Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Self-portrait in Punk Jacket 1991-1992 Silver gelatin print
I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Marcus Sucking His Thumb 1991-1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Marcus in his Punk Jacket, Punt Road, South Yarra 1991-1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Marcus as The Fool (posing for the sculptor Fredrick White) 1991-1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nude, in the Flat, Rear of Derelict House, 455, Punt Road, South Yarra 1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Self-portrait, nude with the mural ‘Two boys on a car’ 1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nude on Floor (with Clifford Last) 1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nude on Couch, Punt Road, South Yarra 1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nude on Couch, Punt Road, South Yarra 1992 Silver gelatin print
Curator: Michal Raz-Russo, museum exhibition coordinator and associate curator
Many thankx to The Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Artist unknown (American) [Three women] c. 1930s Gelatin silver print 8.9 x 14.7cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) The Three Graces c. 1930s Gelatin silver print The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) Look Pleasant c. 1910s Gelatin silver print 8.9 x 8.6cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three women] c. 1910s Gelatin silver print 11.6 x 6.8cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) Untitled 1910/1940 Image: 7.7 x 5.2cm (3 1/16 x 2 1/16 in.) Paper: 8.6 x 6.1 cm (3 7/16 x 2 7/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
After George Eastman introduced the handheld Kodak #1 camera in 1888, amateurs made millions of snapshots depicting friends and family, travels, and festive occasions such as weddings. Even while solidifying such thoroughly conventional behaviours, amateur photography developed a new pictorial language that privileged immediacy, spontaneity, and accident. Career photographers and art historians – but also antiques vendors and flea-market shoppers – have long recognised the value of the “snapshot aesthetic.” The rise of social media and smartphones in recent years has effectively ended the era of the snapshot as both a printed photograph and an image for a private audience.
Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website
Artist unknown (American) Untitled (Summer, Aug, 1920) 1920 Gelatin silver print 13.9 x 8.3cm (5 1/2 x 3 5/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) Untitled c. 1920-1929 Gelatin silver print 13.7 x 8.5cm (5 7/16 x 3 3/8 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
This exhibition explores the early years of vernacular photography through graceful snapshots of female trios. Displaying more than 500 “found” images the exhibition features photographs of celebrations, vacations, and gatherings of family and friends are taken and kept with the aim of preserving moments in life for future generations. What happens, however, when a snapshot becomes an image “type” – transferred into the hands of a collector and folded into a broader cultural history?
This subject is explored in the Art Institute of Chicago’s The Three Graces – on view October 29, 2011, through January 22, 2012, in the museum’s Photography Galleries 3 and 4. The exhibition, featuring a private collection of more than 500 anonymous images depicting female trios, spans nearly a century of female role-playing for the camera. These mostly American “found” photographs, spanning from the 1890s to the 1970s, collectively reveal a great deal about the evolving ritual of women’s self-presentation, a theme already idealised in Classical culture with depictions of “The Three Graces.”
New York collector Peter J. Cohen, who has spent decades scouring flea markets, shops, and galleries in search of rare amateur photographs, amassed this image collection and gave it its title. Cohen was struck by the frequency of images featuring female trios, and had the wit to identify in them a playful echo of the Greek muses Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, who are said to personify beauty, charm, and grace in both nature and humanity. Cohen owns some 20,000 anonymous snapshots spanning from the late 19th century until the 1970s. He has organised his mountainous holdings according to many classifications, among them “Double Exposures,” “Up on The Roof,” and “Dangerous Women.”
For Art Institute exhibition coordinator Michal Raz-Russo, who also authored the accompanying book, the “three graces” theme serves as a frame through which to chart shifts and continuities in women’s self-understanding across nearly a century. The 1888 introduction of the Kodak #1 camera and the 1900 debut of the Kodak Brownie made photography immensely popular, with much of the marketing was directed at women. Modern life and leisure in the 1920s coincided with the arrival of smaller cameras, faster film speeds, and automatic exposures; women of the expanding middle class became practiced at self-portraiture while vacationing or camping on their own. Later, in the mid-20th century, a clear convergence can be seen between women’s self-portraits and ideals of womanhood promulgated in films and glossy magazines. Throughout this history, men are clearly at work too, convincing women to participate in erotic poses according to another set of visual models. While the varieties of picturing and self-picturing are complex, The Three Graces demonstrates that women worked to define themselves as social beings through photography.
Visitors to the exhibition can find information on individual snapshots – gleaned from inscriptions and the clues provided by clothing and setting – at a special computer kiosk located in the gallery.
Press release from The Art Institute of Chicago website
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women] c. 1920s Gelatin silver print 13.5 x 8.3cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Stamped Clyde Banks Photo Services, Crystal Sheer, Aug 5 1932) 1930-1939 Gelatin silver print Paper: 11.7 x 7.1cm (4 5/8 x 2 13/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Stony Creek Dude Ranch, July 1939, stamped Certified, Master Photo Finishers of America, Fountain Photo Service, May 15 1940) Made 1939 Gelatin silver print Paper: 11.6 x 7cm (4 5/8 x 2 13/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Stamped Master Photo Finishers of America, Service and Quality, Kay Tone 10 Point Process, Certified Reg. U.S. Pat Off., Caton Photo Co., Detroit, Michigan, Sep 11 1939) Printed 1939 Gelatin silver print Paper: 10.7 x 7.9cm (4 1/4 x 3 1/8 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women] c. 1940s Gelatin silver print 11.7 x 7cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women and a photographer] c. 1940s Gelatin silver print 12.2 x 7.6cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Gym Teachers Linda “Sissy” House, Sarah Beth Jordan, Seanne Livingston, 9th Grade) Printed 1961 Gelatin silver print Paper: 9 x 9 cm (3 9/16 x 3 9/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled 1960-1969 Internal dye diffusion transfer print Paper: 10.8 x 8.9cm (4 5/16 x 3 9/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Martin M. Homburger (American, active mid-20th century) Untitled [Three women] 1967 Chromogenic print Image: 11.7 x 9.2cm (4 5/8 x 3 5/8 in.) Paper: 12.7 x 10.2cm (5 x 4 1/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled Printed 1968 Chromogenic print Paper: 9 x 8.6cm (3 9/16 x 3 7/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women] c. 1930s Gelatin silver print 14.5 x 8.7cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
The Three Graces: Snapshots of Twentieth-Century Women book cover Hardcover – November 29, 2011
Featuring an amazing treasure trove of unpublished images, this intriguing and entertaining book looks at how women explored their identity through popular photography in the 20th century
Snapshots preserve more than individual likeness and memory. Photographs of celebrations, vacations, and gatherings of family and friends are collected with the aim of constructing and preserving a personal identity for future generations. What happens, however, when a snapshot is subsequently discarded or displaced and becomes merely an “anonymous” image? This and many other questions are discussed in this fascinating selection of anonymous images depicting three women. Presumably all taken by nonprofessionals, these snapshots were acquired over time by a private collector interested in their eclectic yet familiar details, who named the grouping after the iconic Greco-Roman motif.
In traditional western iconography, the Three Graces personify beauty, charm, and grace in both nature and humanity. In the 150 snapshots assembled here, the remarkable consistency of confidence and poise projected by the trios of women – in varied settings, in various states of dress/undress, and over a period of more than fifty years – reveals the formal and behavioral conventions that evolved as photography’s popularity skyrocketed among amateurs. To this end, the iconography of The Three Graces provides a framework for understanding the generational differences and cultural influences that shaped women’s self-presentation in front of the camera in the first half of the 20th century.
Exhibition dates: 15th November, 2011 – 15th April, 2012
Curator: in-house touring exhibition by the National Archives of Australia
Many thankx to The Victorian Archives Centre for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Waves breaking into the pool 1945 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) 1952 Miss Pacific finalists Mary Clifton, Pamela Jansen and Judy Worrad, stand in front of surfboards on Bondi Beach, Sydney 1952 National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Sunbathing, Sydney Beach, NSW c. 1955 National Archives of Australia
Cossies, togs and bathers
Until the 1940s, Australian women wore decidedly modest, albeit colourful, one-piece swimsuits. But the bikini was already in vogue overseas and by the early 1950s Australian women were daring to wear it. Discover the many fashion statements that could be made by wearing a favourite pair of cossies, togs or bathers!
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Christmas party on Bondi Beach, Sydney 1959 National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Santa Claus visits a Sydney beach 1969 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
At the beach
In the 1950s and 1960s, Christmas heralded the start of annual summer holidays for many Australian families. Those who didn’t already live near the coast usually headed towards it, mostly in Holdens and sometimes hauling a caravan. They made tracks to seaside places such as the Gold Coast, Manly, Byron Bay and Sorrento, plonking their bodies on the warm sand, transistors to their ears, to bake in the summer sun. Back then most people seemed unconcerned about sunburn and, as the images show, even beach umbrellas were in short supply.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Bathing beauty 1955 Australian Travel Industry Association collection National Archives of Australia
This image comes from the Australian Travel Industry Association collection, now held in the National Archives. This series consists of black and white prints and negatives of photographs used in publications, notably Walkabout magazine, produced by the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA).
The Victorian Archives Centre plays host to regular displays of original records from our collection as well as touring exhibitions about Victorian stories. Over Summer, the Victorian Archives Centre will present Summers Past: Golden Days in the Sun 1950-1970, a fascinating photographic exhibition highlighting Australia’s fascination with the sun and sea.
Summers Past will explore our enduring love affair of all things summer, invoking memories of carefree sunny days at the beach in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. This is your last chance to view this exhibition before it returns to the National Archives of Australian in April 2012.
So slip on your cossie, slop on the sunscreen and head down to the Victorian Archives Centre this summer!
Summers Past: Golden Days in the Sun 1950-1970 will be on display until April 2012. Entry is free.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Sunbathers relax under a low umbrella at Bondi, NSW 1956 National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Sydney beach scene 1969 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Surfer and bikini girl on the sand 1969 National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Holiday makers at Surfers Paradise 1959 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Snack bar, Surfers Paradise, QLD 1971 National Archives of Australia
Out and about
Australians have always been fairly laid back and never more so than in summer. Looking at these images from the 1950s and 1960s, it’s plain that sophistication was seldom a consideration when choosing what to wear. On holidays, most people preferred to be comfortable rather than trendy, and bare feet were common on coastal streets, as were unbuttoned shirts and even swimwear.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Holiday makers gather around a car on a hot summer’s day 1964 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Surf lifesaving, Bondi Beach 1960 National Archives of Australia
Cliff Bottomley (Australian, c. 1907-1981) Preparing canoes 1948 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
This image comes from the Australian News and Information Bureau collection, now held in the National Archives. This vast archival resource is the legacy of nearly half a century’s work by Bureau photographers who captured hundreds of thousands of photographs of Australians at work and play.
Cooling off
It’s no secret that Australia can be very hot, especially in summer. As the song says, we are girt by sea, and for 85 per cent of Australians a blissful dip in the ocean has always been less that two hours’ drive away. For those living further inland, sanctuary was found in a nearby river or lake, or the town’s public swimming pool.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Harbour swimming pool, Manly, New South Wales 1960 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
This image comes from the Australian News and Information Bureau collection, now held in the National Archives. This vast archival resource is the legacy of nearly half a century’s work by Bureau photographers who captured hundreds of thousands of photographs of Australians at work and play.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Sunbathers relax on the lawn at the Olympic Pool, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 1966 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Surf board riders, Torquay, VIC 1967 National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Children learning to swim 1945 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Nice one, sport!
Between 1950 and 1970, Australia was triumphant in all the sports we loved. We dominated in the pool, won the Davis Cup a remarkable 15 times, and boasted an impressive record against every Test cricket nation. As these images show, Australian youngsters were keen to play the game, and on most summer Saturdays all around the country, boys and girls would play tennis or cricket, or swim like champions.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Boys with kites 1965 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Surf carnival 1966 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Mass tennis class 1967 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
The Victorian Archives Centre 99 Shiel Street North Melbourne, Victoria 3051 Australia
Many thankx to the Tate Modern for allowing me to publish the artwork in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Curated by Nicholas Serota and Mark Godfrey, this show sets up all sorts of telling juxtapositions, while following the thread not just of Richter’s thinking, but of history – and in particular German history – since the second world war. We go from the saturation bombing of Dresden and Cologne to 1960s West German consumerism, from 1970s domestic terrorism to 9/11. There are paintings devoted to Richter’s parents, his aunts and uncles, and what happened to them in wartime. There are paintings devoted to his children, and to becoming a father again in his 60s. He confronts the personal with the public, one kind of history with another. …
Caspar David Friedrich’s German Romanticism, Titian’s Venetian colour, constructivism and postwar gestural painting, minimalism and process art are all grist to Richter’s mill. His 1973 Annunciation After Titian is a reworking from a postcard of the original, while the impossibility of Friedrich’s Romanticism returns time and again in Richter’s seascapes and his Greenland photographs. “I was always looking,” he once said, “for a third way, in which eastern realism and western modernism would be resolved into one redeeming construct.” If this remains Richter’s programme, it is one riven with the irreconcilable, a friction on which his art depends.”
Wedded to this aesthetic of indifference, it seems more than coincidental that he introduced into his practice subject matter directly related to Germany’s recent Nazi past, images from his family album (one of the few possessions he brought over from the East) that most artists would have chosen to keep concealed. Uncle Rudi for instance is a full sizes portrait of his uncle in the uniform of the Wehrmacht – a going away photo, it turns out, as he was to die some months later. What distinguishes this portrait and many others is the addition of Richter’s signature blur. Paint has been dragged across the wet surface with a dry brush, signalling a whole variety of responses. Often interpreted as replicating an out of focus snapshot, evoking speed, or signalling a temporal distancing by underlining the difference between the ‘now’ of the viewer and the ‘then’ of whatever was captured in the photograph, this flurry of soft or hard brush strokes also signals a degree of moral and emotional ambiguity – despite the painter’s insistence on a lack of intentionality on his part. Take his portrait of Aunt Marianne that depicts his maternal aunt cradling Richter as a none-too-happy baby. A schizophrenic, she was sterilized and eventually starved to death by the Nazis. The blur of the brushstrokes bring her and the baby together suggesting the very emotional attachment that Richter was initially keen to disavow. During an interview in 1986 Richter confessed that this dispassionate stance of indifference was mere subterfuge and pretence on his part: “Content definitely – though I may have denied this at one time, by saying that it had nothing to do with content, because it was supposed to be about copying a photograph and giving a demonstration of indifference.”
Anna Leung. “Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern,” on The Arts Section website Nd [Online] Cited 05/12/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Gerhard Richter’s extremely productive career needs to be seen against this shift in attitudes and expectations when pictorial references were no longer drawn directly from the natural world but from an ever-growing nexus of information. Empirical data was being rapidly replaced by conceptual data. From 1961 when he settled in West Germany Richter alternated between figuration and non-figuration treating a wide range of subjects and employing a wide variety of means while not valuing one practice over another. As we shall see Richter is equally adept at dealing with historical genres such as the nude, landscape, portraits and history painting as he is in investigating colour and its absence in his monochromes and colour charts and in his densely layered, explosively coloured abstract canvases. For Richter, Abstraction is as real as Realism is abstract, for what fascinates him is not the image per se or its absence but appearance or semblance as our apprehension of appearance. Richter readily admits that it is inevitable that figurative elements be seen in abstraction and denies any difference between what for him is a false polarity. That this panoply of styles remains Richter’s consistent trademark throughout his long career can be seen as we wander through the rooms of this vast exhibition. Each room displays figurative paintings, mostly from photographic imagery, side by side with abstract paintings. There are two exceptions; the first is the room devoted to 18 October 1977, a cycle of fifteen photo-paintings based on the deaths of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists in Stammheim high security prison, the second the Cage room of abstract paintings that brings the exhibition to an close. Throughout the exhibition we see Richter appropriating mutually contradictory trends associated with Hyperrealism, Minimalism and Conceptual Art while at the same time honing his craft as a painter to produce some extraordinarily beautiful images. Impossible to categorise he demonstrates his determination to confront the crisis of representation on one hand and that of Germany’s recent history on the other.
Anna Leung. “Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern,” on The Arts Section website Nd [Online] Cited 05/12/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Gerhard Richter is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today. Spanning nearly five decades, and coinciding with the artist’s eightieth birthday, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is a major retrospective that groups together significant moments of his remarkable career.
As evoked by the title Panorama this exhibition presents a broad look at the wide range of Richter’s practice, discovering contradictions and connections, continuities and breaks. Each room is devoted to a particular moment of his career showing how he explored a set of ideas. While the focus is on painting, the exhibition includes glass constructions, mirrors, drawings, and photographs, and explores how Richter uses these media to ask questions about painting.
The exhibition includes many of Richter’s most well-known works such as Ema (Nude descending a staircase) 1966, Candle 1982, Betty 1988 and Reader 1994. There are also important works that are rarely shown: the first Colour Chart from 1966, 4 Panes of Glass 1967, a triptych of Cloud paintings from 1970, and, for the first time outside Germany, Richter’s monumental twenty metre long painting Stroke (on Red) 1980, based on a photograph of a brush stroke. There are several groups of important abstract paintings including a room of brightly coloured works from the early 1980s, a room of monumental squeegee paintings from the 1990s, and the Cage series 2006.
Richter was one of the first German artists to reflect on the history of National Socialism, creating paintings of family members who had been members, as well as victims of, the Nazi party. In the late 1980s, looking back to the history of radical political activity in West Germany in the 1970s, he produced the fifteen-part work 18 October 1977 1988, a sequence of black and white paintings based on images of the Baader Meinhof group. At the same time as developing a complex body of abstract work, often using squeegees to drag paint across the surface of his canvases, Richter has continued to respond to significant moments in history. In 2005 he painted September, an image of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, which is shown for the first time in the UK in this exhibition.
Richter is often celebrated for the diversity of his approaches to painting. His practice can seem to be structured by various oppositions, with paintings after photographs as well as abstract pictures; traditional still-lifes alongside highly charged subjects; monochrome grey works and multicoloured grids. Some paintings are planned out and ordered; others are the result of unpredictable accumulations of marks and erasures. Richter sometimes maintains these oppositions, but at other times he undoes them. This exhibition shows how he often brings abstraction and figuration together, and explores related ideas in very different looking works. The exhibition reveals breaks and new beginnings in his career, but it also reveals questions that he has asked throughout his life.
Short Biography
Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and after training in the East, moved to West Germany in 1961. He was part of a group of painters working in Düsseldorf, that included Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg, who turned to image-based painting during the emergence of American Pop art. Major solo exhibitions include the 36th Venice Biennale in 1972, his first large-scale retrospective at Städtische Kunsthalle und Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf in 1986 and Forty Years of Painting, a large-scale retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002. He installed Black Red Gold in the foyer of the Reichstag building in Berlin in 1999 and the window that he designed for Cologne Cathedral was completed in 2007. Richter lives and works in Cologne.”
Gerhard Richter debuted his 15-painting suite 18 October 1977, concerning the radical left-wing Baader-Meinhof Group that had shaken Germany with a two-year campaign of terror, with more public ceremony than usual. At a press conference at the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, introducing the pictures before they were first shown in early 1989, he offered a curious speech, reflecting that, “I hope…there is purpose in looking at those deaths, because there is something about them that should be understood.” If Richter’s words recognized the particularly ambitious nature of these paintings among his growing body of work, it also gave listeners little guidance as to what it was that should be understood. …
Soon after, Richter began wiping across the still-wet surface of his photo-paintings with a squeegee to soften the edges and blur the image. This signature blur can evoke a range of things – the motion of the viewer or the camera, the passage of time, but also something more metaphoric, of the type suggested in the artist’s 1971 musing: “My relationship to reality has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness.” At times, Richter also suggested that this fuzzy gaze might serve a role in helping to focus the mind: “You do not see less,” he wrote, “by looking at a field out of focus through a magnifying glass.” In the October cycle, Richter seems to amp his blurring technique up a notch, so that the images are more obscured, more diffuse than usual, in some cases approaching the edge of recognisability.
The date of the title – October 18, 1977 – marks the bloody denouement of a story that had played out over several years in front of a shaken German nation. From 1968 to 1977, the Baader-Meinhof Group led a campaign of shootings and kidnappings aimed at undermining the German state, leaving more than 30 people dead. The group’s founders – Holger Meins, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader – and several other members of the group were arrested and held in Stammheim prison. On October 17, a plane was diverted to Mogadishu by hijackers who demanded the release of the members of the group from prison. Early the next morning, following the successful liberation of the plane by the German military, three of the Baader-Meinhof Group were found dead in their cells from apparent suicide – though the proximity of these events prompted speculation about their cause of death. …
Richter acknowledged how profoundly unsettling he found the events around the Baader-Meinhof Group: “The deaths of the terrorists, and the related events both before and after,” he reflected, “stand for a horror that distressed me and has haunted me as unfinished business ever since, despite all my effort to repress it.” Perhaps as a way of processing things, Richter began to collect materials related to the group, holding onto “a number” for years before he began painting the October cycle, filed “under the heading of unfinished business.” In fact, over 100 images related to the Baader-Meinhof Group appear in Atlas, Richter’s ongoing scrapbook-like compendium of photographic source material.
When he began working in earnest on what would become 18 October 1977, Richter drew some of his source images from newspapers and magazines or snapshots of television coverage – markers of the pervasiveness of media coverage of the Baader-Meinhof Group during their violent reign and in its aftermath. But others, taken from police evidentiary photographs, were far less readily available, and serve as tokens of Richter’s preoccupation with the topic and his determined research efforts in preparation for painting. …
The narrative arc Richter creates begins in a banally sweet portrait image of a young woman and ends in a collective ritual of public mourning. Yet both, Richter seems to suggest, are inadequate to our understanding of what has taken place. What truth, he seems to ask, do photographs offer? Can violence or righteousness be discerned in the blur of grays?
But he declined to offer answers: “It is impossible for me to interpret the pictures,” he concluded in notes made for the work’s unveiling. “In the first place they are too emotional; they are, if possible, an expression of speechless emotion. They are the almost forlorn attempt to give shape to feelings of compassion, grief, horror (as if the pictorial repetition of events were a way of understanding these events, being able to live with them).”
Curators: co-organised with the National Gallery of Canada and curated by Dr. David Franklin (then Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Canada) and Dr. Sebastian Schütze (Professor of Art History at the University of Vienna)
Simon Vouet (French, 1590-1649) The Fortune Teller c. 1620 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Observe if you will:
1/ The treatment of the background behind Boy Bitten by a Lizard (1594-1596)
2/ The tension of the hands in this painting
3/ The pallor of the skin of Sick Bacchus (1593-1594)
4/ The colour of the bunch of grapes in the same painting
5/ The critical distance between the two apricots and the bowed sash resting on the pediment in the same painting
6/ The youthful innocence of the dupe in The Cardsharps (c. 1595)
7/ The deep, foreboding shadows under the eyes of Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1604-1605)
8/ The astonishingly beautiful skin tones in Gerrit van Honthorst’s Saint Sebastian (c. 1623) and how the blood from the leg wound at left runs in two directions: one direction when Saint Sebastian was standing up, one when he has slumped down. Inspired.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Kimbell Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the artwork in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Not since Michelangelo or Raphael had one artist affected so many of his contemporaries and so irrevocably changed the course of European painting. Caravaggio created a new kind of art: dramatic, deeply emotional, grounded in the vivid details of everyday life, and overwhelmingly human. He used live models, sometimes prostitutes and the very poor, who posed in the studio for his powerful religious scenes as if the events were happening on the streets of Rome. Breaking the boundaries between art and life, he overturned the artistic conventions of the day. He played down details of the setting of a scene, focused on the expressive human figure, and invented a brand of stark realism that shocked many of his patrons.”
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Saint Francis in Ecstasy c. 1594-1595 Oil on canvas Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) The Gypsy Fortune Teller c. 1595 Oil on canvas 45 1/4 x 59 in. (115 x 150cm) Pinacoteca Capitolina, Musei Capitolini, Rome Public domain
One of the most influential figures in the history of art, Caravaggio (1571-1610) overturned the artistic conventions of the day and created stunningly dramatic paintings, both sacred and secular. This ambitious exhibition explores the profound impact of his work on the wide range of painters of Italian, French, Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish origin who resided in Rome. Arranged by theme, it includes over 50 paintings, with Caravaggio’s compelling images juxtaposed with those he inspired. This is the second largest display of his paintings in North America and only the third Caravaggio exhibition to be held in the United States.
Music and Youth
Many of Caravaggio’s early paintings feature handsome youths, whether singly or in groups. He seems to have used the same favorite models repeatedly – and sometimes his own features, which a contemporary tells us he studied in a mirror. The origins of these novel paintings lay in the types of pictures – portraits, still lifes, and allegories – that were painted in a realistic style in the artist’s native Lombardy, in the north of Italy, although he blurred the boundaries between genres to suggest real-life scenes. Caravaggio’s paintings of musicians would have appealed to Roman collectors who were passionate patrons of music, and likely were created to decorate rooms used for performances. They have a dreamy, slightly melancholy air. If the songs are about love, as we can assume they are, they are surely about the painful side of love rather than its joys. Caravaggio’s early paintings of youths are usually scenes of sensual pleasure but with a built-in warning against indulgence, as when a youth has his finger bitten by a lizard lurking in some fruit. He brings us close to his figures, often having them make eye contact with us, and includes lovingly observed still-life details that enhance the naturalism and immediacy of the scene. Even when there is a visitation from the beyond, like the winged Cupid in The Musicians, he treats this in a matter-of-fact way, attentive always to breaking down the boundaries between the painted world and our own. Caravaggio’s musical paintings caught on throughout Europe in the work of his followers, who brought their own innovations to the genre.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) The Musicians c. 1595 Oil on canvas 36 1/4 x 46 5/8 in (92.1 x 118.4cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1952
In this scene, Caravaggio shows some young musicians preparing for a concert. We are brought very close to the figures, as if we share the same space. Caravaggio breaks down the boundaries between art and life, and our reality and the painted world become entwined. The instruments are modern, but the musicians wear antique-inspired dress. The lute player tunes his instrument, and the horn player (possibly a self-portrait) catches our gaze. Another youth studies the musical score; it is no longer legible, but doubtless featured love madrigals. The winged Cupid with a quiver of arrows who is handling some grapes makes explicit the bond between music and love. Wine, like music, makes the spirits light. This painting belonged to Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who hosted concerts at his palace and invited musicians to live in his household, along with artists like Caravaggio.
Theodoor Rombouts (Flemish, 1597-1637) A Lute Player c. 1620 Oil on canvas 43 7/8 x 39 1/4 in (111.1 x 99.7cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art. John G. Johnson Collection, 1917
Caravaggio’s paintings of musicians inspired Rombouts’s depiction of a musician tuning his lute. His intense expression suggests that he is both listening to the sound and sizing up the viewer, his audience. The vividly described carpet and still-life objects on the table recall Caravaggio’s similar close-up presentations. However, the colourful treatment of the costume and the robust delineation of the objects place Rombouts’s work within traditions of Flemish and Dutch painting. The still life, like ephemeral music, serves to remind us of the pleasures of life, but also that pleasure is fleeting. The artist also alludes to the five senses: hearing (the lute), taste (the tankard), smell (the pipe), sight (the musical scores), and touch (the knife).
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Boy Bitten by a Lizard 1594-1596 Oil on canvas 25 5/8 x 20 1/2 in (65 x 52cm) Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell’Arte Roberto Longhi, Florence
One of Caravaggio’s biographers wrote that “he also painted a boy bitten by a lizard emerging from flowers and fruits; you could almost hear the boy scream, and it was done meticulously.” The picture has suggested various interpretations. As an allegory of touch, it provides the basis for a study of how emotion is expressed physically, and arguably Caravaggio alludes to all the five senses (flowers as smell and so on). With the still life of fruits and roses, common emblems of love, he invokes age-old adages – pain can follow pleasure, and love is a rose with thorns that prick. Poets from Petrarch onward played on the similarity of the Italian words for “love” and “bitter” – amore and amaro – to which Caravaggio adds ramarro (lizard), ingeniously enlarging the joke.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Sick Bacchus 1593-1594 Oil on canvas Galleria Borghese, Rome
Cardsharps and Fortune Tellers
The young Caravaggio introduced another new kind of painting to the Roman art world with his scenes from the seamy side of life, its frauds and ruses. He painted these works on a large scale with half-length figures, and they were among his most widely imitated creations. His followers played countless variations on the same themes, trying various levels of subtlety and buffoonery in the humour and facial expressions. These highly animated compositions conjure up an underworld of wily cardsharps, soldiers of fortune, foolish dupes, sensuous and deceitful gypsy women, pickpockets, and thugs. They are based partly on everyday observations in the streets, partly on the stock characters and improvised comedies of the commedia dell’arte, partly on sheer fantasy. In such works, Caravaggio and his followers developed ingenious ways of involving us in the action. We read these amusingly moralising pictures through gestures and expressions – but to unravel the trickery takes time. Despite being frozen in a static image, the story seems to unfold before our eyes like one of the popular plays that were its inspiration. The artist extends the theme of deception by painting his subjects with such a high level of naturalism that the viewer is duped and astounded by his artistry.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) The Cardsharps c. 1595 Oil on canvas 37 1/8 x 51 5/8 in (94.2 x 130.9cm) Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
The players are engaged in a game of primero, a forerunner of poker. Engrossed in his cards, the dupe is unaware that the older cardsharp signals his accomplice, who reaches to pull a hidden card from his breeches. The fingertips of the cheat’s gloved hand are exposed to better feel marked cards. According to an early biographer, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, a great patron of the arts, took the young Caravaggio into his household soon after purchasing this picture. It hung along with The Gypsy Fortune Teller in his palace. Together they would surely have reminded the cardinal and his guests of the story of the prodigal son, warning about the perils of greed and fraud. Caravaggio has treated this subject not as a caricature of vice but in a fresh way, in which the interaction of gesture and glance evokes the drama of deception and lost innocence in the most human of terms. He structures the picture to allow us to witness everything, implicating us in the trickery.
Saints
Caravaggio grounded his saints in everyday reality, indicating their spiritual states by means of natural phenomena, especially light. In his early painting of Saint Francis, he shows the saint’s ecstasy – his mystic identification with Christ – by directing a strong light upon his figure and the consoling angel. God’s grace is signalled by light in other images of the saints, such as the scene of Mary Magdalene’s conversion from her former life of sin. In paintings of Saints Matthew and Jerome in their studies, much emulated in Caravaggio’s circle, light is a metaphor of divine inspiration. Generally the saints seem to be emerging from darkness into light, which adds drama, symbolism, and also a sense of mass – as if they were sculpted, not merely painted. In a break from Roman and Florentine traditions, Caravaggio rejected the practice of refining his composition through drawings before he began to paint and instead worked directly from a live model in the studio, preserving that model’s particular appearance, never making the features or body conform to an ideal of beauty. The effect, central to Caravaggio’s art and that of many of his followers, was startling. At this time, many people believed that the painting of sacred personages such as saints called for a special, elevated style that set them apart from the mundane reality of the here and now. Caravaggio’s radical departure from this principle brought him much harsh criticism. He was accused of merely copying and so failing to capture a higher truth. But others recognised in his work a new kind of religious art that directly engaged the faithful and made old subjects new and alive.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness 1604-1605 Oil on canvas 68 x 52 in (172.7 x 132.1cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase William Rockhill Nelson Trust
Caravaggio’s practice of painting a live model in his studio brings this young, brooding saint to life – as if his image were inhabited by the model’s being. Ottavio Costa, a Roman banker, commissioned this painting for a chapel on a pilgrimage route in the countryside outside of Genoa, where his family had its origins. We can imagine what a powerful experience it would have been to encounter the image of the scarlet-robed saint there, dramatically emerging from the shadows into a strong light. When Caravaggio delivered the painting, Costa decided to keep it and placed a copy in the chapel. But even the copy proved inspiring. An early guide described how it “moves not only the members of the brotherhood but also visitors to penitence.”
Gerrit van Honthorst (Dutch, 1592-1656) Saint Sebastian c. 1623 Oil on canvas The National Gallery, London
The Sacred Narrative
Caravaggio was a masterful storyteller who could bring home the drama and significance of a biblical event with tremendous power. In his scenes from the Old and New Testaments, he created a new kind of painting – dramatic, even theatrical, yet grounded in the observation of ordinary reality – and it proved infectious among his contemporaries in Rome. His approach was to make the scene clear and simple, with the main actors in the drama seen close-up and caught in mid-action at a decisive moment, embodying the whole meaning of the event. He played down the setting, sometimes to the point that it is a mere pool of darkness from which the figures emerge. It was the actions and states of mind of the characters in the story that counted, and Caravaggio presented these with sometimes shocking directness and intensity, breaking all the rules of decorum that restrained more conventional painters. He mastered the art of concealing art, re-creating a scene with such a flavour of reality that it comes across as an eyewitness account. It was his power to draw viewers into the emotion and importance of a scene that made his work an essential object of study, even for such an independent genius as the great Peter Paul Rubens.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Martha and Mary Magdalene c. 1598 Oil and tempera on canvas 38 1/2 x 52 1/4 in (97.8 x 132.7cm) Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of the Kresge Foundation and Mrs. Edsel B. Ford
Martha’s expressive hands, intensely illuminated, underscore her attempt to convert her sister Mary Magdalene from a life of worldly pleasures to one of spirituality. Several details recall Mary’s life of indulgence: the elegant dress, the ivory comb, the alabaster cosmetic jar. The mirror, a powerful symbol of vanity, becomes here an instrument reflecting the divine light that is penetrating Mary’s soul. Martha’s words seem to have been convincing, and her open mouth signals her amazement as she witnesses Mary’s transformation. The orange blossom in Mary’s right hand and the ring on her left indicate her new status as the blessed bride of Christ.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Sacrifice of Isaac 1602-1603 Oil on canvas 41 x 53 1/8 in (104 x 135cm) Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Orazio Gentileschi (Italian, 1563-1639) Saint Francis in Ecstasy c. 1607 Oil on canvas 49 5/8 x 38 5/8 in. (126 x 98 cm) Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577-1640) The Entombment c. 1612-1614 Oil on panel 34 3/4 x 26 1/8 in. (88.3 x 66.5 cm) National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Purchased 1956 Public domain
Bartolomeo Manfredi (Italian, 1582-1622) David and Goliath (The Triumph of David) c. 1615 Oil on canvas 50 3/8 x 38 1/4 in. (128 x 97cm) Musée du Louvre, Paris Acquired in 1990
Jusepe de Ribera (Spanish, 1591-1652) Saints Peter and Paul c. 1616 Oil on canvas 49 5/8 x 44 1/8 in. (126 x 112cm) Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg Public domain
Valentin de Boulogne (French, 1591-1632) Fortune Teller with Soldiers c. 1620 Oil on canvas 58 7/8 x 93 7/8 in. (149.5 x 238.5cm) Toledo Museum of Art Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment. Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey Public domain
Valentin de Boulogne (French, 1591-1632) David with the Head of Goliath and Two Soldiers 1620-1622 Oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid Public domain
Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (Italian, 1587-1625) The Sorrows of Aminta c. 1625 Oil on canvas 39 3/8 x 47 1/4 in. (100 x 120cm) Musée du Louvre, Paris Gift of Paul Jamot, 1937 Public domain
Kimbell Art Museum 3333 Camp Bowie Boulevard, Fort Worth, TX 76107
Many thankx to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Since the early 1970s Haacke has taken on the intertwined political and corporate forces that use cultural patronage as a smokescreen to advance interests that are often antithetical to the vitality of free speech and expression in democracies. Haacke made this work just as the strategy of appropriation – lifting an image out of its original context and re-presenting it in critical fashion – began to make waves in the New York art world of the late 1970s. Like all effective appropriation, it exposes a prior instance of borrowing – in this case, how the investment firm Paine Webber used a documentary photograph to give its annual report the veneer of social concern. The artist then pointedly contrasted it with an image from the same annual report of a beaming trio of executives in a painting-lined gallery. As a counterpoint to the protestor’s signboard, Haacke dropped in text from a different Paine Webber ad campaign to show on whose backs the “risk management” is taking place – a biting indictment, the relevance of which has only increased since the recent economic downturn.
Wall’s staged tableaux straddle the worlds of the museum and the street. His subjects are scenes of urban and suburban disarray that he witnessed firsthand – the kinds of things anyone might see while wandering around a city and its outskirts. Working like a movie director, he restages the scene using nonprofessionals as actors and presents his photographs as colour transparencies in light boxes such as those of large-scale public advertisements found at airports and bus stops. The scale and ambition of his pictures – scenes of everyday life shot through with larger intimations of political struggle – equally evoke the Salon paintings of nineteenth century French painters such as Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, which were themselves brazen combinations of canonical and contemporary subjects.
The Storyteller is set in a barren, leftover slice of land next to a highway overpass in Vancouver, where the artist lives. Various groupings of modern urban castaways – perhaps descendants of the Native Americans who occupied the land before the arrival of Europeans – are dispersed around the hillside, a mini-catalogue of art-historical reference. Like the upside-down, half-submerged figure of Icarus in the background of Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the woman speaking and gesticulating to the two men listening at the lower left becomes the key to unifying the fractured and alienating environment from which Wall’s picture is constructed.
The early 1990s marked the last moment when a wide swath of women artists responded to the sexism they saw as pervasive in the culture – from the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith to the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Clarence Thomas. A pioneer of set-up photography, Simmons dramatically expanded the scale of her constructed tableaux for a series of spotlighted puppet-like objects perched atop doll legs: revolvers, houses, cameras, and cakes. This armed and dangerous example refers to the old-movie cliché where a man carrying a gun is shown in shadow profile. Here, Simmons offers instead the death-dealing seductress – also familiar from film noir – in monumental miniature, a doll capable of turning on its master at a moment’s notice.
In the middle of the 1990’s, diCorcia gained international recognition for his large color photographs of street scenes and passersby. For an earlier series, he traveled to Los Angeles on a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and worked on a part of Santa Monica Boulevard frequented by male prostitutes and drug addicts. For each picture he made there, he carefully composed his setting, then asked young men to pose for him, giving them a small fee (from twenty to fifty dollars) that was negotiated each time.
At that time, NEA support of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe was highly controversial, and diCorcia had to sign a document stating that he would not produce any “obscene” work while on his fellowship. He set up the whole negotiating procedure as a symbolic way of sharing his grant with people whose behavior would surely have been condemned by the censors. The titles always mention the name, the age and the origin of the model, as well as the amount paid. The staged situation interacts with the raw reality of the exchange of money, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, yet preserving an authentic emotional charge.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection from March 22, 2011, through January 2, 2012, in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition features 25 photographs dating from 1979 to the present by 15 contemporary artists.
The exhibition’s title, After the Gold Rush, is taken from a classic 1970 song by Neil Young, whose verses contrast a romanticised past with a present of squandered plenty and an uncertain future. Inspired by the recent political and economic upheavals in America and abroad, this selection juxtaposes new photographs that take the long view of the world’s current condition with prescient works from the 1980s and 1990s that remain startlingly relevant today.
This is the first occasion for the Museum to present recently acquired works by: Gretchen Bender, James Casebere, Moyra Davey, Katy Grannan, Hans Haacke, An-My Lê, Curtis Mann, Trevor Paglen, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Also featured are photographs by: Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Robert Gober, Adrian Piper, Laurie Simmons, Jeff Wall, and Christopher Williams.
After the Gold Rush begins with Hans Haacke’s Thank You, Paine Webber (1979) – the first work by this legendary provocateur of Conceptual art to enter the Metropolitan’s collection. Haacke’s biting photo-diptych is so pertinent to the recent economic downturn that it seems as if it could have been made yesterday. In this work, the artist appropriated images from the investment firm’s annual report to convey his viewpoint that big business provides a veneer of social concern to mask the brutal effects of the “risk management” they offer their clients.
Other works in After the Gold Rush use varying degrees of artifice and photographic realism to reflect on marginalised and repressed voices. Measuring over 14 feet long and presented as a backlit transparency in a light box, The Storyteller (1986) is Jeff Wall’s signature image and is typical of his method. Working from memory, the artist uses nonprofessional actors and real locations to meticulously restage a scene of urban blight that he witnessed in his native Vancouver. Wall plays this photographic verisimilitude against compositions and figural poses indebted to French painters such as Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and Georges Seurat. A comparison of Wall’s Storyteller with Courbet’s Young Ladies of the Village (1852), on view in the Museum’s galleries for Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture, reveals parallels: in both, a keenly observed moment of telling social interaction taking place on a sloping landscape. Each artist has combined a daringly modern subject with references to earlier art.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia is another key figure in the development of staged photography. In the early 1990s, the artist created a series of works in response to the political attacks on gays and federal funding of the arts in the U.S. DiCorcia hired male hustlers to pose for their portraits out on the streets – and paid them with grant money he received from the National Endowment for the Arts. At the same moment, a wide swath of women artists addressed issues of sexism and racism: examples of this politically pointed art are represented by Laurie Simmons’ Walking Gun (1991) – a spotlighted puppet of doll legs and a revolver that seems capable of turning on its master at a moment’s notice – and Adrian Piper’s 1992 work Decide Who You Are #24 (A Moving Target), which includes a childhood image of Anita Hill as part of a blistering meditation in word and image on racial politics. Such works are missives from a time not so long ago when artists regularly commented on present-day politics and culture through their art. (Because of light sensitivity, this work by Adrian Piper will be on view through Sunday, September 26.)
Although the recently made photographs in After the Gold Rush seem at first glance to be less overtly political than their predecessors, they nevertheless address vital issues about contemporary society. James Casebere’s epic vision of America, Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1, (2009), is based on a tabletop model that the artist spent 18 months building. The photograph shows a suburban subdivision of the kind recently ravaged by the foreclosure crisis, and its sunny sense of “Morning in America” comments ironically on the country’s future prospects. An-My Lê’s similarly sweeping five-part photographic piece Suez Canal Transit, USS Dwight Eisenhower, Egypt (2009) will also be featured. Lê is interested in the way in which U.S. armed forces come into contact with the rest of the world. This major new work – which seems at first to be a straightforward panorama of military might overseas – subtly undercuts the viewer’s expectations to question the current position of the U.S. on the global stage.
Trevor Paglen is a young artist whose works plot the “black world” of covert military operations, from telephoto images of predator drones taken from miles away, to software that follows planes used for the extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists. Paglen’s 2008 photograph KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite; USA 186) shows the ghostly white streak of an American reconnaissance satellite bisecting star trails above Yosemite’s Half Dome, a rock formation photographed in the 1860s by artists including Carleton Watkins. To make these and other photographs, Paglen collaborated with amateur astronomers who were originally trained by the U.S. government to look out for Soviet satellites during the Cold War, but turned their attention to American surveillance in recent years.
The final piece in After the Gold Rush is a suite of five recently acquired photographs from 2007-2009 by the celebrated photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. The grouping shifts focus from macro to micro: from expansive aerial views of Shanghai and Dubai to close ups that suggest the smallest increments of sustenance and regeneration. Taken together, they evoke the interconnectedness of all things and a grounding of the political in the personal as a way for an engaged yet expressive art.
Press release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
It was in 1990 – at the height of a worldwide economic recession that also marked the end of the 1980s art bubble – that Davey began photographing the scratched, worn-away surfaces of pennies, the most devalued and lowest form of currency. Her accumulation of one hundred micro-photographic specimens is constructed around the readymade patterns of decay that countless anonymous owners have unconsciously wrought upon their surfaces; their base materiality is incisively contrasted with the most elevated of national symbols. As with all of Davey’s work, there is a melancholic sense of loss that connects subject and form: like pennies, photographs are objects of exchange imprinted by contact with the world around them.
Piper is an artist and a philosophy professor who works in a variety of media, including performance, video, sound pieces, photography, drawing, and writing. She often explores issues of autobiography, racism, and stereotyping. For her 1992 series Decide Who You Are, the artist used a triptych format in which a different appropriated photograph is flanked by an image of the “three wise monkeys” maxim advocating “See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil” at left, and at right a photograph of a young girl who, though not identified, is Anita Hill – who had recently been thrust into the spotlight for accusing then-nominee for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. The verse in the left panel changes in each individual work in the series, while that on the right is unchanging – what the artist once described as “a comprehensive, textbook compendium of commonly invoked litanies of denial and intimidation, from the bland to the vaguely menacing” and “a must for novices and aspiring leaders in business, politics, and culture.”
Robert Gober works primarily in sculpture, installations, and photography. He is perhaps best known for his delicate, ghostly hand crafted versions of domestic fixtures, such as drains, beds, doors, and sinks. Through these uncanny replicas, Gober invests mass produced objects with personal meaning – the private, unruly desires and memories of the individual. This image appeared in the book (his first in the genre) that Gober created to accompany his installation representing the United States at the 2000 Venice Biennale. In it, the artist interweaves his own journey to New York in 1978 as a young gay man with the toxic fallout of homophobic recrimination that accompanied the murder of the Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard twenty years later.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Robert Gober superimposes a man’s hand between two newspaper articles, clipped neatly and placed on a shell-strewn beach. Below his hand, the article refers to Matthew Shepard’s death. Above it, a letter to the editor argues that “Orthodox Jews, conservative Christians and others have a right to speak out against homosexuality without being placed in the category of thuggery.” While the piece obviously precedes Jonathan Rauch’s provocative and important piece in the December issue of the Advocate arguing that gay people should tolerate a certain amount of anti-gay sentiment as a sign that they’re legally and socially secure enough to practice tolerance, it’s a useful encapsulation of the dilemma behind that argument. It’s hard to cast off past threats if you’re not entirely sure they’re past.
Trained as a geographer, Paglen is an artist who plots the topography of a new global and celestial space – the “black world” of covert military operations. Examples of his subjects include the supposed sites used for the extraordinary rendition of prisoners, which he shoots with specially designed cameras from up to forty miles away, and the network of private planes used to transport them under the radar. This image shows the ghostly white streak of an American reconnaissance satellite bisecting star trails above Yosemite’s Half Dome, a rock formation photographed in the 1860s by the photographer Carleton Watkins when the West was still being explored. In order to track such spacecraft, Paglen uses a database created by amateur astronomers who were trained by the U.S. government to search the skies for Soviet sputniks but continued their hobby after the end of the Cold War by tracking our own satellites. In this work, the artist brings into one composition two historically disparate moments in geographic and celestial colonisation.
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.
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Burning oil sludge, north of Denver, Colorado 1973-1974 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) North of Keota, Colorado 1973 printed 1989
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Mobile home park, north edge of Denver, Colorado 1973-1974 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is the first U.S. venue for Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs. The exhibition features more than 200 black-and-white photos spanning Adams’s 45-year career, showcasing the artistic legacy of the American photographer and his longstanding engagement with the contemporary Western landscape. Adams lived and worked in Colorado for nearly 30 years. Many of his most acclaimed images were taken in the Rocky Mountain region and will strike a familiar chord with visitors. The exhibition, organised by the Yale University Art Gallery, will be on view September 25, 2011 – January 1, 2012 in the museum’s Gallagher Family Gallery.
“We’re excited to host the work of one of the foremost photographers of our time,” said Eric Paddock, the DAM’s curator of photography. “Robert Adams’s striking yet quiet photos provoke thought about current economic, political and environmental issues Westerners confront every day. We think visitors will see something very familiar in his work.”
Since becoming a photographer in the mid-1960s, Adams has been widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential chroniclers of the American West. Adams’s photographs and writing insist that the realities of everyday landscapes are as beautiful as idealised scenes from nature. They ask questions about the ways people change and interact with nature, and what it means to live simply and quietly in today’s world. This commitment earned Adams prominence in photography’s “New Topographics” movement of the late 20th century and lends authority to his ongoing work. His photographs of Colorado suburban growth and clear cut forests in the Pacific Northwest, for example, express shock at mainstream social and economic values.
“The Denver Art Museum is pleased to be the first U.S. venue for The Place We Live, showcasing our continued commitment to our photography program,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the DAM. “Colorado has a rich photography history and we’re excited to have visitors engage with these artworks that provide a narrative to the American experience and take a fresh look at their surroundings.”
Featuring more than 200 gelatin silver prints, The Place We Live weaves together four decades of Adam’s work into a cohesive, epic narrative of American experience in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Each of the photographer’s major projects is represented, from early pictures of quiet buildings and monuments erected by prior settlers of his native Colorado to his most recent images of forests and migratory birds in the Pacific Northwest.
Biography
Born in Orange, N.J., in 1937, Robert Adams moved with his family from Madison, Wis., to Denver, Colo., at the age of 15. He earned a doctorate degree from the University of Southern California and, intent on pursuing an academic career, returned to Colorado in 1962 as an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. Disturbed by the rapid transformation of the Colorado Springs and Denver areas, Adams began photographing a landscape transformed by tract housing, highways, strip malls and gas stations. “The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid and what we could not buy,” Adams wrote. “They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love.” Since 1997, he has lived and worked in Oregon.”
Press release from The Denver Art Museum
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Lakewood, Colorado 1968-1971 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) In a New Subdivision, Colorado Springs, Colorado 1969 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Frame for a Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado 1969 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, Colorado 1969 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Denver, Colorado c. 1970 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Longmont, Colorado 1973-1974, printed 2007 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Eden, Colorado 1968 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Colorado Springs, Colorado 1968 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Edge of San Timoteo Canyon, looking toward Los Angeles, Redlands, California 1978 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Quarried Mesa Top, Pueblo County, Colorado 1978 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Longmont, Colorado 1979, printed 1985 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Santa Ana Wash, Redlands, California 1983, printed 1991 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Sitka spruce, Cape Blanco State Park, Curry County, Oregon 1999-2000 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
The Denver Art Museum Civic Center Cultural Complex Located on 13th Avenue between Broadway and Bannock in downtown Denver
Here’s my pick of the nine best exhibitions in Melbourne (with excursions to Bendigo and Hobart thrown in) that appeared on the Art Blart art and cultural archive in 2011. Enjoy!
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (calf carcass in tree) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23.0 cm x 23.0cm
This was a superb exhibition of 61 black and white photographs by Sidney Nolan. The photographs were shot using a medium format camera and are printed in square format from the original 1952 negatives.
The work itself was a joy to behold. The photographs hung together like a symphony, rising and falling, with shape emphasising aspects of form. The images flowed from one to another. The formal composition of the mummified carcasses was exemplary, the resurrected animals (a horse, for example, propped up on a fifth leg) and emaciated corpses like contemporary sculpture. The handling of the tenuous aspects of human existence in this uniquely Australian landscape was also a joy to behold. Through an intimate understanding of how to tension the space between objects within the frame Nolan’s seemingly simple but complex photographs of the landscape are previsualised by the artist in the mind’s eye before he even puts the camera to his face.
2/ Bill Henson at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, March – April 2011
This was an exquisite exhibition by one of Australia’s preeminent artists. Like Glenn Gould playing a Bach fugue, Bill Henson is grand master in the performance of narrative, structure, composition, light and atmosphere. The exhibition featured thirteen large colour photographs printed on lustre paper (twelve horizontal and one vertical) – nine figurative of adolescent females, two of crowd scenes in front of Rembrandt paintings in The Hermitage, St. Petersburg (including the stunning photograph that features The return of the prodigal son c. 1662 in the background, see below) and two landscapes taken off the coast of Italy. What a journey this exhibition took you on!
Henson’s photographs have been said by many to be haunting but his images are more haunted than haunting. There is an indescribable element to them (be it the pain of personal suffering, the longing for release, the yearning for lost youth or an understanding of the deprecations of age), a mesmeric quality that is not easily forgotten. The photographs form a kind of afterimage that burns into your consciousness long after the exposure to the original image has ceased. Haunted or haunting they are unforgettable.
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 2009/10 CL SH767 N17B Archival inkjet pigment print 127 x 180cm Edition of 5
3/ Networks (cells & silos) at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Caulfield, February – April 2011
This was a vibrant and eclectic exhibition at MUMA, one of the best this year in Melbourne. The curator Geraldine Barlow gathered together some impressive, engaging works that were set off to good effect in the new gallery spaces. I spent a long and happy time wandering around the exhibition and came away visually satiated and intellectually stimulated. The exhibition explored “the connections between artistic representation of networks; patterns and structures found in nature; and the rapidly evolving field of network science, communications and human relations.”
Installation photograph of one of the galleries in the exhibition NETWORKS (cells & silos) at the newly opened Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) with Nick Mangan’s Colony (2005) in the foreground
This was a stupendous exhibition by Monika Tichacek, at Karen Woodbury Gallery. One of the highlights of the year, this was a definite must see!
The work was glorious in it’s detail, a sensual and visual delight (make sure you click on the photographs to see the close up of the work!). The riotous, bacchanalian density of the work was balanced by a lyrical intimacy, the work exploring the life cycle and our relationship to the world in gouache, pencil & watercolour. Tichacek’s vibrant pink birds, small bugs, flowers and leaves have absolutely delicious colours. The layered and overlaid compositions show complete control by the artist: mottled, blotted, bark-like wings of butterflies meld into trees in a delicate metamorphosis; insects are blurred becoming one with the structure of flowers in a controlled effusion of life.
Monika Tichacek (Australian born Switzerland, b. 1975) To all my relations (detail) 2011
This was a fabulous survey exhibition of the great artists of 20th century American photography, a rare chance in Australia to see such a large selection of vintage prints from some of the masters of photography. If you had a real interest in the history of photography then you hopefully saw this exhibition, showing as it is just a short hour and a half drive (or train ride) from Melbourne at Bendigo Art Gallery.
6/ Time Machine: Sue Ford at Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Victoria, April – June 2011
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) Self-portrait 1976 1976 From the series Self-portrait with camera (1960-2006) Selenium toned gelatin silver print, printed 2011 24 x 18cm Courtesy Sue Ford Archive
This beautifully hung exhibition flowed like music, interweaving up and down, the photographs framed in thin, black wood frames. It featured examples of Ford’s black and white fashion and street photography; a selection of work from the famous black and white Time series (being bought for their collection by the Art Gallery of New South Wales); a selection of Photographs of Women – modern prints from the Sue Ford archive that are wonderfully composed photographs with deep blacks that portray strong, independent, vulnerable, joyous women (see last four photographs below); and the most interesting work in the exhibition, the posthumous new series Self-portrait with camera (1960-2006) that evidence, through a 47 part investigation using colour prints from Polaroids, silver gelatin prints printed by the artist, prints made from original negatives and prints from scanned images where there was no negative available, a self-portrait of the artist in the process of ageing.
Whether looking down, looking toward or looking inward these fantastic photographs show a strong, independent women with a vital mind, an élan vital, a critical self-organisation and an understanding of the morphogenesis of things that will engage us for years to come. Essential looking.
My analogy: you are standing in the half-dark, your chest open, squeezing the beating heart with blood coursing between your fingers while the other hand is up your backside playing with your prostrate gland. I think ringmeister David Walsh would approve. My best friends analogy: a cross between a car park, night club, sex sauna and art gallery.
Weeks later I am still thinking about the wonderful immersive, sensory experience that is MONA. Peter Timms in an insightful article in Meanjin calls it a post-Google Wunderkammer, or wonder chest. It can be seen as a mirabilia – a non-historic installation designed primarily to delight, surprise and in this case shock. The body, sex, death and mortality are hot topics in the cultural arena and Walsh’s collection covers all bases. The collection and its display are variously hedonistic, voyeuristic, narcissistic, fetishistic pieces of theatre subsumed within the body of the spectacular museum architecture …
Spectatorship and their attendant erotics has MONA as a form of fetishistic cinema. It is as if what Barthes calls “the eroticism of place” were a modern equivalent of the eighteenth century genius loci, the “genius of the place.” The place is spectacular, the private collection writ large as public institution, the symbolic power of the institution masked through its edifice. The art become autonomous, cut free from its cultural associations, transnational, globalised, experienced through kinaesthetic means; the viewer meandering through the galleries, the anti-museum, as an international flaneur. Go. Experience!
Corten Stairwell & Surrounding Artworks February 2011 Museum of Old and New Art – interior Photo credit: MONA/Leigh Carmichael Image Courtesy of MONA Museum of Old and New Art
John Bodin (Australian) I Was Far Away From Home 2009 Type C print on metallic paper 80 x 110cm
The photographs become the surface of the body, stitched together with lines, markers pointing the way – they are encounters with the things that we see before us but also the things that we carry inside of us. It is the interchange between these two things, how one modulates and informs the other. It is this engagement that holds our attention: the dappled light, ambiguity, unevenness, the winding path that floats and bobs before our eyes looking back at us, as we observe and are observed by the body of these landscapes.
One of the fundamental qualities of the photographs is that they escape our attempts to rationalise them and make them part of our understanding of the world, to quantify our existence in terms of materiality. I have an intimate feeling with regard to these sites of engagement. They are both once familiar and unfamiliar to us; they possess a sense of nowhereness. A sense of groundlessness and groundedness. A collapsing of near and far, looking down, looking along, a collapsing of the constructed world.
Like the road in these photographs there is no self just an infinite time that has no beginning and no end. The time before my birth, the time after my death. We are just in the world, just being somewhere. Life is just a temporary structure on the road from order to disorder. “The road is life,” writes Jack Kerouac in On the Road.
Simply put, this was one of the best exhibitions I saw in Melbourne this year.
I had a spiritual experience with this work for the paintings promote in the human a state of grace. The non-material, the unconceptualisable, things which are outside all possibility of time and space are made visible. This happens very rarely but when it does you remember, eternally, the time and space of occurrence. I hope you had the same experience.
Curated by Naomi Cass as part of the Melbourne Festival, this was a brilliant exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne. The exhibition explored, “the fraught relationship between the camera and the subject: where the image is stolen, candid or where the unspoken contract between photographer and subject is broken in some way – sometimes to make art, sometimes to do something malevolent.” It examined the promiscuity of gazes in public / private space specifically looking at surveillance, voyeurism, desire, scopophilia, secret photography and self-reflexivity. It investigated the camera and its moral and physical relationship to the unsuspecting subject.
This is one of the best exhibitions this year in Melbourne bar none. Edgy and eclectic the work resonates with the viewer in these days of uncertainty: THIS should have been the Winter Masterpieces exhibition!
The title of the exhibition, The mad square (Der tolle Platz) is taken from Felix Nussbaum’s 1931 painting of the same name where “the ‘mad square’ is both a physical place – the city, represented in so many works in the exhibition, and a reference to the state of turbulence and tension that characterises the period.”The exhibition showcases how artists responded to modern life in Germany in the interwar years, years that were full of murder and mayhem, putsch, revolution, rampant inflation, starvation, the Great Depression and the rise of National Socialism. Portrayed is the dystopian, dark side of modernity (where people are the victims of a morally bankrupt society) as opposed to the utopian avant-garde (the prosperous, the wealthy), where new alliances emerge between art and politics, technology and the mass media. Featuring furniture, decorative arts, painting, sculpture, collage and photography in the sections World War 1 and the Revolution, Dada, Bauhaus, Constructivism and the Machine Aesthetic, Metropolis, New Objectivity and Power and Degenerate Art, it is the collages and photographs that are the strongest elements of the exhibition, particularly the photographs. What a joy they are to see.
Albert Renger-Patzsch (American born Hungary, 1895-1946) Harbour with crane c. 1927 Gelatin silver photograph Printed image 22.7 h x 16.8 w cm Purchased 1983 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Irene Bayer (American, 1898-1991) No title (Man on stage) c. 1927 Gelatin silver photograph Printed image 10.6 h x 7.6 w cm Purchased 1983 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
This is one of the best exhibitions this year in Melbourne bar none. Edgy and eclectic the work resonates with the viewer in these days of uncertainty: THIS should have been the Winter Masterpieces exhibition!
The title of the exhibition, The mad square (Der tolle Platz) is taken from Felix Nussbaum’s 1931 painting of the same name where “the ‘mad square’ is both a physical place – the city, represented in so many works in the exhibition, and a reference to the state of turbulence and tension that characterises the period.” The exhibition showcases how artists responded to modern life in Germany in the interwar years, years that were full of murder and mayhem, putsch, revolution, rampant inflation, starvation, the Great Depression and the rise of National Socialism. Portrayed is the dystopian, dark side of modernity (where people are the victims of a morally bankrupt society) as opposed to the utopian avant-garde (the prosperous, the wealthy), where new alliances emerge between art and politics, technology and the mass media. Featuring furniture, decorative arts, painting, sculpture, collage and photography in the sections World War 1 and the Revolution, Dada, Bauhaus, Constructivism and the Machine Aesthetic, Metropolis, New Objectivity and Power and Degenerate Art, it is the collages and photographs that are the strongest elements of the exhibition, particularly the photographs. What a joy they are to see.
There is a small 2″ x 3″ contact print portrait of Hanna Höch by Richard Kauffmann, Penetrate yourself or: I embrace myself (1922) that is an absolute knockout. Höch is portrayed as the ‘new women’ with short bobbed hair and loose modern dress, her self-image emphasised through a double exposure that fragments her face and multiplies her hands, set against a contextless background. The ‘new women’ fragmented and broken apart (still unsure of herself?). The photograph is so small and intense it takes your breath away. Similarly, there is the small, intimate photograph No title (Man on Stage) (c. 1927) by Irene Bayer (see above) that captures performance as ‘total art’, a combination of visual arts, dance, music, architecture and costume design. In contrast is a large 16 x 20″ photograph of the Bauhaus balconies (1926) by László Moholy-Nagy (see below) where the whites are so creamy, the perspective so magnificent.
No title (Metalltanz) (c. 1928-1929) by T. Lux Feinenger, a photographer that I do not know well, is an exceptional photograph and print. Again small, this time dark and intense, the image features man as dancer performing gymnastics in front of reflective, metal sculptures. The metal becomes an active participant in the Metalltanz or ‘Dance in metal’ because of its reflective qualities. The print, from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles is luminous. In fact all the prints from the Getty in this exhibition are of the most outstanding quality, a highlight of the exhibition for me. Another print from the Getty that features metal and performance is Untitled(Spiral Costume, from the Triadic Ballet) by T Grill c. 1926-1927 (see below) where the spiral costume becomes an extension of the body, highlighting its form. Also highlighting form, objectivity and detachment is a wonderful 3 x 5″ photograph of the New Bauhaus Building, Dessau (1926) by Lucia Moholy from the Getty collection, the first I have ever seen in the flesh by this artist. Outstanding.
Following, we have 4 photograms by Lucia’s husband, László Moholy-Nagy which display formalist experimentation “inspired by machine aesthetic, exploring a utopian belief that Constructivism and abstract art could play a role in the process of social reform.” Complimenting these photograms is a row of six, yes six! Moholy-Nagy including Dolls (Puppen)1926-1927 (Getty), The law of the series 1925 (Getty), Lucia at the breakfast table 1926 (Getty), Spring, Berlin 1928 (George Eastman House), Berlin Radio Tower1928 (Art Institute of Chicago) and Light space modulator1930 (Getty). All six photographs explore the fascinating relationship between avant-garde art and photography, between they eye and perspective, all the while declaiming what Moholy-Nagy called the “new vision”; angles, shadows and geometric patterns that defy traditional perspective “removing the space from associations with the real world creating a surreal, disjointed image.” This topographic mapping flattens perspective in the case of the Berlin radio tower allowing the viewer to see the world in a new way.
Finally two groups of photographs that are simply magnificent.
First 8 photographs in a row that focus on the order and progressive nature of the modern world, the inherent beauty of technology captured in formalist studies of geometric forms. The prints range from soft pictorialist renditions to sharp clarity. The quality of the prints is amazing. Artists include the wonderful E. O. Hoppé, Albert Renger-Patzsch (an outstandingly beautiful photograph, Harbour with cranes 1927 that is my favourite photograph in the exhibition, see below), Two Towers 1937-1938 by Werner Mantz and some early Wolfgang Sievers before he left Germany for Australia in 1938 (Blast furnace in the Ruhr, Germany 1933, see below). These early Sievers are particularly interesting, especially when we think of his later works produced in Australia. Lucky were many artists who survived in Germany or fled from Nazi persecution at the last moment, including John Heartfield who relocated to Czechoslovakia in 1933 and then fled to London in 1938 and August Sander whose life and work were severely curtailed under the Nazi regime and whose son died in prison in 1944 near the end of his ten year sentence (Wikipedia).
August Sander. Now there is a name to conjure with. The second magnificent group are 7 photographs that are taken from Sander’s seminal work People of the 20th Century. All the photographs have soft, muted tones of greys with no strong highlights and, usually, contextless backgrounds. The emphasis is on archetypes, views of people who exist on the margins of society – circus performers, bohemians, artists, the unemployed and blind people. In all the photographs there is a certain frontality (not necessarily physical) to the portraits, a self consciousness in the sitter, a wariness of the camera and of life. This self consciousness can be seen in the two photographs that are the strongest in the group – Secretary at West German radio in Cologne, 1931 and Match seller 1927 (see below).
There is magic here. Her face wears a somewhat quizzical air – questioning, unsure, vulnerable – despite the trappings of affluence and fashionability (the smoking of the cigarette, the bobbed hair). He is wary of the camera, his face and hands isolated by Sander while the rest of his body falls into shadow. His right hand is curled under, almost deformed, his shadow falling on the stone at right, the only true brightness in this beautiful image the four boxes of matches he clutches in his left hand: as Sander titles him ironically, The Businessman.
Working as I do these days with lots of found images from the 1940s-1960s that I digitally restore to life, I wonder what happened to these people during the dark days of World War 2. Did they survive the cataclysm, the drop into the abyss? I want to know, I want to reach out to these people to send them good energy. I hope that they did but their wariness in front of the camera, so intimately ‘taken’ by Sander, makes me feel the portent of things to come. How differently we see images armed with the hindsight of history!
In conclusion, this is a fantastic exhibition that will undoubtedly be in my top ten of the year for Melbourne in 2011.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Michael Thorneycroft for his help and The National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the accredited photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Felix Nussbaum (German, 1904 – after September 1944) The mad square (Der tolle Platz) 1931 Oil on canvas 97 x 195.5cm Berlinische Galerie Public domain
Over the winter and spring of 1927-1928, Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy took a series of perhaps nine views looking down from the Berlin Radio Tower, one of the most exciting new constructions in the German capital. Moholy had already photographed the Eiffel Tower in Paris from below, looking up through the tower’s soaring girders. In Berlin, however, Moholy turned his camera around and pointed it straight down at the ground. This plunging perspective showed off the spectacular narrowness of the Radio Tower, finished in 1926, which rose vertiginously to a height of 450 feet from a base seven times smaller than that of its Parisian predecessor (which opened in 1889). Moholy attached exceptional importance to this, his boldest image: he hung it just above his name in a room devoted to his work at the Berlin showing of Film und Foto, a mammoth traveling exhibition that he had helped to prepare. Moholy also chose this view and one other to offer Julien Levy, the pioneering art dealer, when Levy visited him in Berlin in 1930. The following year the pictures went on view at the Levy Gallery in New York, in Moholy’s first solo exhibition of photographs.
The Light-Space Modulator is the most spectacular and complete realisation of László Moholy-Nagy’s artistic philosophy. Machine parts and mechanical structures began to appear in his paintings after his emigration from Hungary, and they are also seen in the illustrations he selected for the 1922 Buch neuer Künstler (Book of new artists), which includes pictures of motorcars and bridges as well as painting and sculpture. Many contemporary artists incorporated references to machines and technology in their work, and some, like the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin, even designed plans for fantastic structures, such as the ambitious Monument to the Third International, a proposed architectural spiral of glass and steel with moving tiers and audiovisual broadcasts. (See Tatlin’s Tower.)
In the Light-Space Modulator, Moholy-Nagy was able to create an actual working mechanism. Although he censured capitalism’s inhumane use of technology, he believed it could be harnessed to benefit mankind and that the artist had an important role in accomplishing this. Moholy had made preliminary sketches for kinetic sculptures as early as 1922 and referred to the idea for a light machine in his writings, but it was not until production was financed by an electric company in Berlin in 1930 that this device was built, with the assistance of an engineer and a metalsmith. It was featured at the Werkbund exhibition in Paris the same year, along with the short film Light Display Black-White-Gray, made by Moholy-Nagy to demonstrate and celebrate his new machine.
The Light-Space Modulator is a Moholy-Nagy painting come to life: mobile perforated disks, a rotating glass spiral, and a sliding ball create the effect of photograms in motion. With its gleaming glass and metal surfaces, this piece (now in the collection of the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University) is not only a machine for creating light displays but also a sculptural object of beauty, photographed admiringly by its creator.
Albert Renger-Patzsch (American born Hungary, 1895-1946) Harbour with crane c. 1927 Gelatin silver photograph Printed image 22.7 h x 16.8 w cm Purchased 1983 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Wolfgang Sievers (Germany 1913 – Australia 2007) Blast furnace in the Ruhr, Germany 1933 Gelatin silver photograph 27.5 h x 23 w cm Purchased 1988 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
The Ruhr region was at the centre of the German acceleration of industry in pre-war Germany, with rapid economic growth creating a heavy demand for coal and steel. In keeping with Modernist trends in photography, Sievers shot this blast furnace – the mechanism that transforms ore into metal – from an unusual, dynamic angle. It dominates the frame, appearing menacing and strange. Despite being imprisoned and beaten by the Gestapo, Sievers studied and taught at a progressive private art school until graduation in 1938. In that year he escaped Germany after being called up for military service, ending up in Australia.
August Sander (German, 1876-1964) Match seller 1927 From the portfolio People of the 20th century, IV Classes and Professions, 17 The Businessman
Robert Wiene, Director (German 1873-1938) Still from from the Cabinet of Dr Caligari 1919 5 min excerpt, 35mm transferred to DVD, Black and White, silent, German subtitles Courtesy Transit Film GmbH Production still courtesy of the British Film Institute and Transit Film GmbH
Hannah Höch (German, 1889-1978) Love 1931 From the series Love Photomontage 21.8 x 21cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased, 1983
Hannah Höch made some of the most interesting Dada collages and photomontages, including Love, an image of two strange composite female. Höch’s technique of pasting images together from magazine clippings and advertisements was a response to the modern era of mass media, and a way of criticising the bourgeois taste for ‘high art’. In many of her works, Höch explores the identity and changing roles of women in modern society.
The Mad Square takes its name from Felix Nussbaum’s 1931 painting which depicts Berlin’s famous Pariser Platz as a mad and fantastic place. The ‘mad square’ is both a physical place – the city, represented in so many works in the exhibition, and a reference to the state of turbulence and tension that characterises the period. The ‘square’ can also be a modernist construct that saw artists moving away from figurative representations towards increasingly abstract forms.
The exhibition features works by Max Beckman, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad, Kurt Schwitters and August Sander. This group represents Germany’s leading generation of interwar artists. Major works by lesser known artists including Karl Hubbuch, Rudolf Schlichter and Hannah Höch are also presented in the exhibition in addition to works by international artists who contributed to German modernism.
The Mad Square brings together a diverse and extensive range of art, created during one of the most important and turbulent periods in European history, offering new insights into the understanding of key German avant‐garde movements including – Expressionism, Dada, Bauhaus, Constructivism, and New Objectivity were linked by radical experimentation and innovation, made possible by an unprecedented freedom of expression.
World War 1 and the Revolution
The outbreak of war in 1914 was met with enthusiasm by many German artists and intellectuals who volunteered for service optimistically hoping that it would bring cultural renewal and rapid victory for Germany. The works in this section are by the generation of artists who experienced war first hand. Depictions of fear, anxiety and violence show the devastating effects of war – the disturbing subjects provide insight into tough economic conditions and social dysfunction experienced by many during the tumultuous early years of the Weimar Republic following the abdication of the Kaiser
Dada
The philosophical and political despair experienced by poets and artists during World War 1 fuelled the Dada movement, a protest against the bourgeois conception of art. Violent, infantile and chaotic, Dada took its name from the French word for a child’s hobbyhorse or possibly from the sound of a baby’s babble. Its activities included poetry readings and avant‐garde performances, as well as creating new forms of abstract art that subverted all existing conditions in western art. Though short‐lived, in Germany the Dada movement has profoundly influenced subsequent developments in avant-garde art and culture. The impact of the Dada movement was felt throughout Europe – and most powerfully in Germany from 1917-21.
Bauhaus
The Bauhaus (1919‐1933) is widely considered as the most important school of art and design of the 20th century, very quickly establishing a reputation as the leading and most progressive centre of the international avant‐garde. German architect Walter Gropius founded the school to do away with traditional distinctions between the fine arts and craft, and to forge an entirely new kind of creative designer skilled in both the conceptual aesthetics of art and the technical skills of handicrafts. The Bauhaus was considered to be both politically and artistically radical from its inception and was closed down by the National Socialists in 1933
Constructivism and the Machine Aesthetic
Having emerged in Russia after World War I, Constructivism developed in Germany as a set of ideas and practices that experimented with abstract or non-representational forms and in opposition to Expressionism and Dada. Constructivists developed works and theories that fused art and with technology. They shared a utopian belief in social reform, and saw abstract art as playing a central role in this process.
Metropolis
By the 1920s Berlin has become the cultural and entertainment capital of the world and mass culture played an important role in distracting a society traumatised by World War 1, the sophisticated metropolis provided a rich source of imagery for artists, it also come to represent unprecedented sexual and personal freedom. In photography modernity was emphasised by unusual views of the metropolis or through the representation of city types. The diverse group of works in this section portray the uninhibited sense of freedom and innovation experienced by artists throughout Germany during the 1920s
New Objectivity
By the mid 1920s, a new style emerged that came to be known as Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity. After experiencing the atrocities of World War 1 and the harsh conditions of life in postwar Germany, many artists felt the need to return to the traditional modes of representation with portraiture becoming a major vehicle of this expression, with its emphasis on the realistic representation of the human figure
Power and Degenerate Art
After the seizure of power by the National Socialists in 1933 modern artists were forbidden from working and exhibiting in Germany, with their works confiscated from leading museums and then destroyed or sold on the international art market. Many avant‐garde artists were either forced to leave Germany or retreat into a state of ‘inner immigration’.
The Degenerate art exhibition, held in Munich in 1937, represented the culmination of the National Socialists’ assault on modernism. Hundreds of works were selected for the show which aimed to illustrate the mental deficiency and moral decay that had supposedly infiltrated modern German art. The haphazard and derogatory design of the exhibition sought to ridicule and further discredit modern art. Over two million people visited the exhibition while in contrast far fewer attended the Great German art exhibition which sought to promote what the Nazis considered as ‘healthy’ art.
Karl Grill (German active Donaueschingen, Germany 1920s) Untitled (Spiral Costume, from the Triadic Ballet) c. 1926-1927 Gelatin silver print 22.5 x 16.2cm J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
In 1922, Oskar Schlemmer premiered his “Triadic Ballet” in Germany. He named the piece “Triadic” because it was literally composed of multiples of three: three acts, colours, dancers, and shapes. Concentrating on its form and movement, Schlemmer explored the body’s spatial relationship to its architectural surroundings. Although an abstract design, the spiral costume derived from the tutus of classical ballet.
~ Berlin’s population doubles to two million people
1911
~ Expressionists move from Dresden to Berlin
1912
~ Social Democratic Party (SPD) the largest party in the Reichstag
1913
~ Expressionists attain great success with their city scenes
1914
~ World War I begins ~ George Grosz, Oskar Schlemmer, Otto Dix, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann and Franz Marc enlist in the army
1915
~ Grosz declared unfit for service, Beckmann suffers a breakdown and Schlemmer wounded
1916
~ Marc dies in combat ~ Dada begins at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich
1917
~ Lenin and Trotsky form the Soviet Republic after the Tzar is overthrown
1918
~ Richard Huelsenbeck writes a Dada manifesto in Berlin ~ Kurt Schwitters creates Merz assemblages in Hanover ~ Revolutionary uprisings in Berlin and Munich ~ Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates and flees to Holland ~ Social Democratic Party proclaims the Weimar Republic ~ World War I ends
1919
~ Freikorps assassinates the Spartacist leaders, Karl Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg ~ Bauhaus established in Weimer by Walter Gropius ~ Cologne Dada group formed ~ Treaty of Versailles signed
1920
~ Berlin is the world’s third largest city after New York and London ~ Inflation begins in Germany ~ National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) founded ~ Kapp Putsch fails after right‐wing forces try to gain control over government ~ First International Dada fair opens in Berlin
1921
~ Hitler made chairman of the NSDAP
1922
~ Schlemmer’s Triadic ballet premiers in Stuttgart ~ Hyperinflation continues
1923
~ Hitler sentenced to five years imprisonment for leading the Beer Hall Putsch ~ Inflation decreases and a period of financial stability begins
1924
~ Hitler writes Mein Kampf while in prison ~ Reduction of reparations under the Dawes Plan
1925
~ New Objectivity exhibition opens at the Mannheim Kunsthalle ~ The Bauhaus relocates to Dessau
1926
~ Germany joins the League of Nations
1927
~ Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis released ~ Unemployment crisis worsens ~ Nazis hold their first Nuremburg party rally
1928
~ Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The threepenny opera premieres in Berlin ~ Hannes Meyer becomes the second director of the Bauhaus
1929
~ Street confrontations between the Nazis and communists in Berlin ~ Young Plan accepted, drastically reducing reparations ~ Stock market crashes on Wall Street, New York ~ Thomas Mann awarded the Nobel Prize for literature
1930
~ Resignation of Chancellor Hermann Müller’s cabinet ending parliamentary rule ~ Minority government formed by Heinrich Brüning, leader of the Centre Party ~ Nazis win 18% of the vote and gain 95 seats in the National elections ~ Ludwig Miles van der Rohe becomes the third director of the Bauhaus ~ John Heartfield creates photomontages for the Arbeiter‐Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ)
1931
~ Unemployment reaches five million and a state of emergency is declared in Germany
1932
~ Nazis increase their representation in the Reichstag to 230 seats but are unable to form a majority coalition ~ Miles van der Rohe moves the Bauhaus to Berlin ~ Grosz relocates to New York as an exile
1933
~ Hindenberg names Hitler as Chancellor ~ Hitler creates a dictatorship under the Nazi regime ~ The first Degenerate art exhibition denouncing modern art is held in Dresden ~ Miles van der Rohe announces the closure of the Bauhaus ~ Nazis organise book burnings in Berlin ~ Many artists including Gropius, Kandinski and Klee flee Germany ~ Beckmann, Dix and Schlemmer lose their teaching positions
1934
~ Fifteen concentration camps exist in Germany
1935
~ The swastika becomes the flag of the Reich
1936
~ Spanish civil war begins ~ Germany violates the Treaty of Versailles ~ Olympic Games held in Garmisch‐Partenkirchen and Berlin ~ Thomas Mann deprived of his citizenship and emigrates to the United States
1937
~ German bombing raids over Guernica in Spain in support of Franco ~ The Nazi’s Degenerate art exhibition opens in Munich and attracts two million visitors ~ Beckmann, Kirchner and Schwitters leave Germany ~ Purging of ‘degenerate art’ from German museums continues 1
1/ Timeline credit: Chronology compiled by Jacqueline Strecker and Victoria Tokarowski from the following sources:
~ Catherine Heroy ‘Chronology’ in Sabine Rewald, Glitter and Doom: German portraits from the 1920s, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, exh cat, 2006, pp. 39‐46 ~ Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg, eds, ‘Political chronology’, The Weimar Republic sourcebook, Berkely 1994, pp. 765‐71 ~ Jonathan Petropoulos and Dagmar Lott‐Reschke ‘Chronology’ in Stephanie Barron, ‘Degenerate Art’: the fate of the avant‐garde in Nazi Germany, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, exh cat, 1991, pp. 391‐401
László Moholy-Nagy (American born Hungary, 1895-1946) Bauhaus Balconies 1926 Silver gelatin photograph
John Heartfield’s photomontages expose hidden agendas in German politics and economics of the 1920s and 30s. This image was published six months before the National Socialist Party came to power, and shows Hitler with a spine made of coins and his stomach filled with gold. The caption says that he ‘swallows gold’, alluding to generous funding by right-wing industrialists, and ‘spouts rubbish’.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German, 1880-1938) Woman in hat 1911 Oil on canvas Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
George Grosz (German, 1893-1959) Suicide (Selbstmörder) 1916 Oil on canvas 100 × 77.5cm Tate Modern Public domain
Rudolf Schlichter (German, 1890-1955) Tingle tangel 1919-1920 Oil on canvas
George Grosz (German, 1890-1945) Tatlinesque Diagram 1920 Watercolour, collage and ink on paper 41 x 29.2cm Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969) Dr Paul Ferdinand Schmidt 1921 Oil on canvas 63 x 82cm Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany
El Lissitzky (Russian, 1890-1941) New Man (Neuer) 1923 Color lithograph on wove paper 12 × 12 1/2 in. (30.5 × 31.8cm)
Max Beckmann (German, 1884-1950) The trapeze 1923 Oil on canvas 196.5 x 84cm Toledo Museum of Art Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey Photo: Photography Incorporated, Toledo
This man is legend. He created some of the most memorable and moving photographs in the history of the medium. Once seen, for example his seminal photograph Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath (1972, below), they are never forgotten. Look at the photographs, really look deeply at them. The compositions are flawless, peerless. Smith’s use of chiaroscuro makes his images sing and flow, like a Bach fugue. In spite of everything, “in spite of all the wars and all I had gone through that day, I wanted to sing a sonnet to life and to the courage to go on living it.”
Through that courage he left us a body of work that will live forever as masterpieces of the art of photography. Applause.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Martin-Gropius-Bau for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
One of the most well-known photojournalists in the 20th century, Eugene Smith, with his wife at that time Aileen, took this photograph of Tomoko Uemura bathed by her mother, Ryoko. Tomoko was severally disabled, as a result of mercury poisoning, through her mother who ate fish caught in the nearby bay, contaminated by industrial wastewater from a chemical factory. The Smiths lived in a small fishng village in Southern Japan for four years, and documented the human victims and the natural environments destroyed by industrial pollution.
This photograph was carefully posed and lit by the photographers to create a composition similar to that of Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture in which Mary holds the dead body of her son Jesus. The Smiths created the photograph as a tool to raise the public’s awareness of mercury poisoning and to help the victims’ fight against the polluting corporation and ultimately the Japanese government.
W. Eugene Smith, who was born in 1918 in Wichita, Kansas, and died in 1978 in Tucson, Arizona, first made a name for himself as a politically and socially committed photojournalist in the USA in the 1940s. Many of his photographic reports appeared in Life, the leading picture magazine that had been launched in New York in 1936. Smith saw in photography more than just an illustration to a text and had often asked editors for a greater say in the composition of a photo-essay. His painstakingly researched and emotionally moving features set new standards of photojournalism in the 1940s and 1950s.
Smith had begun to take photographs as a fifteen-year-old, having been inspired by his mother, a keen amateur photographer. In 1936, following the suicide of his father as a result of the Great Crash, Smith initially enrolled at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. But he dreamed of becoming a photographer and moved to New York, where he attended the New York Institute of Photography. He embarked on his professional career in 1937 as a photo reporter for Newsweek.
A year later he began to work as a freelance for the Black Star Agency, and his pictures appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Collier’s, Time and Life. With Life he was to have a close association that went on for years.
When the USA found itself at war at the end of 1941 Smith initially took propaganda shots for the magazine Parade to support the American troops. Then, as a correspondent for Flying magazine, he took part in reconnaissance flights, taking photos from the air. In 1944 he was back on the staff of Life – this time as a war correspondent – documenting the battle of Saipan and the American landings on the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In the course of the fighting the style of his photos changed. Instead of being gung ho they tended to focus on the terrible sufferings of the civilian population and were shot in a way that involved the viewer emotionally. On 22 May 1945 Smith himself was seriously injured, forcing him to submit to a series of operations that went on until 1947.
His new lease of life was symbolised by the first photograph he took after his wound. A Walk to Paradise Garden depicts his two youngest children walking towards a sun-bathed clearing. “While I followed my children into the undergrowth and the group of taller trees – how they were delighted at every little discovery! – and observed them, I suddenly realized that at this moment, in spite of everything, in spite of all the wars and all I had gone through that day, I wanted to sing a sonnet to life and to the courage to go on living it.” (1954)
After his recovery he went back to work for Life again. Documentary features showing the dedicated work of ordinary people were particularly popular with readers. In The Country Doctor (1948) he accompanied a young country doctor from the Denver area on his rounds for several weeks. His report Nurse Midwife (1951) on the black midwife Maud Callen was produced against a background of racial discrimination and the brazen activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South. In developing the prints Smith adjusted the lighting so as to enhance the emotional atmosphere – during a birth, for example – and so arouse sympathy for the selfless efforts of the midwife. His social commitment, however, did not always meet with approval, as in the case of the unpublished report (1950) on the re-election campaign of Clement Attlee, the candidate of the British Labour Party.
Life intended the report to strengthen indirectly the position of the Conservatives by presenting the results of Attlee’s nationalisation policies in a critical light. Smith’s coverage, however, aroused sympathy for Attlee’s programme and the candidate himself. Smith had more success with his Spanish Village feature (1951). He wanted to convey an impression of living conditions under a fascist regime. After obtaining the necessary shooting permission, he spent two months studying the Spanish countryside before finally selecting a remote village in the Estremadura as his subject. Not a few of the photographs, with their chiaroscuro and clearly structured composition, are reminiscent of classical paintings and convey by means of this stylistic device a sense of the hardships but also the beauty of life there.
Smith’s feature on the work of Albert Schweitzer in Lambaréné was to be his last for Life whose refusal to give him a say in the selection and layout of pictures had become unacceptable, and he left the periodical after the appearance of his photo essay Albert Schweitzer – Man of Mercy in November 1955.
A career alternative offered itself in the shape of membership of Magnum, the photographers’ agency founded in 1947. Stefan Lorant commissioned Smith to do an extensive feature on the city of Pittsburgh and its iron foundries, which occupied him for the next few years and nearly exhausted his financial and personal resources. Instead of the 100 prints agreed with Lorant, there arose 13,000 shots out of which he wanted to compose an essay which would be entirely in line with his convictions. In 1958 88 photographs were published in Popular Photography’s Annual Guide, although the essay never appeared in its entirety.
In 1957 Smith, who was known for his excessive devotion to his work, had left his family and moved to 821 Sixth Avenue in New York. The house was visited and used for rehearsals by many well-known jazz musicians, and Smith, who was a passionate music lover, photographed and documented this creative milieu over the next few years, while also keeping an audio record on 1,740 tapes, which were only discovered among his posthumous effects in 1998. At the same time he photographed street scenes from his window while also working on the construction of a psychiatric clinic in Haiti.
In 1961 a commission from the Cosmos PR Agency to photograph the company Hitachi Ltd. took Smith to Japan for a year. This was followed in 1963 by a book which contrasted modern Japan with its deeply rooted traditions. A decade later he again turned to the forced modernisation of Japan and its grave consequences with a shocking series about the Minamata epidemic which had been triggered by the environmental pollution caused by the chemical concern Chisso, which had discharged mercurial waste into the sea near the town of Minamata. The Committee for the Defence of the Victims hired Smith to document the human and ecological dimensions of the catastrophe, and the photographer, who threw himself heart and soul into the project, moved with his second wife, Aileen Mioko Smith, to Minamata. In the course of his researches he was beaten up by company security guards and severely injured. The pictures he took, which appeared in Life and his book Minamata: A Warning to the World largely contributed to publicising the scandal.
By the early 1970s Smith’s photographic work was attracting the attention of museums. His photo A Walk to Paradise Garden had already been selected by Edward Steichen as a symbolic climax to the exhibition The Family of Man (1955), but it was not until 1971 that the first retrospective Let Truth Be the Prejudice was held in the Jewish Museum in New York. In 1977 Smith, by this time seriously ill, moved to Tucson, Arizona, to take up a teaching post at the university there in what was to be the last year of his life.
![Artist unknown (American) '[Three women]' c. 1930s from the exhibition 'The Three Graces' at The Art Institute of Chicago, October 2011 - January 2012](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1930s.jpg "Artist unknown (American) '[Three women]' c. 1930s from the exhibition 'The Three Graces' at The Art Institute of Chicago, October 2011 - January 2012")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three women]' c. 1910s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1910s.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three women]' c. 1910s")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1920s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1920s.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1920s")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1940s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1940s.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1940s")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women and a photographer]' c. 1940s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1940s-b.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women and a photographer]' c. 1940s")
![Martin M. Homburger (American, active mid-20th century) 'Untitled [Three women]' 1967](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/homburger-three-women.jpg "Martin M. Homburger (American, active mid-20th century) 'Untitled [Three women]' 1967")
![Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1930s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/artist-unknown-c.-1930s-b.jpg "Artist unknown (American). '[Three Women]' c. 1930s")
![Karl Grill (German active Donaueschingen, Germany 1920s) 'Untitled [Spiral Costume, from the Triadic Ballet]' c. 1926-1927](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/grill-spiral-costume-from-the-triadic-ballet.jpg "Karl Grill (German active Donaueschingen, Germany 1920s) 'Untitled [Spiral Costume, from the Triadic Ballet]' c. 1926-1927")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.