in the darkroom, during the printing process, as much as in the camera.

Stieglitz’s photograph The Steerage (1907, below) is one of the most iconic images in the history of photography. This powerful image captures the crowded lower deck of a transatlantic steamer, where people traveled in steerage class, the part of the ship with accommodations for those with the cheapest tickets. The Steerage is celebrated for its striking composition, which combines geometric shapes and human forms to create a dynamic and balanced visual narrative. Stieglitz considered this photograph one of his most outstanding achievements, as it encapsulated his transition to straight photography, which embraced photographs looking like photographs rather than the painterly qualities of Pictorialism. This photograph shows his ability to convey the complexity and depth of human experience through a single image. The photograph is a masterpiece of visual artistry and a compelling social document, reflecting the conditions and aspirations of early 20th century immigrants.

Adelaide Ryder. “The Photo-Secession Movement: Pioneering Artistry in Early Photography,” on the UMFA website Nd [Online] Cited 22/10/2024

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
The Steerage
1907
Hand-pulled photogravure on paper

This photograph has become the iconic image of the Photo-Secession and has legendary status. In June 1907 he sailed to Europe to visit family and booked a first-class cabin. On a stroll around the ship, he encountered a bustling scene of labourers and their families traveling in steerage class, the part of the ship with accommodations for those with the cheapest tickets. With a single four-by-five-inch glass plate left in his camera, Stieglitz shot what would be regarded as a definitive masterpiece of both photography and Modernism.

About making this picture Stieglitz recalled: “There were men and women and children on the lower deck of the steerage. There was a narrow stairway leading to the upper deck of the steerage, a small deck right on the bow of the steamer. To the left was an inclining funnel and from the upper steerage deck there was fastened a gangway bridge that was glistening in its freshly painted state. It was rather long, white, and during the trip remained untouched by anyone. On the upper deck, looking over the railing, there was a young man with a straw hat. The shape of the hat was round. He was watching the men and women and children on the lower steerage deck. A round straw hat, the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right, the white drawbridge with its railing made of circular chains – white suspenders crossing on the back of a man in the steerage below, round shapes of iron machinery, a mast cutting into the sky, making a triangular shape. I saw shapes related to each other. I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life.”

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
The Hand of Man
1902
Hand-pulled photogravure on paper

All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Works by Käsebier

Gertrude Käsebier: The Master of Portraiture

Gertrude Käsebier was known for her compelling portraits and allegorical imagery. Käsebier’s work transcended traditional portrait photography by infusing her images with a deep sense of intimacy and character. She believed that a photograph should reveal the inner essence of its subject, and her portraits are renowned for capturing the personality and spirit of the people she photographed.

Käsebier’s approach to portraiture was both innovative and empathetic. This image from the UMFA’s permanent collection is a perfect example of how she photographed women and children, presenting them with dignity and respect at a time when they were not the usual subjects of portraiture. Her work challenged conventional representations and highlighted her subjects’ emotional depth and individuality.

Adelaide Ryder. “The Photo-Secession Movement: Pioneering Artistry in Early Photography,” on the UMFA website Nd [Online] Cited 22/10/2024

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934)
Untitled (Billiard Game)
c. 1909
Platinum print on paper

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934)
Mother and Two Children
1899
Platinum print on paper

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934)
Serbonne (A Day in France)
1901
Platinum print on paper

Both Pumpkin Pie, Voulangis and Serbonne (A Day in France) were set in France in 1901, when the artist was chaperoning art students. The young man in both scenes is Edward Steichen at age 22, whose interest in photography was then budding.

Serbonne is Käsebier’s chaste reference to Édouard Manet’s famous painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) of 1863. An example of ultra-soft focus, this photo was reproduced in the inaugural issue of Camera Work, which was devoted to Käsebier.

Published in Camera Work, 1, 1903

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934)
The Heritage of Motherhood
1904
Gum-bichromate print on paper

This portrays the children’s book author Agnes Rand Lee in mourning after the sudden death of her daughter from illness. A contemporary photographer and critic deemed this image “one of the strongest things that Käsebier has ever done, and one of the saddest and most touching that I have ever seen.” Käsebier extensively manipulated the gum-bichromate process to make this print appear like a charcoal drawing.

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934)
Mother and Child
c. 1900
Multiple gum-bichromate print on paper

The subject of mother and child was a frequent one for Pictorialists, especially Käsebier and Clarence White. The contrast between the tiny infant and the mighty tree gives this image additional symbolic meaning.

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934)
The Picture Book
1903
Platinum print on paper

Alfred Stieglitz had a print of this photograph in his personal collection, which he bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Published in Camera Work, 10, 1905

All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Works by Evans

Frederick Evans (British, 1853-1943) 'Aubrey Beardsley' 1893

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Aubrey Beardsley
1893
Platinum print on paper

Evans, a member of the British art photography group the Linked Ring, was close friends with prominent authors and artists, such as George Bernard Shaw and Aubrey Beardsley. Portrayed here around age 20, Beardsley was a talented artist, designer, and illustrator, whose promising career was cut short by tuberculosis just five years after this photo was made.

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Alvin Langdon Coburn in Eastern Clothing
1901
Platinum print on paper

Coburn was a precocious young American artist. An eighth birthday gift of a Kodak camera sparked his interest in photography. By age 16 Coburn had moved to London to work with his cousin the photographer F. Holland Day, whose portrait by Gertrude Käsebier is in this exhibition. After being included in a landmark exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society, Coburn returned to New York and apprenticed with Käsebier. By the tender age of 20, he became a founding member of the Photo-Secession and launched an international career dividing his time between New York, London, and Paris.

All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Works by Dow

Arthur Wesley Dow (American, 1857-1922)
Silhouetted Trees
c. 1910
Cyanotype print on paper

A painter, printmaker, and photographer, Dow is mainly remembered today as a pioneering educator who taught in New York at the Pratt Institute, Art Students League, and Teacher’s College of Columbia University. Among Dow’s students were Gertrude Käsebier, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Charles Sheeler, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Dow also hired Clarence White to teach photography at Columbia, thereby launching White’s important teaching career.

From the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Works by Haviland

Paul Burty Haviland (American, 1880-1950)
Ship Deck
1910
Platinum print on paper

Haviland was an amateur photographer from a young age and grew up immersed in the arts. His grandfather was an early photography critic in Paris, and his father owned Haviland porcelain factory in Limoges, France. As the New York representative of the family business, Haviland happened to meet Alfred Stieglitz in 1908. Just two years later he became associate editor of Camera Work and helped financially support Stieglitz’s gallery 291.

All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Works by Struss

Karl Struss (American, 1886-1981)
Cables
1912
Gelatin silver print on paper

Struss was a star pupil of Clarence White and became a favourite of Alfred Stieglitz and the youngest member of the Photo-Secession. He is best known for his compelling cityscapes of New York, including the view of the Singer Building through the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge and the dramatic Flatiron Building, Twilight.

Karl Struss (American, 1886-1981)
Flatiron Building, Twilight
c. 1915
Gelatin silver print on paper

Struss eventually broke away from Stieglitz and cofounded the society of the Pictorial Photographers of America along with Clarence White and Gertrude Käsebier in 1916. He … accepted a job as a cameraman for filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille. Struss would become one of the most prolific Hollywood cinematographers with 150 films, an Academy Award, and three Academy nominations to his credit.

All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Nudes by Stieglitz and White

Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925)
Reflected Nude
1909
Platinum print on paper

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) and Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925)
Nude Posed in Doorway (Miss Thompson)
1907
Platinum print on paper

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) and Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925)
The Torso
1907
Palladium print on paper

This is likely the most widely reproduced nude by Photo-Secession artists.

After their personal and professional rupture, Stieglitz wrote White a letter that specifically referred to their collaboration in 1907. Stieglitz insisted “that my name be not mentioned by you in connection with either the prints or the negatives” and further instructed White to erase his name from any prints they had jointly signed. Despite this vitriol, Stieglitz retained in his personal collection two prints of The Torso, one of them jointly signed in pencil.

Published in Camera Work, 27, 1909

All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Images of O’Keeffe by Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Georgia O’Keeffe
1918
Palladium print on paper

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Georgia O’Keeffe (Fixing Hair)
1919-1921
Palladium print on paper

Over two decades, Stieglitz made over 300 photos of O’Keeffe, producing an extraordinary and candid portrait of the artist. She recalled, “I was photographed with a kind of heat and excitement and in a way wondered what it was all about.” The directness and intimacy of this series of photos differ from the idealised nudes that Stieglitz and White made together during the heyday of the Photo-Secession.

All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Works by White

Clarence Hudson White: The Romantic

Clarence Hudson White was celebrated for his romanticised and intimate approach to photography. His 1904 image The Kiss perfectly illustrates his unique style. This platinum print on paper captures a tender moment with a soft focus and gentle lighting. The Kiss portrays an intimate scene imbued with a sense of emotional depth. White’s use of the platinum printing process, which provides a broad tonal range and exquisite detail, enhances the image’s delicate and dreamlike quality. His work reflects the movement’s early emphasis on creating photographs that evoke the emotional and aesthetic qualities of fine art while also paving the way for future explorations in photographic expression.

Adelaide Ryder. “The Photo-Secession Movement: Pioneering Artistry in Early Photography,” on the UMFA website Nd [Online] Cited 22/10/2024

Clarence H. White (American, 1871-1925) 'The Bubble' 1898, printed 1905

Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925)
The Bubble
1898
Platinum print on paper

This image was exhibited at the 1898 Philadelphia Photographic Salon to great acclaim. Fellow photographer and critic Joseph Keiley commented, “Like most of Mr. White’s pictures, it is a well nigh perfect piece of composition whose subject with subtle poetry stimulates and leaves much to the imagination.”

Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925)
The Mirror
1912
Platinum print on paper

Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925)
The Kiss
1904
Platinum print on paper

This is one of White’s best known photographs. Despite his separation from White, Stieglitz kept prints of both The Kiss and The Bubble in his personal collection throughout his life.

All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Works by followers of White

Anne Brigman: The Feminine Mystic of Photo-Secession

Anne Brigman was known for her evocative and mystical imagery. She often placed herself within her compositions, challenging traditional gender roles and expectations. Her connection to the Photo-Secession movement was cemented through her association with Alfred Stieglitz, who published her work in Camera Work and admired her innovative spirit.

Brigman’s 1911 photograph The Pine Sprite exemplifies her distinctive style. The image features a nude female figure intertwined with the natural landscape, blending the human form seamlessly with the rugged environment. This work reflects Brigman’s themes of femininity, nature, and freedom, aligning with the Photo-Secessionist emphasis on personal expression and artistic experimentation. Brigman’s contributions highlighted the movement’s inclusive spirit, showcasing how female photographers could assert their voices and artistic visions in a male-dominated field.

Adelaide Ryder. “The Photo-Secession Movement: Pioneering Artistry in Early Photography,” on the UMFA website Nd [Online] Cited 22/10/2024

Anne Brigman (American, 1869-1950)
The Shadow on My Door (Self Portrait)
1921
Gelatin silver print on paper

Anne Brigman (American, 1869-1950)
The Pine Sprite
1911
Gelatin silver print on paper

Brigman was for a long time the only Californian member of the Photo-Secession. She was a free spirit and pagan whose woodsy nudes inspired by fantasy and folklore were frequently reproduced in Camera Work.

Laura Gilpin (American, 1891-1979)
Ghost Rock, Garden of the Gods, Colorado
1919
Palladium print on paper

An amateur photographer from Colorado Springs, Gilpin moved to New York to study with Clarence White in 1916. This photograph was one of Gilpin’s first successes after returning home in 1919, the beginning of her decades-long career as one of the most notable photographers of the West and Southwest.

All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

In 1916 Gilpin enrolled at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York. Two years later, she returned to her native Colorado Springs and became one of the few women to pursue landscape photography.

This is her depiction of the Garden of the Gods, a scenic rock formation in Colorado Springs. It captures the stillness and otherworldly quality of the area. The photograph also reflects an emphasis on the evocation of mood rather than on descriptive detail.

Text from the National Gallery of Art Facebook page

Edward Steichen

Edward J. Steichen: The Innovator

Edward J. Steichen, a close associate of Stieglitz, brought a unique perspective to the Photo-Secession movement. Steichen was not only a photographer but also a painter, which influenced his photographic style. He experimented with various techniques, including soft focus and manipulation of light, to create both ethereal and visually striking images.

An avid gardener, Steichen propagated and grew a bountiful garden at his French country house. This image of a calla lily is rendered with exquisite detail and tonal richness. Steichen’s botanical images showcase his ability to find harmony between nature and art. His meticulous composition and sensitivity to light transform a simple flower into a work of art, reflecting his painterly approach to photography. His botanical works contributed to the Photo-Secession movement by highlighting the artistic potential of natural forms.

Adelaide Ryder. “The Photo-Secession Movement: Pioneering Artistry in Early Photography,” on the UMFA website Nd [Online] Cited 22/10/2024

Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) 'Lotus, Mount Kisco' 1915 from the exhibition 'Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography' at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, August - December 2024

Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973)
Lotus, Mount Kisco
1915
Gelatin silver print on paper

Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973)
Calla Lily
c. 1921
Platinum print on paper

Steichen had previously photographed flowers in compositions that placed delicate floral arrangements next to women figured as ideals of feminine beauty. In contrast, here he presents the lotus and calla lily in sharp focus and as singular subjects without overt metaphorical meaning.

Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973)
Three Pears and an Apple
1921
Gelatin silver print on paper

On making this picture Steichen wrote: “I was particularly interested in a method of representing volume, scale, and a sense of weight. In my small greenhouse I constructed a tent of opaque blankets. From a tiny opening, I directed light against one side of the covering blanket, and this light, reflected from the blanket, was all. I made a series of exposures that lasted more than two days and one night. As the nights were cool, everything, including the camera, contracted and the next day expanded. Instead of producing one meticulously sharp picture, the infinitesimal movement produced a succession of slightly different sharp images, which optically fused as one. Here for the first time in a photograph, I was able to sense volume as well as form.”

Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973)
Blossom of White Fingers
c. 1923
Gold-toned gelatin silver print on paper

This study of the graceful hands of Steichen’s wife with ultra-soft focus and high-key lighting and printed on gold-toned gelatin paper is one of the rare instances of Steichen using Pictorialist methods after the end of the Photo-Secession.

Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973)
Backbone and Ribs of a Sunflower
c. 1920
Gelatin silver print on paper

Steichen was a knowledgeable botanist and spent five decades photographing the life cycle of sunflowers. This is one of his earliest studies of the plant. He became fascinated with spirals in nature, writing, “I found some form of the spiral in most succulent plants and in certain flowers, particularly in the seed pods of the sunflower.”

Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973)
Advertising Study for Coty Lipstick
1929
Gelatin silver print on paper

Steichen is credited as a founding figure of modern advertising and fashion photography. From 1923 to 1938, he served as chief photographer for the Condé Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair. He had extensive experience in graphic design and advertising from his youth and earlier career. He had designed posters as a young man for a lithographic printer in Milwaukee. As Alfred Stieglitz’s associate on Camera Work from 1903 to 1917, Steichen produced the logo, typeface, and page layouts.

All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Works by Strand

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) 'Central Park' 1915-1916 from the exhibition 'Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography' at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, August - December 2024

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Central Park
1915-1916
Platinum print on paper

Urban life preoccupied Strand and in the 1920s would become a central subject of Modernist photographers around the world. From a Central Park overpass Strand identified this interesting composition with the bright, sinuous path dividing the picture plane. The decisive moment to snap the shutter occurred with the appearance of the two advancing figures and their angular shadows.

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Speckled Toadstool, Georgetown, Maine
1927
Waxed platinum print on paper

Strand continued to use platinum printing long after most other photographers adopted gelatin silver papers, which were more efficient and versatile and had a glossier surface. His prints in platinum are highly regarded for capturing minute detail and a wide range of tonal values.

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Cobweb in the Rain, Georgetown, Maine
1928
Gelatin silver print on paper

All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Works of Straight photography

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Side of White Barn, Bucks County
1917
Gelatin silver print on paper

A painter and photographer, Sheeler became a close friend of Alfred Stieglitz as the Photo-Secession dissolved. This photographic study of line, shape, and tone recalls the hard-edged style of Sheeler’s paintings. Only the chickens appearing at the bottom edge give a sense of scale to the barn.

Alvin Langdon Coburn: The Avant-Garde Creator

Alvin Langdon Coburn pushed the boundaries of photography with his innovative Vortographs, created in 1916-1917. These images are considered some of the first abstract photographs, born from Coburn’s desire to create art that combined the physical with the spiritual. By placing a vortoscope, a triangular arrangement of mirrors and prisms, over a camera’s lens, Coburn created complex images of kaleidoscopic and geometric patterns that simplify the photograph to the essential elements of light and form. This technique broke away from traditional photographic representation, emphasising form, structure, and abstraction. The Vortographs were influenced by the Vorticist movement, which celebrated dynamic and abstract art. Coburn’s pioneering work with these images marked a significant departure from Pictorialism, embracing modernist principles and demonstrating the artistic potential of photography beyond mere depiction. The Vortographs stand as a testament to Coburn’s visionary approach and contributions to the evolution of photographic art.

Adelaide Ryder. “The Photo-Secession Movement: Pioneering Artistry in Early Photography,” on the UMFA website Nd [Online] Cited 22/10/2024

Alvin Langdon Coburn (British American, 1882-1966)
Vortograph
1917
Gelatin silver print on paper

Coburn was one of the Photo-Secessionists who rejected Pictorialism. In his 1916 essay “The Future of Pictorial Photography,” he called for abstraction in photography, concluding, “it is my hope that photography may fall in line with all the other arts, and with her infinite possibilities, do things stranger and more fascinating than the most fantastic dreams.” Coburn created vortographs like this by placing a devise with three mirrors between his camera and subject. When he exhibited them to great fanfare in London in 1917, Ezra Pound proclaimed: “The Camera is freed from Reality!”

All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

Utah Museum of Fine Arts
University of Utah campus
Marcia and John Price Museum Building
410 Campus Center Drive

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 10am – 5pm
Closed Mondays

Utah Museum of Fine Arts website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Photos: ‘Album Horace Vernet’

November 2024

Album Horace Vernet front cover
30 cartes des visite
16cm high x 11cm wide x 3.5cm deep

I purchased this small photo album from an op shop (charity shop) in Melbourne, Australia.

It features 29 carte de visite by the French firm Goupil & Cie of the paintings of the French history painter Horace Vernet (1789-1863) – painter of battles, portraits, and Orientalist and modern national subjects.

“The Universal Exposition of 1855, at which he was represented by twenty-four paintings, crowned his popular and official success. His reputation among artists and critics, on the other hand, was not uncontested. Baudelaire scathingly referred to him as “un militaire qui fait de la peinture,” and while his painstaking factuality and the sheer magnitude of his production commanded respect, the prosy shallowness of his realism, his stylistic banality, and the stridency of his chauvinism were early noted and contributed to the eventual neglect of his work. At the time of his death in 1863, Vernet, a member of thirty academies, was nevertheless France’s most famous artist, admired and imitated throughout Europe and deeply imbedded in popular culture.”1

The only photograph not by Goupil & Cie in the whole album is the second photograph in the album, a portrait of the painter by Bingham (Robert Jefferson Bingham, English 1825-1870). The photograph can be dated to between 1861 when Bingham’s photographic studio in Paris was at Rue de la Rochefoucauld and 1863 when Vernet died. This also helps date the compilation of the whole album.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Anonymous. “Horace Vernet,” on the National Gallery of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 13/10/2024

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

PLEASE NOTE: the photographs appear in the posting in the order they appear in the album.

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) The Studio of Horace Vernet (Interieur d un Atelier) 1824
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie was at Boulevard Montmartre between the 1850s-1880s

Bingham (photographer) Robert Jefferson Bingham (English, 1825-1870)
Photographie De S.M. La Reine D’Angleterre
Medaille de 1ere Classe 1855
58 Rue de Larochefoucualt, Paris
Portrait of Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863)
1861-1863
Carte de visite

Operated at Rue de la Rochefoucauld, 58 from 1861 until 1870.

Born in 1825 near Leicester in England, Bingham had a background in chemistry. He was particularly interested in photographic processes, and published a treatise on this subject in 1848. He later became the first writer to outline the possible use of collodion in photographs and the self-proclaimed ‘Inventeur du procédé collodion’. Bingham first exhibited his photographs of landscapes and of copies of paintings in London at The Great Exhibition in 1851. In 1859 he established a photographic portrait studio in Paris, which thrived throughout the 1860s and continued under his name even after his death in Brussels in 1870.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Bingham also made photographs of the Exposition Universelle of 1855 in Paris. His ability to take some 2500 photographs at relatively high speeds on this occasion encouraged other photographers to use the collodion process for their work as well, helping it become the most popular method from 1855 until about 1880. Henry Cole sent him at the same time to the Louvre to photograph the masterpieces of the museum collection. At some point in 1851 1855, or 1859, Bingham moved to Paris to work there as a photographer, at first together with the American Warren T. Thompson until Thompson returned to England in 1856. Bingham not only worked at the 1855 Exposition, but also displayed his own life-size portraits, for which he won a Medal First Class. Due to a lack of commercial success, however, he soon stopped producing these huge photographs and stuck to more standard formats.

His work at the Louvre inspired him to make photographic portraiture a commercial enterprise, and in 1857 he opened his new atelier in the Nouvelle Athènes quarter of Paris, one of the hotspots of artistic activity at the time. He became friends with many artists, photographing them and their works, and started on a new project, a photographic collection of the works of the recently deceased painter Paul Delaroche. Published in 1858, it was the first photographic catalogue raisonné. It was followed over the next few years by similar works about other artists, including one in 1860 on Ary Scheffer and another one with photographs of the major works of the 1860 Salon. Smaller works with only a handful of photographs were produced for particular collections and for the Napoleon Museum in Amiens.

Anonymous. “Robert Jefferson Bingham,” on the Wikipedia website

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Battle near Vitebsk 1812
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Napoleon Bonaparte leading his troops over the bridge of Arcole 1826
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) La Barrière de Clichy. Défense de Paris, March 30, 1814
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Napoleon reviewing the Guard in the place du Carrousel, c. 1841-1842
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Napoleon bids farewell to his Guard at Fontainebleau on 20 April 1814 (1824)
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) The Lion Hunt 1836
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789–1863) Chasse Aux Sangliers dans la Plaine de Sahara (Wild Boar Hunting in the Sahara Plain) 1838
c. 1860-1863

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Unknown title Nd
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789–1863) Le Giaour, vainqueur d’Hassan (The Giaour conquers Hassan) c. 1827
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863)
Le Giaour, vainqueur d’Hassan
c. 1827
Oil on canvas
25 5/8 x 21 in. (65 x 54cm)
Public domain

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Cavalier arabe, dit aussi ‘La Retraite’ (Arabian horseman, also called ‘The Retreat’) 1839
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863)
Cavalier arabe, dit aussi ‘La Retraite’
1839
Oil on panel
40.8 x 33.5cm (16 x 13 1/4 in.)
Purchased or commissioned by Baron Jean-Conrad Hottinguer (1803-1866) and paid by him to Vernet in 1840; then collection of Baroness Hottinguer, in 1874
Public domain

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Louis-Philippe, accompagné de ses fils, sortant à cheval du château de Versailles (King Louis-Philippe escorted by his sons leaving Versailles on June 10, 1837) 1846
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visit

Horace Vernet (French, 1789–1863)
Louis-Philippe, accompagné de ses fils, sortant à cheval du château de Versailles (King Louis-Philippe escorted by his sons leaving Versailles on June 10, 1837)
1846
Oil on canvas
Height: 368cm
Width: 397.5cm
Musée national du Château de Versailles
Public domain

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Judith and Holofernes 1829
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Judith with the head of Holofernes Nd
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Rebecca and Eleazar at the well (1835, now lost)
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Pie VIII porté dans la basilique de Saint-Pierre à Rome (Pius VIII brought to the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome) 1829
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863)
Pie VIII porté dans la basilique de Saint-Pierre à Rome (Pius VIII brought to the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome)
1829
Oil on canvas
Height: 385cm (12.6 ft)
Width: 329cm (10.7 ft)
Museum of the History of France
Public domain

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Repudiation Of Hagar 1837
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Le Marché d’esclaves (Slave market) 1836
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863)
Le Marché d’esclaves (Slave market)
1836
Oil on canvas
Height: 65cm (25.5 in)
Width: 54cm (21.2 in)
Alte Nationalgalerie
Public domain

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) An Algerian Lady Hawking 1839
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Châtelaine partant pour la chasse (Chatelaine leaving for the hunt) 1840
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Bonaparte after the Battle of Bassano 1848
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) The Arab Tale-teller 1833
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Joseph’s Coat 1853
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Première messe en Kabylie (First mass in Kabylie) 1854
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863)
Première messe en Kabylie (First mass in Kabylie)
1854
Oil on canvas
Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts
Public domain

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Daniel dans la fosse aux lions (Daniel in the Lions’ Den) 1857
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Mountain Hunters Nd
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Le Zouave trappiste (The Trappist Zouave) 1856
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) Zouaves at the Malakoff 1856
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863)
Zouaves at the Malakoff
1856
Oil on canvas
Height: 39.7cm (15.6 in)
Width: 33.9cm (13.3 in)
Royal Collection
Public domain

Goupil & Cie (photographer), Paris 19, Boulevard Montmartre
London, La Haye, Berlin, New York
After a painting by Horace Vernet (French, 1789-1863) The scene of war 1861
c. 1860-1863
Carte de visite

Album Horace Vernet back cover
30 cartes des visite
16cm high x 11cm wide x 3.5cm deep

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Chargesheimer’ at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

Exhibition dates: 27th April – 10th November, 2024

Presentation in the Photography Room

Curator: Barbara Engelbach

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) '77. Deutscher Katholikentag, Köln' (German Catholic Day) 1956 from the exhibition 'Chargesheimer' at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
77. Deutscher Katholikentag, Köln (German Catholic Day)
1956
Gelatin silver paper
29.6 x 39.6cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

A special event in Cologne was the 77th Catholic Day in 1956. It attracted over 800,000 people to the closing rally. Konrad Adenauer gave a speech at the time as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. Chargesheimer does not show the reason for the crowd, but the mass that forms an uncanny formation when it raises its right hand in greeting. In other photographs, the crowd appears to consist of individual people in random constellations.

I was born in 1958. Britain was still recovering from the privations of the Second World War with rationing not ending until mid-1954. Germany was a divided country, West and East, with communism an ever present threat across the border. The Iron Curtain.

Chargesheimer’s objective street photographs picture a Germany which remembers (is embedded in) the horrors of the past even as it strives to create a new future. His images document the immediacy of this world of darkness and light in dystopian and utopian scenes… as though people are dreamt into strange, fractured cities.

In dystopian photographs such as Hinterhof, Cologne (Around 1957, below) and Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne (Before 1958, below), Chargesheimer “captured the mountains of rubble in expressionistic images; the bombed-out ruins of houses radiate a gloomy blackness. Dark backgrounds and harsh contrasts can also be found in his portrait photos.” Illicit, fleeting intimacies and remembrances stain the photographs.

In seemingly mundane utopian photographs, Chargesheimer’s charged eye observes the conflation of the everyday and the absurd: the conformity of suit, tie, dress and handbag in Cologne (Around 1957, below) or the shredded paper being spread by the woman for the celebration of Corpus Christi in Ohne Titel (Konfetti streuendes Mädchen) (c. 1956-1957, below) in an almost empty street, the vanishing point leading off into an interminable, indeterminate distance.

“Chargesheimer takes an interest in people and their lives. This is reflected in the long series of images of individual people and their situations. He photographs a boisterous woman in a top hat in a bar, a couple with a dog in an inn, people decorating the street with flowers and shredded paper for Corpus Christi. Chargesheimer’s careful selection and editing bring the photographs to life. You can immerse yourself in them like in a neo-realist film from the 1950s.” (Text from Museum Ludwig)

Chargesheimer’s documentary visual style (his everyday language of light and life) has a hard cutting edge, sharpened by Germany’s political and social situation – that macrocosmos reduced and intensified in the microcosmic theatre of the street. His photographs alter both spatial and temporal perceptions through their “topographic immediacy… plung[ing] viewers into the nearly real-time plight of believable and flawed protagonists.”1

The drama of the streets. Dark and light. Such is life.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Ara H. Merjian, Rhiannon Noel Welch. “It’s a Neorealist World,” on the Art In America website September 22, 2020 [Online] Cited 01/11/2024

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

“Durch Straßen wie diese führte mein Schulweg, sieben Jahre lang; viele tausend Male bin ich durch solche Straßen gegangen, aber nie in sie eingedrungen; erst viel später – in der Erinnerung begriff ich, was Straßen wie diese bedeuten, ich begriff es, wie man plötzlich Träume begreift, wenn ich in fremden Städten stundenlang durch Straßen ging und eine wie diese suchte, aber nicht fand.”

“My way to school led through streets like these for seven years; I walked through such streets many thousands of times, but never entered them; only much later – in memory – did I understand what streets like these meant, I understood it in the way one suddenly understands dreams when I walked for hours through streets in strange cities and looked for one like this but did not find it.”

Heinrich Böll Streets Like These (1958) from Unter Krahnenbäumen. Bilder aus einer Straße. Mit einem Text von Heinrich Böll (Unter Krahnenbäumen. Pictures from a street. With a text by Heinrich Böll) (Google Translate of the German)

Intimate moments and the rough Rhineland: under the pseudonym Chargesheimer, Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer became a photography legend in post-war Cologne. The Museum Ludwig celebrates the 100th birthday of the former citizen.

He captured the mountains of rubble in expressionistic images; the bombed-out ruins of houses radiate a gloomy blackness. Dark backgrounds and harsh contrasts can also be found in his portrait photos. For example, on the famous “Spiegel” cover photo from 1956 with a portrait of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, which for some was all too diabolical and therefore damaging to the election campaign. Romy Schneider and Jean-Paul Belmondo were later better off.

His early death remains a mystery to this day. Chargesheimer died on New Year’s Eve 1971, probably taking his own life. He was only 47 years old.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Chargesheimer', Museum Ludwig, Köln 27. 4. - 10.11.2024

Installation view of the exhibition 'Chargesheimer', Museum Ludwig, Köln 27. 4. - 10.11.2024 showing Chargesheimer's 'Große Vitrine (Gebetsmühle)' (Large display case (prayer wheel)) Nd

Installation views of the exhibition Chargesheimer, Museum Ludwig, Köln 27. 4. – 10.11.2024 showing in the bottom image Chargesheimer’s Große Vitrine (Gebetsmühle) (Large display case (prayer wheel)) Nd
Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln/Marc Weber

On May 19, 2024, Cologne photographer Karl Heinz Hargesheimer, who was known as Chargesheimer (1924-1971), would have turned one hundred. To celebrate the centenary of his birth, Museum Ludwig will display a selection of around fifty of his works in the Photography Room. Chargesheimer rose to fame with his photo books Cologne intime and Unter Krahnenbäumen, both of which focus on everyday life in Cologne. The presentation includes forty-three pictures taken within the context of these two series. Two videos allow visitors to access the contents of the photo books. In addition, the presentation includes three of Chargesheimer’s lesser-known sculptures called Meditationsmühlen (Meditation Wheels) and six of his abstract photographic experiments.

In 1957 Chargesheimer’s photographs were published in Cologne intime, a photo book organised by Hans Schmitt-Rost, the then director of the Nachrichtenamt, or news agency, in Cologne. Chargesheimer was tasked with taking representative images of the reconstruction of the city, which had been reduced to ruins in the war, as well as depicting the “typical” residents of Cologne. The photographs contributed by Chargesheimer reflect his unusual, direct view of everyday life. In his 1958 book, Unter Krahnenbäumen, which he organised himself as an independent project, he juxtaposed similar photographs in starkly contrasting series of motifs. This documentation tells the unvarnished truth while affectionately exploring the street in Cologne whose name is featured in the book’s title. Chargesheimer shows life in the streets and in the bars of a lively Cologne neighbourhood that was still intact. German writer Heinrich Böll wrote in the foreword to this publication, “Streets like this one are perhaps the only places where people really live.”

Chargesheimer pursued many interests. Alongside his documentary studies, he investigated photography as an image-producing medium. In the late 1940s, he began experimenting with light graphics and photochemical processes and creating photographs without a camera. Chargesheimer described his experiments with photographic plates and negatives in a text accompanying his first exhibition in Milan in 1950: “Panning, wiping, scraping, cooling, burning – adding acids, bases, colours, and varnishes.” These experiments resulted in painterly works in the style of Art Informel that was prevalent at the time.

In 1967 Chargesheimer began creating kinetic works called Meditationsmühlen (Meditation Wheels) made of Plexiglas. Three of these works from the collection of the Museum Ludwig will be presented in the exhibition for the first time in thirty years. Consisting of multiple levels of crystalline elements made of Plexiglas, the dome-shaped constructions are put into motion through a complex system of gears. The bewildering variety of light reflexes from Plexiglas prisms creates an unusual contrast to the precise mechanics of the gears. Chaos and control seem to complement one another here.

Chargesheimer

On May 19, 2024, the Cologne photographer Chargesheimer (1924-1971), born Karl Heinz Hargesheimer, would have celebrated his hundredth birthday. To mark the occasion, the Museum Ludwig is showing a selection of around fifty of his works. Chargesheimer rose to fame with his photobooks Cologne intime and Unter Krahnenbäumen, which are dedicated to the city of Cologne. In them, he casts a singular and incisive gaze on everyday events. These images convey the artist’s attentive and empathetic approach to photographing the day-to-day lives of people in the various neighbourhoods he documented.

Chargesheimer explored photography’s diverse possibilities. In addition to his documentary work, he utilised photography’s potential as a pictorial medium. In the late 1940s, he began experimenting with light graphics and photochemical processes to produce cameraless photographs. The resulting images are painterly and abstract. From 1967, Chargesheimer also created kinetic sculptures made of Plexiglas, which he called Meditation Wheels.

Press release from Museum Ludwig

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) 'Formlose Mitte' (Shapeless Center) 1949 'Chargesheimer' at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Formlose Mitte (Shapeless Center)
1949
Gelatin silver paper, light graphics
59.6 x 47.7cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Untitled
Around 1950
Gelatin silver paper, light graphics, mixed media
59.8 x 49.7cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Chargesheimer (Karl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) 'Untitled (girl scattering confetti)' c. 1956-1957 'Chargesheimer' at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

Chargesheimer (Karl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Ohne Titel (Konfetti streuendes Mädchen)
Untitled (girl scattering confetti)
c. 1956-1957
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Chargesheimer (Karl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) 'Fußballplatz' (Football field) 1957 'Chargesheimer' at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

Chargesheimer (Karl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Fußballplatz (Football field)
1957
From: Im Ruhrgebiet (In the Ruhr area)
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln

Cologne intime, 1957

In the mid-1950s, Chargesheimer photographed different views of Cologne for his photobook Cologne intime. Hans Schmitt-Rost, then head of the municipal news agency in Cologne, had commissioned him to document the successful reconstruction of the city. At the same time, he was to capture images of “typical” local residents. Chargesheimer photographed streets with empty properties cleared of rubble and the prominent new buildings in the city centre. His photographs show crowds of people on the main shopping streets, at the 77th Catholic Convention in Deutz in 1956, and at the Federal Garden Show in 1957. Chargesheimer enlarged details to show particular individuals going about their day. He focused on their distinctiveness, the quality that made them stand out in the crowd.

Hans Schmitt-Rost (1901-1978), who designed the book, uses his evaluative comments to dictate how the photographs should be read. He headed the Cologne City Intelligence Office from 1945 to 1966. In this role, he played a key role in shaping Cologne’s self-portrayal as a city removed from contemporary history, whose actual history is rooted in the Middle Ages. He excluded the Nazi era or relativized it as something foreign to the people of Cologne.

Text from Museum Ludwig

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971) 'Schildergasse, Cologne' Before 1957 'Chargesheimer' at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Schildergasse, Cologne
Before 1957
Gelatin silver paper
29.8 x 39.7cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Cologne
Before 1957
Gelatin silver paper
29.9 x 39.7cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Hohe Straße, near Große Budengasse, Cologne
Before 1957
Gelatin silver paper
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Chargesheimer captured Hohe Straße from a distance. But he wasn’t concerned with the distance to the action, because he highlighted individual people. They stand out in the crowd because they make eye contact with him or speak to him.

The Hohe Straße in Cologne is an important motif for the publication. The filled shop windows and the streams of passers-by represent the economic boom after the currency reform in 1948… The Hohe Straße was already an important shopping street at the end of the 19th century. The Tietz department store, built in 1895, was also famous. Its owner, Alfred Leonhard Tietz, was forced during the Nazi era to sell the department store chain to Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank for well below market value. He was robbed of his assets and had to flee. The department store was renamed Westdeutsche Kaufhof AG and continued to operate under this name after 1945.

Text from Museum Ludwig

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Kirmes Unter Krahnenbäumen
Before 1957
Gelatin silver paper
26.3 x 39.8 cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Kirmes Unter Krahnenbäumen
Around 1957
Gelatin silver paper
26.3 x 39.8cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Autobahnzubringer im Rechtsrheinischen (Motorway feeder road on the right bank of the Rhine)
Around 1957
Gelatin silver paper
39.7 x 29.8cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Hinterhof, Cologne
Around 1957
Gelatin silver paper
24.7 x 19.6cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Away from the rebuilt city centre, Chargesheimer photographed intimate neighbourhoods for the photo book Cologne, which were characterised by old buildings, small shops and ruined properties. He also photographed Cologne’s nightlife in bars, workers’ pubs and restaurants with prostitutes without making any judgments.

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Cologne
Around 1957
Gelatin silver paper
30.4 x 23.3cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Cologne
1957
Gelatin silver paper
30.4 x 23.3cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne
Before 1958
Gelatin silver paper
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Unter Krahnenbäumen, 1958

A year after Cologne intime was published by Greven Verlag, they invited Chargesheimer to realise another photobook. This time, the selection and arrangement of the photographs were placed firmly in his hands. He dedicated the book to the small street of Unter Krahnenbäumen in Cologne. The opening pages present everyday life on the street, documenting people working or chatting with neighbours. These are followed by images of Carnival, which is celebrated on the street and in pubs until late into the night. Pages dedicated to children and the elderly mark a change in theme, while those devoted to the funfair or preparations for the Corpus Christi procession show a mix of generations. On the final pages, photographs of locals dancing and laughing on Unter Krahnenbäumen and inside its pubs reveal the year-round liveliness of the street.

Chargesheimer takes an interest in people and their lives. This is reflected in the long series of images of individual people and their situations. He photographs a boisterous woman in a top hat in a bar, a couple with a dog in an inn, people decorating the street with flowers and shredded paper for Corpus Christi. Chargesheimer’s careful selection and editing bring the photographs to life. You can immerse yourself in them like in a neo-realist film from the 1950s.

Text from Museum Ludwig

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne
Before 1958
Gelatin silver paper
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne
Around 1958
Gelatin silver paper
24.7 x 21.3cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

The Eigelsteinviertel was a lively and diverse neighbourhood in the 1920s. That changed under National Socialism, when the SA (Storm Division) and later the Gestapo (Secret State Police) persecuted communists. When the Nazis seized power, Jewish residents were expropriated, deported and murdered; Roma families living in Stavenhof, Unter Krahnenbäumen and on Gereonswall were deported to Auschwitz by the Cologne criminal police in the 1940s. After the war, the construction of the Nord-Süd-Fahrt marked a turning point in urban development. In 1957, the master plan for reconstruction came into force, which formed the basis of urban planning until the 1970s. He envisaged a 34-meter-wide lane for the north-south route across the district, which today also cuts through Unter Krahnenbäumen. The street had already been planned in this form during the National Socialist era. Even before the war began, the Nazi city administration had bought up land on both sides of the planned route.

Text from Museum Ludwig

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne
Around 1958
Gelatin silver paper
24.8 x 21.3cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne
Around 1958
Gelatin silver paper
24.9 x 21.3cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne
1958
Gelatin silver paper
17.9 x 29.8cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Chargesheimer’s work with the unwieldy large format camera Linhof Super Technika meant that he spent a while in each location. He became part of the situation because the residents turned to him and started talking to him. Many of the photos were taken on the Catholic holiday of Corpus Christi. The residents decorated the street with green leaves, house altars and shredded paper for the procession.

Chargesheimer (Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, German 1924-1971)
Kleine runde Meditationsmühle (Small round meditation mill)
1968 /1969
Acrylic, metal, machine part
Diameter: 34cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Gerd Sander (German, b. 1940)
Portrait of Chargesheimer
1969
Gelatin silver paper
27 x 19cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
© Gerd Sander, courtesy of Galerie Julian Sander, Köln
Reproduction: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Museum Ludwig
Heinrich-Böll-Platz, 50667 Köln, Germany

Opening hours:
Tuesday through Sunday: 10am – 6pm

Museum Ludwig website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place’ at the Denver Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 10th March – 20th October, 2024

Curators: Curator of Photography, Eric Paddock, in collaboration with Kimberly Roberts, Denver Art Museum Curatorial Associate, and Lauren Thompson, Senior Interpretive Specialist

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
From the installation In Place (Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, Four Corners Region)
2017-2020
Pigmented inkjet print
© and courtesy Fazal Sheikh

There are some stunning photographs in this exhibition but their “formula” is well known – aerial photographs of the blighted landscape etched by both geological and human forces (a la Edward Burtynsky, Richard Woldendorp et al) paired with objective, frontal “dead pan” portrait photographs (a la Thomas Ruff, Rineke Dijkstra et al), both forms of topographical mapping (of the land and of the face… as is the regulated presentation) – images which attempt to interrogate “the impact of uranium, coal, oil, and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and its Indigenous inhabitants.”

This is strong work but it begs the question: what fresh insight are these photographs giving us into the object of the photographers attention, other than the specifics of “American Southwest” and “Indigenous inhabitants” which turn out to be conceptually and visually generic? Is it necessary for everything to be new again or can work such as this stand in its own right and not just be an echo of what has come before. For the general public the work might seem fresh and new but for the informed observer this is well trodden, indeed trampled ground.

The press release states that “The project reflects on the resilience of Indigenous people in the face of threats to the culture, spirituality, and health.” I don’t feel that with these photographs. Where is the art that expresses through a partnership with the photographer the eloquent, unique voice of the Indigenous inhabitants of this ancestral landscape, its spirit and its fire?

As with any art please make up your own mind.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Installation views of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing the opening wall text (below)

Thirst | Exposure | In Place presents photographs from three projects Fazal Sheikh made on the Colorado Plateau from 2017 to 2023. The portraits, landscapes, and testimonies make visible the far-reaching consequences of extractive industry and climate change.

Exposure examines the impact of uranium, coal, oil, and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and its Indigenous inhabitants. Sheikh partnered with Utah Dine Bikeyah – a coalition among the Hopi, Navajo, Uintah Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni tribes – and with Indigenous elders and scientists form Princeton University to address the region’s hazardous waste and pollution left by short-sighted development and poorly remediated industrial sites. The project reflects on the resilience of Indigenous people in the face of threats to the culture, spirituality, and health.

In place evokes the enduring landscape of the Bears Ears region in Utah, while Thirst presents a selection from a new series about the Great Salt Lake, which is shrinking due to dwindling rain and snowfall. As the lake dries up, winds may carry clouds of toxic sediment from the lake bed – by-products from mining, agriculture, and urban development – across the valley and beyond.

Opening wall text from the exhibition

Denver Art Museum Talk with Fazal Sheikh March 9, 2024

Photographer Fazal Sheikh speaks about his recent work in the Four Corners region and at the Great Salt Lake, in connection with his exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place. His photographs address the consequences of industrial land use, engage questions about water use and climate change, and reflect on the ongoing relationship between people and nature. Sheikh discusses the origin of each series, his immersion in the landscapes and communities he photographed, and his collaborations with writers, scientists, and Indigenous community members that are woven throughout this work.

Installation view of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing work from the series Thirst: Great Salt Lake 2022

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
From the series Thirst: Great Salt Lake
November 2022
Pigmented inkjet print
© and courtesy Fazal Sheikh

Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place is an exhibition created from three projects photographer Fazal Sheikh made on the Colorado Plateau from 2017 to early 2023. Sheikh’s portraits and landscapes shed light on the far-reaching consequences of extractive industry and climate change.

Born in 1965 in New York City, Sheikh creates images of displaced communities and marginalised people that prompt awareness of the world beyond the museum. The photographs in Thirst ǀ Exposure ǀ In Place expose indelible marks on the Colorado Plateau and American Southwest landscape that have been etched by both geological and human forces. Through this beautiful and sometimes frightening new work, Sheikh encourages viewers to witness the consequences of the past and imagine the shape of the future.

The exhibition presents Sheikh’s recent work in three interrelated sections: Thirst is a new series of aerial photographs that document the decline of the Great Salt Lake in northeast Utah, which is shrinking due to overconsumption and dwindling rain and snowfall. Exposure examines the impacts of uranium, coal, oil and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and on its Indigenous inhabitants. In Place evokes the enduring landscapes of the Bears Ears region in Utah, bringing Sheikh’s photographs together with contributions from scientists and Indigenous communities in and around Bears Ears in southeastern Utah.

Visitors will reflect upon the transformation – and often devastation – of these landscapes in the context of the past, present and future, while considering the juxtaposition of beauty and catastrophe, as well as intimate, human-scale stories and those spanning vast geological eras and changes.

Text from the Denver Art Museum website

Installation view of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing work from the series Exposure 2019

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
Mexican Hat Uranium Mill Disposal Cell, Mexican Hat, Utah, 37°8’0.88″N/109°52’28″W
From the series Exposure 2017
Pigmented inkjet print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979
Image courtesy and © Fazal Sheikh

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
Norman Sam (Diné), Lifelong Shepherd, Montezuma Creek, Aneth Chapter, Southeastern Utah
From the series Exposure 2019
Pigmented inkjet print. Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979
Image courtesy and © Fazal Sheikh

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
Lola Yellowman (Diné), Widow of Uranium Miner John Guy, Cane Valley–Monument Valley, Navajo Nation
From the series Exposure 2019
Pigmented inkjet print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979
Image courtesy and © Fazal Sheikh

Lola Yellowman’s Testimony

“The medicine men told our men not to work in the mines, that it was dangerous, but the men needed to support their families and had no choice … My husband, John Guy, worked in the mines like my father. He would arrive home during his lunch break with his clothes caked in uranium dust, and I cleaned those clothes in our home every day. The children played on the tailings pile, but no one from the company ever told us the dangers they were being exposed to.”

Wall text from the exhibition

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
Chapita Wells Oil and Gas Field, Uintah Range, Utah, 40°4’10″N/109°27’26″W
From the series Exposure 2017
Pigmented inkjet print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979
Image courtesy and © Fazal Sheikh

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
Jonah Yellowman (Diné), Spiritual Advisor to Utah Diné Bikéyah, Cane Valley – Monument Valley, Navajo Nation
From the series Exposure 2022
Pigmented inkjet print
Image courtesy and © Fazal Sheikh

Installation view of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing work from the series In Place (Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, Four Corners Region), 2017-2020

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) presents Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place, an exhibition created from three projects photographer Fazal Sheikh made on the Colorado Plateau from 2017 to early 2023. Sheikh’s portraits and landscapes shed light on the far-reaching consequences of extractive industry and climate change. Thirst ǀ Exposure ǀ In Place will open March 10, 2024, and will be on view through October 20, 2024, in the museum’s Photography galleries, located on level 6 of the Martin Building, and will be included with general admission.

“Through expansive aerial shots and intimate portraits, Fazal Sheikh documents these regions and their people with solidarity and honesty,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the Denver Art Museum. “The Colorado Plateau is a region deeply impacted by climate change and economic development. This exhibition offers a nuanced view into the past, present and future lives of its inhabitants.”

Sheikh is best known for his deeply humane photographs of refugees and migrants displaced by war and famine. Focusing on the United States for the first time, Sheikh explores how Indigenous people and the lands they call home have been affected by industrial growth and government policy.

“The aerial photographs in this exhibition remind us of the great age and natural beauty of the Colorado Plateau,” said Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography at the DAM and curator of this exhibition for Denver. “They create an awareness of deep human and geological time and raise questions about the future of the region. In that context, Sheikh’s portraits and accompanying text affirm local communities’ need to protect their sacred spaces and encourage wider recognition of that need.”

The DAM exhibition presents Sheikh’s recent work in three interrelated sections:

Thirst is a new series of aerial photographs that document the decline of the Great Salt Lake in northeast Utah, which is shrinking due to overconsumption and dwindling rain and snowfall. As the lake dries up, winds carry clouds of toxic sediment – by-products from mining, agriculture and urban development – from the lakebed, across the valley and beyond.

Exposure examines the impacts of uranium, coal, oil and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and on its Indigenous inhabitants. Sheikh partnered with Utah Diné Bikéyah – a coalition among the Hopi, Navajo, Uintah Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni tribes – and with Indigenous elders and scientists from Princeton University – to address hazardous waste and pollution left across the region by short-sighted development and poorly remediated industrial sites. The project reflects on the resilience of Indigenous people in the face of threats to their culture, spirituality and health.

In Place evokes the enduring landscapes of the Bears Ears region in Utah, bringing Sheikh’s photographs together with contributions from scientists and Indigenous communities in and around Bears Ears in southeastern Utah. Visitors are surrounded by images made at a close distance and from high in the air. Sixty-three large colour photographs show the tremendous geological variety and the long cultural continuities of the Four Corners region.

Jonah Yellowman, spiritual advisor for the Utah Diné Bikéyah intertribal coalition and one of its founding members, will present an offering that represents his Navajo (Diné) spirituality and a deep connection to the land. This offering will be present in the gallery during the run of the exhibition.

Sound recordings taken from seismometer readings by University of Utah geologist Jeffrey Ralston Moore will resonate throughout the gallery space. They represent the otherwise inaudible vibrations of rock formations on the Colorado Plateau.

Taken together, the photographs and collaborations in Thirst | Exposure | In Place lay bare the indelible marks etched on the landscape by geological and human forces. Sheikh asks us to witness the consequences of what has passed and imagine what is yet to come.

Sheikh will speak about his recent work in the Four Corners region and at the Great Salt Lake, in connection with his exhibition in a lecture event at the DAM on March 9, 11am – 12pm. The lecture will take place in the Sharp Auditorium, in the lower level of the museum’s Hamilton Building. Sheikh will discuss the origin of each series, his immersion in the landscapes and communities he photographed and his collaborations with writers, scientists and Indigenous community members that are woven throughout this work. This exhibition follows the Denver Art Museum’s 2017 presentation of Common Ground: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh, 1989-2013.

Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place is organised by the Denver Art Museum. The exhibition is presented by Jane Watkins, with additional support from the donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign and the residents who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). Promotional support is provided by 5280 Magazine and CBS Colorado.

The exhibition was curated in Denver by Curator of Photography, Eric Paddock, in collaboration with Kimberly Roberts, Denver Art Museum Curatorial Associate, and Lauren Thompson, Senior Interpretive Specialist.

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
From the installation In Place (Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, Four Corners Region)
2017-2020
Pigmented inkjet print
© and courtesy Fazal Sheikh

Denver Art Museum
100 W 14th Ave Pkwy,
Denver, CO 80204, United States
Phone: (720) 865-5000

Opening hours:
Open daily from 10am – 5pm, 10am – 8pm on Tuesdays

Denver Art Museum website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85′ at Four Corners, London

Exhibition dates: 20th September – 19th October, 2024

Curator: Isaac Blease

Chris Killip (British, 1946-2020)
Durham Miners’ Gala
1984
Gelatin silver print
© Chris Killip Photography Trust – Magnum Photos

This is another excellent exhibition with a social conscience from Four Corners, ably supported by the Martin Parr Foundation.

THE LEGACY: “The strike was lost, Scargill defeated. But the greatest losers were not just the miners, but the whole labour movement which soon found itself trampled by the global restructuring of business by Thatcher and her successors on both sides of the Atlantic.

Workers in Britain and the world would soon awake to the reality of the new Thatcher – and Reagan – industrial revolution; a huge rise in ‘compensation’ for a few executives, and gutted workplaces, leading to low-paying McJobs for the rest.”

Audsley Edwards

Losers and losers

Pardon my language but, in a guttural English accent, I declare Thatcher and her minions, police and media, bastards … bloody bastards!

Her name still sends shivers down my spine. Vindictive, unbending, inhuman.

Class warfare has never been far from the surface in British society. Upstairs downstairs, the haves and the have nots. New wealth devolved from the British Industrial Revolution 1750-1900 (which produced machine-made, mass produced goods) used man power and child power – in the factories, down the pits.

Trade unions were legalised in 1871 in the UK and sought to reform socio-economic conditions for people in British industries. They were especially strong in the coal mining industry. Coal mining in the UK has a long history dating back to Roman times and this history has long been celebrated, as can be seen in Bill Brandt’s photographs of the tough life of miners and their families (1937, below) and the ACKTON HALL COLLIERY commemorative plate (1985, below).

After the Second World War, “All the coal mines in Britain were purchased by the government in 1947 and put under the control of the National Coal Board (NCB).”1 Pit closures became a regular occurrence in many areas. “Between 1947 and 1994, some 950 mines were closed by UK governments.”1 “In early 1984, the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher announced plans to close 20 coal pits which led to the year-long miners’ strike which ended in March 1985.”2

“A strike was called by the Yorkshire region of the NUM in protest against proposed pit closures, invoking a regional ballot result from 1981. The National Executive Committee, led by Arthur Scargill, chose not to hold a national ballot on a national strike, as was conventional, but to declare the strike to be a matter for each region of the NUM to enforce. Scargill defied public opinion, a trait Prime Minister Thatcher exploited when she used the Ridley Plan, drafted in 1977, to defeat the strike. Subsequently, over several decades, almost all the mines were shut down.”3

“Scargill stated, “The policies of this government are clear – to destroy the coal industry and the NUM.” … This was denied by the government at the time, although papers released in 2014 under the thirty-year rule suggest that Scargill was right.”4

In the era of anti-Apartheid (in June 1984 Thatcher received a visit from P. W. Botha the South African premier), anti-war, pro abortion, nuclear disarmament, Gay Liberation, Women’s Liberation, Clause 28, anti-fascist marches and student protests – in the era of Thatcherism (“deregulation, privatisation of key national industries, maintaining a flexible labour market, marginalising the trade unions and centralising power from local authorities to central government”),5 Thatcher saw strong trade unions as an obstacle to economic growth through the implementation of neoliberal economic policies.

“Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency…. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers.”5

The losers from the Miners’ Strike were the working class communities and people of the mining villages… and the power of the unions. Thatcher wanted to destroy their power more than anything else and bugger the cost to communities and human beings. Their side of this conflict is portrayed in this exhibition through artefacts and photographs using photography as a tool of resistance.6

The photographs depict the miners struggle for existence through nuance, context and detail and set out to portray the essence of the mining communities identity under duress. There is a wonderful sense of empathy from the photographers towards the people they are photographing, a warts and all approach documenting their class struggle. But we must also be aware that photographs were used by the government and the media to portray the miners as the villains of the conflict, for photography is situated ‘within the reproduction of certain forms of power that can reorganise, map, and penetrate the body’.7 This power is then used in exploitative and controlling ways… as in when the “BBC reversed footage on the Six O’Clock News to suggest the miners had attacked the police, and that the police had simply retaliated. [Despite an Independent Police Complaints Commission report in 2015 confirming the reversal, the BBC has never officially accepted this.]”8 Other examples of the exploitative use of photographs and biased reporting to denigrate the fight and plight of the miners appeared in the tabloid press with newspapers facing allegations that the coverage of the strike amounted to a “propaganda assault on the miners.”9

Photography and film, then, was used to reorganise the truth, map the conflict on tv and in the media, and penetrate the political and social “body” of the United Kingdom, used by the powers that be in controlling and exploitative ways to demonise the miners’ cause in the eyes of the British public.

Susanna Viljanen perceptively, directly and sadly observes that,

“While technically Thatcher was right – most of the mines were unprofitable, many worked at loss and each tonne of coal produced negative cash flow – the aftermath was sad. Thatcher was not only a crank, she was utterly vindictive. The Unions had brought down Edward Heath’s cabinet 1974, and now the Conservatives extracted revenge on the Unions – and on the British working class. Many of the former mine towns fell into bankruptcy, poverty and despair.

It also turned out that her theory of self-correctiveness of the market economy was simply wrong. New businesses did not emerge and the miners did not get relocated on job markets, but mass unemployment ensued. The aftermath also destroyed the social fabric and the networks of the mining towns and the working class, exacerbating the situation even worse. The destruction wasn’t creative, it was merely destructive.”

While I realise the coal mining industry would have eventually closed with the move to renewables (the United Kingdom has just become the first major country to announce the closure of all coal fired power stations ending its 142-year reliance on the fossil fuel) – there is still a double loss from the British state’s abuse of power and the outcome of the Miners’ Strike, the results of which are still being felt today – namely that Britain lost any form of empathy for the working man, and it lost the history of its working people, its culture and social community.

Men had to move away to find jobs as new industries did not emerge where old ones were closed. Country towns and mining towns were depopulated and became even more impoverished than they were before. Colliery bands and choirs vanished, a sense of community was eviscerated and with the closure of the pits the life energy of the villages was destroyed. Bankruptcy, poverty and despair ensued. A social history that stretched back centuries had been disembowelled, obliterated.

This is the great sadness of those times. This cold, freezing winter of our discontent.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Footnotes

1/ “History of coal miners,” on the Wikipedia website

2/ “Coal mining in the United Kingdom,” on the Wikipedia website

3/ “History of trade unions in the United Kingdom,” on the Wikipedia website

4/ “Arthur Scargill,” on the Wikipedia website

5/ George Monbiot. “Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems,” on The Guardian website 15 April 2016 [Online] Cited 23/09/2024

6/ “Photography has long been associated with acts of resistance. It is used to document action, share ideas, inspire change, tell stories, gather evidence and fight against injustice.”

Text from the exhibition Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest, 2024 on the South London Gallery website [Online] Cited 29/09/2024

7/ Michael Hayes. “Photography and the Emergence of the Pacific Cruise: Rethinking the representational crisis in colonial photography,” in Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson (eds.,). Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place. Routledge, 2002, pp. 172-87.

8/ Lesley Boulton quoted in Adrian Tempany. “‘A policeman took a full swipe at my head’: Lesley Boulton at the Battle of Orgreave, 1984,” on The Guardian website 17 December 2016 [Online] Cited 23/09/2024

“The miners always said the police had brutally attacked them without justifiable provocation, and that the attack felt preplanned. They complained that the BBC had reversed footage, to show miners who threw missiles seemingly before the police charge rather than in retaliation for it…

Far less publicised, a year later, was the unravelling of the police case. Officers had arrested and charged 95 miners with riot, an offence of collective violence carrying a potential life sentence. Yet in July 1985 the prosecution withdrew and all the miners were were acquitted after the evidence of some police officers, including those in command, had been discredited under cross-examination.

In 1991 South Yorkshire police paid £425,000 compensation to 39 miners who had sued the force for assault, unlawful arrest and malicious prosecution. But still the police did not admit any fault, and not a single police officer was ever disciplined or prosecuted.”

David Conn. “We were fed lies about the violence at Orgreave. Now we need the truth,” on The Guardian website 22nd July 2015 [Online] Cited 03/10/2024

9/ “My recent research, which involved analysis of both news language and press photographs of the time, shows that this year-long strike was portrayed by newspapers – on all sides – as a metaphorical war between the government and the National Union of Mineworkers.

It shows how the media used “war framing” words, phrases and photographs while reporting the strike – often drawing on iconic texts and images associated with World War I. This framing presented the miners as “the enemy”, while at the same time, it justified the actions of the government and the police as necessary and even noble.”

Christopher Hart. “War on the picket line: how the British press made a battle out of the miners’ strike,” on The Conversation website June 8, 2016 [Online] Cited 03/10/2024

“The 1984-1985 miners’ strike was a defining moment in British industrial relations. Shafted, edited by Yorkshire freelance Granville Williams and published by the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (CPBF), to which the NUJ is affiliated, has been published to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the start of the strike. It bravely explores the ways in which the media covered the strike and looks into the devastating impact of the pit closure programme on mining communities.

It analyses the pressures on journalists who reported the strike, with accounts from prominent reporters, among them Pete Lazenby of the Yorkshire Evening Post, Nick Jones of the BBC, and Paul Routledge of The Times. But the book also looks at the important contribution from the alternative media and the coverage of the long conflict by freelance photographers and filmmakers.”

Julio Etchart. “Shafted,” on the Freelance website May 2009 [Online] Cited 03/10/2024

10/ Susanna Viljanen. “Why didn’t Thatcher realize the mining towns would become much poorer without the mines?,” on the Quora website Nd [Online] Cited 29/09/2024

Many thankx to Zena Howard for her help, and to the Martin Parr Foundation and Four Corners for allowing me to publish the photographs and art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“We face not an employer, but a government aided and abetted by the judiciary, the police and you people in the media.”

Arthur Scargill

“For those who have lived through this strike, its enormity cannot be underestimated. We have brought together some of the best-known photographs – including John Harris’s image of a policeman with a truncheon held from a horse swinging at a cowering woman, and John Sturrock’s photograph of the confrontation between mass pickets and police lines at Bilston Glen – to rarely seen snapshots taken by Philip Winnard, a striking miner himself.”

Martin Parr

“The exhibition is an attempt to commemorate and reflect on the miners’ strike of 1984-85, a seismic, yet often overlooked event in the recent history of Britain. By focusing on the complex role photographs played during the year-long struggle we hope for the show to transcend the purely historical or nostalgic and take the visitor on a journey through a series of timeless images that show the resilience, camaraderie and violence of the strike, to reconnect and consider it again in relation to the present. The ephemera materials show the urgent use of images and the creativity that was deployed in support of the striking miners. Together, the works tell a story of the battle against Margaret Thatcher and the National Coal Board’s pit closures, but what ultimately shines through is the unity and imagination of people coming together in defence of their communities and the basic rights to work and to survive.”

Isaac Blease, Exhibition Curator

ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 explores the vital role that photography played during this bitter industrial dispute. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike, Four Corners is delighted to tour this exhibition from the Martin Parr Foundation. One of Britain’s longest and most violent disputes, the repercussions of the miners’ strike continue to be felt today across the country.

The exhibition looks at the central role photographs played during the year-long struggle against pit closures, with many materials drawn from the Martin Parr Foundation collection. Posters, vinyl records, plates, badges and publications are placed in dialogue with images by photographers, investigating the power and the contradictions inherent in using photography as a tool of resistance. They include photographs by Brenda Prince, John Sturrock, John Harris, Jenny Matthews, Roger Tiley, Imogen Young and Chris Killip, as well as Philip Winnard who was himself a striking miner.

The photographs show some familiar imagery – the lines of police and the violence – but also depict the remarkable community support from groups such as Women Against Pit Closures and the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. Photography was used both to sway public opinion and to document this transformative period in British history.

The catalyst for the miners’ strike was an attempt to prevent colliery closures through industrial action in 1984-85. The industrial action, which began in Yorkshire, was led by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and its President, Arthur Scargill, against the National Coal Board (NCB). The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher opposed the strikes and aimed to reduce the power of the trade unions. The dispute was characterised by violence between the flying pickets and the police, most notably at the Battle of Orgreave. The miners’ strike was the largest since the General Strike of 1926 and ended in victory for the government with the closure of a majority of the UK’s collieries.

Text from the Four Corners website

Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

George Monbiot. “Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems,” on The Guardian website 15 April 2016 [Online] Cited 23/09/2024

Bill Brandt (British, born Germany 1904-1983)
Unemployed miner returning home from Jarrow
1937
Gelatin silver print

Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Installation view of the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 at Four Corners, London showing:

At top left

Unknown maker (British)
Dartboard with Margaret Thatcher photograph
Nd
Martin Parr Foundation Collection

At left,

John Sturrock (British)
In the wake of an earthmoving machine, men search for small lumps of coal on an old colliery tip at South Kirby
13th December, 1984

At second left,

Unknown maker (British)
When They Close A Pit They Kill A Community
Welsh Congress in Support of Mining Communities 1984-1985
1985
Poster

Bill Brandt (British, born Germany 1904-1983)
Coal-Miner’s Bath, Chester-le-Street, Durham
1937
Gelatin silver print

Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Brenda Prince (British, b. 1950)
Dot Hickling on strike from N.C.B canteen at Linby Colliery helped organise and turn the miners kitchen in Hucknall for a year during strike. Son & son-in-law also on strike, Nottingham
1984/85
© Brenda Prince

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
Northumbrian Miner at His Evening Meal
1937
Gelatin silver print

Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Installation view of the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 at Four Corners, London showing below the text from the magazine at left:

The Women’s Support Group

“This Time We Didn’t Want To Be On The Outside”

At Lea Hall women came to play a crucial role in the dispute. And the same was true throughout the country. In the past women have often been criticised for putting pressure on their husbands during strikes, pressures that come from the responsibilities of paying the rent or the mortgage, of keeping the house nice and making sure that the children are well clothed and fed. But the Lea Hall women stood by their husbands, their sons and their fathers for the whole twelve months. To being with they set up the Lea Hall Women’s support Group, and organised it along similar lines to the Strike Committee. They appointed their own officials, and they met on a regular basis. At first their main concern was with raising money and making sure that everyone was fed. But later they came to be concerned with the whole running of the strike, and demanded that they should have their own representatives on the Strike Committee. In December four of their members were admitted, and in that way the women came to be unbolted in organising everything from picketing to fundraising to welfare.

“It started one Sunday. We talked about it and walked around the estate trying to find out if women were interested. We got quite a good response. The first meeting was at Chris’ house, 30 women turned up, we chose a Chairwoman, a Secretary and a Treasurer. After that we met at the Social Club. We had weekly meetings where we discussed things like correspondence, what we can afford to buy, food parcels and collections. We organised ourselves as Lea Hall Women’s Support Group; it was something separate from the Strike Committee.”

Installation view of the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 at Four Corners, London showing at left, Jenny Matthews’ quilt commissioned by the Martin Parr Foundation to mark the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike

Jenny Matthews (British)
Cole Not Dole
Nd
© Jenny Matthews

Detail from a quilt commissioned by the Martin Parr Foundation to mark the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike.

Installation view of the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 at Four Corners, London showing at left the wall text below; in the four photographs from top left clockwise, John Sturrock’s Miners’ Strike 1984 mass picket confronting police lines, Bilston Glen. Norman Strike at the front of a mass picket, Scotland, unknown photographer Carcroft NCB Central Store 1984, Howard Sooley’s Rossington Main Colliery 1984, Roger Tiley’s ‘Scabs’ returning to work, Newbridge, South Wales, 1984-1985; and at right, the poster VICTORY TO THE MINERS, VICTORY TO THE WORKING CLASS (below)

To mark the 40th anniversary of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, Four Corners is delighted to present this exhibition from the Martin Parr Foundation, which looks at the vital role that photographs played during the year-long struggle against pit closures.

The miners’ strike was one of Britain’s longest and most bitter industrial disputes, the repercussions of which continue to be felt throughout the country today. This industrial action was led by the National Union of Mineworkers and its president, Arthur Scargill, against planned colliery closures by the National Coal Board which threatened 20,000 job losses.

Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government strongly opposed the strike and aimed to reduce the power of the trade unions. It was a dispute characterised by weaponised news coverage and visual media created sway public opinion against the strike. Photographs documenting the events in 1984-85 are exhibited here in dialogue with selected ephemera created in support of the miners – including posters, vinyl records, plates, badges and publications.

The exhibited works cover a variety of approaches, from photo-journalism to photo-montage, as well as vernacular photographs taken by Philip Winnard, himself a striking miner. They include some iconic imagery of the lines of police and picket violence – most notably at the infamous Battle of Orgreave. But they also depict the remarkable community solidarity from groups including Women Against Pit Closures and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners.

The strike ended in defeat for the miners on the 3rd March 1985, with most of Britain’s coal mines shut down. It was a running point in British society, leading to weakened trade unions and loss of workers’ rights, the privatisation of nationalised industries, and today’s insecure jobs market. Forty yeas on, ex-mining communities face a legacy of mass unemployment and social inequality. This exhibition offers a unique account of the strike, but also a space to reflect on power, community and the relationship between photography and societal change.

The exhibition features work by John Harris, Chris Fillip, Jenny Matthews, Brenda Prince, Neville Pyne, Howard Sooley, John Sturrock, Roger Tiley, Philip Winnard, Imogen Young and uncredited photographers of original press prints. It includes many materials drawn from the Martin Parr Foundation collection. The original exhibition was curated by Isaac Blease at Martin Parr Foundation. A book to accompany the exhibition is published by Bluecoat Press.

This exhibition is made possible with the generous support of Alex Sainsbury, Foyle Foundation, Hallett Independent, National union of Mineworkers and the Society for the Study of Labour History. With many thanks to the Martin Parr Foundation, Mary Halpenny-Killip, Matthew Fillip, Ceri Thompson, National Museum of Wales, Craig Oldham, Graham Smith, Bluecoat Press, British Journal of Photography, Isaac Blease, Tom Booth Woodger, Mick Moore and Safia Mirzai.

Wall text from the exhibition

Unknown maker (British)
VICTORY TO THE MINERS, VICTORY TO THE WORKING CLASS
Nd
Poster

Installation view of the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 at Four Corners, London showing closed colliery commemorative plates:

Commemorative Plates

Left, top to bottom

Clayton West NUM Yorkshire Area
The Dirty Thirty No Surrender
Durham Miners Association

Right, top to bottom

Justice for Mineworkers
Littleton Miners’ 1984 Struggle 1985
Loyal to the Last Ollerton Miners

Unknown maker (British)
ACKTON HALL COLLIERY commemorative plate
1985

A series of commemorative plates was made for closed collieries. As shaft sinking began in 1873 the year 1877 may indicate when coal production began.

Installation view of the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 at Four Corners, London showing at second left in the bottom image, Brenda Prince’s photograph Women’s’ picket at Bevercotes Colliery, night shift, 11pm. Nottingham, February 1985 (below); and at third right top, Roger Tiley’s photograph NUM union officials, Maerdy Miners’ Hall, Rhondda Fach, South Wales, 1984-1985

Brenda Prince (British, b. 1950)
Women’s’ picket at Bevercotes Colliery, night shift, 11pm. Nottingham
February 1985
Gelatin silver print
© Brenda Prince

We were all documentary photographers who had our own
projects and interests. We would work on our own stories and
my miners’ strike images came out of that. As a working class
woman, I became aware of the inequalities in society; not just
between men and women but also relating to race, class,
people with disabilities and sexuality. The miners’ strike gave
me the opportunity to document working class people who were
really struggling to keep their jobs and keep their communities
alive.

…on starting to document the miners’ strike

My brother lived in Calverton, a small pit village so I was able to
stay with him. I got in touch with Women’s action groups in the
area (Hucknall & Linby, Ollerton) and they put me in touch with
others (Clipstone, Blidworth). I began by photographing the
striking miners’ communal kitchens or soup kitchens and they
gradually got to know me. I was accepted by the men because
they knew I was on their side and perhaps because I was a
woman, they didn’t take me seriously as a ‘Press’
photographer. The more I went up there the more I got to know
people. They’d say, ‘oh you should come with us to so and so’.
I think that’s how I heard about the night pickets at Blidworth.

…on covering the role played by women in the miners’
strike:

There was so much the women were doing. What I found
important about the miners’ strike and women getting involved,
is that up till then many hadn’t taken so much interest in what
was happening in this country politically, but the strike
politicised them – they began to take note and watch the news
and realise that a lot of politicians are hypocrites, and you can’t
trust them and you still can’t.

Women became more confident as a result of the strike, which I
thought was great. It was good for other women and young girls
to see their Mums and daughters speaking out at the meetings,
doing things they wouldn’t have done before, eg. picketing.
Most of them would have been typical mothers and wives,
cleaning, cooking, shopping, looking after their children instead
of going on the picket line, visiting and supporting other
collieries, getting together with other women and planning days
of action, e.g., Women Against Pit Closures.

After the strike, as told to me and recorded in interviews about
the strike, they saw things differently, so it was a positive
experience for some women despite the hardship but hard for
the men who lost their jobs.

Extract from ONE YEAR interview with Brenda Prince on the Martin Parr Foundation website [Online] Cited 24/09/2024

Philip Winnard (British)
Houghton Main
1984
© Philip Winnard

Howard Sooley (British)
Carcroft NCB Central Store
1984
© Howard Sooley

Brenda Prince (British, b. 1950)
Buying an ice cream at Yorkshire Miners’ Gala. June
1984
© Brenda Prince

Photographer uncredited
Three coaches used to take miners to Hem Heath Colliery, burning fiercely at a depot at Trentham near Stoke-on-Trent
1984
Press print

Neville Pyne (British)
A policeman getting to grips with a picket
1984
Press print
© Neville Pyne

Philip Winnard (British)
Spread from photo album NUM Strike, 12th March 1984, TILL WE WIN
1984
Photo album
© Philip Winnard

The last picket line at Darfield Main. Monday morning March 4th 1985.
Houghton Main scabs had been taken in 2 hours early (we called at Darfield on way home)

The last picket line of the strike. This was at Corton Wood waiting for scabs comeing out at dinner time. Mont 4th March 85. The Picket’s were joined by Women from the Support Group.

Text from the photo album pages above

“The media was a very important aspect of the miners’ strike – the photographs were used against the miners in terms of demonising them,” Blease explains. “Images were used to illustrate violence and chaos in quite demonising and weaponised ways, but then on the other hand photographs were used to debase that media bias – through posters, photojournalists working for left-wing and union press, and people like Sturrock, John Harris, Prince and Imogen Young who were photographing the strike in a more holistic way.” …

Many of the photographers featured were part of the communities that they were documenting. Philip Winnard was one such example, as he was on strike himself from the Barnsley Main Colliery. “When he went on strike, he took his camera along and started recording his experiences when he was picketing,” Blease says. “We wanted to focus on how photographs were used in different ways and shared with friends and colleagues. He compiled these really amazing photo albums and they follow the strike chronologically, starting with the first picket lines and finishing with the return to work marches a year later.”

“They feel like family albums and spare no punches in how they record the strike,” he continues. “There’s violence, the intimidation of strike breakers, fundraising community activities, newslettering – there’s everything, and it gives an intimate familiarity with the event.”

Women also feature heavily throughout the exhibition, highlighting the oft-overlooked role they played in supporting – from those making food in the striking miners’ kitchens to all female picket lines at the collieries. Photographers such as Brenda Prince, who was a member of women’s only photography agency Format, documented this.

“Prince was focusing a lot on women’s roles in the strike,” Blease says. “So miners’ wives, community work, fundraising, picketing themselves, gathering food packages, and they played a very important role. These photographers were not just focusing on the sensational battle that was going on, they were showing how communities were coming together, but also how communities were being destroyed by the dispute, and photography was the medium that was catching this.”

Isaac Muk. “In Photos: The miners’ strike, 40 years on,” on the Huck website 6th March, 2024 [Online] Cited 24/09/2024

Brenda Prince (British, b. 1950)
Sidney Richmond, retired Pit Deputy, babysitting Sean (3 months old) – first strike baby in the village. Clipstone Colliery, Nottingham
1984-1985
© Brenda Prince

Imogen Young (British)
London’s Lesbian and Gay ‘Support the Miners’ Group take part in David’s Day celebration in Neath Colbren Club
2 March 1985
© Imogen Young

ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 explores the vital role that photography played during this bitter industrial dispute.

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike, Four Corners is delighted to tour this exhibition from the Martin Parr Foundation. One of Britain’s longest and most violent disputes, the repercussions of the miners’ strike continue to be felt today across the country.

Press release from Four Corners

John Harris (British)
Lesley Boulton at the Battle of Orgreave
1984
Gelatin silver print
© John Harris/reportdigital.co.uk

Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Photographer Lesley Boulton is attacked by a truncheon-wielding policeman at Orgreave. The picture was published by only one of 17 national newspapers in Britain.

On 18 June, miners came from all over the country to picket the coking plant outside Orgreave village, near Rotherham. I arrived at about 9.15am, with my camera – I was documenting life on the picket line. It was a glorious day: miners were sitting in the sun, or playing football, when suddenly police horses charged out in small groups. They did this twice, then there was a massive charge and they started attacking people. I didn’t see any trigger for this.

People tried to escape across the railway line, which led to a lot of injuries. And there were policemen on foot with short shields, laying about people with truncheons. I was numb with shock. This was violence far in excess of anything I’d ever witnessed: they were whacking people about the head and body with impunity. Some men tried to defend themselves. We couldn’t believe it when the BBC reversed footage on the Six O’Clock News to suggest the miners had attacked the police, and that the police had simply retaliated. [Despite an Independent Police Complaints Commission report in 2015 confirming the reversal, the BBC has never officially accepted this.]

It was chaos. I ran back to the village and hid in a car repair yard. After a few minutes, I came out and photographed one man pinned to a car bonnet, being beaten terribly. At the bus stop, a man was lying on the ground with a chest injury. I was calling to a policeman standing in the road, asking him to get an ambulance, when these two mounted police bore down on me. A man pulled me out of the way just as one of them took a full swipe at my head with his truncheon, and missed.

When I look at this photograph, I wonder what was going through his mind. The police claimed the image was doctored; when I tried to press charges for assault, the director of public prosecutions’ office told me there wasn’t enough evidence. How much did they need?

I don’t take this image personally, because it’s not about me; it’s about something much bigger: an expression of arbitrary power, and what can happen when our masters decide to put us in our place. Besides, I didn’t suffer the way the miners and their families did.

Lesley Boulton quoted in Adrian Tempany. “‘A policeman took a full swipe at my head’: Lesley Boulton at the Battle of Orgreave, 1984,” on The Guardian website 17 December 2016 [Online] Cited 23/09/2024

Philip Winnard (British)
Spread from photo album NUM Strike, 12th March 1984, TILL WE WIN
1984
Photo album
© Philip Winnard

Showing photographs from the Battle of Orgreave

Battle of Orgreave

The Battle of Orgreave was a violent confrontation on 18 June 1984 between pickets and officers of the South Yorkshire Police (SYP) and other police forces, including the Metropolitan Police, at a British Steel Corporation (BSC) coking plant at Orgreave, in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England. It was a pivotal event in the 1984–1985 UK miners’ strike, and one of the most violent clashes in British industrial history.

Journalist Alastair Stewart has characterised it as “a defining and ghastly moment” that “changed, forever, the conduct of industrial relations and how this country functions as an economy and as a democracy”. Most media reports at the time depicted it as “an act of self-defence by police who had come under attack”. In 2015, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) reported that there was “evidence of excessive violence by police officers, a false narrative from police exaggerating violence by miners, perjury by officers giving evidence to prosecute the arrested men, and an apparent cover-up of that perjury by senior officers”.

Historian Tristram Hunt has described the confrontation as “almost medieval in its choreography … at various stages a siege, a battle, a chase, a rout and, finally, a brutal example of legalised state violence”.

71 picketers were charged with riot and 24 with violent disorder. At the time, riot was punishable by life imprisonment. The trials collapsed when the evidence given by the police was deemed “unreliable”. Gareth Peirce, who acted as solicitor for some of the pickets, said that the charge of riot had been used “to make a public example of people, as a device to assist in breaking the strike”, while Michael Mansfield called it “the worst example of a mass frame-up in this country this century”.

In June 1991, the SYP paid £425,000 in compensation to 39 miners for assault, wrongful arrest, unlawful detention and malicious prosecution.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Poster for the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 at Four Corners, London showing in the background, Brenda Prince’s photograph Riot police await orders in fields surrounding Orgreave coke works, S. Yorkshire, Miners’ dispute, 1984

Poster for the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 outside of Four Corners, London

BUY THE BOOK FROM BLUECOAT PRESS

Martin Parr Foundation

Martin Parr Foundation supports emerging, established and overlooked photographers who have made and continue to make work focused on Britain and Ireland. We preserve a growing collection of significant photographic works and strive to make photography engaging and accessible for all. We are committed to making the Martin Parr Foundation a place for everyone and to reflect the diversity of British and Irish culture.

Four Corners

Four Corners centre for film and photography has been based in East London for 50 years. We champion creative expression for social change, connecting communities and image-makers to learn skills and create new work. Drawing on our radical history, our exhibitions explore how photography and film can tell stories from the margins, looking to the past to inspire the future.

Four Corners
121 Roman Road, Bethnal Green,
London E2 0QN
Nearest tube: Bethnal Green, Central Line

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday 11am – 6pm
Thursday 11am – 8pm (July and on 31 Aug)

Four Corners website

Martin Parr Foundation website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920’ at Tate Britain, London

Exhibition dates: 16th May – 13th October 2024

Curator: Tabitha Barber

Attributed to Levina Teerlinc (Flemish, 1510-1576)
Portrait of a Lady holding a Monkey
1560s
Watercolour and bodycolour heightened with gold and silver
Image: 46 × 46 mm
Frame, circular: 62 × 62 mm
Victor Reynolds and Richard Chadwick

There have been some mixed reviews of this exhibition – “tremendous show… an archaeological dig into the nation’s cultural past” (Jonathan Jones in The Guardian); “niggardly photography section… Only rarely do women’s art and women’s history spark together in this show… For even the best of the artists here are occasionally represented by the least of their works, quite apart from the mystifying omissions.” (Laura Cumming in The Guardian).

Indeed, Laura Cumming poses an interesting question: “Here is a dilemma straight away: which should take precedence, the painting or the fact? Should the show present art on its own terms, or as instance, evidence, expression of social history? It is an extremely complex remit…”

Having not been to London to see the exhibition I can only make generalised comment, but in my opinion the presentation should be a combination of both – art and social history – recognising that one does not exist, emerge, without the other. Art does not live in a bubble isolated from society and society itself is influenced by new ideas, new concepts of art. It’s not the chicken and the egg, it’s the scramble to make sense of living in this world using art as an expression, a (real, surreal, revolutionary, dream, abstract etc…) vision of the world that surrounds us.

Just from compiling this posting I have been enlightened as to the lives of many artists that I had never heard of before. I have admired their work and learnt about their lives and the conditions under which they worked. The exhibition has brought into my consciousness (and the consciousness of others) artists that I would have never have known about. It tells their stories in however fragmented a way … but at least it tells them. And that is a very good thing.

My particular favourites in the posting are three portraits where the sitter stares directly at you: Joan Carlile’s perceptive Portrait of a Lady Wearing an Oyster Satin Dress (1650s, below) so captivating of gaze, so incisive in its simplicity; Maria Cosway’s beautifully rendered Self Portrait (Nd, below) such a luminous and engaging presence; and Gwen John’s powerful Self-Portrait (1902, below) vibrant of colour, full of self-assurance. Wonderful evocations of humanity.

Scottish artist Dame Ethel Walker observes,

“There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.”

And that is what his exhibition gives you the obligation to do: to educate yourself, to make yourself a little more informed, to use your brain, eyes, and heart …and make up your own mind about the merit of the work.

I for one are very grateful for that opportunity.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. I have added relevant text from the large print guide and other bibliographic information from accredited sources to illuminate the works presented.

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

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at right, Lucy Kemp-Welch’s Colt Hunting in the New Forest 1897

Spanning 400 years, this exhibition follows women on their journeys to becoming professional artists. From Tudor times to the First World War, artists such as Mary Beale, Angelica Kauffman, Elizabeth Butler and Laura Knight paved a new artistic path for generations of women. They challenged what it meant to be a working woman of the time by going against society’s expectations – having commercial careers as artists and taking part in public exhibitions.

Including over 150 works, the show dismantles stereotypes surrounding women artists in history, who were often thought of as amateurs. Determined to succeed and refusing to be boxed in, they daringly painted what were usually thought to be subjects for male artists: history pieces, battle scenes and the nude.

The exhibition sheds light on how these artists championed equal access to art training and academy membership, breaking boundaries and overcoming many obstacles to establish what it meant to be a woman in the art world.

Text from the Tate Britain website

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura) c. 1638-1639 (below)

Artemisia Gentileschi (Italian, 1593-1653)
Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura)
c. 1638-1639
Oil on canvas
98.6 x 75.2cm (support, canvas/panel/stretcher external)
Royal Collection Trust
© His Majesty King Charles III 2024

Gentileschi claimed that ‘all the … Princes’ displayed her self-portrait in their galleries. In addition to this work, Charles I owned another self-portrait, which is now lost. Here, Gentileschi uses her own image to portray the allegorical figure of Pittura (also the Italian feminine noun for painting), who she depicts in a working apron before an easel absorbed in the act of creation.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

As a self-portrait the painting is particularly sophisticated and accomplished. The position in which Artemisia has portrayed herself would have been extremely difficult for the artist to capture, yet the work is economically painted, with very few pentiments. In order to view her own image she may have arranged two mirrors on either side of herself, facing each other. Depicting herself in the act of painting in this challenging pose, the angle and position of her head would have been the hardest to accurately render, requiring skilful visualisation.

Text from the Royal Collection Trust website

Installation view of the exhibition ‘Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920’ at Tate Britain showing Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders c. 1638-1640 (below)

Artemisia Gentileschi (Italian, 1593-1653)
Susanna and the Elders
c. 1638-1640
Oil on canvas
189.0 x 143.2cm (support, canvas/panel/stretcher external)
Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2024

Likely commissioned by Queen Henrietta Maria, this work was displayed in her Withdrawing Chamber in Whitehall Palace. The subject is an Old Testament narrative on virtue and faith. Susanna, bathing in privacy, is spied on by two elders who attempt to sexually assault her. When she resists them, the men accuse her of adultery. Susanna is arrested and about to be put to death until the men are questioned, and her innocence is revealed. Here, Gentileschi depicts Susanna as vulnerable and fearful, shielding her nakedness. She returned to the subject throughout her career.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

This spring, Tate Britain will present Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920. This ambitious group show will chart women’s road to being recognised as professional artists, a 400-year journey which paved the way for future generations and established what it meant to be a woman in the British art world. The exhibition covers the period in which women were visibly working as professional artists, but went against societal expectations to do so.

Featuring over 100 artists, the exhibition will celebrate well-known names such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman, Julia Margaret Cameron and Gwen John, alongside many others who are only now being rediscovered. Their careers were as varied as the works they produced: some prevailed over genres deemed suitable for women like watercolour landscapes and domestic scenes. Others dared to take on subjects dominated by men like battle scenes and the nude, or campaigned for equal access to training and membership of professional institutions. Tate Britain will showcase over 200 works, including oil painting, watercolour, pastel, sculpture, photography and ‘needlepainting’ to tell the story of these trailblazing artists.

Now You See Us will begin at the Tudor court with Levina Teerlinc, many of whose miniatures will be brought together for the first time in four decades, and Esther Inglis, whose manuscripts contain Britain’s earliest known self-portraits by a woman artist. The exhibition will then look to the 17th century. Focus will be given to one of art history’s most celebrated women artists, Artemisia Gentileschi, who created major works in London at the court of Charles I, including the recently rediscovered Susanna and the Elders 1638-40, on loan from the Royal Collection for the very first time. The exhibition will also look to women such as Mary Beale, Joan Carlile and Maria Verelst who broke new ground as professional portrait painters in oil.

In the 18th century, women artists took part in Britain’s first public art exhibitions, including overlooked figures such as Katherine Read and Mary Black; the sculptor Anne Seymour Damer; and Margaret Sarah Carpenter, a leading figure in her day but little heard of now. The show will look at Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, the only women included among the Founder Members of the Royal Academy of Arts; it took 160 years for membership to be granted to another woman. Women artists of this era are often dismissed as amateurs pursuing ‘feminine’ occupations like watercolour and flower painting, but many worked in these genres professionally: needlewoman Mary Linwood, whose gallery was a major tourist attraction; miniaturist Sarah Biffin, who painted with her mouth, having been born without arms and legs; and Augusta Withers, a botanical illustrator employed by the Horticultural Society.

The Victorian period saw a vast expansion in public exhibition venues. Now You See Us will showcase major works by critically appraised artists of this period, including Elizabeth Butler (née Thompson)‘s monumental The Roll Call 1874 (Butler’s work prompted critic John Ruskin to retract his statement that “no women could paint”), and nudes by Henrietta Rae and Annie Swynnerton, which sparked both debate and celebration. The exhibition will also look at women’s connection to activism, including Florence Claxton‘s satirical ‘Woman’s Work’: A Medley 1861 which will be on public display for the first time since it was painted; and an exploration of the life of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, an early member of the Society of Female Artists who is credited with the campaign for women to be admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. On show will be the student work of women finally admitted to art schools, as well as their petitions for equal access to life drawing classes.

The exhibition will end in the early 20th century with women’s suffrage and the First World War. Women artists like Gwen John, Vanessa Bell and Helen Saunders played an important role in the emergence of modernism, abstraction and vorticism, but others, such as Anna Airy, who also worked as a war artist, continued to excel in conventional traditions. The final artists in the show, Laura Knight and Ethel Walker, offer powerful examples of ambitious, independent, confident professionals who achieved critical acclaim and – finally – membership of the Royal Academy.

Press release from Tate Britain

Joan Carlile (English, 1606-1679)
The Carlile Family with Sir Justinian Isham in Richmond Park
1650s
Oil on canvas
Lamport Hall
CC BY-NC-ND

Joan Carlile (English, 1600-1679)
Portrait of a Lady Wearing an Oyster Satin Dress
1650s
Oil on canvas
30.8 x 25.5cm
National Portrait Gallery, London
Government Art Collection
Purchased from Philip Mould Ltd, 2018

Joan Carlile or Carlell or Carliell (c. 1606-1679), was an English portrait painter. She was one of the first British women known to practise painting professionally. Before Carlile, known professional female painters working in Britain were born elsewhere in Europe, principally the Low Countries.

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at left, Joan Carlile’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady known as Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart and Duchess of Lauderdale 1650s (below); and at right, Portrait of an Unknown Lady 1650-1655 (below)

Joan Carlile (English, 1606-1679)
Portrait of an Unknown Lady (installation view)
1650-1655
Oil on canvas
Support: 1107 × 900 mm
Frame: 1205 × 1012 × 73 mm
Photo: Tate

Joan Carlile (English, 1606-1679)
Portrait of an Unknown Lady known as Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart and Duchess of Lauderdale
1650s
Oil on canvas
The Bute Collection at Mount Stuart

Here, Carlile uses the same white satin dress seen in a nearby painting. The pose, with the sitter elegantly gathering a handful of fabric, is taken from works by Charles I’s portrait painter, Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641). The sitter is sometimes identified as Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart and Duchess of Lauderdale. She was Carlile’s near neighbour in Petersham, at Ham House. The broken columns in the background are often used to symbolise loss.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Joan Carlile (English, 1606-1679)
Portrait of an Unknown Lady
1650-1655
Oil on canvas
Support: 1107 × 900 mm
Frame: 1205 × 1012 × 73 mm
Photo: Tate

Portraits by Joan Carlile are rare and this is one of only approximately ten that can be identified. Of these, two are in public collections (Ham House, Surrey, and National Portrait Gallery, London), while others are held in historic house collections and family trusts in the United Kingdom, for example Lamport Hall, Burghley House and Berkeley Castle. Carlile seems to have specialised in small-scale full length portraits of figures, usually female, set in large landscape or garden settings. The composition employed here, in which the figure holds the skirt of her dress with one hand and shawl with another, was most likely a template arrangement. It appears in two other portraits, one showing the figure facing the same way as here, the other in reverse, but with both figures wearing the same white satin dress. This repeated composition adds weight to the proposition that Carlile was a professional artist. The wife of Lodowick Carlile (or Carlell), a minor poet and dramatist who also held the office of Gentleman of the Bows to Charles I, Joan Carlile lived with her husband in Petersham, a suburb of London. However, in 1653 their neighbour, Brian Duppa, recorded that ‘the Mistress of the Family intends for London, where she meanes to make use of her skill to som more Advantage then hitherto she hath don’ (quoted in Toynbee and Isham 1954, p.275). In 1654 Carlile is recorded as living in London’s Covent Garden, then the heart of the artistic community (see Burnett 2004/2010, accessed 2 October 2015).

Text from the Tate website

Joan Carlile challenged societal expectations by becoming one of Britain’s first professional women artists in the 1600s, earning her living as an oil painter. Initially employed in King Charles I’s household, Carlile liked to paint in her spare time. With the outbreak of the Civil War, she began painting to support herself.

Carlile moved to Covent Garden in the 1650s – then the centre of the art world – and set up a successful commercial portrait business. Her template of carefully posed figures in silk gowns against landscape backgrounds, seen here in Portrait of an Unknown Lady (1650-5), proved extremely popular. Admired as a professional artist in her lifetime, only a small number of her portraits still exist, some which have never been seen in public.

Text from the Tate website

In her Portrait of an Unknown Lady (1650-1655) the astonishing nacreous lustre of the sitter’s white silk gown, shown full length, shines against the foil of the dull brown foliage behind her. At this point, the Civil War had ended but the restoration of the monarchy was still in the future, and Carlile’s painting, with its overt celebration of luxury and leisure (the spotless pale fabric speaks of both) seems provocative.

It is possible that Carlile taught Anne Killigrew (1660-1685), an accomplished painter and poet whose family encouraged her creative pursuits, although it’s not clear if she ever painted professionally. Only a handful of Killigrew’s works survive today, including Venus Attired by the Three Graces, which reveals her interest in mythological scenes.

Although she died of smallpox aged just 25, Killigrew stands alongside Beale and Carlile as one of Britain’s first female artists.

Alicia Foster. “Blazing a trail: Britain’s first women artists deserve to be better known,” on the Art UK website 13 May 2024 [Online] Cited 03/09/2024

Anne Killigrew (English, 1660-1685)
Venus Attired by the Three Graces
c. 1680
Oil on canvas
Support: 1120 × 950 mm
Frame: 1282 × 1102 × 63 mm
Falmouth Art Gallery
Purchased with the assistance of the Victoria and Albert Museum Purchase Grant Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund, the Beecroft Bequest, Falmouth Decorative and Fine Arts Society, the Estate of Barry Hughes in memory of Grace and Thomas Hughes and generous donations from local supporters
Public domain

Anne Killigrew has been described as the most celebrated female English prodigy of the Seventeeth Century. A poet and artist of great beauty and repute, Killigrew died of smallpox at the age of just 25. Anne’s exceptional qualities as an artist and a poet were highly praised in her short lifetime. The poet John Dryden dedicated a poem to her in which he refers directly to this picture: ‘Where nymphs of brightest form appear, and shaggy satyrs standing near’ (from ‘To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew Excellent In The Two Sister-Arts of Poesy And Painting: An Ode’). Anne Killigrew worked at the Royal Court of King James II as Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen. Anne’s grandfather, Sir William Killigrew, was the Governor of Pendennis Castle, and his son, Dr Henry Killigrew moved to London to work as chaplain to King Charles I. He later became master of the Savoy Hospital.

Text from the Falmouth Art Gallery website

Mary Beale (English, 1633-1699)
Sketch of the Artist’s Son, Bartholomew Beale, Facing Left
c. 1660
Oil on paper
Support: 325 × 245 mm
Frame: 421 × 340 × 32 mm
Tate
Purchased 2010
Photo: Tate

In the late 1650s and early 1660s Beale and her family were living on Hind Court, off Fleet Street in London. She painted privately and had a painting room in her home. Her husband had a civil service position as Deputy Clerk of the Patents. Portrait sittings of family and friends were often social occasions, with conversation and dinner afterwards. It is in this period that Beale produced small oil sketches on paper of family members, particularly her two young sons. Whether they relate to larger oil on canvas portraits is unclear.

This oil sketch of a young boy, shown in three-quarter profile, is of Mary Beale’s eldest son Bartholomew, baptised in 1656. His appearance, both in age and costume, is very similar to that in Mary Beale’s Self-portrait with her family (Geffrye Museum, London), painted c. 1659-60, before the birth of her youngest son Charles. It relates closely to another sketch of Bartholomew in oil on paper painted at the same time, Sketch of the Artist’s Son, Bartholomew Beale, in Profile c. 1660 (Tate T13245). Whether these sketches are connected to the production of the Geffrye Museum portrait, or were simply executed at around the same time, is not known. They are painted in oil on paper, which seems to have been a feature of Beale’s working method in the early 1660s but is not known in her later career, when she made preparatory sketches in chalk on paper or in oil on canvas (see, for example, Portrait of a Young Girl c. 1679-81, Tate T06612). When this sketch was made, the Beale family was living in Hind Court, off Fleet Street in London, where Mary Beale’s husband, Charles, was employed as Deputy Clerk of the Patents Office. It is difficult to determine whether Beale had much of a commercial portrait practice at this date, but documents certainly record the production of portraits of family and friends. In her ‘painting room’, Beale had ‘pencills [sic.], brushes, goose & swan fitches’, as well as ‘quantities of primed paper to paint on’ (George Vertue, transcription of Charles Beale’s 1661 notebook, now lost, quoted in Barber 1999, p. 16).

Text from the Tate website

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Mary Beale’s Anne Sotheby 1676-1677

Mary Beale (English, 1633-1699)
Anne Sotheby
1676-1677
Oil on canvas
Tate
Purchased with funds provided by the Nicholas Themans Trust 2024

Beale’s husband kept a daily record of her activities in the studio. Two of his over 30 notebooks and a few partial transcripts are still known. They record Beale’s sitters, her painting stages, her painting materials and her prices. For her commissioned works, she borrowed poses from the portraits of the court artist Peter Lely (1618-1680). Anne Sotheby’s pose is taken from his portrait of Lady Essex Finch. Beale charged £10 for paintings of this size. Her sons acted as studio assistants; her youngest, Charles, was paid to paint the drapery in this portrait.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Mary Beale (née Cradock) (1633-1699) was an English portrait painter. She was part of a small band of female professional artists working in London. Beale became the main financial provider for her family through her professional work – a career she maintained from 1670/71 to the 1690s. Beale was also a writer, whose prose Discourse on Friendship of 1666 presents a scholarly, uniquely female take on the subject. Her 1663 manuscript Observations, on the materials and techniques employed “in her painting of Apricots”, though not printed, is the earliest known instructional text in English written by a female painter. Praised first as a “virtuous” practitioner in “Oyl Colours” by Sir William Sanderson in his 1658 book Graphice: Or The use of the Pen and Pensil; In the Excellent Art of PAINTING, Beale’s work was later commended by court painter Sir Peter Lely and, soon after her death, by the author of “An Essay towards an English-School”, his account of the most noteworthy artists of her generation.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Mary Beale (English, 1633-1699)
Mary Beale
c. 1666
Oil on canvas
109.2 x 87.6cm
National Portrait Gallery, London
Purchased, 1912
CC BY-NC-ND

Beale is shown holding an unframed canvas on which are sketch portraits of her two sons, Bartholomew (1656-1709) and Charles (1660-1714?)

Mary Beale (English, 1633-1699)
Self Portrait
c. 1675
Oil on sacking
89 x 73cm
West Suffolk Heritage Service
Purchased
CC BY-NC-ND

The early English portrait painter Mary Beale (1622/1623-1699) had a father who was an amateur artist, miniature painter and a collector of paintings (her family owned work by Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck) and her husband, Charles, was also an amateur painter and ran her studio in London’s fashionable Pall Mall.

Unusually, in her case, her talent was matched by her spouse’s high regard of it, and she was allowed to supersede him and establish a professional career. She took on female apprentices, though no records of their subsequent careers survive.

Alicia Foster. “Blazing a trail: Britain’s first women artists deserve to be better known,” on the Art UK website 13 May 2024 [Online] Cited 03/09/2024

Exhibition guide

Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 celebrates over 100 women who forged public careers as artists. The exhibition begins with the earliest recorded women artists working in Britain. It ends with women’s place in society fundamentally changed by the First World War and the first women gaining the right to vote. Across these 400 years, women were a constant presence in the art world. Now You See Us explores these artists’ careers and asks why so many have been erased from mainstream art histories.

Organised chronologically, the exhibition follows women who practised art as a livelihood rather than an accomplishment. The chosen works were often exhibited at public exhibitions, where these artists sold their art and made their reputations. Most of the women featured belonged to a social class that gave them the time and opportunity to develop their talents. Many were the daughters, sisters or wives of artists. Yet even these women were regarded differently. Now You See Us charts their fight to be accepted as professional artists on equal terms with men.

Many of the exhibited works reflect prejudiced notions of the most appropriate art forms and subjects for women. Others challenge the commonly held belief that women were best suited to ‘imitation’, proving they have always been capable of creative invention. From painting epic battle scenes to campaigning for access to art academies, these women defied society’s limited expectations of them and forged their own paths. Yet so many of their careers have been forgotten and artworks lost. Drawing on the artists’ own writings, art criticism, and new and established research, this exhibition attempts to restore these women to their rightful place in art history. Now You See Us aims to ensure these artists are not only seen but remembered.

Women at the Tudor Courts

There are significant gaps in our knowledge of women’s artistic lives in the sixteenth century. As is the case for many artists in this exhibition, their lives are poorly documented and often hidden behind those of their husbands and fathers. The problems this presents are evident in this room.

Susanna Horenbout (1503-1554) and Levina Teerlinc (c. 1510s-1576) are among the earliest women in Britain to be named as artists. Their reputations are clearly recorded. In 1521, Horenbout’s skill was admired by the German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), and in 1567, both artists were praised by the Italian historian Lodovico Guicciardini (1521-1589). Yet no works by Horenbout have been identified, and those attributed to Teerlinc are not certain.

Horenbout and Teerlinc were both daughters of Flemish manuscript illuminators and were likely trained in their family workshops. Both arrived in England to work at the court of Henry VIII. But as women, they were not employed as artists. While Horenbout’s brother Lucas Horenbout (1490-1544) was Henry VIII’s painter, she served Anne of Cleves as one of her Gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber. Teerlinc served Elizabeth I likewise. This does not mean that they did not paint – at court, their artistic talents would have been a distinguishing skill – but, as is a common feature of this exhibition, written histories have failed to record their activities.

Working in a different context – as a scribe and calligrapher – the works of Esther Inglis (1571-1624) can be identified. Inglis authored more than 60 manuscript books and included her name and self-portrait in many. Raised in Scotland, she may have learnt the art of calligraphy from her mother, Marie Presot (active 1569-1574).

Artemisia Gentileschi

Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi arrived in London in c. 1638-9 by invitation of Charles I. Like other European rulers, Charles I employed artists of international reputation to signal the cultural sophistication of his court. Gentileschi had prestigious patrons across Europe, including the Grand Duke of Tuscany and Philip IV of Spain. She was the first woman to be a member of the Academy of the Arts of Drawing in Florence, and in Rome, her house had been ‘full of cardinals and princes’. Gentileschi’s fame as an artist was augmented by her status as a woman.

In London, Gentileschi worked for Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria. Records suggest she produced seven works for the royal collection. These included self-portraits and large history paintings, with subject matter drawn from classical history, mythology, and the Bible. Only the two displayed here are still known. Gentileschi often placed women at the centre of her works, depicting narratives that celebrate their strength and virtue. Susanna and the Elders is an example of the kind of work for which Gentileschi was celebrated.

Gentileschi achieved in her lifetime what many women who came after her had to fight to attain: she was a professional artist who ran her own studio, was a member of an art academy, worked from life models and was ranked as a serious artist alongside men. Despite this, Gentileschi’s status has fluctuated over time, and the artist has faded in and out of art history.

Early accounts of Gentileschi’s work focus on her personal life as much as her painting. Like many of the women artists who came after her, the details of her biography continue to dictate interpretations of her work.

The First Professionals

In 1658, historian William Sanderson (c. 1586-1676) published Graphice. The use of the pen and pensil. Or, The most excellent art of painting. The publication lists contemporary artists practising in England. He includes four women working in oil paint: ‘Mrs Carlile’ (Joan Carlile), ‘Mrs Beale’ (Mary Beale), ‘Mrs Brooman’ (probably Sarah Broman) and ‘Mrs Weimes’ (Anne Wemyss). Carlile and Beale are believed to be two of the earliest British women to have worked as professional artists. Very little is known about Broman or Wemyss beyond snatches of information in archives.

This short list highlights how unusual it was for British women to pursue art as a profession in the seventeenth century. Women had little agency over their own lives and were subject first to their fathers and then their husbands. Limited to the domestic sphere, they were not expected to conduct public lives. Many women painted privately with no thought of turning it into a career. While young men began as apprentices or assistants in the studios of professionals, this route was not open to most women.

In the seventeenth century women writers, poets, playwrights and artists began to give voice to those questioning their secondary status and petitioning for women’s rights. They argued that it was lack of education, not ‘weak minds’ that limited their opportunities. This fight for equality and access to education runs throughout the exhibition.

The First Exhibitors

The first public art exhibition in Britain took place in London in 1760, and art shows soon became an important part of the city’s social calendar. Founded in 1768, the Royal Academy quickly emerged as a driving force in cultural life, with its Summer Exhibition attracting tens of thousands of visitors every year. Other venues, including the Society of Artists and the British Institution also hosted exhibitions.

Women artists played an active part in this competitive world. An estimated 900 women exhibited their work between 1760 and 1830. Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser were both founding members of the Royal Academy (although, as women, they weren’t awarded full membership and were excluded from the Academy’s council meetings and governance). Despite this precedent, it would take more than 150 years for the next woman to be elected to membership.

Kauffman is one of the few women artists of the eighteenth century whose profile has been sustained. Many others made names for themselves, but their careers are not well documented. Even Moser is less well known, perhaps because she painted flowers while Kauffman pursued the ‘high genre’ of history painting, depicting historical, mythological and biblical narratives.

Art critics of the time often criticised women for their ‘weak’ figurative work, yet they were denied access to life-drawing classes. Women artists also had to battle social expectations. Publishing a private or studio address in an exhibition catalogue was a signal of commercial practice, but painting for money was considered improper. Women artists of higher social rank were listed as ‘honorary’ exhibitors; some exhibited simply as ‘a Lady’, and after marriage, many switched their status from ‘commercial’ to ‘amateur’.

‘Just What Ladies Do For Amusement’

In 1770, the Royal Academy banned ‘Needle-work, artificial Flowers, cut Paper, Shell-work, or any such baubles’ from its exhibitions. They also banned works that were copies. Other categories of art that the Academy considered ‘lower’, such as miniature painting, pastel and watercolour were also treated dismissively. Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), the Academy’s President, said that working in pastel was unworthy of real artists and was ‘just what ladies do when they paint for their own amusement’.

These ‘lower arts’ were ones that women practised the most. Small in scale and considered less technically challenging than oil painting, they demanded less equipment and could be pursued at home. They were taught to middle and upper-class girls and were the realm of women who pursued art as amateur accomplishment.

Despite this, these art forms offered opportunities for women to earn a living. Many turned miniature painting, needlework and pastel into lucrative professional careers, supplementing their income through tutoring. Their patrons were often women, and some boasted large, fashionable clienteles and even galleries which became tourist attractions.

Founded in 1754, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (the Society of Arts) offered cash prizes and medals in many categories, including the ‘polite arts’. Awards were given for patterns for embroidery, copies of prints, drawings of statues and of ‘beasts, birds, fruit or flowers’, as well as landscapes. Some prizes were specifically intended for young women. The Society was a stepping stone to a career and many of the artists in this exhibition won medals. Yet most of the women recorded as submitting work for competition can no longer be identified beyond their names.

Flowers

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, painting flowers was considered a suitably delicate pursuit for women. Imitating nature (rather than demonstrating creative or imaginative flair) was thought to be an appropriate outlet for women’s artistic skills. Flowers were also at the heart of respectable hobbies like embroidery, botany and gardening. In the 1850s, the women’s periodical the Ladies’ Treasury called flower painting ‘a ladylike and truly feminine accomplishment’. When Mary Moser exhibited Cymon and Iphigenia (based on a poem by John Dryden, 1631-1700) at the Royal Academy in 1789, a reviewer urged her to stick to flowers. She painted flowers ‘transcendently’, he noted, and should do ‘nothing else’.

Many women were employed as professional illustrators, recording plant species for horticulturists and botanical publishers. Some conducted hybrid careers, working as illustrators and drawing tutors while exhibiting flower paintings for a wider market. In the Victorian era, critics applauded several women artists as leaders of the genre. Yet the idea that flower painting, especially in watercolour, was an exclusively amateur pastime has damaged the legacies of many accomplished artists who successfully worked within this genre.

Victorian Spectacle

Grand exhibitions were a defining part of the Victorian art world. The Royal Academy, the leading art institution since 1768, was still Britain’s most prestigious exhibition venue, but was later criticised for its traditional conservatism. New venues, such as London’s Grosvenor Gallery, which opened in 1877, became rival spaces, and exhibitions in Liverpool and Manchester offered fresh opportunities for exhibiting artists. The Victorian era was also the age of World Fairs. Major exhibitions were held in London and Paris, and in 1893, the World’s Exposition in Chicago was visited by over 25 million people.

This room explores the successes of women artists on this public stage. Many of the works on display were shown in these exhibitions. They won international medals, praise from art critics and public recognition. Yet women tackling ‘male’ subjects, such as battle scenes, caused surprise. Opinion was also divided on women painting the nude: some thought it immoral, others brave.

Exhibitions gave women a public platform to build substantial reputations, and some became popular names. Despite this, membership of the Royal Academy, which was a mark of professional recognition, remained out of reach. As a result, women had no automatic exhibiting rights and were reliant on committees of men selecting their works for exhibition. Without institutional support, they had to navigate the commercial art market on their own.

Women artists’ campaigns for access to the Academy joined calls for greater equality in society. From the 1850s, women petitioned for equal rights to education and work, as well as women’s suffrage. These causes are reflected in the works in this room.

Watercolour

Watercolour was considered one of the ‘polite arts’ best suited to women. However, there were few opportunities to practice professionally. The principal watercolour societies – the Old (founded in 1804) and the rival New (founded in 1807 and reconstituted in 1831) – restricted the membership of women. Membership of the Old was limited to six women (in practice, usually four), while the New admitted around ten.

In both societies, women were confined to the category of ‘Lady Members’ until the end of the nineteenth century. They had no say in governance and were denied access to the financial premiums awarded to full members. Since the annual exhibitions of both societies were closed to non-members, most women had limited opportunities to exhibit their work.

Against these odds, many women water colourists achieved significant commercial and critical success. They enjoyed solo shows and developed commercial relationships with dealers, taking control of their careers.

In 1857, a group of women founded the Society of Female Artists (later, the Society of Lady Artists in c. 1869, then the Society of Women Artists in 1899) to promote the work of women artists in Britain.

Photography

The announcement of photography in 1839 marked a major shift in the art world. In its first decades, photography was a laborious practice that required an understanding of chemistry and optics, as well as expensive equipment. It needed more money, specialist instruction and time than most other art forms. For women who had access to these privileges, the medium provided new opportunities.

From its foundation in 1853, the Photographic Society of London welcomed women members. However, they rarely attended meetings, which were scheduled in the evenings when women required a chaperone to leave the house. The atmosphere of the meetings was described as a ‘men’s club’ and it wasn’t until 1898 that the Society belatedly banned smoking ‘in respect of ladies’ attendance’. Meetings often included papers on new techniques and equipment, providing significant benefits to those who were able to join.

Women participated in London’s first public photographic exhibitions at the Royal Society of Arts in 1852-3 and at the Photographic Society in 1854. The Amateur Photographic Association, established in 1861, also welcomed women from its outset. In the 1890s and early 1900s, London’s Photographic Salon became a key venue. Founded by the Linked Ring Brotherhood, who promoted photography as a fine art, Salon exhibitors included women from across Europe and the US. A photograph of British photographer Carine Cadby in silhouette, examining one of her glass plate negatives, featured on the cover of the 1896 Salon catalogue. Despite this, women were not elected as members of the Linked Ring until 1900. By 1909, they numbered just 8 among 63 men.

Art School

Women were excluded from enrolment at the Royal Academy Schools, Britain’s principal art academy, until 1860. Laura Herford (1831-1870) was the first woman admitted. She had submitted her work for consideration using only her initials and was assumed to be a man. Once women gained entry, they were determined to achieve equal access to training.

Women were barred from the Academy’s life-drawing classes until 1893. Their exclusion from this vital component of art education was justified on many grounds. Chiefly, it was to ‘protect’ women’s supposed modesty, but also because they were considered amateurs who lacked the intellectual capacity to practice art at the highest level. Women students marshalled critical support for their cause and submitted petitions. Life drawing was considered essential to the training of men pursuing careers as artists. Why, they argued, was it not also essential for women?

The Female School of Art, founded in 1842, provided another route into art education. Like several regional schools, such as that in Manchester, it encouraged women into vocational careers in design. Women also had access to private academies, including Sass’s and Leigh’s (later Heatherleys) in London, which prepared students for admission to the Royal Academy Schools. And some women artists, such as Louise Jopling, established their own art school.

In 1871, the founding of the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London signalled a fundamental change of attitudes. From the outset, the Slade offered women an education on equal terms with men. Studying from life models was a central focus of teaching and by the turn of the century, women students outnumbered men by three to one. Access to life drawing had been regarded as the last barrier to equal opportunity. Now they could study from life, some critics argued it was up to women to prove they could be successful artists.

Being Modern

The first two decades of the twentieth century saw rapid change for women, with their rights, roles and opportunities evolving at an unprecedented pace. The First World War signalled a decisive change for women’s place in society and in 1918, after decades of campaigning, some women finally gained the right to vote.

At the same time, the art world was also changing. New art groups and exhibiting societies rejected tradition and promoted modernist aesthetics. Instead of figurative realism, they privileged form, colour and experimentation. Many saw modernism as an opportunity for greater artistic freedom. However, despite growing liberalism in art and society, women artists still faced challenges. The New English Art Club became a rival exhibiting venue to the Royal Academy but was slow to admit women. The Camden Town Group labelled itself ‘progressive’ but openly excluded women.

While modernism is often presented as the dominant movement of the early twentieth century, it doesn’t account for all artistic production of the period. Membership of the Royal Academy, an exhibiting venue many now regarded as too traditional, remained a symbolic goal for many women. When Annie Swynnerton was elected an Associate Member in 1922, Laura Knight said she had broken down the ‘barriers of prejudice’. In 1936, Knight was elected a Royal Academician, becoming the first woman to achieve full membership since the eighteenth century.

The artworks in the final room of the exhibition explore this complex period. Their variety reveals women forging their own paths and pursuing professional careers with purpose and confidence. While many chose not to challenge traditional artistic values, they pushed the boundaries of what was expected of them, paving the way for generations of women artists who came after them.

Text from the Tate exhibition guide

Mary Delany (English, 1700-1788)
Rubus Odoratus
1772-1782
The British Museum
Bequeathed by Augusta Hall, Baroness Llanover in 1897

Delany was not a professional artist. However, she pursued art with a seriousness of purpose, working in a range of artistic and decorative mediums. She was in her early seventies when she turned to botanical collage, which stemmed from the Dutch art known as knipkunst or schaarkunst. Over the course of a decade, Delany created nearly one thousand botanically accurate collages of plants made from intricately cut pieces of coloured paper. In this collage, Delany shows a flowering raspberry, which was introduced to Britain from North America in 1770.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Mary Knowles (English, 1733-1807)
Needlework Picture
1779
Silk (textile), wool, giltwood, glass (material) embroidered, dyeing
89.2 x 84.5cm (frame, external)
Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2024

Mary Morris Knowles, born of a Quaker family in Rugeley, Staffordshire, was celebrated as much for her intellect, religious conviction and unusual powers of conversation as for her skill with the needle. A friend of the poetess Anna Seward (‘The Swan of Lichfield’) and of Dr Johnson, she is now regarded as an important early protagonist of the feminist viewpoint in English cultural life. Her support for the abolition of slavery, her investigation into mystical science and her knowledge of garden design, in addition to her accomplishment as a needlewoman, suggest the breadth of her interests. In 1771 she was introduced by her fellow Quaker Benjamin West to Queen Charlotte, who remained on terms of friendship with her over the next thirty years and whose interest in female accomplishments, notably needlework, was well known. Mrs Knowles’s visits to Buckingham House included an occasion in 1778 on which she presented her 5-year-old son George to the King and Queen.

Following the first visit in 1771, the Queen commissioned Mrs Knowles to make a copy of Zoffany’s portrait of George III in needlework or ‘needle painting’ as it was also known. This technique ‘so highly finished, that it has all the softness and Effect of painting’ was achieved with a combination of irregular satin-stitch and long-and-short stitch, worked on hand-woven tammy in an arbitrary pattern and at speed, using fine wool dyed in a wide range of colours under her own supervision. Eight years later Mrs Knowles embroidered the self portrait showing her at work on the Zoffany which, like the earlier piece, she signed with initials and dated. This appears always to have been in the Royal Collection and was presumably also commissioned by Queen Charlotte.

Text from the Royal Collection Trust website

Mary Black (English, c. 1737-1814)
Messenger Monsey (1693-1788)
1764
Oil on canvas
127 x 101.6cm
Gift from Frederick Walford, 1877
Royal College of Physicians, London
CC BY-NC-ND

This portrait of the physician Messenger Monsey (1694-1788) is Black’s only known oil painting. Black likely hoped it was a step towards establishing herself as a professional artist, but the issue of payment caused friction. Black hope to charge her client £25, half the amount charged by leading portraitist Joshua Reynolds, but after Monsey’s complaint offered to drop it to a quarter. Monsey considered Black’s expectation of a fee improper. He claimed it would damage her reputation if word got out, and even referred to her as a ‘slut’ in a letter to his cousin.

Wall text from the exhibition

Little is known of the father-and-daughter artists Thomas and Mary Black. Thomas was mainly employed painting draperies for more successful painters, and Mary usually painted copies of old masters. In a letter from Monsey to Mary Black, the doctor wrote: ‘I was bedevilled to let you make your first attempt upon my gracefull person… drawn like a Hog in armour’.

Text from the Art UK website

Black was clearly unfazed by awkward sitters. She built a flourishing artistic practice, painting and teaching the aristocracy, earning enough to live independently (she never married) and keep servants and a horse and carriage at her London home. She died there in old age just as the nineteenth century began.

Alicia Foster. “Blazing a trail: Britain’s first women artists deserve to be better known,” on the Art UK website 13 May 2024 [Online] Cited 03/09/2024

Mary Moser RA (English, 1744-1819)
Standing Female Nude
Nd
Black and white chalk on grey-green paper
49 x W 30.2cm
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

As women were excluded from life drawing classes, many took their own steps to improve their anatomical knowledge. They sketched from casts and statues and copied from other artists’ drawings and anatomy books. These rare works show that some artists found ways around these restrictions, although little is known about how Moser and Stone accessed life models.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Mary Moser RA (English, 1744-1819)
Flowers in a vase, which stands on a ledge
1765
Watercolour and bodycolour on paper
The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge

From the same series as the work nearby, this watercolour represents Sagittarius. The vase is filled with a cascade of late flowering plants: asters, chrysanthemums and rare pale nerines, captured in the cold light of winter. In addition to her professional profile as a Royal Academician, Moser acted as a royal tutor. She was part of Queen Charlotte’s circle and taught the princesses botany, embroidery and flower painting. She worked alongside other artists, including Meen and Delany, whose work is also displayed in this room.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Admired for her striking paintings of flowers, Mary Moser was recognised for her talent from a very young age. She trained with her father, an acclaimed artist and goldsmith, winning her first medal for flower drawing at 14. At just 24, she became one of only two female founders of the Royal Academy, alongside Angelica Kauffman.

Moser painted portraits and historical scenes, but her skilled floral still life works, like Flowers in a vase, which stands on a ledge (1765), were praised by critics. Though still life was traditionally seen as a ‘lesser subject’, her floral works were so widely appreciated she received royal commissions, including one from Queen Charlotte. Despite recognition and the exhibition of many paintings, few of Moser’s works survive today.

Text from the Tate website

Mary Moser RA (English, 1744-1819)
Vase of Flowers
Between 1758 and 1819
Oil on canvas
72.1 x W 53.6cm
The Fitzwilliam Museum
Gift from Major the Hon. Henry Rogers Broughton, 1966

The exquisite attention to detail in her painting, with its beads of dew and butterflies on the wing, was perhaps nurtured by seeing her father’s work; as a goldsmith and medallion maker, this was also his talent. But the gorgeous sensuality – seen also in her approach to the nude figure – was entirely her own. She married, aged 53, but also had an affair with the estranged husband of another artist: Maria Hadfield Cosway (1759-1839).

Alicia Foster. “Blazing a trail: Britain’s first women artists deserve to be better known,” on the Art UK website 13 May 2024 [Online] Cited 03/09/2024

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Angelica Kauffman’s Colouring 1778-1780 (below)

Angelica Kauffman RA (Swiss, 1741-1807)
Colouring
1778-1780
Oil on canvas
1260 x 1485 x 25 mm
© Royal Academy of Arts, London
Photo: John Hammond

This painting is part of a set of the four [titled ‘Elements of Art’] commissioned from Kauffman by the Royal Academy to decorate the ceiling of the Royal Academy’s new Council Room in Somerset House which opened in 1780. …

Kauffman represented each of her four Elements of Art as women. Female personifications of abstract concepts and values were commonplace in European art but depicting all four as women was unusual. Design (or Disegno), in particular, was known as ‘the father of all the arts’ and was traditionally depicted as a man, often in contrast to Colour or Painting personified as a woman (see Baumgartel). In Design and Colouring, the women are physically engaged in the act of creating whereas in Composition and Invention they are shown in contemplation. In Invention the figure looks to the sky for inspiration and in Composition she is deep in thought with her head resting on her hand in the traditional gesture of melancholy or reverie.

Text from the Royal Academy website

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at centre, Maria Cosway’s Georgiana as Cynthia from Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ 1781-1782 (below); and at right, Cosway’s A Persian Lady Worshipping the Rising Sun 1784 (below)

Maria Cosway (Italian-English 1760-1838)
Georgiana as Cynthia from Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’
1781-1782
Oil on canvas
Chatsworth House
Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images
Public domain

Maria Cosway (Italian-English 1760-1838)
A Persian Lady Worshipping the Rising Sun
1784
Oil on canvas
61 x 73.7cm
Sir John Soane’s Museum
Gift from the artist, 1822
By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
CC BY-NC-ND

As well as portraits, Cosway exhibited history paintings. This work was shown at the Royal Academy in 1784. Although only a few of Cosway’s history pictures can be located now, paintings such as this one were well known through reproductions made by leading engravers and print publishers. Cosway’s success was hindered by her husband, who did not like her to paint professionally. She reflected later that had he permitted it, she would have ‘made a better painter, but left to myself by degrees, instead of improving, I lost what I brought from Italy of my early studies.’

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Maria Cosway (Italian-English 1760-1838)
Bouquet of Flowers
1780
Watercolour on paper
The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)
Bequeathed by Sir Robert Clermont Witt, 1952
CC BY-NC-ND

Maria Cosway (Italian-English 1760-1838)
The Judgement of Korah, Dathan and Abiram
c. 1801
Pen, ink and oil on canvas
37.5 x 29.2cm
Yale Center for British Art
Paul Mellon Collection
CC BY-NC-ND

Maria Cosway (1759-1838) (after)
Self Portrait
Nd
Oil on canvas
61 x W 50.8cm
Temple Newsam House, Leeds Museums and Galleries
Bequeathed by Sam Wilson, 1925
CC BY-NC-ND

Sarah Biffin (English, 1784-1850)
Self-portrait
c. 1821
Watercolour and bodycolour on ivory
Private collection

Biffin, whose baptism record notes that she was born ‘without arms or legs’, taught herself to sew, write and paint using her mouth and shoulder. She wrote that, as a child, ‘I was continually practising every invention; till at length I could, with my mouth – thread a needle – tie a knot – do fancy work – cut out and make my own dresses’.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at left, Clara Maria Pope’s Peony 1822 (below); and at right, Pope’s Peony 1821 (below)

Clara Maria Pope (British, 1767-1831)
Peony
1822
Bodycolour on card
The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Courtesy the Natural History Museum

Clara Maria Pope (British, 1767-1831)
Peony
1821
Bodycolour on card
The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
Courtesy the Natural History Museum

Pope appears in museum records under many names: Clara Leigh, Clara Wheatley (her first husband was the artist Francis Wheatley, 1747-1801), Clara Maria Pope (she married actor Alexander Pope in 1807) and Mrs Alexander Pope. Her changes of name have obscured her career as an artist. She exhibited watercolour landscapes and portraits, miniatures and genre works, but above all, Pope was an artist of flowers. She worked for the leading botanical publisher Samuel Curtis (1779-1860). The scientifically accurate peonies depicted here are 2 of 11 designs. They may have been intended as plates for a work that was never published.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Augusta Innes Withers (English, 1792-1877)
The Canon Hall Muscat Grape
c. 1825
Watercolour on paper
444 × 352 mm
RHS Lindley Collections
Courtesy the Royal Horticultural Society, Lindley Library

Withers was employed by the Horticultural Society to make official ‘portraits’ of varieties of fruit growing in their orchards. The quality of Withers’s work meant her high fees were not questioned. Here, she paints sunlight glowing through grapes and the translucency of the skin of gooseberries in great detail. Withers drew and handcoloured engraved illustrations in the Horticultural Society’s Transactions and made illustrations of fruit for John Lindley’s Pomological Magazine in 1828 (Lindley was Secretary of the Society). Withers was also regarded as one of the best teachers of botanical illustration.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at left, Rebecca Solomon’s Sherry, Sir?
c. 1858-1862 (below); and at right, Solomon’s A Young Teacher 1861 (below)

Rebecca Solomon (English, 1832-1886)
Sherry, Sir?
c. 1858-1862
Oil on canvas
Private collection

Solomon often painted scenes of domestic life and interiors, which were considered more suitable subjects for women artists than history painting. Solomon’s domestic scenes include subtle commentary on social hierarchies. Sherry, Sir? depicts a maid with a silver tray. It reprises a well-known painting of the same title, painted by William Powell Frith (1819-1909) in 1851, but unlike Frith’s painting, Solomon draws attention to domestic labour and the hierarchies of a middle-class home. Solomon was the sister of artists Abraham Solomon (1823-1862) and Simeon Solomon (1840-1905).

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Rebecca Solomon (London 26 September 1832 – 20 November 1886 London) was a 19th-century English Pre-Raphaelite draftsman, illustrator, engraver, and painter of social injustices. She is the second of three children who all became artists, in a prominent Jewish family. …

Solomon’s artistic style was typical of popular 19th-century painting at the time and falls under the category of genre painting. She used her visual images to critique ethnic, gender and class prejudice in Victorian England. When Solomon started painting genre scenes, her work demonstrated an observant eye for class, ethnic and gender discrimination. Solomon’s paintings reflect a combination of interest in the theatre and commitment to social consciousness that is not exist in other artist’s painting in the nineteenth century.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Solomon painted in a more equivocal manner… She [the subject of the painting] is equally attractive and demure, but, by being painted from the side and against the background of a middle-class interior, the viewer is invited to reflect on her social status.

This is framed in a genre painting and by no means a piece with pretensions to social realism, but Solomon seems to be underlining the definite restrictions on this young woman’s position in society.

The pictures hanging behind her may contribute to that interpretation of the artist. They are not yet identified, but it seems that on the left we are shown an allegorical subject later than Gainsborough or Reynolds, depicting a young peasant boy or young peasant girl holding a dog in a landscape. On the right, a more specific engraving of a genre painting from Solomon’s own time showing what appears to be an itinerant family of street vendors. By placing his servant girl between these two paintings, Solomon seems to be asking us to compare.

José Luis Jiménez García. “La otra versión de la ‘Sherry Girl’,” on the Diario de Jerez website 07 June 2023 [Online] Cited 28/08/2024 Translated from the Spanish by Google Translate

Rebecca Solomon (English, 1832-1886)
A Young Teacher
1861
Oil on canvas
61 by 51cm
Tate and the Museum of the Home

Rebecca Solomon’s painting is a complex reflection on gender, race, religion and education in mid-nineteenth century London. As with many of her works, it considers women who worked in better-off households as professional carers. In A Young Teacher, Solomon modifies a traditional domestic scene between mother and child, with the surrounding books stressing the theme of learning. The woman at the centre of the image was modelled by Jamaican-born Fanny Eaton, who became a prominent muse for many Victorian artists and featured in some of the most iconic paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite period. …

Believed to be the first Jewish woman to become a professional artist in England, Rebecca Solomon’s work shone a light on inequality and prejudice at a time when these subjects were far from mainstream. She was active in social reform movements, including as part of a group of 38 artists who petitioned the Royal Academy of Arts to open its schools to women.

Text from the Tate website

Emily Osborn (English, 1828-1925)
Nameless and Friendless.
“The rich man’s wealth is his strong city: the destruction of the poor is their poverty” (Proverbs: 10:15)
1857
Oil on canvas
Support: 825 × 1038 mm
Frame: 1042 × 1258 × 75 mm
Tate
Purchased with assistance from Tate Members, the Millwood Legacy and a private donor 2009
Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED

Osborn exhibited widely and was supported by wealthy patrons. She was also part of the ‘rights of woman’ debate, campaigning for more public roles for women. Nameless and Friendless, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1857, dramatises the difficulties faced by women artists. Osborn shows a young woman offering a painting to a sceptical dealer. With no reputation (‘Nameless’) and no connections (‘Friendless’), she has little chance of a sale. Behind her, two leering men emphasise the impression of her isolation and vulnerability.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Emily Mary Osborn’s Barbara Bodichon (1827-1891) Nd (below)

Emily Mary Osborn (1828-1925)
Barbara Bodichon (1827-1891) (installation view)
Nd
Oil on canvas
120 x 97cm
Girton College, University of Cambridge

Martha Darley Mutrie (British, 1824-1885)
Wild Flowers at the Corner of a Cornfield
1855-1860
Oil on canvas
Support: 821 × 632 mm
Frame: 958 × 781 × 65 mm
Photo: Tate (Seraphina Neville)

Martha Darley Mutrie is considered one of the leading painters of flowers active in Britain in the nineteenth century. She was born in Ardwick, near Manchester. She trained together with her sister, the painter Annie Feray Mutrie (1826-1893), under George Wallis (1811-1891) at the Manchester School of Design from 1844 to 1846, and also undertook private lessons with him. The sisters began exhibiting at the Royal Manchester Institution from 1845 and at the Royal Academy, London, showing there consistently from the early 1850s. Their work was regularly well received by the critics. Mutrie and her sister moved to London in 1854, where they painted flowers in interior settings, carefully arranged, and also outdoors in mock natural settings.

Despite the prominence of women artists painting still lifes and flowers, the men practitioners of the genre, such as George Lance (1802-1864) and William Henry ‘Birds Nest’ Hunt (1790-1864), received greater critical and institutional attention. Martha and Annie Mutrie achieved success that was otherwise rare for women working as artists at the time.

The art critic John Ruskin admired both artists’ work and wrote about one of Annie’s pictures in his review of the 1855 Royal Academy exhibition. In his review Ruskin suggested that she abandon artificial compositions and paint instead ‘some banks of flowers in wild country, just as they grow’ (John Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, 1855). This painting might be seen as a response to Ruskin’s insight and the advances in science that in the 1850s brought a new focus to the study of nature, with arguments over beauty and truth.

Text from the Tate website

Florence Claxton (British, 1838-1920)
‘Woman’s Work’: A Medley
1861
Oil on canvas
Martin Beisly Fine Art, London

In the 1850s, Claxton became part of the UK’s first organised movement for women’s rights. Woman’s Work satirises women’s opportunities for professional employment. At its centre a group of women fawn at the feet of a man seated below a statue of the Golden Calf – a false idol. Confined by
a surrounding wall, doors to professions such as medicine are shut to the women. Only the artist Rosa Bonheur has managed to scale the wall’s heights. The painting was exhibited at London’s National Institution for Fine Arts in 1861 and received mixed reviews. Some praised its comic strength but others described it as ‘vulgar’.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty
1865
Albumen print
Wilson Centre of Photography

Annie Keene (1842/3-1901) was an artist’s model at the Royal Academy Schools. Cameron showed Keene’s portrait at the 1866 Hampshire and Isle of Wight Loan Exhibition, and it was for sale at her 1868 exhibition at London’s German Gallery. In this photograph, Cameron’s shallow depth-of-field gives a bold effect. Her friend, the scientist and photographic innovator John Herschel (1792-1871), praised the portrait as ‘a most astonishing piece of high relief – She is absolutely alive and thrusting out her head from the paper into the air’.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Elizabeth Butler (British, 1846-1933)
The Roll Call
1874
Oil on canvas
93.3 x 183.5cm (support, canvas/panel/stretcher external)
Royal Collection Trust
© Royal Collection Trust / His Majesty King Charles III 2024

Butler specialised in battle paintings, challenging society’s expectations of women artists. The exhibition of The Roll Call at the Royal Academy in 1874 was one of the greatest art sensations of the nineteenth century. It was praised by Academicians and hung ‘on the line’ (the most prestigious, eye-level position). The painting proved so popular with the public that a policeman had to be stationed nearby to protect the adjacent paintings. Queen Victoria summoned the work to Buckingham Palace for a private viewing, and the copyright sold for the enormous sum of £1,200.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

The Roll Call captured the imagination of the country when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874, turning the artist into a national celebrity. So popular was the painting that a policeman had to be stationed before it to hold back the crowds and it went on to tour the country in triumph. The painting’s focus on the endurance and bravery of ordinary soldiers without reference to the commanders of the army accorded with the mood of the times and the increasing awareness of the need for social and military reforms.

Though the public had been exposed to other images of the Crimean War, primarily prints, photographs and newspaper illustrations, never before had the plight of ordinary soldiers been portrayed with such realism. Butler researched her subject by studying A. W. Kinglake’s seminal history of the Crimean War, as well as by consulting veterans of the Crimea, several of whom served as models for the painting. She also painstakingly sought out uniforms and equipment from the Crimean period in order to be correct in the smallest military details. The sombre mood and simple yet dramatic composition Butler achieved in The Roll Call vividly epitomised the grimness not only of the Crimean War but of all wars.

Text from the Royal Collection Trust website

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing at left, Louise Jopling’s Through the Looking-Glass 1875 (below); and at right, Jopling’s A Modern Cinderella 1875 (below)

Louise Jopling (English, 1843-1933)
Through the Looking-Glass
1875
Oil paint on canvas
Support: 539 × 437 mm
Tate
Purchased with funds provided by the Nicholas Themans Trust and Tate Patrons 2024
Photo: Tate (Sonal Bakrania)

This is a self-portrait Jopling made while pregnant with her son, Lindsay, in 1875.

Jopling was one of the most successful and best-known women artists of the late nineteenth century. She exhibited regularly and, from the 1880s, ran her own art school for women. Jopling hosted receptions and established connections with many artists and art dealers. She carefully planned the exhibition of her work by choosing venues appropriate to each painting’s scale and ambition. Jopling sent this self-portrait to the Society of Lady Artists in 1875. In the same year, A Modern Cinderella, hanging nearby, was shown at the Royal Academy. Both works were purchased by the dealer Agnew: this work for £26, but Cinderella for £262.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Tabitha Barber, curator of the exhibition, said: “What’s happened to Jopling’s legacy is the story of what’s happened to most women artists … They have been regarded, studied and judged differently.”

Jopling, who in 1901 became one of the first women admitted to the Royal Society of British Artists, was a celebrated artist in her day, Barber said. Her patrons included the de Rothschild family, and the Grosvenor Gallery founders Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay. “At a time when women weren’t allowed to be members of the Royal Academy, her works were exhibited there almost every year and spoken about in the press. She was reviewed by male art critics, and reviewed well.”

Jopling’s paintings were also commercially successful, selling for some of the highest prices that British female artists could command – albeit far less than their male contemporaries.

“She is among a handful of female artists who were society figures and household names – and it just seems so astonishing that they’re so little known now,” said Barber.

Donna Ferguson. “Tate Britain acquires first painting by pioneering English female artist overlooked for a century,” on The Guardian website 12 May 2024 [Online] Cited 02/09/2024

Louise Jopling (English, 1843-1933)
A Modern Cinderella
1875
Oil on canvas
Support: 910 × 700 mm
Private collection

A Modern Cinderella shows a model removing her fine clothes at the end of a painting session. A glimpse of Jopling’s easel can be seen in the mirror’s reflection. In 1875, Jopling exhibited this work at the Royal Academy. There, the model’s naked shoulder was cause for criticism. Although one reviewer thought it was ‘quite harmless’, a picture dealer’s wife reportedly said that ‘she could never hang such a thing in her house’. Jopling also showed the painting at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where she had also trained.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

If this is, indeed, a self-portrait, Jopling has painted herself as somewhere in the liminal space between the social groups she simultaneously belonged to and was excluded from. Despite Jopling’s notoriety and prominence among high-class Pre-Raphaelite artist circles, she experienced a high degree of discrimination. In 1883, she was commissioned to paint a portrait for 150 guineas but lost her employment in favour of Sir John Everett Millais, who requested 1000 guineas for the same project (Clement). In the traditional circles of high society, Jopling was looked down upon for pursuing a career in the fine arts, which was inherently a masculine task. The woman in the image is either taking the dress off or putting it on, but either way, has turned her back to her easel, which could be interpreted as forfeiting a part of her true identity to fit either end of the accepted spectrum of femininity. The underclothing she portrays herself in fit the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic style of dress, which fit natural waists and emphasised a woman’s beauty through medieval and Greek-inspired silhouettes (Shrimpton, Jayne. Victorian Fashion. Shire Publications, 2016). The inclusion of this white aesthetic dress, as well as the scandalous drop of the strap is a signal of societal rebellion against traditional beauty norms. The woman in the image could also be read as shedding the skin of the two dresses before her to reveal her true, natural, artistic self below.

Emily Goldstein. “‘A modern Cinderella, 1875. Oil on Canvas’ by Louise Jopling,” on the COVE Studio website 23/10/2020 [Online] Cited 02/09/2024

Marianne Stokes (Austrian, 1855-1927)
The Passing Train
1890
Oil on canvas
Support: 600 × 760 mm
Frame: 885 × 955 mm
Private collection

Marianne Stokes (née Preindlsberger; 1855-1927) was an Austrian painter. She settled in England after her marriage to Adrian Scott Stokes (1854-1935), the landscape painter, whom she had met in Pont-Aven. Stokes was considered one of the leading women artists in Victorian England.

Annie Louisa Swynnerton ARA (British, 1844-1933)
Mater Triumphalis
1892
Paris, musée d’Orsay
Donated by Edmund Davis, 1915

Swynnerton campaigned for women’s suffrage, access to professional training, and equal opportunities. She rebelled against the belief that ‘women could not paint’. Exhibited at the New Gallery in 1892, Mater Triumphalis was regarded as a bold work. It brought Swynnerton international recognition, winning a medal at the 1893 World Exposition in Chicago. Despite this, Swynnerton received mixed reviews from British critics. They were impressed by the artist’s skill and the painting’s ‘quivering life’ but found the ‘frank realism’ of the woman’s naked body disconcerting.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Henrietta Rae’s Psyche before the throne of Venus 1894 (below)

Henrietta Rae (British, 1859-1928)
Psyche before the throne of Venus
1894
Oil paint on canvas
Support: 1941 × 3058 × 31 mm
Frame: 2525 × 3826 × 270 mm
Lent from a private collection, courtesy of Martin Beisly Fine Art

Rae was determined not to be pigeonholed as a ‘woman artist’. She painted classical nude compositions despite the belief that they were not a suitable subject for women artists. Against these odds, Psyche Before the Throne of Venus was a success at the 1894 Royal Academy Exhibition, and Rae received praise from critics as well as members of the Academy. The periodical The Englishwoman’s Review described the painting as ‘the most ambitious and successful woman’s work yet exhibited – one which could not have been executed a few years ago, when we had not the opportunity of studying from the life’.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Lucy Kemp-Welch’s Colt Hunting in the New Forest 1897

One of the most important pieces of art ever inspired by the New Forest was a painting by Lucy Kemp-Welch (1869-1958), entitled ‘Colt Hunting in the New Forest’. This painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1897, when she was only 26 years old. It was an impressive canvas measuring 1537 x 3060 mm (approximately 5ft x 10ft) and was described as depicting ‘a wide glade in the forest, along which race a number of colts unwilling to relinquish their liberty and to fall into the hands of the four mounted lads who try to catch them’.[1] Lucy Kemp-Welch was born in Bournemouth, in 1869, and spent much of her time wandering in the New Forest, where she ‘personally studied the wild ponies in this pleasant part of England’.[2] Her love of horses and wild ponies remained with her all her life. In order to capture the energy and excitement of the pony drifts for ‘Colt Hunting’ she actually had the full-sized canvas transported to the Forest, where she sketched from life, as the commoners galloped their ponies past her. When the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy it caused a sensation and was promptly purchased for £525.00.[3] The buyers were trustees of the Chantrey Bequest, who administered a large sum of money left in the will of Sir F. L. Chantrey to obtain works of art by British artists, in order to create a national collection. It was only the third time, since its creation in 1875, that the Chantrey Bequest had purchased artwork by a woman. Lucy Kemp-Welch became a celebrity overnight.[4]

In the same year that Lucy Kemp-Welch exhibited ‘Colt Hunting in the New Forest’, the Tate Galley was built and her painting was transferred to this new, public collection. However, ‘Colt Hunting’ was immediately archived and has never been publicly exhibited. Indeed, there are rumours that the Tate Gallery loaned the painting to the Royal Academy during the Blitz ‘in the hope that the Luftwaffe’s friendly bombs might rid them of this monstrous woman’s work for good’.[5] It is difficult to conceive of the prejudice against women in the late Victorian period and early 20th century, particularly women such as Lucy Kemp-Welch, who stepped out of the roles proscribed to them by a patriarchal society.[6] Her sympathies for the suffragette movement certainly didn’t endear her to the male-establishment figures that controlled the art world. She nevertheless continued to paint and made a successful, and award winning (Paris Salon) career as an artist.

newforestcommoner. “Lucy Kemp-Welch: Colt Hunting in the New Forest,” on the New Forest Commoner website November 27, 2016 [Online] Cited 28/08/2024

Gwen John (Welsh, 1876-1939)
Self-Portrait
1902
Oil on canvas
Tate
Purchased 1942
Photo: Tate (Mark Heathcote and Samuel Cole)

John exhibited this self-portrait at the New English Art Club (NEAC) in 1900. It was her debut as an exhibitor. The NEAC had been founded as a forward-thinking artists’ group, created out of dissatisfaction with the art establishment, exemplified by the conservative Royal Academy. Tutors from the Slade, where John had trained, were on the NEAC committee. Despite its progressive stance, in 1900 John was one of only 16 women exhibitors among 75 men. John’s choice to show a self-portrait was perhaps a deliberate assertion of her presence.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Here is a dilemma straight away: which should take precedence, the painting or the fact? Should the show present art on its own terms, or as instance, evidence, expression of social history? It is an extremely complex remit…

[Laura] Knight is strongly represented with a sequence of cliff-edge paintings; but what about her near-namesake, Winifred Knights? The Deluge is a shattering masterpiece of British modernism, painted in 1920 and thus eligible, yet not here. And why are the ethereal and supremely original blue cyanotypes of Anna Atkins (1799-1871) missing from the niggardly photography section, along with Christina Broom (1862-1939), pioneering photojournalist, whose stirring portraits of suffragettes would have been so apt?

The show is thick with flowers, descending from Delany right down to Helen Allingham’s twee cottage gardens, all ready for their postcard reproductions. And if Allingham, then why not the visionary genius of Beatrix Potter? Weak pre-Raphaelite schlock fills the largest gallery, along with Victorian pieties such as Emily Osborn’s distressed gentlewoman, eyes downcast, awaiting the verdict of a dealer on her latest canvas, while two male artists leer in the background. Nameless and Friendless is terminally mawkish.

Only rarely do women’s art and women’s history spark together in this show. You see it in Ethel Wright’s fabulous 1912 portrait of the suffragette Una Dugdale Duval, in an arsenical green dress beneath a wallpaper of ludicrous fighting cocks, where Wright’s modern bravado exactly meets that of her sitter. And you see it in Gwen John’s immortal 1902 self-portrait, small and distanced, light catching her eyelashes in an atmosphere of hushed stillness, so direct and yet so self-contained: the momentous assertion of reticence.

That epochal image appears on the exhibition posters, perhaps promising too much. For even the best of the artists here are occasionally represented by the least of their works, quite apart from the mystifying omissions. The theme of Now You See Us is undoubtedly riveting. The captions (and the excellent catalogue) are superbly written. But art is trumped by social history too often in this show, words overshadowing images.

Laura Cumming. “Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 review – revelations and mystifying omissions,” on The Guardian website 19 May 2024 [Online] Cited 02/09/2024

Gwen John (Welsh, 1876-1939)
Chloë Boughton-Leigh (1868-1947)
1904-1908
Oil on canvas
58.4 x 38.1cm
Tate
Purchased 1925

Gwendolen Mary John (22 June 1876 – 18 September 1939) was a Welsh artist who worked in France for most of her career. Her paintings, mainly portraits of anonymous female sitters, are rendered in a range of closely related tones. Although in her lifetime, John’s work was overshadowed by that of her brother Augustus and her mentor and lover Auguste Rodin, awareness and esteem for John’s artistic contributions has grown considerably since her death.

Gwen John trained at the Slade School of Art in London, where her brother Augustus was also a student. She settled in Paris in 1904, working as a model, becoming Rodin’s mistress and immersing herself in the artistic world of the metropolis. She lived in France for the rest of her life, exhibiting on both sides of the Channel. The portrait shown here is of a Paris friend, Chloë Boughton-Leigh. The subdued colouring, short foreground and self-absorption of the sitter create a deeply intense atmosphere. John showed it in London, at the New English Art Club.

Text from the WikiArt website

Minna Keene (née Bergmann, Canadian born Germany, 1861-1943)
Decorative Study No. 1, Pomegranates
c. 1906
Carbon print

The subject of this photograph is believed to be of Violet Keene, Minna Keene’s daughter.

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Ethel Wright’s The Music Room, Portrait of Una Dugdale 1912 (below)

Ethel Wright (British, 1866-1939)
The Music Room, Portrait of Una Dugdale (installation view)
1912
Oil on canvas
Private collection

This portrait of suffragette and women’s rights activist Una Dugdale Duval (1879-1975) was exhibited at the Stafford Gallery in October 1912. Its flat areas of colour and bold outlines represent a stylistic shift for Wright, who had exhibited at the Royal Academy since the 1880s. Wright shows Duval as cultured and sophisticated, dressed in green, a suffrage colour. Wright made the work the same year Duval made national news for her refusal to promise to obey her husband during their marriage vows. In 1913, Duval published a pamphlet, Love and Honour but Not Obey.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Ethel Wright (British, 1866-1939)
The Music Room, Portrait of Una Dugdale
1912
Oil on canvas
Private collection

Vanessa Bell (English, 1879-1961)
Still Life on Corner of a Mantelpiece
1914
Oil on canvas
Support: 559 × 457 mm
Frame: 614 × 512 × 49 mm
Tate
Purchased 1969
© Estate of Vanessa Bell

In 1913, Bell left the Friday Club for the short-lived exhibiting society, the Grafton Group. It included artists who were experimenting with post-impressionism. She was also a founding member of the Omega Workshops. Based in Bloomsbury’s Fitzroy Square, the Workshops aimed to remove the false divisions between fine and decorative arts. The mantelpiece in this painting was in Bell’s house at 46 Gordon Square in London. The objects on it include handmade paper flowers from the Omega Workshops. Bell’s use of an unconventional low viewpoint, fractured, abstracted forms and bright colours show her exploring different techniques associated with twentieth-century art movements.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Dame Laura Knight DBE RA RWS (English, 1877-1970)
A Dark Pool
1917
Oil on canvas
460 × 458 mm
Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne
© Estate of Dame Laura Knight. All rights reserved 2024 / Bridgeman Images
Image credit: Laing Art Gallery

Anna Airy (English, 1882-1964)
Shop for Machining 15-inch Shells: Singer Manufacturing Company, Clydebank, Glasgow
1918
Oil on canvas
Support: Height 1828 mm., Width 2133 mm
© Imperial War Museum

In 1918, Airy received a commission from the Imperial War Museum, thereby becoming Britain’s first official woman war artist. Her 1.7 by 1.8-metre canvases depict munitions production and war-related heavy industry. She later recalled the hot and dangerous conditions in which she worked. A former Slade student, Airy enjoyed a high public profile, won through exhibition and good reviews at the Royal Academy. In 1915, an art critic hailed her as ‘the most accomplished artist of her sex’. Airy was aware, however, of the prejudice women artists still faced. Galleries and buyers, she said, felt ‘safer with a man’.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Anna Airy (English, 1882-1964)
Study for ‘The L Press: Forging the Jacket of an 18-inch Gun, Armstrong-Whitworth Works, Openshaw’
1918
Oil on canvas
Private collection

Olive Edis (British, 1876-1955)
War
1919
Carbon print on paper
Wilson Centre for Photography

Edis was Britain’s first woman war photographer. She was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to photograph the activities of servicewomen on duty in France and Flanders. This bleak, blasted landscape captures the impact of the First World War.

Text from the exhibition large print guide

Installation view of the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain showing Dame Ethel Walker’s Decoration The Excursion of Nausicaa 1920 (below)

Dame Ethel Walker DBE ARA (Scottish, 1861-1951)
Decoration: The Excursion of Nausicaa
1920
Oil on canvas
1835 × 3670 mm
Tate
Purchased 1924
Photo: Tate

Writing to J. B. Manson (Monday, 2 June, no year given, but almost certainly 1924), the artist described her work thus:’… Nausicaa early one lovely summer’s morning goes to her father and mother – the King and Queen – to ask permission to have a waggon and mules given to her to take her and her attendants and to fill it with the clothes of the palace that require washing, also with dainties and wine and good food for a forthcoming picnic – and go down to the river adjoining the sea to wash them – which he gives her. On arriving at the river they unharness the mules and are unpacking or unloading the waggons of the clothes and the food for the picnic, and are beginning to wash them in the river. A little wood divides the sea from the river where the goat girl – kneeling by the tree near her goats – hears the strange voices that are sounding in her usually silent little wood. To show it is the sea a girl, nude, has stepped up on to the bank after bathing….’ The story is based on Book VI of the Odyssey: ‘… they spread/The raiment orderly along the beach/Where dashing tides …/… leaving the garments, stretch’d/ In noon-day fervour of the sun, to dry.’

Text from the Tate website

In her lifetime Scottish artist Ethel Walker was celebrated for her trailblazing paintings of the female form. A teacher before she painted fulltime, she developed her own unique style – large, mural-like paintings, which she called her ‘decorations.’ Walker often painted male and female nudes confidently placing female sensuality at the centre of her work, as seen in Decoration: The Excursion of Nausicaa (1920). Its dream-like vision of a feminist utopia was ahead of its time.

Working steadily for decades, she achieved many professional milestones, exhibiting around the world and representing Britain at the Venice Biennale four times. In 1943, Walker was made a Dame of the British Empire, and after her death The Times called her ‘the most important woman artist of her time.’ Despite this, it is only now that her artistic legacy is finally being recognised.

Text from the Tate website

‘There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.’

– Ethel Walker

Tate Britain
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG
United Kingdom
Phone: +44 20 7887 8888

Opening hours:
10.00am – 18.00pm daily

Tate Britain website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Álbum de salón y alcoba (The Bedroom and Dressing Room Album). Instalación de David Trullo’ at Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid

Exhibition dates: 24th April – 22nd September, 2024

Kaulak (Antonio Cánovas del Castillo y Vallejo) (Spanish, 1862-1933)
Studio portrait
1921-1922
Photographic positive
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid

Kaulak (22 December 1862 – 13 September 1933), was a Spanish photographer, art critic, editor and amateur painter. His uncle was prime minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, assassinated in 1897 by an anarchist, hence his use of a pseudonym; the meaning of which is unexplained, although the word appears to be of Basque origin.

What fabulousesness!

An archive of ‘galant photography’ and other art works illustrating the intimate public and private scenes of a couple in Spain in the 1920s-1930s which builds a memory, a narrative. The exhibition combines photographs and documentation of the most varied kinds, with elements of the daily life of its time.

“… above all [the exhibition] makes us reflect on our own archives: what we keep and what we discard, what we hide and what we reveal, how we build and invent our own history, how we want to be remembered and what we leave to those who come after us.”

The appreciation and enjoyment of difference pictured through photography and art, telling a story otherwise long forgotten.

I have added appropriate bibliographic text where possible.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Anonymous photographer
Portrait
c. 1935
Photographic positive
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid

The Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas (MNAD) in Madrid, a state museum of the Ministry of Culture of Spain, joins the PHotoESPAÑA 2024 festival with the opening of Álbum de salón y alcoba. Una instalación de David Trullo, which can be visited free of charge until September 22.

From a forgotten collection that contained public -or living room- photographs and private -or bedroom- scenes of a couple in the 20s and 30s of the last century, the visual artist David Trullo has made this exhibition. The installation is “the result of opening an unnoticed time capsule and putting it in context with pieces from the museum and other collections to explore the limits of intimacy, leading the viewer to surpass them.”

In addition to putting a “rediscovered treasure” into context, the installation offers a review of how photographic documentation is exhibited and interpreted. It also proposes to reflect “on our own archives: what we keep and what we discard, what we hide and what we reveal, how we construct and invent our own history, how we want to be remembered and what we leave to those who come after us.”

The installation is, in itself, an album that captures the intimacy and public life of the 1920s and 1930s, combining the most varied photographs and documentation with elements of the everyday life of her time. It includes pieces and archives from several private collections, the Museo Sorolla, the Muséu del Pueblo d’Asturies, the Museo Nacional del Teatro de Almagro, the Asociación para la Enseñanza de la Mujer-Fundación Fernando de Castro and the Museo de Historia de Madrid, among others.

Between “the living room” and “the bedroom” a route is traced that goes from the preservation of intimate albums – among which a positive by Kaulak stands out, – through the first advances in amateur photography, to the ‘galant photography’, more or less erotic, and other genres of popular culture that include among its protagonists Tórtola Valencia, Sara Montiel, Conchita Piquer or the queer copla singer Miguel de Molina.

Text from the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas website

Advertising design for ‘Florido y Cía’ (Florido and Co.)
c. 1930
Watercolour on paper
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid

Anonymous photographer
Miguel de Molina
1937
Photographic positive
Colección Pedro Víllora

Miguel Frías de Molina (Málaga, April 10, 1908 – Buenos Aires, March 4, 1993), known artistically as Miguel de Molina, was a Spanish singer of copla. Tortured, expelled from Spain and later persecuted by the Franco dictatorship for being a “faggot and a red”, he settled in Argentina in 1946, invited by Eva Perón.

He had an unmistakable personal style combining cabaret, flamenco dancing, deep vocal emotionalism, spectacular costumes and a narcissistic stage persona that made him extremely popular with audiences. His gay identity was openly acknowledged with a sense of humour that was very close to what today would be recognised as ‘low camp.’ Between 1936 and 1942 Molina spent most of the Spanish Civil War on Republican ground. This together with his homosexuality and sympathies for the Left had disastrous consequences for his career. He left Spain for Argentina, where he was hugely successful. But life in exile was not easy and the Argentinean government soon threatened him with expulsion. Molina credited the direct intervention of Eva Perón with helping him stay in the country and continue his career. Unfortunately his overt support for the Perón government made him a despised figure once the Peróns were driven from power. The rampant homophobia of the changed political climate and the cultural shift that accompanied it proved detrimental to his mental and emotional health, prompting him to withdraw from artistic life in 1960. While many personalities who were faced with persecution under Francoism were being rediscovered in the 1980s, Molina, by then bitter and withdrawn, languished in obscurity. It was not until two films that celebrated his life were released a decade later that his uniquely stylised performances and colourful life would finally be celebrated.

Anonymous. “Miguel de Molina – Nominee,” on The Legacy Project website Nd [Online] Cited 21/08/2024

Anonymous maker
Fan
c. 1925
Lacquered wood and painted and corrugated paper
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Masú del Amo

Bruno Zach (Austrian born Ukraine, 1891-1935) (designer)
Figure of a woman with a fur coat
c. 1920
Cast bronze
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Fabián Álvarez

Bruno Zach (6 May 1891 – 20 February 1935) was an Austrian art deco sculptor of Ukrainian birth who worked in the early-to-mid 20th century. His output included a wide repertoire of genre subjects, however he is best known for his erotic sculptures of young women.

Muchas Gracias (Thank You) Magazine, Year VII – No. 344
September 13, 1930
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid

Translated text at the bottom of the magazine:

Thank you very much
For this rascal
We want to tell this little bitch that it fits her well. But we stumbled upon the fit.

Oswald Haerdtl (Austrian, 1899-1959)
Cocktail set
1924
mouth-blown glass
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Lucía Morate

Oswald Haerdtl was an important Austrian architect, designer, and architecture teacher.

He studied under Kolo Moser and Oskar Strnad at the Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule, and entered Josef Hoffmann’s master class in 1922, soon becoming his assistant. From 1935 to 1959, he was head of the architecture department. His teaching, architectural projects, and international connections, to Italy and France in particular, made him a lasting influence on post-war Modernism in Vienna, bringing a sense of lightness and elegance into the design vocabulary.

Text from the J & L Lobmeyr website

Ramón Peinador Checa (Spanish, 1897-1964)
Advertising design for ‘Perfumes Oriente’
1925
Wash on paper
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Javier Rodríguez Barrera

Ramón Peinador Checa (Madrid, December 25, 1897 – Mexico City, May 26, 1964) was a Spanish painter, draftsman, engraver, illustrator, designer and decorator who, exiled in Mexico, became a naturalised citizen of that country.

Photography lies and deceives us. What the camera shows us is staged, either by us or by the eye of the person who creates the images. What we commonly call a “photographic archive” is nothing more than a fragmented collection transformed over the years, with which a memory, a narrative, is built.

From a forgotten collection containing public photographs -or from the living room- and private scenes -or from the bedroom- of a couple in the twenties and thirties of the last century, the visual artist David Trullo proposes this installation.

It is the result of opening an unnoticed time capsule and putting it in context with the pieces of the twentieth century that put an end to the monopoly of the professional photographer. Cameras and processes are simplified and photography is becoming an essential accessory for any occasion, and not only for amateurs, including the female sector: the Kodak Petite from 1926 is promoted as a camera ‘for smart and modern girls’.

In addition to putting a rediscovered treasure into context, the installation proposes a review of the way photographic documentation is displayed and interpreted, but above all it makes us reflect on our own archives: what we keep and what we discard, what we hide and what we reveal, how we build and invent our own history, how we want to be remembered and what we leave to those who come after us.

During this period, Madrid reinvented itself and became as cosmopolitan as other European cities, although it was the bourgeois and aristocratic elites who truly enjoyed it. A surprising and varied sexual atmosphere also emerged, along with new ways of understanding bodies, identities and relationships that were reflected in publications, advertising and photography, with the so-called ‘galant photography’ flourishing within it.

The National Museum of Decorative Arts joins PHotoESPAÑA 2024 with David Trullo’s installation ‘Album of living room and bedroom’

~ With a selection of images from the public and the private, the visual artist discovers a photographic capsule that time has preserved to be reread from the present day

~ The tour includes everything from photographic positives by Kaulak to portraits of Sara Montiel, Conchita Piquer or the queer copla singer Miguel de Molina

The National Museum of Decorative Arts (MNAD), a state museum of the Ministry of Culture, is joining the PHotoESPAÑA 2024 festival with the inauguration of ‘Album of living room and bedroom. Installation by David Trullo’, which can be visited free of charge until September 22.

From a forgotten collection containing public photographs – or from the living room – and private scenes – or from the bedroom – of a couple in the 1920s and 1930s, the visual artist David Trullo has created this proposal. The installation is “the result of opening an unnoticed time capsule and putting it in context with the pieces from the museum and from other collections to explore the limits of intimacy, leading the viewer to surpass them.”

In addition to putting a “rediscovered treasure” into context, the installation offers a review of the way of exhibiting and interpreting photographic documentation. It also suggests reflecting “on our own archives: what we keep and what we discard, what we hide and what we reveal, how we build and invent our own history, how we want to be remembered and what we leave to those who come after us.”
From living room to bedroom

The installation is, in itself, an album that captures the intimacy and public life of the 1920s and 1930s, combining photographs and documentation of the most varied kinds, with elements of the daily life of its time. It features pieces and archives from various private collections, from the Sorolla Museum, the Muséu del Pueblo d’Asturies, the Museo Nacional del Teatro de Almagro, the Asociación para la Enseñanza de la Mujer-Fundación Fernando de Castro or the Museo de Historia de Madrid, among others. Between “the living room” and “the bedroom” there is a journey that goes from the conservation of intimate albums – among which a positive by Kaulak stands out – through the first advances in photography for amateurs, to reaching ‘galant photography’, more or less erotic, and other genres of popular culture that include among their protagonists Tórtola Valencia, Sara Montiel, Conchita Piquer or the queer copla singer Miguel de Molina.

Text from the National Museum of Decorative Arts exhibition press dossier

Antonio Peyró (Spanish, 1882-1954)
The Baticola (Elena Plá Toda)
1934
Glazed ceramic
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Masú del Amo

Antonio Peyró Mezquita was a Spanish ceramist.

‘Reciprocal pleasure’, cover by Josep Renau Berenguer
1933
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Masú del Amo

Josep Renau Berenguer (Spanish, 1907-1982) was an artist and communist revolutionary, notable for his propaganda work during the Spanish Civil War. Among his production, he is remarkable for his art deco period, his political propaganda during the Spanish Civil War, the photo murals of the Spanish Pavilion in the International Exhibition of 1937 in Paris, a series of photomontages titled Fata Morgana or The American Way of Life, and murals and paintings made in Mexico, such as Tropic, dated in 1945.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Louis Majorelle (French, 1859-1926) (designer)
Sofa
1901-1926
Silk velvet
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Lucía Morate

Louis-Jean-Sylvestre Majorelle, usually known simply as Louis Majorelle, (26 September 1859 – 15 January 1926) was a French decorator and furniture designer who manufactured his own designs, in the French tradition of the ébéniste. He was one of the outstanding designers of furniture in the Art Nouveau style, and after 1901 formally served as one of the vice-presidents of the École de Nancy.

Louis Majorelle is one of those who contributed the most to the transformation of furniture. Thanks to posterity, we recognise today a piece of furniture from him as we recognise a piece of furniture from André Charles Boulle and Charles Cressent, the french Prince regent’s favourite artists. During the early 18th century, Cressent replaced the magnificence of ebony and tortoiseshell associated with tin and copper by the softer harmonies of foreign woods. Like him, Louis Majorelle dressed the elegant structure of Art Nouveau furniture with exotic wood inlays.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Álvaro Retana (Spanish born Philippines, 1890-1970)
Figure for Celia Gámez
c. 1920
Ink and graphite on paper
Colección Pedro Víllora

Álvaro Retana Ramírez de Arellano (Batangas, Philippines, August 26, 1890 – Torrejón de Ardoz, Madrid, February 10, 1970) was a writer, journalist, cartoonist, fashion designer, musician, libertine and Spanish couplet lyricist.

Celia Gámez Carrasco (August 25, 1905 – December 10, 1992) was an Argentinian film actress, and one of the icons of the Golden Age of Spanish theatre. She was more commonly known in Franco’s Spain, particularly in her later years, as La Protegida.

Vitín Cortezo (Spanish, 1908-1978)
Figure for Celia Gámez
1939
Mixed technique on paper
Colección Pedro Víllora

Víctor María Cortezo Martínez-Junquera, also known as Vitín Cortezo (Madrid, June 10, 1908 – March 2, 1978) was a Spanish painter, illustrator, costume designer and set designer.

Anonymous maker
Bloomers and cotton slip with silk knit stockings
c. 1930
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Fabián Álvarez

Karl Klaus and Franz Staudigl
Figure (Serapis Wahliss series)
1913-1914
Painted and glazed ceramic
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photo: Fabián Álvarez

Karl Klaus (Austrian, 1889-1925) was a student of Josef Hoffmann. The figure was designed for Serapis-Wahliss, a noted Viennese retailer and manufacturer of porcelain. Franz Staudigl was an Austrian painter born 1885 – died 1944.

Anonymous photographer
Concha Piquer
1927
Photographic positive
Museo Nacional del Teatro, Almagro

María de la Concepción Piquer López (13 December 1906 – 12 December 1990), better known as Concha Piquer (and sometimes billed as Conchita Piquer), was a Spanish singer and actress. She was known for her work in the copla form, and she performed her own interpretations of some of the key pieces in the Spanish song tradition, mostly works of the mid-20th century trio of composers Antonio Quintero, Rafael de León y Manuel Quiroga.

Anonymous maker
Perfume bottles
1850-1900
Engraved and gilded silver and blown glass
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas. Madrid
Photo: Fabián Álvarez

Anonymous maker
Paul Koruna, Paris (no dates) (photographer)
Promotional poster for ‘Rosalío’
Nd
Montage of photographic positives
Colección Ramón Gato

Anonymous maker
Paul Koruna, Paris (no dates) (photographer)
Promotional poster for ‘Rosalío’ (details)
Nd
Montage of photographic positives
Colección Ramón Gato

Anonymous maker
Manila shawl
1876-1925
Embroidered silk
Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
Photos: Javier Rodríguez Barrera

National Museum of Decorative Arts
c/ Montalbán, 12. Madrid

Opening hours
Tuesday – Saturday: 9.30am – 3.00pm
Sundays and holidays: 10.00am – 3.00pm
Afternoons (Thursday): 5.00pm – 8.00pm

National Museum of Decorative Arts website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar’ at Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Exhibition dates: 26th April – 15th September 2024

Altstadt (Rupertinum)

Curator: Katharina Ehrl

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Simmeringer Heide und Erdberger Mais, 1967-1976
Silver gelatine print on baryta paper, brown toned
Museum der Moderne Salzburg
© Bildrecht, Vienna 2024

Deriving pleasure from the dérive

In recent weeks Art Blart has posted on social documentary photographers of the urbanscape: David Goldblatt documenting social conditions in South Africa under apartheid and Roger Mayne with his “mixture of reality and unreality” photographs of the communities of Southam Road and surrounds, London.

One could argue that both could be seen as a focused urban male flâneur (or flâneuse in the case of a female), who saunters around the city observing society – the serendipitous Mayne more so than the working in series focused Goldblatt. And here we have another photographer of the urbanscape until recently unknown to me, that of the magnificent Austrian photographer Elfriede Mejchar (1924-2020) who – according to the exhibition text – is another flâneur, “her flaneur-like practice underlying her earlier bodies of work.”

But Mejchar’s was a very concentrated photographic practice, one in which the photographer again and again “explored Vienna’s peripheral zones on the southeast edge of the city” to create photographic series often created over several years. Therefore, rather than being a wandering dilettante photographer, I believe that Mejchar was a focused conceptual artist who used Guy Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive” (1956)1 (or “drift”) to ground her photographic practice.

With its focused flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters, one of the goals of the dérive includes studying the terrain of the city (psychogeography), the exploration of urban environments that emphasises interpersonal connections to places. The pyschogeography of the urbanscape.2

A quotation by Grant W. Ray is instructive in this regard:

“Debord’s Dérive is not simple a walk through the streets of the city, of chance encounters. Instead one must move rapidly and decisively through the urban space, with intention… They should be aware of their surroundings, of the “… ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction…” Thus the most talented photographers who’s oeuvre includes the investigation of the urbanscape. The walk itself, the interaction of operator, camera, and site breaks down the normal relationship we have with public urban spaces. Their activity alone is the Dérive.”3

Working decisively and with intention, at the edge of the city, in spaces with no boundaries, where there were few people, or using different typologies of the city such as hotel rooms in which she stayed during her everyday job, Mejchar focused on the pyschogeography of the urbanscape through her reflective, non-decisive moment photographs, capturing “the complexity of this desolate and yet, in her eyes, beautiful landscape” and the changes that were happening to the urbanscape.

“Elfriede Mejchar consciously broke away from the photographic mainstream and the reportage style that was popular at the time. Rather than searching for the so-called “decisive moment,” she approached her subjects in a strongly conceptual and serial manner. She focused not on the extraordinary but on the unspectacular and the commonplace, the everyday and the banal, repeatedly addressing these in new ways in her photographic series.” (Text from the Wien Museum website)

Working with the periphery, the borders between urban and rural spaces, the non-decisive moment, landscapes subjected to human interventions and photographs in series, Mejchar’s photographs are more than mere representation of these sites: they challenge the viewer to “instigate more than just chance encounters for the viewer looking at the photographs,” through an understanding of the “subtle variations of the daily social realities created and maintained through public works and layout.”4 “The photographers activity of finding these sites is the dérive, the photograph itself is the pyschogeography, the questioning.”4

With her training as a classical photographer in the manner of Sudek, Brassaï or Tudor-Hart (see the first two photographs in the posting On Her Own. The photographer Elfriede Mejchar) grounding her later objective conceptual photographs, Mejchar’s point of departure is the pleasure she derives from the focused dérive and the results of her activity (through the objective and precise eye of a topographer a la Bernd and Hiller Becher) – the questioning photographs – brought to the attention of the viewer.

Mejchar investigates “traces of civilisation that humans leave in nature or along the edges of the urban fabric” and in so doing brings peripheral things (and her ideas about them) to the centre of our attention, making them psychologically valuable for all of us. The artist derives pleasure from her measured dérive and investigation of the evanescent, posing important questions about seemingly mundane things before they pass out of sight, memory, and existence.

And in her pleasure, is ours.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

See another posting about the artist’s work: On Her Own. The photographer Elfriede Mejchar at Wien Museum MUSA, Vienna, 18th April – 1st September, 2024

1/ “Psychogeography describes the effect of a geographical location on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.

How do different places make us feel and behave? The term psychogeography was invented by the Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955 in order to explore this. Inspired by the French nineteenth century poet and writer Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur – an urban wanderer – Debord suggested playful and inventive ways of navigating the urban environment in order to examine its architecture and spaces.”

Anonymous. “Psychogeography,” on the Tate website Nd [Online] Cited 13/09/2024

2/ Guy Debord (November 1956). “Theory of the Dérive”. Les Lèvres Nues (9). Translated by Ken Knabb.

3/ Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” 1958 on the Bureau of Public Secrets website Nd quoted in Grant W. Ray. “Dérive,” on the Silverpoetics website 13 July 2009 [Online] Cited 20/08/2024

4/ Ibid.,

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

Poesie des Alltäglichen. Fotografien von Elfriede Mejchar / The poetry of the everyday

To mark the centenary of her birth, in 2024 three museums in Austria host exhibitions of works by the photographer Elfriede Mejchar (1924-2020, Vienna, AT). The Museum der Moderne Salzburg presents the artist as a portraitist. Curator Katharina Ehrl guides you through the exhibition in this short film.

In 2024, three museums host exhibitions of works by the Austrian photographer Elfriede Mejchar (1924-2020, Vienna, AT). The Museum der Moderne Salzburg is collaborating with the Landesgalerie Niederösterreich and the Wien Museum to honor the artist’s work at three different locations on the occasion of her 100th birthday, with each location offering a different focus.

Salzburg’s contribution to this collaborative project will present the artist’s portraits. With her series of works entitled “Artists at work” (1954-1961), for example, Mejchar demonstrates impressively how she engages with the artistic personalities of Christa Hauer, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Josef Mikl and Arnulf Rainer by mapping their working situation in their studios. But she also demonstrated the same precision of perception when encountering the inanimate objects in her surroundings, thereby giving landscapes, flowers and discarded furniture the appearance of animated portraits.

The photo collections at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg hold a total of 665 photographs by Mejchar. Otto Breicha, the first director of the Museum’s predecessor institution, was a long-time colleague of Mejchar who recognised the artistic value of her photographic work and helped to promote it. As early as 1982, one year before the official opening of the Rupertinum, a comprehensive collection of her work was added to the photographic collection that later grew through further purchases and donations and today constitutes a focal point of the Museum’s photographic holdings.

Text from the Museum der Moderne Salzburg website

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing at left, work from Mejchar’s series Eine Kostümierung der geliehenen Identität (A Masquerade of Borrowed Identity) (below); and at right, photographs from the series Nobody is Perfect (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing work from Mejchar’s series Künstler bei der Arbeit, 1954-1961 (Artists at work, 1954-1961) (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Arnulf Rainer
1954-1961
From the series Künstler bei der Arbeit, 1954-1961 (Artists at work, 1954-1961)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Arnulf Rainer (Austrian, b. 1929)

Arnulf Rainer (born 8 December 1929) is an Austrian painter noted for his abstract informal art.

Rainer was born in Baden, Austria. During his early years, Rainer was influenced by Surrealism. In 1950, he founded the Hundsgruppe (dog group) together with Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, and Josef Mikl. After 1954, Rainer’s style evolved towards Destruction of Forms, with blackenings, overpaintings, and maskings of illustrations and photographs dominating his later work. He was close to the Vienna Actionism, featuring body art and painting under the influence of drugs. He painted extensively on the subject of Hiroshima such as it relates to the nuclear bombing of the Japanese city and the inherent political and physical fallout.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Christa Hauer
1954-1961
From the series Künstler bei der Arbeit, 1954-1961 (Artists at work, 1954–1961)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Christa Hauer-Fruhmann (Austrian, 1925-2013)

Christa Hauer-Fruhmann (b. March 13, 1925 in Vienna; d. March 21, 2013 in St. Pölten) was an Austrian painter. …

She was initially under the artistic influence of her father and created representational works such as landscapes, portraits and nude drawings. At the end of her stay in the USA, around 1960, she turned to abstract painting, particularly action painting, color field painting and informal art. Later, cosmic forms and a turn to nature determined her works.

Text from the German Wikipedia website translated by Google Translate

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
1954-1961
From the series Künstler bei der Arbeit, 1954-1961 (Artists at work, 1954-1961)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Friedensreich Hundertwasser (Austrian, 1928-2000)

Friedensreich Hundertwasser Regentag Dunkelbunt (born Friedrich Stowasser, born December 15, 1928 in Vienna; died February 19, 2000 on board the Queen Elizabeth 2 off Brisbane) was an Austrian artist, who worked primarily as a painter, but also in the fields of architecture and environmental protection. …

Artistically, he was an opponent of the “straight line” and any kind of standardisation throughout his life. This is particularly evident in his work in the field of building design, which is characterised by imaginative liveliness and individuality, but above all by the inclusion of nature in architecture.

Text from the German Wikipedia website translated by Google Translate

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing photographs from Mejchar’s series Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators) (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Aglaia Konrad
1988
From the series Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Aglaia Konrad (Austrian, b. 1960)

Aglaia Konrad (born 1960) is an Austrian photographer and educator living in Brussels. …

Konrad’s photographs explore urban space in large cities. Konrad’s work has been to known to be distinctly international in that it highlights urban elements independent of cultural markers. Her work highlights the ubiquitous elements of urban life through methods like filming a city from the perspective of a moving car or compiling a series of aerial views of skyscrapers.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Prof. Dr. Otto Breicha
1988
From the series Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Otto Breicha (Austrian, 1932-2003)

Otto Breicha (b. 26 July 1932 in Vienna; d, 28 December 2003 in Vienna) was an Austrian art historian, publicist and museum director. …

Breicha is considered an important integration figure in the Austrian art and literature scene of the 1960s. As director of the Rupertinum he collected works by Kurt Moldovan, Günter Brus, Fritz Wotruba and Gotthard Muhr, among others. He edited portfolios by Karl Anton Fleck, Gotthard Muhr, Peter Pongratz, Alois Riedl, Karl Rössing, Johannes Wanke, Max Weiler and many others.

Breicha built up an important photo collection in the Rupertinum. He also took photos of authors himself, especially during his time at the Austrian Society for Literature from 1962 to 1972.

Text from the German Wikipedia website translated by Google Translate

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing photographs from Mejchar’s series Simmeringer Heide und Erdberger Mais, 1967-1976 (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

The Creative Element in Documentation

Created between 1967 and 1976, the photographic series “Simmeringer Heide und Erdberger Mais” (Simmeringer Heide and Erdberger Mais) is Mejchar’s first long-term cycle, for which she takes hundreds of pictures over the years. The series uses the photographic medium to explore the Viennese periphery. Simmeringer Heide and Erdberger Mais are areas on the southeastern outskirts of Vienna that were altered by humans and gradually taken over by commercial operations which transformed them into an industrial landscape. Mekchav first discovers them at a time when unused parcels of land (locally known as “Gstatten”), derelict market gardens, and scattered industrial structures are still defining features of the scenery. What sets the series apart is the choice of subject and the matter-of-fact manner in which the photographer treats it, compiling a kind of anecdotal inventory. The shots demonstrate that Mejchar’s objective in there art – as in the documentary photography that is her day-to-day work – is to render exactly what the objective and precise eye of a topographer sees. In framing an area in the urban periphery as a landscape, she trains this eye and her lens on a subject that has been largely absent from Austrian photography.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing work from Mejchar’s series Hotel (Fremdenzimmer), 1970-1986 (Hotel (Guest Room), 1970-1986) (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Hotel (Fremdenzimmer), 1970-1986 (Hotel (Guest Room), 1970-1986)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper, brown tones
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Flachsspinnerei in Stadl-Paura (Flax spinning mill in Stadl-Paura)
1986
© Elfriede Mejchar/Landessammlungen NÖ

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing work from Mejchar’s series Die Monatssesseln, 1986-1988 (The Armchairs of the Month, 1986-1988) (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Die Monatssesseln, 1986-1988 (The Armchairs of the Month, 1986-1988)
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Oscillation (Salzburger Landesatelier) (Oscillation (Salzburg State Studio))
1988
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing work from the Mejchar’s series Eine Kostümierung der geliehenen Identität (A Masquerade of Borrowed Identity) (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Eine Kostümierung der geliehenen Identität (A Masquerade of Borrowed Identity)
1989
Gelatin silver print on baryta paper
Museum der Moderne Salzburg
© Bildrecht, Vienna, 2024
Photo: Andrew Phelps

Introduction

Elfriede Mejchar (1924-2020 Vienna, AT), the grande dame of Austrian photography, was in the employ of the Federal Monuments Office for almost forty years. Meanwhile, she also began her groundbreaking work on the outskirts of Vienna. Harnessing the photographic series as a documentary and investigative medium, she limned an imposing portrait of the urban landscape. Her work, which had a lasting influence on the evolution of photography in Austria, now also stands as an important documentary record of the country in the postwar period.

As a professional photographer, Mejchar traveled to various regions throughout Austria, including in Lower and Upper Austria and Styria, to capture buildings and cultural assets of art-historical significance in photographs. Yet she also used her official trips and her scant free time to pursue her own photographic interests, which focused on the small and seemingly trivial and the traces of civilisation that humans leave in nature or along the edges of the urban fabric and that receive little if any attention. It may seem that the documentary dimension is less important in the resulting works, that it is eclipsed by the narrative element. In fact, Mejchar fuses both, scrutinising her motifs with an attentive eye that picks up on the singular or peculiar and registers it without manipulation.

Elfriede Mejchar was not interested in the so-called “pivotal moment” and did not care for the conventional photojournalistic style of her time. Her work began when people had left, and she approached her themes from a very conceptual angle. Both the documentary series she created under the open sky and the object photographs, still lifes, and collages she made in her studio reflect this approach. She photographed the “evanescent before it evanesces”, in urban and rural landscapes and everyday scenes, capturing the changes that affected the particular scenery and its distinctive atmosphere.

The Creative Element in Documentation

Produced between 1967 and 1976, the photographic series “Simmeringer Heide and Erdberger Mais” is Mejchar’s first long-term cycle, for which she takes hundreds of pictures over the years. The series uses the photographic medium to explore the Viennese periphery. Simmeringer Heide and Erdberger Mais are areas on the southeastern outskirts of Vienna that were altered by humans and gradually taken over by commercial operations which transformed them into an industrial landscape. Mejchar first discovers them at a time when unused parcels of land (locally known as “Gstätten”), derelict market gardens, and scattered industrial structures are still defining features of the scenery. What sets the series apart is the choice of subject and the matter-of-factly manner in which the photographer treats it, compiling a kind of anecdotal inventory – empty lots, paths and roads, utility poles and a select few close-ups. The shots demonstrate that Mejchar’s objective in her art – as in the documentary photography that is her day-to-day work – is to render exactly what the objective and precise eye of a topographer sees. In framing an area in the urban periphery as a landscape, she trains this eye and her lens on a subject that has been largely absent from Austrian photography.

The use of a sulfur-based solution to tone the photographs – which is the cause of the brownish tinge – reflects a recurring concern in Mejchar’s photographs: existence in time and impermanence. In this instance, the technique’s purpose is not to alter the colour, but rather to make it more durable.

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing at left, work from Mejchar’s series Künstler bei der Arbeit, 1954-1961 (Artists at work, 1954-1961); and at right, the wall text ‘The Artist as Chronicler’
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

The Artist as Chronicler

Portraiture plays a role early on in Elfriede Mejchar’s work; she receives her professional training in a portrait studio. She subsequently makes a conscious choice to avoid the genre, but then, in the 1950s, returns to it.

“Künstler bei der Arbeit”, 1954-1961 (Artists at Work)

The series “Künstler bei der Arbeit” (Artists at Work) is her first major cycle of portraits, comprising over 340 gelatin silver prints. Mejchar is often brought in to capture exhibitions in installation shots, especially at the Vienna Secession, where she is introduced to many young artists waiting to make a name for themselves as well as some of their older colleagues who have been active since before 1945. The incomprehension with which the visitors gaze at abstract art that does not represent anything with any accuracy prompts the young photographer to record the intensity and seriousness with which the artists dedicate themselves to their craft, often braving considerable hardship. The series accordingly focuses on visualising the real studio and workplace settings of thirty-six artists, including Christa Hauer, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Josef Mikl, and Arnulf Rainer.

“Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern”, 1988-1994 (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators)

In the body of work “Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern” (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators), by contrast, Mejchar undertakes to depict everyone involved in fine art photography in Austria in the late twentieth century. Over the years, the series grows to comprise eighty double portraits, each composed, in accordance with a rigorous conception, of an en face portrait side by with a three-quarter view. The works have a distinctly staged quality, underscored by the unvarying austere setting and the emphasis on the hands, among other aspects. In this respect they recall Mejchar’s final examination, in which she had to realise a portrait both in profile and en face to demonstrate her command of photographic lighting designing and the handling of human sitters.

With these two projects, Mejchar becomes an important chronicler of the Austrian arts scene.

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing at left, work from Mejchar’s series Oscillation (Salzburger Landesatelier) (Oscillation (Salzburg State Studio)) (above); and at right, the wall text ‘The Other Gaze’ (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

The Other Gaze

“Hotel (Fremdenzimmer)”, 1970-1986 (Hotel (Guest Room))

As part of her work for the Federal Monuments Office, Elfriede Mejchar has to travel a great deal, mainly to more rural areas. The photographic series “Hotel (Fremdenzimmer)” (Hotel (Guest Room)) is a kind of lasting documentary record of these trips and perhaps the most significant one. Bed, table, chair, mirror, wardrobe, patterned wallpaper, and sometimes a washbasin: for over fifteen years, the photographer captures her rooms with their often spartan furnishings in the numerous modest hotels and inns that – though it may not look like it at first glance – provide her with accommodation. Here and there one does espy a toothbrush, a pair of shoes, a ruffled bedcover, all traces that reveal the ostensibly absent photographer’s presence. A certain melancholy suffuses these shots of hotel rooms as witnesses to a world that has all but disappeared

“Die Monatssesseln”, 1986-1988 (The Armchairs of the Month)

The same melancholy is also unmistakable in the photographs of objects that have outlived their usefulness and been discarded and, it seems, forgotten. In the series “Die Monatssesseln” (The Armchairs of the Month) Mejchar portrays found motifs such as discarded seating furniture. The series shows a wide variety of such items, from kitchen chairs to living-room armchairs and even car seats, that have become part of the natural or other scene where they were dumped. No less diverse than the pieces of furniture and their environments are the feelings they elicit; as Mejchar puts it, “a mess can be beautiful in its own way.”

“Oszillation (Salzburger Landesatelier)”, 1988

The dreariness of the hotel rooms contrasts with the sober-mindedness and lucidity of the photographs in “Oszillation (Salzburger Landesatelier)” (Oscillation (Salzburger Landesatelier)). Yet although the two series are very different on the surface, both are sustained by a minimalism that is operative on the level of the motifs, in the austere interiors, as well as in Mejchar’s precisely chosen camera angles. These photographs capture the rooms of the State of Salzburg’s studio residence for visiting artists, located, like the Salzburger Kunstverein, in the historic Künstlerhaus. Mejchar herself lives there for a while in 1988, a change of working environment that is reflected in her output from the period.

Nobody Is Perfect

In the late 1980s, Elfriede Mejchar branches out in a fresh creative direction. She has been retired for some years and feels free to take on new challenges. Setting aside the flaneur-like practice underlying her earlier bodies of work, she starts photographing in the studio.

Tapetenbild. Triptychon, 1988 (Wallcover Picture. Tryptic) “Eine Kostümierung der geliehenen Identität”, 1989 (A Costume for the borrowed Identity) “Tagebuch Jänner 1988”, 1988 (Diary January 1988) “Nobody Is Perfect”, 1996

Faces change shapes, snakes coil around heads, open and closed eyes alternate. For the collages in “Tagebücher Jänner 1988,” Mejchar reuses her own photographs; in other series, by contrast, she works with found images such as shots of female models from print advertisements or fuses figural representations with fabric and wallpaper patterns. The works are rapidly composed out of visual fragments that she often only loosely places side by side or in overlapping arrangements, dispelling their aura of perfection. “I build pictures for myself on the wall, from materials that are at hand in the public sphere, that are on public display, but I strip away the ideal of flawless beauty that is constantly rubbed in our faces by dismembering it or covering it up.” It is the temporary and easily mutable that fascinates Mejchar, qualities that had had no place in her professional work.

“Amaryllis”, 1994-1997

Pictures of flowers in fine art, whether painted or photographed, inevitably have a clichéd dimension. Mejchar photographs only a special selection of flowers such as amaryllises, lilies, and tulips that she grows in her own garden. In the studio, rather than recording the flowers with a romantic gesture, she captures their gradual transformations – full blossoms, some full of delicate life, some already wilting and recognisably perishable. Showing them between florescence and decay, in a kind of liminal instant, she revisits a theme that surfaces throughout her oeuvre: the capturing of a state of affairs at a defined point in time.

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing the wall text Elfriede Mejchar: biographical note 1924-2020 Vienna, AT; and some photographs of Elfriede Mejchar working
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar: biographical note 1924-2020 Vienna, AT

Elfriede Mejchar is raised in Lower Austria. In 1939, she moves to Germany, where, from 1941 until 1944, she trains as a photographer with Ernst Ley in his small photography studio in Nordenham, completing her education with the official apprenticeship examination.

In light of the political developments, the young photographer and her mother to return to Vienna in 1944. She gets her first job when the Federal Monuments Office (BDA) hires her to document historic architecture with a view to potential bomb damage. She witnesses the turbulent final weeks of the war in Austria, then returns to northern Germany, before settling in Vienna in 1947. From then until her retirement in 1984, Mejchar works as a photographer for the Federal Monuments Office on a steady contract. She buys her first own camera in 1953, and in 1960 she earns a master’s certificate in photography as an external student at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt Wien. Busy with her daytime work for the BDA, she also starts pursuing her own photographic interests in the 1960s, although she does not publicly exhibit her output until 1976, when the Museum of the Twentieth Century in Vienna mounts the fifty-two-year-old photographer’s first solo exhibition. After retiring in 1984, she dedicates herself entirely to freelance and fine art photography.

Elfriede Mejchar does not win the public recognition she merits until old age; in 2002, she is awarded the Honorary Prize for Photography of the Federal Chancellor’s Office, followed in 2004 by the Honorary Prize for Fine Art Photography of the State of Lower Austria and the Prize of the City of Vienna for Fine Art.

Text from the exhibition

Anonymous photographer
Elfriede Mejchar
Nd
Gelatin silver print

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing photographs of Mejchar’s flower series

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Nobody is perfect
1996
Chromogenic print
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg
© Bildrecht, Vienna, 2024
Photo: Andrew Phelps

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Nobody is perfect
2003
© Elfriede Mejchar/Landessammlungen NÖ

Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Altstadt (Rupertinum)
Wiener-Philharmoniker-Gasse 9
5020 Salzburg
Austria

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 6pm

Museum der Moderne Salzburg website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Suburbia. Building the American Dream’ at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB

Exhibition dates: 20th March – 8th September 2024

Curators: Philipp Engel and Francesc Muñoz

Suburbia. Building the American Dream exhibition poster

An offer you can’t refuse

“The “American dream” can be summed up in a mental image that seems frozen in time: a home of one’s own, surrounded by lawns, with a pool in the back garden and a couple of cars slumbering in the garage… Suburbia. Building the American Dream draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry.” (Text from the CCCB website)

To me, there has always be something slightly askew, slightly out of kilter about the “American dream”. It promotes a generalised simulation of a imaginary reality, sold as a lifestyle, more fiction than fact. It is the ghost of desire that haunts the everyday reality of life, entirely on the side of demand: I want therefore I must have.

This desire must be satiated in the nuclear family, the white picket fence, the idyllic family home, the loveable children – as much a surface that reflects the approbation of others as for the sustenance of the self. As Anthony Giddens observes we are inescapably involved in a

“‘reflexive project of the self’: this project is reflexive because it involves unremitting self-monitoring, self-scrutiny, planning and ordering of all elements of our lives appearances and performances in order to marshal them into a coherent narrative called ‘the self’. We have to interpret the past and plan the future in relation to an identity we are attempting to constitute in a particularly immediate and transient social present. Consumerism is central to this self-obsession. This is partly because we not only have to choose a self, but (as Foucault’s line of argument also indicates) have to constitute ourselves as a self who choses, a consumer.”1

The American Dream endeavours to direct the identity we are attempting to constitute (through consumerism), so that it fits into a particularly conformist idea of a wholesome life: patriarchal, hegemonic, puritan (most important in America), god fearing, white – a particularly hyperreal simulation of a world that never existed in the first place. An imaginary construction.2

Photographs reinforce this “imaginary” state of being, this desire for the American Dream. As the wonderful Victor Burgin observes,

“The structure of presentation – point-of-view and frame – is intimately implicated in the reproduction of ideology (the ‘frame of mind’ of our ‘points-of-view’). More than any other textual system, the photograph presents itself as ‘an offer you can’t refuse’. The characteristics of the photographic apparatus position the subject in such a way that the object photographed serves to conceal the textuality of the photograph itself – substituting passive receptivity for active (critical) reading. … With most photographs we see, […] decoding and investiture takes place instantaneously, unselfconsciously, ‘naturally’; but it does take place – the wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imaginary plenitude. The imaginary object here, however, is not ‘imaginary’ [as in fictive] in the usual sense of the word, it is seen, it has a projected image.”3 (My bold and italics)

The photographs of the American Dream, then, deny an impoverished reality in favour of a desired imaginary plenitude. You too can live the dream, because you have seen the evidence of the projected image, and this imaginary identification can have very real effects.

In the desire for the dream we witness (elsewhere in the world) the egocentric obsession of some of the builders in the British series “Grand Designs” where people mortgage themselves up to the hilt, become sick, have marriage breakdowns and can’t finish the project, because of a dream… to build huge houses with 7 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms that no one in their right mind needs to build for 2 people. Or the case of the Australian Melissa Caddick who, in a Ponzi scheme stole A$30 million from investors, including her friends and family, in order to appear a successful business woman. “Caddick used the proceeds of her crimes to acquire “all the trappings of wealth” and that her “success was all a façade and the financial services business was an elaborate front for Ms. Caddick’s Ponzi scheme”.”4

Ego is reinforced by the image reflected back to us by the photograph.

Christopher Lasch comments that, “The proliferation of recorded images undermines our sense of reality. As Susan Sontag observes in her study of photography, “Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.” We distrust our perceptions until the camera verifies them. Photographic images provide us with the proof of our existence, without which we would find it difficult even to reconstruct a personal history…”5

Photographs posit a reality that promotes the dream, that verifies the dream, as ‘an offer you can’t refuse’.

Thankfully, some of the contemporary artists in this posting (I particularly like the work of Weronika Gęsicka) undermine the utopian ideal through wit, humour and critical inquiry.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Anthony Giddens. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991

2/ “In sociology, the imaginary as a Lacanian term refers to an illusion and fascination with an image of the body as coherent unity, deriving from the dual relationship between the ego and the specular or mirror image… “The term ‘imaginary’ is obviously cognate with ‘fictive’ but in its Lacanian sense it is not simply synonymous with fictional or unreal; on the contrary, imaginary identifications can have very real effects.””

David Macey, “Introduction”, Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London, 1994, p. xxi quoted in “Imaginary (sociology)” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 01/09/2024

3/ Victor Burgin (ed.,). Thinking Photography. Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1982, pp. 146-148.

4/ Farid Assaf SC quoted in Kate McClymont. “Melissa Caddick’s ‘trappings of wealth’ a front for her Ponzi scheme”. The Sydney Morning Herald 29 June 2021 in “Melissa Caddick,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 01/09/2024

5/ Christopher Lasch. The Culture of Narcissism. W.W.Norton and Company, New York, 1978, p. 48.

Many thankx to the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Inside the exhibition: Suburbia. Building the American Dream

Philipp Engel, curator of the exhibition “Suburbia”, examines the origin and vast expansion of residential neighbourhoods in the United States, an urban model centred on constructing large swathes of single-family homes on the outskirts of cities. Engel reflects on the allure that suburban landscapes have stirred in Western culture while highlighting the main issues and contradictions of the model, including segregation, safety paranoia and unsustainable consumption of water and energy.

Introduction

Greg Stimac (American, b. 1976)
Chandler, Arizona
2006
From Mowing the Lawn portfolio
Impressió digital Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago

Who hasn’t longed for the American dream? A big house with a garden, a swimming pool and a couple of cars in the garage. A quiet, safe place to live as a family, close to nature in a people-friendly neighbourhood. This exhibition traces the cultural history of a lifestyle ideal that has been endlessly reproduced on television, in advertising and in cinema, and analyses the validity and the most controversial aspects of its urban planning model.

Suburbia. Building the American Dream draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry. The exhibition goes back to the origins of residential neighbourhoods in the early nineteenth century, explains how they developed massively in the 1950s, and reviews the economic, political and social context of their relentless expansion across the United States.

Now, when more and more families are pursuing their own version of the dream on the outskirts of cities, it is a good moment to analyse the contradictions of an urban planning model based on social, ethnic and gender segregation.

The dream of living in a house with a swimming pool is still very much alive today and has been exported all over the world. The exhibition shows the impact of this highly unsustainable model, based on constant car use, with examples of developments around Barcelona and Madrid.

With abundant historical material, period documentaries, photographs, paintings, films and series, novels and magazines, works of art and everyday objects, the exhibition places us in the mental paradise of the suburb and invites us to rethink the value of the city and public space today.

Suburbia. Building the American Dream presents the work of foremost creators who, from different points of view, help us to take a critical look at the famed American way of life: Jessica Chou, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Doyle, Gerard Freixes, Rodrigo Fresán, Gabriele Galimberti, Weronika Gesicka, Benjamin Grant, Todd Hido, Joel Meyerowitz, Matthias Müller, Blanca Munt, Alberto Ortega, Bill Owens, Sheila Pree Bright, León Siminiani, Todd Solondz, Amy Stein, Greg Stimac, Angela Strassheim, Deborah Stratman, Ed & Deanna Templeton, Kate Wagner and Christopher Willan.

Text from the CCCB website

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Land. Provincetown
1976
Archival pigment print
Collecció Pancho Saula i Michelle Ferrara / Galeria Alta, Andorra

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Dusk. New Jersey
1978
Archival pigment print
Collecció Pancho Saula i Michelle Ferrara / Galeria Alta, Andorra

The “American dream” can be summed up in a mental image that seems frozen in time: a home of one’s own, surrounded by lawns, with a pool in the back garden and a couple of cars slumbering in the garage. Suburbia. Building the American Dream traces the cultural history of a lifestyle ideal shared far and wide by literature, television, advertising and cinema, and analyses the most controversial aspects of an urban planning model that has spread beyond US territory and reached our shores. Journalist Philipp Engel curates this exhibition with geographer Francesc Muñoz collaborating as adviser on the model in the local context.

Since the 1990s most of the American population has lived in this sprawling urban mass that has continued to spread, even beyond US borders. At a time when more and more families are pursuing their own version of the dream on city outskirts, the exhibition analyses the contradictions of an urban planning model based on social, ethnic and gender segregation. It also shows the impact of this highly unsustainable model, based on constant car use, with examples of developments around Barcelona and Madrid. With abundant historical material, photographs, paintings, audiovisuals, literature, works of art and everyday objects, the exhibition situates us in the mental paradise of the model of residential development inspired by American suburbia, and invites us to rethink the value of the city and public space today.

Suburbia. Building the American Dream decodes an almost abstract landscape that is still valid in pop culture. It does so through the work of foremost creators who help us take a critical look at the famed American way of life. It includes works by Jessica Chou, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Doyle, Gerard Freixes, Gabriele Galimberti, Weronicka Gęsicka, Benjamin Grant, Todd Hido, Joel Meyerowitz, Matthias Müller, Blanca Munt, Alberto Ortega, Bill Owens, Sheila Pree Bright, León Siminiani, Amy Stein, Greg Stimac, Angela Strassheim, Deborah Stratman, Ed & Deanna Templeton, Kate Wagner and Christopher Willan, among others.

Installation views of the exhibition Suburbia. Building the American Dream at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing in the second image photographs by Charlotte Brooks (below); and in the bottom image, visitors looking at satellite images of US cities and suburbs that show their grid layout
© Alice Brazzit, CCCB, 2024

Charlotte Brooks (American, 1918-2014)
[Image from LOOK – Job 57-7621 titled Myers family]
20th December 1957
Film negative
Look magazine photograph collection (Library of Congress)
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

Installation view of the exhibition Suburbia. Building the American Dream at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing photographs by Gregory Crewdson (below)

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled (Dream House)
2002
Digital C-print
29 x 44 inches

American photographer Gregory Crewdson is best known for his uncanny images of deceptively serene suburban life. Using Hollywood film techniques and elaborate sets, Crewdson creates what he calls “frozen moments”: meticulously staged scenes whose narrative meaning remains a mystery. Throughout this series, special attention is paid to light. The twilight setting favoured by the photographer functions as a metaphor, an eerie evocation of the darkness on the edge of town.

Crewdson created this twelve-part portfolio, Dream House, as a commission for The New York Times Magazine in 2002. The cinematic character of these frozen vignettes is underscored by the use of Hollywood actors (Gwyneth Paltrow, Tilda Swinton, and Philip Seymour Hoffman among others) whose celebrity contrasts with the “Anytown” anonymity of their environments.

Text from the Mutual Art website

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Julianne Moore (Dream House)
2002
Digital C-print
29 x 44 inches

Sections of the exhibition

Planning A Dream

When the Industrial Revolution reached the USA in the first half of the 19th century, big cities became engines of progress, but they were also seen as dangerous places, in contrast with the opulent nature of the New World. With the emergence of the railway, the tram and the automobile, the mobility revolution prompted the gradual colonisation of city outskirts, transforming the countryside into residential neighbourhoods.

From Llewellyn Park (New Jersey) to Tuxedo Park (New York), throughout the 19th century the first gated communities began to pop up across the United States. At the end of the century, after the West was won, the appearance of the tram gave the middle classes access to the periphery, giving rise to a new type of housing that led to an orderly arrangement of city grids. But it wasn’t until the popularisation of the famous Ford Model T that the US landscape was radically transformed, crisscrossed by roads that became freeways. The automobile became a symbol of freedom, marking the birth of the suburbs that were to spring up everywhere.

This first section includes historical material like the original lithograph View of New York by John William Hill (1836); The American Woman’s Home by Catharine Beecher, the bible of “domestic feminism”; a Ford T Touring (1923) produced by General Motors, and films like The Suburbanite (1908), among other Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton classics.

Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803–1892)
Villa for David Codwise, near New Rochelle, NY (project; elevation and four plans)
1835
Pen and ink, watercolour, graphite
Sheet: 14 5/16 x 9 in. (36.4 x 22.9 cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924
Public domain

Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803–1892)
Ericstan, for John J. Herrick, Tarrytown, New York (perspective)
1855
Watercolour, ink, and graphite on paper
25 5/16 x 30in. (64.3 x 76.2cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924
Public domain

Davis’ most successful castellated villa was built for dry-goods merchant John J. Herrick. The design was dominated by an enormous three-story circular tower facing west over the Hudson River. The tower housed an extraordinary circular parlor that had an intricately vaulted ceiling springing from a massive central cluster of delicate Gothic columns. Ericstan was demolished in 1944.

After Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803-1892)
Friend & Aub (Publisher Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Map of Llewellyn Park and Villa Sites, on Eagle Ridge in Orange & West Bloomfield
1857
Lithograph
14 7/16 x 23 7/16 in. (36.7 x 59.6cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924
Public domain

Morse & Fronti (Charles W. Morse and J. Fronti)
Residence of Mr. E. Hooker, Fremont Ave., Orange, N.J.
1860
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection
The New York Public Library
Public domain

Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907)
Sunnyside on the Hudson
1856-1871
Hand coloured lithograph
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain

Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907)
Sunnyside on the Hudson (detail)
1856-1871
Hand coloured lithograph
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain

Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907)
American railroad scene: lightning express trains leaving the junction
1874
Hand coloured lithograph
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain

Advertising by Samuel. E. Gross.
August Gast & Co. New York
c. 1900
Lithography
Library of Congress

Advertising by Samuel. E. Gross.
August Gast & Co. New York (detail)
c. 1900
Lithography
Library of Congress

Anonymous photographer
Bain News Service (publisher)
Skaters on the lake at Tuxedo Park
1910
Glass negative
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain

Anonymous photographer
Thomas Edison in the garden of his residence in Glenmont
1917
Thomas Edison National Historical Park, West Orange, New Jersey

Anonymous photographer
General Motors Pavilion: Futurama, Norman Bel Geddes. New York World’s Fair. General Motors – Crowds leading into Futurama
1939
New York World’s Fair 1939-1940 records
Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library
Public domain

Catalog of the Aladdin company selling houses by mail
1950
Courtesy Historic New England

Federal Housing Administration, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota
c. 1950
Courtesy Minnesota Streetcar Museum, Minneapolis

The advertisement reads, “With a small down payment your rent money will buy a home. Consult your architect, builder, material dealer or any participating financial institution. Federal Housing Administration.”

The Suburban Room

The suburban explosion was first and foremost demographic, occurring as World War II soldiers returned, eager to set up home. There was no room for them in the crowded cities. With the support of the state, which offered generous loans, suburbs were built using the Fordist assembly-line production logic. It was the “American way of life”, the start of a collective dream that fascinated the whole world.

And so the baby boom took place in 11 million single-family homes fitted with all kinds of electrical domestic appliances, presided over by a brand new television set on which the new suburbanites watched idealised versions of themselves with identical skin colour and the same war experiences, age, mortgage and feeling of uprootedness. The media echoed this phenomenon, and cinema and literature reflected this standardised landscape in which a wife waited at home for her husband with a drink for him in her hand, children went everywhere by bicycle, and everyone had barbecues on Sundays.

Sponsored by the state, Suburbia became a paradise that excluded racial minorities. But little by little, by the sixties, the gates of paradise were opened to African Americans and other minorities, giving rise to a white exodus, the white flight.

As well as a variety of historical material, this section reviews sitcoms portraying the suburbs, from the 1940s to the present day. It also includes the famous illustration New Kids in the Neighborhood by Norman Rockwell and a broad selection of the photographs that make up Bill Owens’ Suburbia (1972), the first book of photographs about this American urban planning model.

Arthur S. Siegel (American, 1913-1978)
Detroit, Michigan. Riot at the Sojourner Truth homes, a new U.S. federal housing project, caused by white neighbours’ attempt to prevent Negro tenants from moving in. Mounted police and whites
Detroit 1942
Library of Congress
Public domain

General Electric advertisement
It’s a promise
1945
Private collection, Barcelona

Anonymous photographer
Aerial view of Levittown
1949
Courtesy Levittown Public Library

Mural of household appliance advertisements published in different American magazines
1947-1962

Mural of household appliance advertisements published in different American magazines (details)
1947-1962

Getting to Work. The Trials to U.S. commuters
Time, January 18, 1960
Library of Catalonia, Barcelona

John Cheever
Time, March 27, 1964
Library of Catalonia, Barcelona

Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978)
New Kids in the Neighbourhood
1967
Lithograph
Norman Rockwell Museum Collection

Bill Owens (American, b. 1938)
Suburbia, Cul de sac, Pleseanton, California
1972
Gelatin silver
Bill Owens Archive, Milan

Bill Owens (American, b. 1938)
I don’t feel that Richie playing with guns will have a negative effect on his personality. (He already wants to be a policeman.)
1972
Gelatin silver
Bill Owens Archive, Milan

The Residential Nightmare

And night fell on Suburbia. What had been a dream became a nightmare. The idea of a safe, healthy, happy place was gradually contaminated with fears, terrors and paranoias. Doors were bolted and alarms installed. After all, in the American Gothic tradition, the house, often haunted, had always been a source of horror – evil lurked there. With the appearance of mass-produced housing, a new sub genre called Suburban Gothic was consolidated, and began to manifest itself both in literature and in cinema. Unlike the traditional Gothic, in this new landscape the family residence was no longer tied to a specific territory, as it had been in New England; now, with its white picket fence and green lawn, it could be anywhere in the country. And evil came from outside, it threatened to invade the home and even undermine it. Under the guise of shiny normality, American suburbs always conceal cracks through which terror creeps.

To illustrate this residential nightmare, we take in historical materials of the atomic age, photographs of the dark side of suburbia by Amy Stein, Todd Hido, Gregory Crewdson, Angela Strassheim and Gabriele Galimberti, and Kate Wagner’s installation, McMansionHell. Alberto Ortega, an artist from Seville resident in the US who has devoted himself to painting the suburbs at night, presents two works for the first time at the CCCB.

Todd Hido (American, b. 1968)
Untitled #2214
1998
From the series House Hunting

Angela Strassheim (American, b. 1969)
Untitled (Elsa)
2005
Left Behind series
Courtesy of the artist

Installation view of the exhibition Suburbia. Building the American Dream at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing the work of Gabriele Galimberti from the series The Ameriguns with at top right, Joel, Lynne, Paige and Joshua (44, 43, 5 and 11 years old) – central Texas 2021; and at bottom right, Eric Arnsberger (30) and Morgan Gagnier (22) – Lake Forest, California 2021
© Alice Brazzit, CCCB, 2024

Gabriele Galimberti (Italian, b. 1977)
Joel, Lynne, Paige and Joshua (44, 43, 5 and 11 years old) – central Texas
2021
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

Gabriele Galimberti (Italian, b. 1977)
Avery Skipalis (33) – Tampa, Florida
2021
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

Avery Skipalis (33) stands with her firearms in front of her house in Tampa, Florida, USA. Her son looks on from a window. Avery joined the US Air Force when she was 17, and after serving in the UAE, Japan and Germany, left to start a company that offers firearms safety classes to adults and children.

Alberto Ortega (American born Spain, b. 1976)
Annunciation
2023
Oil on aluminium panel
Courtesy of the artist

Alberto Ortega (Sevilla, Spain 1976) creates oil paintings made after miniature sets that he builds as references. The small-scale sets enable him to recreate suburban scenes using details that recall the 1950s. Since he’s able to control the angle and point of view, the lighting, the location of every element, much like a film director would do, his works have a strong cinematic feel.

As an immigrant to the United States, Alberto is intrigued by American suburban life as depicted in film, literature, and visual art. Through these images of American homes, buildings, and neighbourhoods, he portrays society and some of its contradictions. These scenes represent hopes and dreams, the threat of their failure, and alienation.

Text from the Alberto Ortega website

Kate Wagner (American, b. 1993)
Observations from McMansion Hell
2023
Digital print on palboard
Courtesy of the artist

McMansion Hell is a blog that humorously critiques McMansions, large suburban homes typically built from the 1980s to 2008 and known for their stylistic attempt to create the appearance of affluence using mass-produced architecture. The website is run by Kate Wagner, an architectural writer. …

The blog uses Wagner’s commentary atop images of the interiors and exteriors of McMansions, using arrows to note features she finds questionable or in poor taste. Besides critiquing the homes themselves, the website also criticises the perceived material culture of wastefulness McMansions can represent, gives anecdotes of situations when McMansions have been a poor financial investment, and provides other essays on urban planning and architectural history. The blog offers subscriptions with bonus content, generating sufficient funding for Wagner to work on the blog full-time.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Post-Suburbia?

The appearance of New Urbanism in the 1990s began to herald the inevitable death of Suburbia due to the announced depletion of oil that has not yet occurred. Meanwhile, Suburbia continues to spread, transform and diversify. Today, 8 out of 10 Americans live in sprawl and single-family homes, representing 75% of the residential areas where new generations continue to dream of living. This is a new suburbia that is more open but also more unequal.

This suburb is made up of very diverse communities, as captured by the cameras of the photographers Sheila Pree Bright (who portrays African American life around Atlanta) and Jessica Chou (who immortalises the Asian community in Monterrey Park, California). New lifestyles also proliferate there, like at Huntington Beach, a “contemporary suburb” and surfing capital featured in the works of artist and skateboarder Ed Templeton.

This section also focuses on the environmental impact of this highly polluting city model, through the apocalyptic bonsai of artist Thomas Doyle and the satellite photographs of Benjamin Grant, a lethal panorama of the effects of the sprawling city.

Thomas Doyle (American, b. 1976)
Proxy (Haven Ln.)
2012
Mixed media
Courtesy of the artist

Thomas Doyle work mines the debris of memory through the creation of intricate worlds sculpted in 1:43 scale and smaller. Often sealed under glass, the works depict the remnants of things past – whether major, transformational experiences, or the quieter moments that resonate loudly throughout a life. In much the way the mind recalls events through the fog of time, the works distort reality through a warped and dreamlike lens.

Text from the Ronchini Gallery website

Weronika Gęsicka (Polish, b. 1984)
Untitled #16
2015-2017
From the series Traces
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist and Jednostka Gallery, Warsaw

For her series “Traces”, Polish artist Weronika Gęsicka searched through various online image databases for photographs from the 1940s to the 1960s that in her eyes reflect the American way of life at that time. Many of these scenes are full of clichés, showing happy-looking people in an apparently perfect world. The exact origin of the pictures is not verifiable. As a result, they are a mixture of advertisements and private photos. Gęsicka manipulates the idyllic scenes in a playful way by digitally distorting the images. In doing so, she does not follow a strict pattern, but instead decides intuitively what detail she finds fascinating and will edit. In this way, the rather stereotypical scenes of suburban American life are transformed into a humorous, but also uncomfortable reality. Covered faces, deformed bodies and peculiar superimpositions create a distorted version of the American dream. Gęsicka’s photos are characterised by a discomforting, almost oppressive mood that sometimes only reveals itself at second glance: young men at a tea dance, whose heads are submerged in the cleavages of their oversized female partners, family members hidden behind a curtain at the dinner table, or a father coming home from work, separated by a trench from his children, who are running towards him.

In “Traces”, Weronika Gęsicka questions how we perceive images. In doing so, she makes us aware that even the medium of photography, which allegedly reflects reality, is not objective. Each photograph merely satisfies a perception of what is happening and, in the photographer’s eye, remains a subjective likeness. By modifying the images, she is playing with the observer, who is initially confident that he can quickly classify and identify the scene – until he notices that nothing in these pictures is as it seems at first glance.

Anonymous. “Weronika Gęsicka: A Disconcerting Idyll,” on the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation website Nd [Online] Cited 13/08/2024

Weronika Gęsicka (Polish, b. 1984)
Untitled #52
2015-2017
From the series Traces
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist and Jednostka Gallery, Warsaw

Ed Templeton (American, b. 1972)
Contemporary Suburbium
2017
Digital printing on baryta paper
Courtesy of Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

Jessica Chou (American born Taiwan, b. 1985)
The Mark Keppel High School Dance Team at the 2019 Miss Dance Drill Team USA National Dance Competition
2019
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

Benjamin Grant (American, b. 1984)
Berwyn, Illinois
2023
Digital printing
Images created by Overview, source images
© Nearmap

Overview takes its inspiration from Daily Overview – an Instagram account established by author Benjamin Grant. Since he began the project in December 2013, his daily posts have both delighted and challenged his audience from all corners of the globe. For Overview, Grant has curated and created more than 200 original images by stitching together numerous high-resolution satellite photographs. With each Overview, Grant aims to not only inspire a fresh perspective of our planet but also encourage a new understanding of what human impact looks like. He lives and rides his bike in New York City.

Text from the Penguin Books website

Benjamin Grant (American, b. 1984)
Berwyn, Illinois (detail)
2023
Digital printing
Images created by Overview, source images
© Nearmap

Sprawl Reaches Our Shores

The formation of Suburbia as a cultural phenomenon in Catalonia is a reality historically ignored by narratives about the Catalan process of urbanisation, too focused on city growth and the ideological differentiation between an urban, Barcelona-based Catalonia and an “inner” Catalonia, the birthplace of what still today we call the “countryside”.

Suburban Catalonia shows how, in many territories, urban growth no longer corresponds to the well-known metaphor of city growth as an “oil stain”. In fact, an endless mass of oil stains has spread across the territory, giving rise to the same cloned reality everywhere: regional urban sprawl. The sprawl that is so commonplace today developed with the motorisation of society starting in the latter half of the 20th century as part and parcel of a very heterogeneous cultural discourse: the ideological propaganda of the American way of life mixed with local traditions derived from criticism of the built-up, crowded industrial city popularly disseminated in expressions such as “la caseta i l’hortet” (a little house and a garden) that idealised rural life. The path leading from those initial suburban choices to today’s regional urban sprawl is not a straight one, making the Catalan suburb a world yet to be discovered.

Christopher Willan has made a photographic reportage about the Catalan suburban world specially for the exhibition, which also includes Blanca Munt’s installation Mira-Sol Alert about the neighbourhood’s paranoid state of alert and an audiovisual piece by filmmaker León Siminiani that closes the exhibition.

Pere Torné Esquius (Spanish, 1879-1936)
The rocking chair (El balancí)
1913
Oil on canvas
National Art Museum of Catalonia, Barcelona

For different reasons, the singular work of the painter, illustrator and cartoonist Pere Torné Esquius (Barcelona 1879 – Flavancourt, France, 1936) doesn’t fit in with either the modernist proposals or the noucentista style (turn of the century), even though the latter considered him to be one of theirs.

Settled in Paris from 1905 onwards, although he would often return to Barcelona to regularly exhibit there, his work, of apparent simplicity, responded to a certain primitivism which was somewhat naive and with a strong French influence. His painting, highly singular, maintained pictorial and atmospheric values which provided the whole production with a sense of unity.

The favourite topics of Torné Esquius were interior or secluded spaces, such as gardens or living rooms, humble or of artisan extraction. It is worth highlighting, very often, the absence of the human figure and the main presence of inanimate elements that on occasions would cause a disturbing or even alarming effect. He also produced other genres such as landscapes or portraits.

Despite the fact that he was a painter, his professional work was based on illustration, focused on three main lines: children’s literature, the illustration of literary texts and the collaboration in magazines and periodical publications, often satirical, such as Papitu, Picarol or Le Rire, amongst others.

Anonymous. “Torné Esquius. Poetics of the Everyday,” on the Museu Nacional D’Art De Catalunya website 2017 [Online] Cited 13/08/2024

XXIII Barcelona International Exhibition Fair, 1955. USA Pavilion. OITF: Office of International Trade Fair. Single-family house model: “house beautiful prefabricated”
1955
Historical Archive of the College of Architects of Catalonia

Barcelona Metropolitan Area
Orthophoto. Dispersed urbanisation in the municipality of Corbera de Llobregat
2015

Blanca Munt (Spanish, b. 1997)
Mira-sol alert
2023
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

In 2019, photographer Blanca Munt engaged in a neighbourhood chat group created to surveil her own neighbourhood and alert to any potential home burglaries or other suspicious activity. What is initially presented as an effective tool for the neighbours soon becomes a source of speculation, suspicion and paranoia. The seemingly quiet community life in a neighbourhood of well-lit streets and conventional homes founders due to the actual burglaries, but also due to the disintegration of the idea of community when personal security is at stake: mistrust, typically based on suspicious appearance or behaviour, now extends to any neighbours who fail to rigorously conform to the group’s purpose.

With a clean and sober design reminiscent of a real estate or security company brochure, the dispassionate pictures portrayed in Mira-sol Alert intertwine with the mental images stemming from an inflamed rhetoric, which gradually take shape as we learn the self-interested views of the different actors in this landscape – neighbours, suspects, police officers, local authorities – and which appeal strongly to our fears and contradictions. In her own words, Blanca Munt calls for a “reflection on the tension between the privilege of living in a peaceful place and the constant sense of lurking threat encouraged by our current culture of fear.”

Text from the Dalpine website

Christopher Willan (British lives Spain)
Sant Quirze del Vallès
2023
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

Christopher Willan (British lives Spain)
Els Trullols Park-1
2023
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

The Curators

Philipp Engel: Graduate in Modern Literature from the University of Toulouse, with a thesis on Bret Easton Ellis. After ten years in the music sales and distribution business, he started to work as a cultural journalist, specializing in cinema and literature. He is currently a contributor to various periodicals, such as Cultura(s), El Mundo, Cinemanía, Sofilm and Coolt.

Francesc Muñoz: Lecturer in Urban Geography, director of the Observatory of Urban Planning at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and professor at the Università IUAV di Venezia. He has received prizes such as the Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis Attending to Human Values in Engineering (UPC, 2004) and the Bonaplata Award for the exhibition The Light Factory, about the power station in Sant Adrià de Besòs (2014). He has curated shows such as the commemorative exhibition of 30 years of democratic town councils, Local, Local! The City to Come (CCCB, 2010), and the exhibition Architectures on the Waterfront (Fundació Mies van der Rohe, 2019), and was a member of the Cerdà Year Advisory Board (2010).

Press release from the CCCB

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB
Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona
Phone: (+34) 933 064 100

Opening hours:
From Tuesday to Sunday and bank holidays 11.00 – 20.00
Closed Monday

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition dates: 21st July, 2024 – 5th January, 2025

within, bridge and fissure

Footnotes

About the exhibition

Exhibition catalogue

Exhibition dates: 24th August – 29th December 2024

Id est / that is

Quotes on Walls

The Role of Camera Work

Introduction

The Rebirth of Art Photography in Europe

Alfred Stieglitz and the American Pictorialist Movement

Close Collaborations and the Sudden End of the Photo-Secession

Late Pictorialism and the Clarence White School

Straight Photography, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand

Heinrich Kühn

Gertrude Käsebier

Clarence Hudson White

Paul Strand

Works by Emerson, Post, Evans, and Sutcliffe

Works by Thiollier

Works by Kühn

Portraits by Steichen

Glossary of Photographic Printing Methods and Terms from the History of Photography

Gelatin Silver Print

Cyanotype

Platinum or Palladium Print

Pigment Prints

Gum Bichromate Print

Bromoil (Transfer) Print

Photogravure

The Photo-Secession

Pictorialism / Pictorialist

The Linked Ring

Straight Photography

Camera Notes

Camera Work

The Photo-Secession Movement: Pioneering Artistry in Early Photography

The Birth of the Photo-Secession Movement

Similarities

Differences

Who were the Photo-Secessionists?

Works by Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz: The Visionary Leader

Works by Käsebier

Gertrude Käsebier: The Master of Portraiture

Works by Evans

Works by Dow

Works by Haviland

Works by Struss

Nudes by Stieglitz and White

Images of O’Keeffe by Stieglitz

Works by White

Clarence Hudson White: The Romantic

Works by followers of White

Anne Brigman: The Feminine Mystic of Photo-Secession

Edward Steichen

Edward J. Steichen: The Innovator

Works by Strand

Works of Straight photography

Alvin Langdon Coburn: The Avant-Garde Creator

November 2024

Exhibition dates: 27th April – 10th November, 2024

Presentation in the Photography Room

Chargesheimer

Cologne intime, 1957

Unter Krahnenbäumen, 1958

Exhibition dates: 10th March – 20th October, 2024

Denver Art Museum Talk with Fazal Sheikh March 9, 2024

Lola Yellowman’s Testimony

Exhibition dates: 20th September – 19th October, 2024

Losers and losers

Footnotes

Neoliberalism

The Women’s Support Group

“This Time We Didn’t Want To Be On The Outside”

Commemorative Plates

…on starting to document the miners’ strike

…on covering the role played by women in the miners’ strike:

Battle of Orgreave

…on covering the role played by women in the miners’
strike: