David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 9:00 Going home: Marabastad-Waterval bus: For most of the people in this bus the cycle will start again tomorrow at between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. 1983-1984 From the series The Transported of KwaNdebele. A South African Odyssey Silver gelatin print 55.5 x 37cm Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
This looks like a very interesting exhibition, one which “examines documentary photographs dating from around 1979 in terms of their aesthetic, ethical, performative, and political engagement with reality” by examining one series of work for each of the thirteen artists. The exhibition investigates the photographs in terms of the documentary approaches they embody not through individual images, but through a series of images.
As the press release rightly notes, “Documentary standpoints are revealed not only by the photographs themselves, but also by the way in which they are used. The exhibition thus addresses five sets of issues in relation to each series of photographs: who the photographers were or are; when and where the photographs were taken; who commissioned them; where, how, and with which target audience in mind they were first published; and the extent to which they open up possibilities for photography today.”
The selection of the series offers a broad range of styles, continents and subject matter – as well as illustrating the changing nature of documentary photography between the years 1974-1985, between Candida Hofer’s series Turks in Germany and Thomas Ruff’s Portraits.
I think I have to buy the catalogue.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Museum Ludwig for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) AM/PM Travelers from KwaNdebele buying their weekly season tickets at the PUTCO depot in Pretoria 1983-1984 From the series The Transported of KwaNdebele. A South African Odyssey Silver gelatin print 55.5 x 37cm Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Miyako Ishiuchi (Japanese, b. 1947) Apartment #45 1977-1978 Silver gelatin print 35.5 x 28cm Courtesy of Miyako Ishiuchi and The Third Gallery Aya, Edobori, Nishi-ku, Osaka
Miyako Ishiuchi (Japanese, b. 1947) Apartment #47 1977-1978 Silver gelatin print 35.5 x 28cm Courtesy of Miyako Ishiuchi and The Third Gallery Aya, Edobori, Nishi-ku, Osaka
In his short book Camera Lucida, written in 1979 and first published in 1980, Roland Barthes distinguished two responses to photography – its taming by means of aesthetic categories, including authorship, oeuvre, and genre, and its acceptance as an unflinching record of reality relying on untamed effects. Some twenty years later the exhibitions documenta 10 and 11, set up in 1997 and 2002 respectively, proved that viewing photography both as an art form and as a reproduction of reality need not be a contradiction in terms. On the contrary, Okwui Enwezor has shown that in its documentary capacity photography can redefine the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Today, thirty-four years after the publication of Barthes’s volume, our exhibition examines documentary photographs dating from around 1979 in terms of their aesthetic, ethical, performative, and political engagement with reality.
The far-reaching social upheavals and crises associated with the period around 1979 highlighted the documentary approach as a major artistic concern. In his Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914‒1991 historian Eric Hobsbawm described the decades after 1975 as a period of crisis. The U.S.A. and the Soviet Union fought proxy wars in Latin America and many African countries in an attempt to cement their spheres of influence; the Islamic revolution took place in Iran; destabilisation of the Soviet Union began around 1980; and China developed into one of world’s most dynamic economic regions. In addition, banking policy worldwide led to a debt crisis in the so-called Third World and the power of transnational economies, promoted by revolutions in transport, manufacturing, and communication technology, grew in proportion to the decreasing influence of territorial states.
Artists and photographers monitored and documented these global changes over longer periods of time, generally in the places where they lived. This activity often resulted in a multitude of photographs. The exhibition therefore focuses not on individual images, but on series. It features one series for each of the thirteen artists and photographers represented in the museum’s collection, including Robert Adams, Joachim Brohm, Ute Klophaus, and Candida Höfer. Loans of works by David Goldblatt, Miyako Ishiuchi, and Raghubir Singh complement the collection.
Barthes based his discussion on the immediate emotional effect of single photographic images, on their arousal of feelings of wonder, sorrow, and empathy. His analysis revolved around viewer responses to what he perceived as the essence of photography. By contrast, the exhibition investigates photographs in terms of the documentary approaches they embody. Do they represent an ethnographic view, for example, aimed solely at recording change, or are they linked to a policy of investigative disclosure? Documentary standpoints are revealed not only by the photographs themselves, but also by the way in which they are used. The exhibition thus addresses five sets of issues in relation to each series of photographs: who the photographers were or are; when and where the photographs were taken; who commissioned them; where, how, and with which target audience in mind they were first published; and the extent to which they open up possibilities for photography today.
The catalogue, which contains an introductory essay and a text on each of the thirteen series of photographs, outlines the basic attitudes to photography and documentary work apparent in the works. Addressing the current role of documentary photography from a historical perspective, the volume constitutes a major contribution to the ongoing discourse on documentary work. Its extensive bibliographies also make it an important a resource for further research. Moreover, since the majority of the photographs come from the Museum Ludwig’s holdings, the catalogue acts as a reevaluation of its collection.
Frank Stella was an American artist best known for his use of geometric patterns and shapes in creating both paintings and sculptures. Arguably one of the most influential living American artists, Stella’s works utilise the formal properties of shape, colour, and composition to explore non-literary narratives… “Abstraction didn’t have to be limited to a kind of rectilinear geometry or even a simple curve geometry. It could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with the shapes,” he explained. “It wouldn’t be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of the shapes and colours would give you a narrative sense. You could have a sense of an abstract piece flowing along and being part of an action or activity.”
Text from the Artnet website
Think about the big 4 colours: Red Green Blue Yellow – and then there are the browns, the purples, magenta, cyan etc etc… Then have a look at the Gerhard Richter (Abstract Painting (613-3), 1986 below) in that light. A great colourist – but very reliant on the big four. Now compare him to Helen Frankenthaler (Belfry, 1979 below) – with this artist it’s a sort of a green, a sort of a red. And she used that palette in her watercolours as well.
They are both certainly aware of the presence of something else. I don’t know if Helen Frankenthaler would say that, and Gerhard Richter certainlywouldn’t, but there is an energy that is not human in the work of both of these artists. My benchmark in photography has always been the first Paul Caponigro exhibition which was called “In the presence of …” : hardly the vibrancy or thezeitgeist of Frankenthaler and Richter, but he had it right in front of his camera.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Princeton University Art Museum for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the art work for a larger version of the image.
Study for Homage to the Square reveals a great deal about the series that has done more than any other to establish Josef Albers’s reputation in the United States. More than one thousand Homages to the Square exist, some paintings, others prints. Launched in 1950, the series forecasts many of the key concerns of the 1960s, including seriality and repetition. In its predilection for regular shapes and methodical compositions, as well as spatial and chromatic illusionism, Homage to the Square also lays the foundation for that decade’s romance with geometric abstraction. Importantly, Homages to the Square are rooted in interwar Constructivism. Albers spent more than ten years at the Bauhaus, from 1920 to 1933, experimenting with glass, typography, furniture design, photography, printmaking, and painting. There he was weaned on the insights of artists like Piet Mondrian and fellow teachers Laslo Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius. Albers also played an important role in transmitting European modernism to a younger generation of American artists, first at Black Mountain College, where he taught between 1933 and 1949, and then at Yale, where he was an instructor from 1950 to 1958.1
Each work in the Homage to the Square series conforms to one of four formats, all based on nested squares. What distinguishes one format from another is the mathematical ratio governing the intervals between the squares.2 Within this standardised program, however, Albers extracts incredible variety. The squares are rendered in a range of hues that vary in their degree of brightness and saturation, creating “optical reversals” that cause some squares to project and others to recede. Albers once described the Homage to the Square series as a stage on which colour might “act.”3 While individual works experiment with different “colour climates,” the cycle in its entirety explores the “relational” character of colour.4 Colour, Albers believed, is one of the most mutable, contingent, even deceptive phenomena in the world: any one colour is invariably affected by the colours around it, altering its identity and manipulating perception in the process.5 What we see is never what we see in the Homage to the Square cycle. The paint handling in Study is much looser than in other works from the series, whose smooth, fastidious surfaces are free of what Albers called “hand-writing,” by which he meant texture, impasto, and visual incident.6 However, the very informality of this smaller piece underscores an often overlooked feature of the series as a whole: the gentle, imprecise edges separating one square from another. In finessing the boundaries between shapes, Albers also finessed the boundaries between colours, investing his works with maximum visual intensity.
Kelly Baum
1/ Richard Anuszkiewicz studied with Albers at Yale between 1953 and 1955. 2/ See Werner Spies, Josef Albers (New York: Abrams, 1970), pp. 48-50. 3/ See Sewell Sillman, Josef Albers: Paintings, Prints, Projects (New York: Clarke and Way / Associates in Fine Arts, 1956), p. 36. 4/ See Spies, Josef Albers, 44. In 1963, Albers published the important Interaction of Color. 5/ In this respect, Albers sought to exploit the “discrepancy” between “physical fact” and “psychic effect.” See Hal Foster, “The Bauhaus Idea in America,” in Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World, ed. Achim Borchardt-Hume (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 99. 6/ Kynaston L. McShine, Josef Albers: Homage to the Square (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), n.p. In the same publication, Albers describes his painting technique, which involved applying paint directly from the tube with a palette knife in one thin, even coat to create a “homogenous” “paint film.”
Woman II and Untitled (Woman) attest to de Kooning’s pursuit of fluidity and irresolution. Over the course of the 1960s, he altered his materials so as to facilitate his protracted editing process and increase the speed, vitality, and fluency of his brushwork – smooth supports reduced drag while safflower oil and kerosene slowed the drying time of his paints. As de Kooning said in 1960, “I was never interested … [in] how to make a good,” as in a perfect, finished “painting.” “I didn’t want to pin it down at all.”
An intriguing paradox lies at the heart of Helen Frankenthaler’s work. In 1952 the artist started to create paintings that were gestural in appearance but not in fact. Thanks to a novel technique called staining, in which paint is poured onto canvas, Frankenthaler made marks that mimicked the sweeping strokes of Abstract Expressionism but indexed neither her hand nor her distinctive personality. Insofar as she minimised the role of will, choice, and subjectivity, Frankenthaler heralded a paradigm shift in postwar painting, breaking with Abstract Expressionism and planting a wedge between gesture and hand, art and artist. Frankenthaler’s technique, which evolved over time to include implements as unconventional as rags, mops, basters, sponges, squeegees, and windshield wipers,1 also has bearing on the equally paradoxical space of her paintings. In one respect, Frankenthaler strove to acknowledge, through the very act of painting, the feature that distinguishes painting from every other medium – flatness.2 This she did by thinning her paint and applying it to unprimed canvas, allowing the paint to penetrate the fabric. What results is not only a flat surface that reiterates the flat support on which it resides but also an image that is identified exactly with its ground. At the same time,
Frankenthaler’s work generates undoubtedly atmospheric effects. As the artist said in 1971, “Pictures are flat and part of the nuance and often the beauty or the drama that makes a work, or gives it life … is that it presents such an ambiguous situation of an undeniably flat surface, but on it and within it an intense play and drama of space, movements, light, illusion, [and] different perspectives.”3 Belfry and February’s Turn, both from the midpoint of Frankenthaler’s career, rely on just such an ambiguous sensation of space and depth. In their case, however, this ambiguity is exacerbated by the intrusion of marks that contradict the illusion of “aerated” flatness.4 Take the anomalous, almost gratuitous brushstroke in the centre right of Belfry, for instance, or the beige clump and the area of black impasto in February’s Turn, all of which lie obstinately on the surface of otherwise dyed canvases.
These marks very clearly qualify as painterly touches. As such, they introduce a degree of materiality to Frankenthaler’s mostly disembodied paintings and recall traditional Abstract Expressionism. Belfry and February’s Turn likewise exemplify a theme that concerned Frankenthaler from the very beginning of her career: landscape. Although abstract, these paintings evoke, through format, palette, and composition, the environments in which the artist lived and traveled, including the waterfront property she bought in Connecticut in 1978 and the arid, sunburned deserts of Arizona, which she visited in 1976 and 1977.
Kelly Baum
1/ Susan Cross, “The Emergence of a Painter,” (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998), p. 41. 2/ See, for instance, Clement Greenberg’s, “Modernist Painting [1960-65],” in Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 754-60. 3/ Cindy Nemser, “Interview with Helen Frankenthaler,” Arts Magazine 46 (November 1971), p. 54. 4/ John Elderfield, Frankenthaler (New York: Abrams, 1989), 66, 255. See also E. A. Carmean, “On Five Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler,” Art International 22, No. 4 (1978): pp. 28-32; and Karen Wilkin, Frankenthaler: The Darker Palette (Savannah, GA: Savannah College of Art and Design), 1998.
Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024) Monument Valley, Utah 1970 From Portfolio II Gelatin silver print
Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024) Rock Wall, Connecticut 1959 Gelatin silver print
Few artists have tackled the subject of painting with more self-consciousness, with greater sensitivity to the history, dilemmas, and possibilities of the medium, than Gerhard Richter. For the last five decades, Richter has explored the very nature of painting with and in paint, making his an especially reflexive enterprise. In many ways, contradiction defines his prolific body of work, as does diversity, whether of mode, style, technique, or content. A student of two very different art academies, one in Dresden and the other in Düsseldorf, where he trained with Joseph Beuys, Richter was weaned on Eastern European Social Realism as well as Western Pop and Fluxus. His earliest mature canvases, from the early 1960s, consist of blurry renditions of mostly ready-made photographs representing subjects both banal and chilling, from automobiles and Nazi officials to military aircraft and aerial cityscapes. By 1966, Richter had begun to experiment with abstraction. To this day, he still alternates between objective and nonobjective painting.
The groundwork for pieces like Abstract Painting (613-3) was laid in the early 1970s, when Richter began a series of nonrepresentational paintings based on photographic enlargements of brushstrokes.1 Because they depict, in a highly illusionistic manner, reproductions of otherwise abstract marks, such paintings confuse the handmade and the technological, the original and the copy. Richter continued to duplicate brushstrokes until 1980, when he started to make actual abstract paintings, albeit in unconventional ways.2 Abstract Painting (613-3) exemplifies the technique for which Richter is recognised today, one in which editing, subtraction, and cancellation play crucial roles.3 Here as elsewhere, the artist fleshed out a preliminary composition with ordinary brushes. As it was drying, he covered the hard edge of a squeegee with paint and dragged it across the surface of the canvas, an action that blended some layers but removed others, thereby revealing what was previously concealed.4 The resulting works are tapestries of abrasions and palimpsests, heterogeneous fields of visual incident. Discontinuity is particularly evident in Abstract Painting (613-3), due to variations in the directionality of paint, the combination of cool and warm hues, and the presence of a vertical seam near the middle of the canvas. To the extent that it cedes some control to chance and introduces the spectre of mechanicity, Richter’s process “muffles singular signs of personal expression”5 and trades existential drama for moderation, unlike the gestural, virtuosic canvases his paintings superficially resemble. As with many of his abstractions after 1980, Abstract Painting (613-3)‘s palette is bright and sumptuous in appearance but not necessarily in tone.6 For Richter, colour does not signify “happiness,” he once said, but instead a “tense” or “artificial” “cheeriness” associated with “gritted teeth.”7
Kelly Baum
1/ See Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 53, pp. 68-69. 2/ These new abstractions coincided with a revival of Expressionism, called Neo-Expressionism, in the United States and Europe, a tradition from which Richter felt alienated and to which his works stand in pointed contrast. See “MoMA Interview with Robert Storr, 2002,” in Gerhard Richter: Writings, 1961-2007, ed. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (New York: D.A.P., 2009), p. 428. 3/ See ibid., pp. 71–74. 4/ Richter’s squeegees are essentially long pieces of rectangular plastic, often as wide as his canvases, to which handles are attached. While abrading a surface with the squeegee, Richter will sometimes use a brush or a knife to further blend and scrape. See Gerhard Richter Painting, directed by Corinna Belz (Berlin: Zero One Film, 2011), dvd. 5/ Hal Foster, “Semblance According to Gerhard Richter,” Raritan 22 (Winter 2003): 160. See also Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Abstract Paintings 2009 (Cologne: Walther Kônig, 2009), 89, 95. Richter does not always agree with this reading of his work. See “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” in Gerhard Richter: Writings, p. 180. 6/ The stringent quality of this and other abstractions by Richter is due as much to his predilection for bright, sharply contrasting colours as it is to his avoidance of earth tones. 7/ See “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 2004,” p. 489.
The paintings in Rothko to Richter narrate a history of postwar art whose greatest points of tension and most important moments of breakthrough revolve around facture, from the Latin facere, meaning “to make.”3 Together they demonstrate a fundamental fact: when painting’s prerogatives change, so too do its procedures. Focusing on select works from the Haskell Collection, this essay explores the nature of marks and mark-making in abstract painting after World War II. In the case of the artists seen here, mark-making was an activity of incredible consequence. The success or failure of any one painting might rest on something as elementary as the choice between oil paint and acrylic paint or a brush and a palette knife. It might depend on the difference between staining and smearing, between choppy strokes and fluid swipes, or between painting dry-on-dry and wet-on-wet.
With this in mind, my essay examines how and what marks signify within a single artist’s work as well as in postwar painting as a whole. How do shifts in the way marks are made signal broader shifts in artistic practice? What are the different, often competing logics of mark-making at any given moment? How do marks reflect or, alternately, disavow the impact of mass media, technology, and photomechanical reproduction in the mid- to late twentieth century? Such an investigation is premised on a particular understanding of the word “mark.” First and foremost, “mark” is a product as well as a process – more specifically, it is an end that cannot be separated from its means. Marks are also structural – as well as vocal – components of any given painting. Not only do they reveal a great deal about a painting’s meaning, they also shape that meaning, give it form and substance, for the viewer. For the purposes of this essay, then, I consider the mechanics of mark-making to be socially, physically, symbolically, and historically important.
Marks are the constituent feature, the backbone, of painting. A painting may be comprised of hundreds, if not thousands, of marks. In most cases, these marks are made in paint, on a support, by the hands of an artist. Even when those hands wield an implement – a brush or palette knife, for example – a physical connection still obtains between artist and mark.4 (What are implements like these, after all, but prostheses that extend the hand’s reach and capability?) Many of the artists in Rothko to Richter exploit this very character of the mark. In their paintings, a direct, transparent relationship exists between mark and method, a one-to-one correspondence between every stroke of paint and every movement of the artist’s hand. Here mark and method are tautological: the former records the latter. However, not every artist in Rothko to Richter subscribes to this approach. Several developed techniques designed to depersonalise the act of mark-making, to literally divorce the mark from the artist’s hand. Some even went so far as to erase the traces their tools left behind, effacing marks as soon as they were created. Instead of flaunting the process by which their paintings were produced, these artists dissimulated.
Dominating the Haskell Collection are Abstract Expressionist painters and their counterparts in Europe, including Appel, de Kooning, Goldberg, Kline, Riopelle, Rothko, and Tworkov.5 To varying degrees, these artists prized immediacy, virtuosity, and expression. Autographic gestures play a key role in their paintings.6 Such marks constitute a kind of painterly handwriting that indexes the artist’s distinct will, personality, and psychological state – his or her very self.
Etymologically, “gesture” derives from the Medieval Latin gestura, meaning “to carry.” In its original form, gesture denoted bearing – that is, the manner in which human beings deport themselves physically. It was also affiliated with rhetoric: in the past, gesture delineated a set of “bodily movements, attitudes, expression of countenance” intended to “giv[e] effect to oratory.”7 Gesture was a supplement to speech, a kind of accent or embellishment, in other words. All such connotations are relevant to the Expressionist canvases in the Haskell Collection: for artists like Goldberg and Kline, gestures were overtures, forms of communication that served to address viewers directly and invite them to participate in a subjective exchange. Gesturing involved gesticulating in the sense we understand that word today. In Appel’s Dans la Tempête (1960) or de Kooning’s Woman II (1961), for instance, the artist’s hand, wrist, and arm – sometimes his entire body – are marshalled so as to externalise otherwise private impulses, instincts, and passions. The affective power of such gestures was in direct proportion to their muscularity, fluidity, and dynamism, traits enthusiastically embraced by American and European Expressionists, who equated intensity of spirit with intensity of brushwork.
As art historian Meyer Schapiro astutely argued in 1957, the new emphasis on gesture among abstract painters of the postwar generation precipitated concomitant changes in technique. “The consciousness of the personal and spontaneous” in painting, Schapiro wrote, “stimulates the artist to invent devices of handling, processing, surfacing, which confer to the utmost degree the aspect of the freely made. Hence the great importance of the mark, the stroke, the brush, the drip, the quality of the substance of paint itself, and the surface of the canvas as a texture and field of operation.”8 This holds true of Appel’s Dans la Tempête (1960), de Kooning’s Untitled (Woman) (1965), Goldberg’s The Keep (1958), and Kline’s Untitled (1960), among other works, whose richly impastoed surfaces and bold, impetuous brushwork register not only heightened emotion but also the presence of the artist.
If Schapiro championed these paintings as enthusiastically as he did, it was because they represented, in his view, the “last hand-made personal objects within our culture.”9 Insofar as Rothko’s and de Kooning’s canvases preserved increasingly obsolete methods of fabrication, privileging manual over industrial forms of production, they “affirmed the individual in opposition to the contrary qualities of the ordinary experience of working and doing.”10 For Schapiro, the importance of painters like Goldberg and Tworkov lay precisely in their efforts to humanise art at a moment when the subject was under assault from the dehumanising forces of science, technology, and mass media. In his view, Abstract Expressionism represented the last bastion of freedom and individuality in an increasingly homogenous, mechanised world, a bulwark against the intrusion of standardisation into every walk of life.
However, by the late 1950s, when Schapiro made this claim, a sea change was already well under way in the world of art. Even then, a younger generation of artists, represented by Rauschenberg and Stella, was beginning to embrace at the level of technique the very shifts in society and subjectivity that Schapiro and the Abstract Expressionists decried. As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, increasing numbers of artists would cease to identify either physically or emotionally with their canvases. Simultaneously, they began to align painting with fabrication, deriving insight from the fields of design and engineering. Gradually, the taste for “the machine-made, the impersonal, and reproducible,” likewise “an air of coolness and mechanical control,” would infiltrate art, heralding a break with Abstract Expressionism.11
3/ Sometimes reduced to “texture,” facture designates the way a work of art has been made and the manner in which its material components have been manipulated. 4/ As much as possible, I have tried to avoid falling into the all-too-common trap of fetishising the painted mark. Although much can be learned about a painting by deciphering the marks that comprise it, the mark is often conflated with something more problematic, the artist’s touch, a supposed symbol of singularity and authenticity that is inextricably related to the work’s exchange value and its status as a commodity on the market. 5/ For more information on Expressionism in Europe, see Serge Guilbaut, “Disdain for the Stain: Abstract Expressionism and Tachisme,” in Abstract Expressionism: The International Context, ed. Joan Marter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). 6/ As Michael Leja argues, this was a historically, culturally, and ideologically specific self that invested great importance in “irrationality” and reflected new knowledge about the human mind, psyche, and condition. See his Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 2-9, pp. 36-41. See also Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 7/ Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Gesture,” http://www.oed.com/search?searchType=dictionary&q=gesture&_searchBtn=Search. 8/ Meyer Schapiro, “Recent Abstract Painting (1957),” in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1978), p. 218. 9/ Ibid., p. 217. 10/ Ibid., p. 218. 11/ Ibid., p. 219. As Schapiro notes, if science and engineering were “distasteful” to the Abstract Expressionists, it was due largely to the role they played in World War II and the Holocaust.
Hans Hofmann is generally associated with the New York School, but he actually belongs to an earlier generation of artists based in Europe. Indeed, Hofmann witnessed firsthand the invention of abstraction while living in Paris from 1904 to 1914. Between 1933 and 1958, he would impart the lessons of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso as well as those of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian to the students who attended his art schools in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts.1 Later in life, after the works in the Haskell Collection were made, Hofmann helped broker the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism, a movement that shared his more recent predilection for restraint, objectivity, and pictorial problem-solving.2
Hofmann was never wedded to any one approach to painting. Indeed, “diversity” was in many respects his signature style. Before the late 1940s, he produced paintings of abstracted interiors, still lifes, landscapes, and figure studies, all of which bear the imprint of Cubism and Fauvism. By 1950, however, his paintings were reliably abstract: no, or almost no, recognisable content remained. Characterised by radiant luminosity, brilliant colour contrasts, and tactile surfaces, Composition #3 and Midday were created just a few years before the artist closed his two schools, a moment that coincided with his critical recognition as a painter. Colour serves a structural role in both paintings, generating form and defining space. In Composition #3, paint is added and subtracted, sometimes ferociously, with implements ranging from fingertips and spatulas to thick brushes and sharp paintbrush handles, all of which register clearly on the canvas. Clement Greenberg could have been describing this work when he wrote, “Klee and Soutine were perhaps the first to address the picture surface consciously as a responsive rather than inert object, and painting itself as an affair of prodding and pushing, scoring and marking, rather than of simply inscribing or covering. Hofmann has taken this approach further, and made it do even more.”3 For its part, Midday exemplifies Hofmann’s distinctive brand of “grandiose Pointillism,” a manner adopted around 1954.4 Covered in a dense crust of paint, the work is made of staccato brush marks that extend from edge to edge, resulting in an atomised, decomposed surface whose impasto projects into space.5 Midday‘s resemblance to a mosaic is more than coincidental: in 1950 and 1956, Hofmann received commissions to create monumental mosaics for public spaces.
Kelly Baum
1/ On the ways in which Hofmann divests the tradition of abstraction embodied by Mondrian and Kandinsky of its social and utopian aspirations, see Sam Hunter, “Introduction,” in Hans Hofmann, ed. James Yohe (New York: Rizzoli, 2002), pp. 15-16. 2/ Like many of his contemporaries in Europe and the United States, Hofmann often linked the creation of art to spirituality, on the one hand, and to the artist’s personal temperament, on the other. However, these priorities were far less pronounced in his work than in that of artists such as Mondrian and Rothko. Hofmann’s concern was more for the mechanics – the grammar – of art. Ibid., p. 16, 20. 3/ “Hans Hofmann [1958],” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 195. 4/ Hunter, “Introduction,” p. 29. 5/ On the art historical importance of Hoffmann’s “fat” surfaces, which contribute to the perception of his pictures as “objects,” see Clement Greenberg, Hofmann (Paris: G. Fall, 1961), p. 32, 34.
IN THE WAKE OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM by Hal Foster
This selection from the Haskell Collection focuses on Abstract Expressionism and its aftermath and, as such, provides an occasion to reflect on the fate of these two terms, abstraction and expression, in the advanced painting of this period. I want to do so briefly here, one term at a time.
In Western painting at least since Rembrandt, we look for expression, first and foremost, in brushwork, especially brushwork that exceeds the task of representation, brushwork that appears as gesture. Gesture in excess of representation tends to be read as the mark of the artist, not only of his distinctive touch but of that touch at a particular moment. We thus take gesture to be singular, original, authentic, in a word, individual – an indication, perhaps, of the very subjectivity of the artist at that instant in time. Now, what happens to this set of associations when we jump two hundred and fifty years, from Rembrandt to Van Gogh (to stay on a Dutch axis), and then move fifty years further, from Van Gogh to Willem de Kooning (who is represented in the Haskell Collection by two oil studies for his great Woman paintings)? In what ways do these associations, these conventions (for that is what they are), come under pressure?
Pitched in this way, the question is too general; so consider the works in the Haskell Collection produced by 1960 or so by Karel Appel, Michael Goldberg, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and Jack Tworkov. Can we agree that, in each case, the artist appears to believe in his gesture as defined above, that is, as a bearer of a uniquely subjective touch? All of these pieces, even when not large, conceive the picture as an “arena” for “action” (per the famous account of Abstract Expressionism given by the critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952).1 At the same time, this action is always qualified by calculation: note, for example, how Hofmann minds the edges of his canvases; and this gesture is sometimes wilful: note, for instance, how Goldberg seems a little forced in his painterly attack.
Once reiterated, a gesture, whether within one painting or from one painting to another, becomes a performance (not simply an action) as well as a sign (not simply an expression), and in this way it becomes divided from the very presence that it appeared to register in the first place. Jackson Pollock struggled with this conundrum – it was one factor that led to his partial return to figuration as early as 1951 – and we can sense this struggle in some of the works in the Haskell Collection, too (I see it in the Riopelle, among others). This problem of the reiteration of gesture is compounded by the greater difficulty of the repetition of style, that is, the repetition of the set of conventions that is Expressionism. For if de Kooning, Pollock, and friends worked in the wake of German Expressionism, so their followers laboured in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism; thus they were belated Expressionists, in effect, twice over. As gesture came under existential pressure and Expressionism under art historical pressure, they could not help but see that the former might not be as singular, nor the latter as original, as they had once thought.2
Note what occurs after 1960, in part in response to this predicament, in the Color Field painting of Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Jenkins, and Morris Louis: gesture becomes muted, and the paint is loosened from the brush. Letting paint flow is what Frankenthaler learned from the drip paintings of Pollock, and what Louis and others learned from Frankenthaler (they exploited the new fluidity of acrylics here). And yet, however liberated, this paint speaks less of the expressive presence of the painter than of the material conditions of the painting – the fact that acrylic paint runs, mixes, responds to gravity, and stains the canvas (if it is not gessoed) in such a way that its weave becomes apparent and its flatness is foregrounded. “Flatness and the delimitation of flatness”: according to the critic Clement Greenberg, these are, respectively, the essential attribute of painting in general and the distinctive capability of abstract painting in particular.3 In this respect, see how Louis, in the 1962 painting in the Haskell Collection, lets his long bands of paint develop in a way that declares not only the vertical hang of the painting but also its flat surface; here the physical characteristics of paint, colour, and canvas are the sole subjects. Indeed, the painting seems to be produced as though by gravity alone, as though it were almost automatic; in comparison with Abstract Expressionism, the expressivity of the artist is here suppressed.
Such is the lesson that Frank Stella took from Louis in paintings like Double Scramble (1978) – a late example of work initiated in the mid-1960s. The critic Michael Fried termed such compositions “deductive structures” because they seemed to derive strictly from the rectangle of the support and the width of the stretcher, that is, they were deduced from the given structure of the painting alone.4 Here we are even further from the expressivity of Abstract Expressionism than we were with Louis: the composition seems to draw itself. Expressivity appears to return in the abstractions of Gerhard Richter, who is also represented in the Haskell Collection, yet the victory is a Pyrrhic one: like his canvases, his gestures are so numerous and so reiterative that they seem to cancel one another out and so to nullify as much as to register any expressive self.
Like expression, abstraction also comes under pressure during the period surveyed by the Haskell Collection. Although presented in transcendental terms by pioneers of abstract painting such as Wassily Kandinsky in the 1910s, it was largely drained of this metaphysics by the 1960s, to the point where Stella could describe his work in the most positivist of terms: “What you see is what you see.”5 At the same time, abstraction was still endowed with great consequence for art history in general. In 1936, when the curator Alfred H. Barr Jr. presented his famous diagram of “Cubism and Abstract Art” for his show of that title at the new Museum of Modern Art in New York, abstraction served as the through-line of twentieth-century art, one that Greenberg made not only coherent but also ineluctable through his narrative of the progressive self-refinement of “modernist painting.” This story provided continuity as well as goal to twentieth-century art: “I cannot insist enough,” Greenberg wrote in “Modernist Painting” (1961), “that Modernism has never meant, and does not mean now, anything like a break with the past.”6
However, this story soon hit a large bump in the road. As abstract painting focused evermore on its own materiality, its status as an object became impossible to avoid; clearly the next step, it seemed to some avant-gardists, was to dispense with paintings altogether and to produce objects instead. Greenberg already glimpsed this heretical possibility with Stella, and this is why he never included Stella in his canon. Even if Fried still regarded Stella as the exemplar of “modernist painting,” for others, such as his close friend Carl Andre, Stella was on the other side, their side, the side of the Minimalist object as defined by the artist-critic Donald Judd. At this point, then, a “deductive structure” by Stella could be read – was read – as pure painting by some and as specific object by others.
This ambiguous status of abstract painting – as both transcendental force and mere thing, as both full and null – was already glimpsed in its first years. For example, for Kazimir Malevich, the monochrome, in its ideality, pointed to a world beyond this one; for his compatriot Aleksandr Rodchenko, however, the monochrome, in its materiality, underscored that this world was the only one we have. (At times these poles switched their charge: for some artists, transcendental abstraction suggested an emptying out of painting, a sort of Zen nullity of its own, while for others, mundane abstraction suggested a thingly presence, a fullness of its own, but the ambiguous status remained constant.) The paradox of abstraction as both full and null returns in the period surveyed by the Haskell Collection: the canvases by Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and others clearly hold to the metaphysical power of abstract painting, whereas the paintings by Richter, Stella, and others manifestly do not.
Abstract painting was challenged by more than its own objecthood; it also faced an external threat, one that was even more grave. This problem runs back to its early days too, for abstraction emerged, circa 1912-1913, along with two other avant-garde inventions, the collage and the readymade, which brought the mass-media image and the mass-produced object into the frame of high art. For many artists and critics, abstract painting was all the more important for the stout resistance it offered to these troublesome incursions (this is certainly what Greenberg believed), yet it could not fend off such mediation forever, and in the 1950s and 1960s it mostly gave up.7 De Kooning, for example, used bits of collage in his Woman series, and Robert Rauschenberg, who is also represented in the Haskell Collection, added massive amounts of mediated images to his paintings.8 By the time of Richter, such mediation is fully folded into painting: almost from the start of his career, he has moved back and forth between abstract paintings and figurative ones based on photographs (both appropriated and his own); moreover, as suggested above, his abstract paintings appear mediated in their own ways. And this always-already mediated condition is the very point of departure of the spectacular paintings by Jack Goldstein in the Haskell Collection: however abstract they appear, they are worked up entirely from appropriated images. At this point the categories of abstraction and expression are transformed beyond recognition.9
1/ Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News 51 (December 1952). 2/ As represented in the Haskell Collection, some artists, such as Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell, carried on as if these problems didn’t matter much. 3/ Clement Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” Art International 25 (October 1962), p. 30. 4/ Michael Fried, Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1965). 5/ Frank Stella, quoted in Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” Art News 65 (September 1966), p. 59. 6/ Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” Arts Yearbook 4 (1961), p. 108. 7/ It is not clear how opposed abstraction was to these other forms in the first place. For example, a monochrome or a grid painting is already a kind of readymade, and as soon as paint comes from an industrial tube, it is a sort of readymade too. 8/ De Kooning was rarely fully abstract; Greenberg comments on his “homeless representation” in “After Abstract Expressionism,” p. 25. 9/ These complications continue in the current work of Wade Guyton, Amy Sillman, Christopher Wool, and many others; indeed, they are largely what sustain advanced painting in the present.
“We live always in a tremendous chaos,” Karel Appel stated to an interviewer in 1986, “and who can make the chaos positive anymore? Only the artist.”1 Registering, but also redeeming, social, political, and psychic conflict was an ethical imperative for Appel, who came of age as an artist in the 1940s. Appel witnessed firsthand the brutalisation of human beings by war, prejudice, deprivation, and occupation, and he sought to visualise these experiences through art. His canvases are ravaged, quite literally, by brushes, palette knives, and fingers. Choked by thick layers of impasto, their surfaces are as agitated as the animals and figures the paintings depict. Form, colour, content, and technique all serve as corollaries to the period of profound turmoil in which Appel worked. Importantly, the artist’s approach to historical trauma was dialectical. The devastation of pre- and postwar Europe, he believed, was a tabula rasa making possible the rebirth of both art and human beings.2
Appel was a founding member of Cobra (1948-1951), a group of Expressionist painters from Amsterdam, Brussels, and Copenhagen. Appel shared with other Cobra artists an appreciation for the art of the untutored, including children and the mentally ill, whose supposed alienation from Western, classical tradition granted them privileged access to the wellsprings of creativity: fantasy, passion, and instinct.3 Believing that society had been betrayed by logic and science, Appel turned to the irrational for inspiration. His predilection for the primal aligned him with Jean Dubuffet and Art Brut, an association formalised by his appearance in French critic Michel Tapié’s 1952 exhibition Un Art autre.Dans la Tempête was painted in 1960, three years after Appel relocated temporarily to New York, where he socialised with Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Upon arriving in Manhattan, Appel was struck not only by the spontaneous, improvisatory spirit of jazz but also by the city’s “unfinished quality.”4 He subsequently sought to translate this contingency into paintings like Dans la Tempête. Trapped in a state of arrested development, this work also demonstrates Appel’s longstanding fascination with the “creaturely,” that is, with the reduction of humans to the condition of animals.5 Here as elsewhere, the artist elides the one and the other, manufacturing from their cross-pollination a grotesque bestiary of mutants whose anatomical deformations evoke distress. Much as Appel blends pigment by painting wet-on-wet, so too does he blur the boundaries between things and the grounds they inhabit: permeability trumps both spatial and physical integrity, as seen in Dans la Tempête, where a yellow zoomorphic shape at the left and a barely legible demi-human at the right thrash amongst swirls of paint.6
Kelly Baum
1/ Sam Hunter, “Karel Appel in the Spirit of Our Time,” Arts Magazine 62 (January 1988), p. 60. 2/ Hal Foster, “Creaturely, Cobra,” October 141 (Summer 2013), p. 7. 3/ See Karel Appel, Psychopathological Notebook: Drawings and Gouaches, 1948-1950 (Bern: Gachnang and Springer, 1999). 4/ Hunter, “Karel Appel,” p. 62. 5/ Foster, “Creaturely, Cobra,” pp. 6-8. 6/ Appel described his work from 1955 to 1960 as “nightscapes” that merge “paysage” and “visage.” Helena Kontova and Giancarlo Politi, “Karel Appel,” Flash Art, no. 134 (May 1987), p. 53.
Modularity, seriality, and repetition – three of his main concerns here – ground us firmly in modernity, in the realm of synthetics and industrial production. Importantly, the title of the series, Mires, has both televisual and physiological connotations: it is French for “test pattern” (a signal used to calibrate television sets), but it also means “sight” as well as “aim,” as in “the sense of focusing sight on a point in an unlimited continuum.” Instead of the visionary, then, the Mires address vision itself. As the artist once wrote, the Mires “represent the spectacles that are offered to our eyes,” by which he meant the myriad optical enticements that bombard viewers in the form of signs, displays, and advertisements. Following from this, we might say that Dubuffet sought in works like Mire G119 to fashion an artistic equivalent for the “mobile,” “dynamic,” “impulsive,” and wholly mediated character of vision in the late twentieth century.
Although his paintings seem to share a great deal with those of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Jenkins never counted himself a member of the Color Field school – or indeed, of any school at all. Jenkins moved to New York in 1948, during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, but relocated to Paris just five years later, joining an artistic community that included Joan Mitchell, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Michel Tapiés, and Wols. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Jenkins absorbed a dizzying array of writing on matters ranging from art and magic to psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism.1 From this heady brew, he developed a distinctly mystical art that sought to make the invisible visible. The role of the artist, Jenkins believed, was to serve as a conduit, or “medium,” through which memories, emotions, and experiences passed directly onto canvas.2
In 1959-1960, Jenkins’s work took a dramatic turn: after visiting a small port on the northeast coast of Spain, near the Cap de Creus, he began to prioritise fluidity as both a style and a concept, a decision that led him to experiment with water-based acrylic. Method played a crucial role in creating the effect of flux that Jenkins sought. In Phenomena Spanish Cape paint is poured directly onto the canvas from a can or watering pot, allowing for continuous, uninterrupted shapes to emerge.3 The downward flow of paint was hastened by gravity but controlled by the artist, who tilted the support right and left, up and down, to encourage the medium in one direction or another. Jenkins used water to mute or lighten tones and ivory knives, which left no discernible trace on the canvas, to spread the paint as it pooled.4 The result is a paradox: a painting born of the artist but from which all evidence of his hand – his labor – has been effaced. Phenomena Spanish Cape suggests expansion, radiation, and suspension. Evoking eddies, clouds, and tides, the sheets of colour seem to swell and drift like the natural events whose appearances they distill.5 We might also recognise in the work’s composition – with its veils of colour that project out from a dominant red mass into areas of white-primed canvas – an aerial view of a peninsula, perhaps the Spanish cape referenced in the title. In all of Jenkins’s paintings after 1960, the title of the work is prefaced by the word “phenomena,” meaning an event of spiritual and subjective import, a snapshot of “ever-changing reality” objectified on canvas.6
Kelly Baum
1/ For more on Jenkins’s spiritual and intellectual background, see Albert Elsen, Paul Jenkins (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1973), pp. 20-21, p. 35, 46, 67. 2/ Ibid., p. 19. 3/ Ibid., p. 56. Jenkins first experimented with pouring paint in 1953-54. 4/ For more on the artist’s technique and materials, which he honed, quite literally, to a science, see ibid., pp. 65-76. 5/ On the role of nature in his work, see Jean Cassou, Jenkins (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1963), pp. 13-14. 6/ Ibid., p. 6.
Princeton University Art Museum McCormick Hall, Princeton, NJ Phone: (609) 258-3788
The Museum is located on the Princeton University campus, a short walk from Nassau Street in downtown Princeton. Once on campus, simply follow the lamppost Museum banners.
Exhibition dates: 4th April – 28th September, 2014
Curator: Anna Sparham, Curator of Photographs at the Museum of London
Christina Bloom (British, 1862-1939) The 1st Life Guards prepare to leave Hyde Park Barracks and head to war, on 15 August 1914. They were destined for the devastating Battle of Mons 1914 Christina Broom/Museum of London
Look at the portrait of Christina Bloom at the bottom of the posting. Now there is a formidable human being. The look in the eyes shows determination and toughness, toughness to survive and succeed in a male dominated world.
Broom taught herself photography at the age of 40 – “to create and sell photographic postcards – a trade which was thriving. At work between 1903 and 1939, she gained exclusive access to leading London events from suffragette processions to King George V’s coronation and became photographer to the Household Brigade, forging a unique relationship with the Guards” – and became the UK’s first female press photographer. She must have had something special … and then you look at her photographs and you realise what: spontaneity, structure, spirit and the rest. Her tableaux vivant in this posting are almost sculptural in their construction, the photographer ordering the elements, posing the people but then evincing from them a warmth and intimacy in their engagement with the camera that is quite remarkable.
In terms of structure you need look no further than The 1st Life Guards prepare to leave Hyde Park Barracks (1914, top photo below) or Captain Greer of the 1st Irish Guards and his machine gun team (Nd, below) to see how Broom arranges her subject matter. In the 1st Life Guards photograph the man standing at left, the man seated on the horse and the man second right stare directly at the camera forming strong triangular sight lines. This triangle is then crossed by the man third from left who gazes out of the picture perpendicular to the camera’s gaze. His gaze is then “crossed” by the soldier standing at right staring away into the distance at 45 degree angle away from the camera. This image is a masterclass in sight lines and positioning, complemented by the intimacy of the gaze of the soldier second from the right staring directly into the camera (see detail), and the women positioned on the staircase in the background. Magic is happening here.
Again, in the second image of the machine gun team the photograph is eloquently and formally constructed – the symmetry of the twin doors and white squares behind echoed by the horseshoe arrangement of the men with the machine guns pointing in opposite directions. The stoic words ‘MACHINE GUN SHED. EAST’ are emblazoned above the men as though to press home their purpose, but upon detailed inspection the character of the men shines through – the stiff upper lip, the wicked sense of humour and the cheeky chappy can all be seen in this otherwise formally posed photograph. Added poignancy comes with the knowledge that every single person in the photograph was killed soon afterwards on the battlefields of the Western Front. Evidence of the stress of the war can be seen in the photograph King George V and Queen Mary host a tea party for wounded soldiers and sailors (1916, below). Gone are the jovial bonhomie smiles and comradeship, to be replaced by bandages and bouquets, and gaunt-looking, wary, young, scared looking soldiers staring out at the camera.
Terrific photographs from a skilled and intuitive artist.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum of London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Christina Bloom (British, 1862-1939) The 1st Life Guards prepare to leave Hyde Park Barracks and head to war, on 15 August 1914 (detail) 1914 Christina Broom/Museum of London
Christina Bloom (British, 1862-1939) The 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards prepare for war at the Wimbledon Common training camp in 1914. Lieutenant HRH the Prince of Wales can be seen inspecting the field kitchen, having marched there from Wellington Barracks 1914 Christina Broom/Museum of London
Christina Bloom (British, 1862-1939) The 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards prepare for war at the Wimbledon Common training camp in 1914 (detail) 1914 Christina Broom/Museum of London
Christina Bloom (British, 1862-1939) Wounded patients from King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers visit the Royal Mews in 1915. Originally set up after the Boer War by two sisters, the hospital treated injured officers during the First World War at its premises in Grosvenor Gardens 1915 Christina Broom/Museum of London
Christina Bloom (British, 1862-1939) The ‘Bermondsey B’hoys’ from the 2nd Grenadier Guards appear at ease for this informal photograph taken inside their base at Wellington Barracks sometime during 1914 or 1915 c. 1914-1915 Christina Broom/Museum of London
Christina Bloom (British, 1862-1939) The ‘Bermondsey B’hoys’ from the 2nd Grenadier Guards appear at ease for this informal photograph taken inside their base at Wellington Barracks sometime during 1914 or 1915 (detail) c. 1914-1915 Christina Broom/Museum of London
Today, the Museum of London announces a major new acquisition – the remaining photography collections of Christina Broom – the UK’s first female press photographer. The collection includes wartime photo of Rudyard Kipling’s son, Jack, who tragically died in the Battle of Loos, 1915.
Aged 40, Broom taught herself photography to create and sell photographic postcards – a trade which was thriving. At work between 1903 and 1939, she gained exclusive access to leading London events from suffragette processions to King George V’s coronation and became photographer to the Household Brigade, forging a unique relationship with the Guards.
Museum of London’s Curator of Photographs, Anna Sparham, said: “At over 2,500 photographs strong, this acquisition sees the museum add to its already significant collection of suffragette images by Christina Broom, with scenes documenting key moments of early 20th century London life. It also brings to light Broom’s diverse photographic oeuvre, traversing subjects such as royal celebration and occasion, the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Races, women’s work and predominantly London’s military activities before, during and in the aftermath of war. Whilst Broom’s images exude strength and relevance on their own, for me, it is the photographer’s own fascinating story of determination and entrepreneurialism that makes them truly come alive.”
The collection also includes a snapshot of Jungle Book writer, Rudyard Kipling’s son Jack, taken by Broom in 1915. Jack tragically died in the Battle of Loos later that year.
From Friday 4 April, highlights from this remarkable collection will be on show as part of a new, free display – Christina Broom. In this centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War, the display focuses on Broom’s portrayal of London’s military life. On show is a small, yet poignant selection of stills depicting soldiers in London mobilising for war and leaving for the Western Front. A major exhibition focused on Broom’s life and photography will follow in the near future.”
Press release from the Museum of London
Christina Bloom (British, 1862-1939) Captain Greer of the 1st Irish Guards and his machine gun team group together for this rather formal photograph, just prior to leaving for the war. They were all killed in battle soon afterwards Nd Christina Broom/Museum of London
Eric Beresford Greer was the son of Sir Joseph Henry Greer and Olivia Mary Beresford of Grange, Moy. He was born in April 1892 at the Curragh, Co. Kildare. He was raised by his Grandmother Agnes Isabella Greer in Moy, County Tyrone. He was educated at Eton College from 1906-1910 and joined the Irish Guards in 1911. Eric B Greer married Pamela Fitzgerald around 13 Feb 1917. Lieutenant Colonel Eric Beresford Greer was commanding the 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards when he was killed in action on 31 July 1917. Lieutenant Colonel Eric Beresford Greer was awarded the Military Cross.
His death near the village of Boezinghe on 31st July 1917 is recorded in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Irish Guards in the Great War’.
He had been in every battle in which the Guards were engaged since the opening of the war, including the fighting at Cuinchy, when Michael O’Leary performed the valorous deeds which won him, on the recommendation of Colonel Greer, the Victoria Cross. Enthusiastic in everything he took up, he interested himself much in athletics, and was the quarter mile champion of the army, and winner of the Irish Guards Cup each year from the time that he joined the regiment. While at Eton he also distinguished himself at the different sporting fixtures. He was awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in the field and was also mentioned in dispatches. His younger brother, Lieutenant Francis St Leger Greer, M.C., fell in action in February last, having previously been decorated for conspicuous gallant in action. The late Colonel Greer was married a few months ago to the younger daughter of the Honourable Eustace and Mrs Fitzgerald of 2 Manson Place, Queens Gate, London S.W.
Christina Bloom (British, 1862-1939) Captain Greer of the 1st Irish Guards and his machine gun team group together for this rather formal photograph, just prior to leaving for the war (detail) Nd Christina Broom/Museum of London
Christina Bloom (British, 1862-1939) Soldiers from the Household Battalion leaving for the Front bid farewell to their families from a platform at Waterloo Station in 1916. Broom made several similar photographs. For many relatives, they served as final mementos 1916 Christina Broom/Museum of London
Christina Bloom (British, 1862-1939) King George V and Queen Mary host a tea party for wounded soldiers and sailors at the Royal Mews in March 1916. The wounded, including many from British colonies, were brought to Buckingham Palace from nine London hospitals 1916 Christina Broom/Museum of London
Jack Kipling suffered from incredibly poor eye-sight, and had to wear very thick glasses to be able to see anything at all. When the First World War broke out in August 1914, Jack (then only aged 17) was desperate to join up. When he tried to volunteer, he was turned down because of his poor vision. He turned to his father for help. Rudyard Kipling pulled strings amongst his military friends and Jack was enlisted as a trainee officer, still under age. (Officers were supposed to be at least 18 years old, in order legally to join up). Tragically, Jack was killed in the Battle of Loos in 1915 at the age of 18. Kipling felt the loss of his son keenly, harbouring a tremendous amount of guilt for the part he played in Jack’s journey to the Western Front.
On the back of the photographic postcard, the words “Rudyard Kipling’s son – centre with glasses” are written in pencil.
Christina Broom/Museum of London
Christina Bloom (British, 1862-1939) A lieutenant from the 1st Life Guards poses for the camera in August 1914. He was later recorded as missing presumed killed during the War. Christina Broom’s stall can be seen in the distance just beneath the clock 1914 Christina Broom/Museum of London
Christina Bloom (British, 1862-1939) A trio of soldiers, including an Irish Guard on the left and a Scots Guard on the right, stand together with their hopeful message Nd Christina Broom/Museum of London
Anonymous photographer Portrait of photographer, Christina Broom Nd Christina Broom/Museum of London
Exhibition dates: 4th August – 21st September, 2014
Curators: Charles Silver, Curator, and Dave Kehr, Adjunct Curator, both from the Department of Film at MoMA
The Lost Patrol original theatrical poster
Art Blart is running hot at the moment, with lots of exhibitions finishing up around the 5th October 2014. I shall then scale things back for a while to start making a new body of my own art work. To get the ball rolling the next three postings on consecutive days feature photography and the First World War.
In this posting I have included text about each film, theatrical film posters and video to supplement the media images.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the MoMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The Lost Patrol. 1934. USA. Directed by John Ford
The Lost Patrol
The Lost Patrol is a 1934 war film made by RKO. It was directed and produced by John Ford. During World War I, the commanding officer of a small British patrol in the Mesopotamian desert is shot and killed by an unseen Arab sniper, leaving the Sergeant (Victor McLaglen) at a loss, since he had not been told what their mission is. He decides to try to rejoin the brigade, though he does not know where they are or where he is.
Eventually, the eleven men reach an oasis. During the night, one of the sentries is killed, the other seriously wounded, and all their horses are stolen, leaving them stranded. One by one, the remaining men are picked off by the unseen enemy. In desperation, the Sergeant sends two men chosen by lot on foot for help, but they are caught and tortured to death, before their bodies are sent back. The pilot of a British biplane spots the survivors, but nonchalantly lands nearby and is killed before he can be warned. The men take the machine gun from the airplane and set the plane on fire in a desperate bid to signal British troops. Sanders (Boris Karloff), a religious fanatic, goes mad.
In the end, only the Sergeant is left. When the Arabs finally show themselves, he manages to kill them all with the machine gun. Moments later, another British patrol arrives, attracted by the smoke from the burning plane.
Seventh Heaven. 1927. USA. Directed by Frank Borzage
7th Heaven (1927) is a silent film and one of the first films to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture (then called “Outstanding Picture”). The film was written by H.H. Caldwell (titles), Benjamin Glazer, Katherine Hilliker (titles) and Austin Strong (play), and directed by Frank Borzage.
Hearts of the World. 1918. USA. Directed by D.W. Griffith
Hearts of the World. 1918. USA. Directed by D.W. Griffith
Hearts of the World
Hearts of the World (1918) is a silent film directed by D. W. Griffith, a wartime propaganda classic that was filmed on location in Britain and near the Western Front, made at the request of the British Government to change the neutral mindset of the American public.
Two families live next to one another in a French village on the eve of World War I. The Boy in one of the families falls for the only daughter in the other family. As they make preparations for marriage, World War I breaks out, and, although the Boy is American, he feels he should fight for the country in which he lives.
When the French retreat, the village is shelled. The Boy’s father and the Girl’s mother and grandfather are killed. The Girl, deranged, wanders aimlessly through the battlefield and comes upon the Boy badly wounded and unconscious. She finds her way back to the village where she is nursed back to health by The Little Disturber who had previously been a rival for the Boy’s affections. The Boy is carried off by the Red Cross. Von Strohm, a German officer, lusts after the Girl and attempts to rape her, but she narrowly escapes when he is called away by his commanding officer.
Upon his recovery, the Boy, disguised as a German officer, infiltrates the enemy-occupied village, finds the Girl. The two of them are forced to kill a German sergeant who discovers them. Von Strohm finds the dead sergeant and locates the Boy and Girl who are locked in an upper room at the inn. It’s a race against time with the Germans trying to break the door down as the French return to retake the village.
“I don’t believe that Mr. Griffith every forgave himself for making ‘Hearts of the World.’ ‘War is the villain,’ he repeated, ‘not any particular people'” said Lillian Gish, actress playing ‘The Girl’.
The Mysterious Lady. 1928. USA. Directed by Fred Niblo
The Mysterious Lady
The Mysterious Lady (1928) is an MGM silent film starring Greta Garbo, Conrad Nagel, and Gustav von Seyffertitz, directed by Fred Niblo, and based on the novel War in the Dark by Ludwig Wolff.
In Vienna, Captain Karl von Raden (Conrad Nagel) purchases a returned ticket to a sold-out opera and finds himself sharing a loge with a lovely woman (Greta Garbo). Though she repulses his first advance, she does spend an idyllic day with him in the countryside. Karl is called away to duty, however. Colonel Eric von Raden (Edward Connelly), his uncle and the chief of the secret police, gives him secret plans to deliver to Berlin. He also warns his nephew that the woman is Tania Fedorova, a Russian spy. Tania comes to him aboard the train, professing to love him, but he tells her he knows who she is. Dejected, she leaves. The next morning, when Karl wakes up, he finds the plans have been stolen. As a result, he is sentenced to military degradation and imprisonment for treason. However, Colonel von Raden visits him in prison and arranges for his release. He sends his nephew to Warsaw, posing as a Serbian pianist, to seek out the identity of the real traitor and thus exonerate himself.
In Warsaw, by chance, Karl is asked to play at a private party where he once again crosses paths with Tania. She is being escorted by General Boris Alexandroff (Gustav von Seyffertitz), the infatuated head of the Russian Military Intelligence Department. Foolhardily, Karl plays a tune from the opera they attended together. She recognises it, but does not betray him. As the party goers are leaving, she slips away for a few stolen moments with her love. The jealous Alexandroff suspects their feelings for each other. He hires Karl to play the next day at a ball he is giving at his mansion for Tania’s birthday.
While Alexandroff and Tania are alone in his home office, he receives a parcel containing the latest secrets stolen by the traitor, whom he casually identifies as Max Heinrich. Later, Tania steals the documents, gives them to Karl, and sends him out via a secret passage. However, it is all a trap. Alexandroff comes in and tells Tania that what she stole was mere blank paper; he shows her the real documents. He pulls out a gun and announces that he intends to use it on Karl, who has been captured outside. She struggles with Alexandroff and manages to fatally shoot him; the sound goes unheard amidst the merriment of the party. When the guards bring the prisoner, she pretends the general is still alive and wants to see him alone. She and Karl escape with the incriminating documents and get married.
What Price Glory. 1952. USA. Directed by John Ford
What Price Glory
What Price Glory is a 1952 American Technicolor war film based on a 1924 play by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings, though it used virtually none of Anderson’s dialogue. Originally intended as a musical, it was filmed as a straight comedy-drama, directed by John Ford and released by 20th Century Fox on 22 August 1952 in the U.S.
Broken Lullaby (The Man I Killed). 1932. USA. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Broken Lullaby
Broken Lullaby (1932) is an American drama film directed by Ernst Lubitsch and released by Paramount Pictures. The screenplay by Samson Raphaelson and Ernest Vajda is based on the 1930 play L’homme que j’ai tué by Maurice Rostand and its 1931 English-language adaptation, The Man I Killed, by Reginald Berkeley.
Haunted by the memory of Walter Holderlin, a soldier he killed during World War I, French musician Paul Renard (Holmes) confesses to a priest, who grants him absolution. Using the address on a letter he found on the dead man’s body, Paul then travels to Germany to find his family.
Because anti-French sentiment continues to permeate Germany, Dr. Holderlin (Barrymore) initially refuses to welcome Paul into his home, but changes his mind when his son’s fiancée Elsa identifies him as the man who has been leaving flowers on Walter’s grave. Rather than reveal the real connection between them, Paul tells the Holderlin family he was a friend of their son, who attended the same musical conservatory he did.
Although the hostile townspeople and local gossips disapprove, the Holderlins befriend Paul, who finds himself falling in love with Elsa (Carroll). When she shows Paul her former fiancé’s bedroom, he becomes distraught and tells her the truth. She convinces him not to confess to Walter’s parents, who have embraced him as their second son, and Paul agrees to forego easing his conscience and stays with his adopted family. Dr. Holderlin presents Walter’s violin to Paul, who plays it while Elsa accompanies him on the piano.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. 1921. USA. Directed by Rex Ingram
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) is an American silent epic war film produced by Metro Pictures Corporation and directed by Rex Ingram. Based on the Spanish novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, it was adapted for the screen by June Mathis. The film stars Pomeroy Cannon, Josef Swickard, Bridgetta Clark, Rudolph Valentino, Wallace Beery, and Alice Terry.
The film had a huge cultural impact, becoming the top-grossing film of 1921, beating out Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, and going on to become the sixth-best-grossing silent film of all time. The film turned then-little-known actor Rudolph Valentino into a superstar and associated him with the image of the Latin Lover. The film also inspired a tango craze and such fashion fads as gauchopants. The film was masterminded by June Mathis, who, with its success, became one of the most powerful women in Hollywood at the time.
The film premiered in New York to great critical acclaim. Many critics hailed it as a new Birth of a Nation. However, the German press was less enthused with the portrayal of Germans in the film. With its extended scenes of the devastated French countryside and personalised story of loss, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is often considered to be one of the first anti-war films made.
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Metro Pictures poster for the film (1921)
Opening on the 100th anniversary of the day World War I began, The Museum of Modern Art’s The Great War: A Cinematic Legacy runs from August 4 through September 21, 2014, highlighting 60 feature-length films and thematic programs that attempt to provide a comprehensive view of the war as portrayed in film. The various films focus on prewar activities; espionage; the battlefields in the trenches, in the air, and on and beneath the sea; actualités; and the various homefronts before, during, and after the war. Familiar films, such as A Farewell to Arms (1932) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), along with several lesser-known works from as far away as New Zealand – including Chunuk Bair (1992) – reflect the universality of a war that reshaped the prevailing values of what passed for civilisation. In August, the program is predominately drawn from the early years, either during the war or in the succeeding decades, and includes several silent films. The program in September will concentrate mainly on later, more contemporary films up to, and including, Steven Spielberg’s War Horse (2011). The Great War is organised by Charles Silver, Curator, with Dave Kehr, Adjunct Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.
Many of the films in the series deal with the entrenched stalemate in France, including Verdun, Vision d’Histoire (Verdun, Vision of History) (1928) directed by Leon Poirier. The film, largely pacifist in nature, is based on the great 1916 battle and integrates actual footage with realistic restaged material using many actors who had been soldiers in the war. Similarly, Les Croix de bois (Wooden Crosses) (1932), directed by Raymond Bernard, forms something of a pacifist trench-based trio with Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and G. W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 (1930). The Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front, adapted from the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, depicts the disillusionment of German youth after experiencing the realities of war.
Another series of films highlights the importance of aviation in the war. William Wellman’s Wings (1927) was the first film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. The romantic action-war film, which effectively launched Gary Cooper’s career, features the story of a pair of American pilots fighting over Europe. The film was praised for its spectacular aerial sequences, which have an added air of authenticity because Wellman was himself an ace pilot with the Lafayette Escadrille and winner of the Croix de Guerre. Hell’s Angels (1930), directed by Howard Hughes, includes lavishly produced scenes of aerial warfare and Zeppelin bombing. Howard Hawks’s Dawn Patrol (1930) emphasises the tension of a commander sending men on suicidal aerial missions in flying crates. Lilac Time(1928), from George Fitzmaurice, stars Cooper as a British aviator in a squadron based in France, who falls in love with a farmer’s daughter.
Several of the newer films in the exhibition exemplify how the horrors of the war have had a lasting effect on civilisation. Steven Spielberg’s War Horse (2011), an adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s children’s novel about a thoroughbred in France, reminds us that war, and particularly World War I, is also a horror for non-human creatures. In My Boy Jack (2007), directed by Brian Kirk, Rudyard Kipling pulls strings to get his son John sent to France early in the war. Based on a play by David Haig, the film ends tragically at the Battle of Loos. Joyeux Noel (Merry Christmas) (2005), directed by Christian Carion, is a moving re-creation of a Christmas truce on the 1914 battlefield in France, as German, British, and French soldiers fraternise and exchange gifts.
Special thanks to Pacific Film Archive, Janus Films, Universal Pictures, Turner Classic Movies, Pathe.
Press release from the MoMA website
Friendly Enemies. 1942. USA. Directed by Allan Dwan
The Great Dictator. 1940. USA. Directed by Charles Chaplin
The Great Dictator
The Great Dictator is a 1940 American satirical political comedy-drama film starring, written, produced, scored, and directed by Charlie Chaplin, following the tradition of many of his other films. Having been the only Hollywood filmmaker to continue to make silent films well into the period of sound films, this was Chaplin’s first true talking picture as well as his most commercially successful film.
At the time of its first release, the United States was still formally at peace with Nazi Germany. Chaplin’s film advanced a stirring, controversial condemnation of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini’s fascism, antisemitism, and the Nazis. Chaplin’s film followed only nine months after Hollywood’s first parody of Hitler, the short subject You Nazty Spy! by the Three Stooges which itself premiered in January 1940, although Chaplin had been planning it for years before. Hitler had been previously allegorically pilloried in the German film by Fritz Lang, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. In his 1964 autobiography, Chaplin stated that he would not have made the film had he known about the actual horrors of the Nazi concentration camps at the time.
The Heart of Humanity. 1919. USA. Directed by Allen Holubar
The Heart of Humanity
The Heart of Humanity is a 1918 American silent war propaganda film produced by Universal Pictures and directed by Allen Holubar. The film stars Dorothy Phillips, William Stowell and Eric von Stroheim. A copy of the film is preserved at the EmGee Film Library and in private collections.
The film “follows the general theme and construction of [D. W. Griffiths’s film] Hearts of the World and, in places, parallels [its] plot”. The film was made toward the end of World War I and is known for showcasing von Stroheim as a lecherous ‘Hun’. The most notorious scene from this movie is the depiction of a near-rape prior to the defenestration of a crying baby.
Kameradschaft (Comradeship). 1931. Germany. Directed by G. W. Pabst
Kameradschaft – Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1931
Coal – camaraderie, in the literal translation of the original title – is based on a reconstruction of a mine disaster that occurred in Courrières near the French-German border in 1906. Fire has broken out on the French side. The necessary equipment to combat it is lacking. All facilities are available on the adjacent German side which has been separated by an underground fence since 1919.
Comradeship
Comradeship (German: Kameradschaft, known in France as La Tragédie de la mine) is a 1931 dramatic directed by Austrian director G. W. Pabst. The French-German co-production drama is noted for combining expressionism and realism.
The picture concerns a mine disaster where German miners rescue French miners from an underground fire and explosion. The story takes place in the Lorraine / Saar region, along the border between France and Germany. It is based on an actual historical event, one of the worst industrial accidents in history, the Courrières mine disaster in 1906 in Courrières, France, where rescue efforts after a coal dust explosion were hampered by the lack of trained mine rescuers. Expert teams from Paris and Germany – miners from the Westphalia region – came to the assistance of the French miners. There were 1,099 fatalities, including children.
Kameradschaft in German means a bond between soldiers or those who have similar opinions and are in friendship. The word is similar to comradeship, camaraderie or fellowship.
In 1919, at the end of World War I the border between France and Germany changes, and an underground mine is split in two, with a gate dividing the two sections. An economic downturn and rising unemployment adds to tension between the two countries, as German workers seek employment in France but are turned away, since there are hardly enough jobs for French workers. In the French part of the mine fires break out, which they try to contain by building many brick walls, with the bricklayers wearing breathing apparatus. The Germans continue to work on their side, but start to feel the heat from the French fires.
Three German miners visit a French dance hall and one of them almost provokes a fight when Francoise (Andree Ducret), a young French woman, refuses to dance with him. The rejected miner thinks it’s because he’s German, but it’s actually because she’s tired. She and her boyfriend, Emile (Georges Charlia), a miner, leave, and she expresses her distress over the stories about fires and explosions in the mine. The next morning, he stops in to say goodbye to her before she leaves for Paris, then he and her brother, Jean (Daniel Mendaille), another miner, leave for work.
The fire gets out of control, causing an explosion that traps many French miners. In response, Wittkopp (Ernst Busch) appeals to his bosses to send a rescue team. As they ride out of town to help, the leader of the German rescue effort explains to his wife that the French are men with women and children and he would hope that they would come to his aid in similar circumstances. The trio of German miners breaks through the gate that marks the 1919 border. On the French side, an old retired miner (Alex Bernard) sneaks into the shaft hoping to rescue his young grandson (Pierre-Louis).
The Germans successfully rescue the French miners, not without difficulties. After all the survivors are rescued, there’s a big party with speeches about friendship between the French and Germans. French officials then rebuild the mining gate, and things return to the way they were before the disaster and rescue.
When the film was released in the United States in 1932, Mordaunt Hall, film critic for the New York Times, praised the realism and the screenplay, writing “[Kameradschaft is] one of the finest examples of realism that has come to the screen … [the] scenes in the mine are so real that one never thinks of them as being staged … [and] [t]hroughout the length of this tale of horror one feels as though one were permitted through some uncanny force to look into all parts of the mine … All the noises and sounds are wonderfully natural.”
The Road Back is a 1937 drama film made by Universal Pictures, directed by James Whale. The screenplay is by Charles Kenyon and R. C. Sherriff from the eponymous novel by Erich Maria Remarque. Combining a strong anti-war message with prescient warnings about the dangers of the rising Nazi regime, it was intended to be a powerful and controversial picture, and Universal entrusted it to their finest director, James Whale.
The novel on which the film is based was banned during Nazi rule. When the film was made, Universal Pictures was threatened with a boycott of all their films by the German government unless the anti-Nazi sentiments in the script were watered down. Carl Laemmle and his son, Carl Laemmle, Jr., the former heads of Universal, had recently been ousted by a corporate takeover. The new studio heads, fearing financial loss, caved in to German pressure and the film was partially reshot with another director, and the remainder extensively re-edited, leaving it a pale shadow of Whale’s original intentions. To the director’s further displeasure, writer Charles Kenyon was ordered to interject the script with comedy scenes between Andy Devine and Slim Summerville, which Whale found unsuitable. Disgusted with the studio’s cowardice under its new management, Whale left Universal after completing Wives Under Suspicion, an unsuccessful remake of his own The Kiss Before the Mirror. He returned two years later to direct Green Hell, but never made another film for Universal after that.
The Secret Agent. 1936. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Secret Agent
Secret Agent (1936) is a British film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on two stories in Ashenden: Or the British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham. The film starred John Gielgud, Peter Lorre, Madeleine Carroll, and Robert Young. Future star Michael Redgrave made a brief, uncredited appearance; he would play the male lead in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes two years later. This was also Michael Rennie’s film debut (uncredited).
Gielgud plays a British officer, a famous writer whose death is faked during World War I, and who is sent by the mysterious “R”, head of British intelligence, to Switzerland on a secret mission. Carroll plays a female agent who poses as his wife. Lorre appears as a British agent working with them, a killer known variously as “the Hairless Mexican” and “the General”. Typical Hitchcockian themes used here include mistaken identity and murder.
Tell England (The Battle of Gallipoli). 1931. Great Britain. Directed by Anthony Asquith, Geoffrey Barkas
Tell England
Tell England is a 1931 British drama film directed by Anthony Asquith and Geoffrey Barkas and starring Fay Compton, Tony Bruce and Carl Harbord. It is based on the novel Tell England by Ernest Raymond which featured two young men joining the army, and taking part in the fighting at Gallipoli. Both directors had close memories of Gallipoli, as did Fay Compton’s brother, Compton Mackenzie. Asquith’s father Herbert Asquith had been Prime Minister at the time of the Gallipoli Landings, a fact which drew press attention to the film, while Barkas had personally fought at Suvla Bay in the Gallipoli campaign. In the United States it was released under the alternative title The Battle of Gallipoli.
Exhibition dates: 29th April – 22nd September, 2014
Curatorship: Manuel J. Borja-Villel, Tamara Díaz y Teresa Velázquez
Artists: Vito Acconci, Efrén Álvarez , Erich Andrés, Karel Appel, Archigram, Archizoom, Ricardo Baroja, Bernardo Bertolucci, Lina Bo Bardi; André Vainer and Marcelo Ferraz. Photography: Paquito, André Breton, Hans Bruggeman, Caja Lúdica, Camping Producciones, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Tranquillo Casiraghi, Mariana Castillo Deball, Francesc Català-Roca, Mario Cattaneo, Agustí Centelles, Chto Delat?, Julieta Colomer, Joan Colom, Constant (Constant Nieuwenhuys), Waldemar Cordeiro, Corneille, Violette Cornelius, Margit Czenki, Guy Debord, Maya Deren, Disobedience Archive. Curator: Marco Scotini, Ed van der Elsken , James Ensor, El equipo de Mazzanti (Giancarlo Mazzanti, Carlos Medellín, Stanley Schultz, Juliana Zambrano, Eugenia Concha, Lucia Lanzoni and Mariana Bravo), Escuela de Valparaíso, Marcelo Expósito, Aldo van Eyck, Kattia García Fayat, Priscila Fernandes, Ángel Ferrant, José A. Figueroa, Robert Filliou, Peter Fischli, Peter Friedl, Alberto Giacometti, John Goldblatt, Francisco de Goya, GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel), Grupo Contrafilé, Eric Hobsbawm, Lady Allen of Hurtwood, Internationale Situationniste, Cor Jaring, Kindel (Joaquín del Palacio), Henri Lefebvre, Fernand Léger, Helen Levitt, Liverani, L.S. Lowry, Maruja Mallo (Ana María Gómez González), Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky), Melchor María Mercado, Boris Mikhailov, Masato Nakagawa, Beaumont Newhall, Palle Nielsen , Isamu Noguchi , Nils Norman, Nudo (Eduardo Marín and Vladimir Llaguno), Hélio Oiticica, OMA / Rem Koolhaas, Cas Oorthuys, Amédée Ozenfant, Martin Parr, Jan H Peeterse, Erik Petersen, Adrian Piper, Cedric Price, Ab Pruis, Edgar Reitz and Alexander Kluge, Oliver Ressler, Jorge Ribalta, Xavier Ribas, Marcos L. Rosa, Emilio Rosenstein (Emil Vedin), Roberto Rossellini, Otto Salemon, Louis Sciarli, Alison y Peter Smithson, Kenneth Snelson, José Solana (José Gutiérrez Solana), Carl Theodor Sørensen, Humphrey Spender, Christensen Tage, Túlio Tavares (comp.), Teatro Ojo, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Jean Vigo, Nuria Vila, Dmitry Vilensky, Pedro Vizcaíno, Peter Watkins, Weegee (Arthur H. Fellig), David Weiss
Many thankx to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of the exhibition Playgrounds. Reinventing the square at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Through a selection of works from different time periods and in different mediums (paintings, sculptures, installations, videos, photographs, archive devices…), this exhibition analyses the socialising, transgressive and political potential of play when it appears linked to public space. The premise of Playgrounds is twofold: on one side, the popular tradition of carnival shows how the possibility of using recreational logic to subvert, reinvent and transcend exists, if only temporarily. On the other side, there has been two fundamental constants in utopian imagery throughout history: the vindication of the need for free time (countering work time, productive time) and the acknowledged existence of a community of shared property, with a main sphere of materialisation in public space.
The historical-artistic approach to the political and collective dimension of spaces of play, on view in this exhibition, gets under way in the second half of the 19th century, a time that signals the start of the process of free time becoming consumption time; a process that threw the concept of public space into crisis as it started to be conceived not only as an element for exercising (political) control, but also one for financial gain. Thus, cities started to become the objects of rational and utilitarian planning, where the field of architecture was redefined, providing spaces for play with new values, built as one of the key points of the modern ideology of the public.
This ideology was reshaped in the early decades of the 20th century; for instance, during this time projects were implemented that allowed the recovery and increased value of land that had been completely torn apart by war, turning it into areas of play aimed at nurturing children’s independence. The significant turning point in this process of restructuring took place during the 1960s, when, as demonstrated by numerous artistic and activist experiences and practices in recent decades, the festive subversion and anti-authoritarian outbursts from carnivalesque logic started to be employed as political tools attempting to generate other ways of making and contemplating the city, as well as organising community life.
With some 300 works, the exhibition recounts a different history of art, from the end of the 19th century to the present day, whereby the artwork plays a part in redefining public space by exploring the city as a game board, questioning modern-day carnival, vindicating the right to laziness, reinventing the square as a place of revolt and discovering the possibilities of a new world through its waste. The exhibit takes the playground model as an ideological interrogation of an alienated and consumerist present.
Text from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía website
Frank Burke (Australian, 1920-1984) A kids scooter race at the Paddy’s Markets in Sydney, 19 August 1956 1956 Silver gelatin print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Boy with Ribbon 1940 Silver gelatin print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York (Two girls with ribbon) c. 1940
Agustí Centelles (Catalan, 1909-1985) Barcelona, España. Guardería infantil en Vía Layetana [Babysitting in Layetana Road] 1936-1939 Silver gelatin print
Fernand Léger (French, 1881-1951) Les Loisirs – Hommage à Louis David [Leisure – Homage to Louis David] 1948-1949
Louis Sciarli (French, b. 1925) Le Corbusier. Marseille: Unité d’habitation, École Maternelle [Le Corbusier. Marseille: housing unit, Kindergarten] 1945/2014
Maruja Mallo (Ana María Gómez González) (Viveiro, Lugo, Spain, 1902 – Madrid, Spain, 1995) The Fair (La verbena) 1927 (September) Oil on canvas 119 x 165cm
In 1928, at a one-woman exhibition put on by Ortega y Gasset in the rooms of the Revista de Occidente, Maruja Mallo showed the four oil paintings in the Madrid Fair series from which La verbena (The Fair), currently in the Museo Reina Sofía collection, is taken. In this colourful painting, an example of her personal world-view, the artist creates Baroque-filled scenes that are apparently without logic, where the motifs self-multiply into a whirlwind of lines and sensations. Imbued with a sharp critical sense, which is translated by the painter into subtle satire, the painting contains all the elements of the traditional popular Madrid fairs (the shooting gallery, the test-your-strength machine), alongside the principal characters and other, stranger kinds of characters like the one-eyed giant, the priest enjoying one of the sideshows or the man with deformed feet, begging with a guitar on his back. All this contributes to an undeniably Surrealist atmosphere.
Marcos L. Rosa Revisitando los playgrounds de Aldo van Eyck 1974/2011
The exhibition addresses the socialising, transgressive and political potential of play in relation to public space. Ever since the popular tradition of the carnival, it has been recognised that it is possible, even if only temporarily, to subvert, reinvent and transcend an everyday life reduced to a mere exercise in survival. The recognition of the existence of communal goods and the need for free time, in direct contradistinction to working time, are two fundamental constants of the utopian imagination throughout history.The public space, as an ambience which synthesises the notion of communal goods, is materialised as part of the experience of citizen participation.
Adopting as its premise the notion of carnival pageantry as a practice that alters the established order, the exhibition Playgrounds. Reinventing the square will explore the collective dimension of play and the need for a “ground” of its own in order to engage in the construction of a new public arena. Playgrounds (curated by Manuel J. Borja-Villel, Tamara Díaz and Teresa Velázquez) takes a historical and artistic approach to the space reserved for play and its socialising, transgressive and political potential from the dawn of modernity to the present day. The show to be seen at the Museo Reina Sofía aims to explore the recreational, playful, festive side of life that puts the humdrum reality of the everyday on hold, subverting, reinventing and transcending it for one fleeting moment.
With approximately 300 works in several formats (painting, sculpture, facilities, video, photography, graphical arts, cinema and documents) of artists like James Ensor, Francisco of Goya, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, Alberto Giacometti, Ángel Ferrant, Hélio Oiticica, Lina Bo Bardi, Fischli and Weiss, Vito Acconci, Priscila Fernandes, or Xabier Rivas, Playgrounds. Reinventing the square shows how the playful element, understood as creative strategy, coexists with questions related to the public sphere Departing from this idea, the exhibition explores the recognition of the time and the space of the game as areas of essay and learning.
The show adopts the model of the ‘playground’ as an ideological interrogation of an alienated and consumerist present. After the industrial revolution and the gradual implantation of labor systems based on the capitalist principle of minimum investment for maximum gain, there emerges an indissociable identification between producer and consumer, one of whose immediate consequences is the conversion of free time into consumption time. The alienation of labor dominates modes of life and gives rise to a crisis in public spaces, threatened in their turn by economic forces. Derived from a rational and utilitarian planning of the city, the public park is instituted as a surrogate collective paradise, leading from the mid-19th century to great urban facilities for mass consumption and entertainment. From architecture, within the Modern Movement and its derivates, comes the definition of the playground, endowed with new social, pedagogical and functional values while at the same time emerging as one of the key points of the modern ideology of the public.
The ideas of a “junk playground”, proposed by the Danish architect Carl Theodor Sørensen in 1935, and of an “adventure playground”, which was promoted in the United Kingdom by the landscape architect Lady Allen of Hurtwood and spread to several European cities after the Second World War, are means of retrieving and attaching significance to wastelands and bomb sites as play areas aimed at child autonomy. In the sixties, the child is vindicated as an autonomous political subject in a context dominated by the vindication of the right to the city, and coinciding with the high point of the revolt of the homo ludens (borrowing from the essay of the same name by Johan Huizinga) in the context of May ’68. As evidenced by the numerous processes of social activism in recent years, festive subversion and the anti-authoritarian overspilling of boundaries by the carnival become new ways of practising politics. The movements of 2011 in such scattered locations as Tahrir (Cairo), Sol (Madrid), Syntagma (Athens), and other squares, streets and neighbourhoods restored the public and democratic dimension of such spaces. This temporary occupation, articulated through virtual communications networks, implied a reappropriation of the political and experimentation with other forms of organisation and communal life.
The introduction to the exhibition will provide background on the carnivalesque concept of life, underscoring certain aspects related to the notion of free time in modern life. The show will also revisit the street as a place of play and self-realisation, through examples of adventure playgrounds as well as photographs and films that will give a historic panoramic since the 1930s from a documentary perspective. The nucleus of the exhibition is devoted to the model of the modern playground and its contradictions, with relevant materials accounting for the urban revolution of the 1960s, the consideration of the city as a relational and psychological construction and works that parallel aesthetic and political transformations.
The last section of the show will consist of a series of experiments based on anti-hegemonic exercises, such us the civil appropriation of the street for “playground” use and works that challenge passive recreation through the emancipative power of play, not to mention recent experiences that resume the collective reinvention of the square and have become essential in envisioning new ways of doing politics.
Press release from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Untitled (Boy and gun) 1940 Silver gelatin print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Children playing with a picture frame, New York (Niños jugando con un marco, Nueva York) c. 1940
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Fruit and candy Nd
Francesc Català-Roca Valls (Tarragona, Spain, 1922 – Barcelona, Spain, 1998) Games in an Empty Lot 1950 (circa) / Posthumous print, 2003 Selenium-toned gelatin silver print on paper
Joan Colom (Spanish, 1921-2017) No title 1958-1961 (circa) / Vintage print From the series El carrer (The Street) Gelatin silver print on paper
Joan Colom published his series on Barcelona’s Chinatown in the magazine AFAL (1962) with an autobiography: “Age: 40. Profession: Accountant. Hobbies: Apart from photography, obviously, none.” Of his method, Colom said: “I have decided to only work with subjects that I have predetermined.” Oriol Maspons adds the technical details: “Everything was taken using a Leica M2, shot from the hip without framing or focusing. A real photographer’s work. More than a year on the same subject.” The series had been exhibited with some success (and controversy) at the Sala Aixelá in Barcelona the previous year, under the title El carrer (The Street). In 1964 it was finally published by Lumen in one of the finest photo-books in their Palabra e Imagen collection, “Izas, rabizas y colipoterras”, designed by Oscar Tusquets and Cristian Cirici. Camilo José Cela contributed a text based around Colom’s (surreptitious but captionless) photos that was full of broad, cruel humour, pitilessly mocking the women, photographed by Colom and judged by Cela. Somewhat ahead of her time, one of the women actually sued the photographer, the only result of which was the photo-book’s withdrawal from bookshops, and Colom’s retirement from photography for years. From the 1980s onwards public obscurity became public recognition, which has continued to grow.
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Sabatini building. Room A1 Calle Santa Isabel, 52 Madrid 28012 Spain Phone: (+34) 91 7741000
Curators: Ángeles Alonso Espinosa, anthropologist and curator at the Museo Amparo in Mexico, and José Antonio Rodríguez, historian of the image and freelance curator
I really love the work of artists such as Kati Horna and Florence Henri “with the production of collages and photomontages inspired by the avant-garde movements of the 1930s (the Bauhaus, Surrealism, German Neue Sachlichkeit, Russian Constructivism).”
Horna’s photographs have more of a political edge than that of Florence Henri, with her unique photographic reportage of the Spanish Civil War between 1937-39 and her Hitler series both having a strong social critique. Here is another politically aware artist who stood up for the cause, who recorded the “everyday life for the civilian population through a vision that was in empathy with the environment and the people.” Again, here is another who was lucky to survive the maelstrom of the Second World War, who would have certainly ended up dead if she and her Andalusian artist husband José Horna had not fled Paris in 1939 for their adopted country Mexico.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS I spent hours cleaning up the press images, there were in a really poor state, but the work was so worthwhile… they really sing now!
Many thankx to the Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
This summer, the Jeu de Paume, which is celebrating 10 years devoted to the image, will be inviting the public to discover Kati Horna (1912-2000), an avant-garde, humanist photographer, who was born in Hungary and exiled in Mexico, where she documented the local art scene.
In collaboration with the Museo Amparo in Puebla (Mexico), the Jeu de Paume is presenting the first retrospective of the work of photographer Kati Horna (Szilasbalhási, Hungary, 1912-Mexico, 2000), showing more than six decades of work in Hungary, France, Spain and Mexico. Kati Horna, a photographer whose adopted homeland was Mexico, was one of a generation of Hungarian photographers (including André Kertész, Robert Capa, Eva Besnyö, László Moholy-Nagy, Nicolás Muller, Brassaï, Rogi André, Ergy Landau and Martin Munkácsi) forced to flee their country due to the conflicts and social upheaval of the 1930s.
Cosmopolitan and avant-garde, Kati Horna was known above all for her images of the Spanish Civil War, produced at the request of the Spanish Republican government between 1937 and 1939. Her work is characterised by both its adherence to the principles of Surrealist photography and her very personal approach to photographic reportage.
This major retrospective helps to bring international recognition to this versatile, socially committed, humanist photographer, highlighting her unusual artistic creativity and her contribution to photojournalism. It offers a comprehensive overview of the work of this artist, who started out as a photographer in Hungary at the age of 21, in the context of the European avant-garde movements of the 1930s: Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus school, Surrealism and German Neue Sachlichkeit. Her vast output, produced both in Europe and Mexico, her adopted country, is reflected in a selection of over 150 works – most of them vintage prints, the vast majority of them unpublished or little known.
In Mexico, Kati Horna formed a new family with the émigré artists Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, Emerico ‘Chiki’ Weisz, Edward James and, later on, Leonora Carrington. In parallel with her reportages, she took different series of photographs of visual stories, extraordinary creations featuring masks and dolls, motifs that began to appear in her work in the 1930s.
Kati Horna also became the great portraitist of the Mexican literary and artistic avant-garde; her visionary photographs captured the leading artists in Mexico during the 1960s, such as Alfonso Reyes, Germán Cueto, Remedios Varo, Pedro Friedeberg, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Mathias Goeritz and Leonora Carrington.
The exhibition is divided into five periods: her beginnings in Budapest, Berlin and Paris between 1933 and 1937; Spain and the Civil War from 1937 to 1939; Paris again in 1939; then Mexico. The exhibition also presents a number of documents, in particular the periodicals that she contributed to during her travels between Hungary, France, Spain and Mexico. The works come from the Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna, the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica de España, Salamanca, the Museo Amparo, Puebla, as well as private collections.
Afterwards I returned to Paris, and do you know why I didn’t die of hunger in Paris? Before I left, everyone mocked me, “there’s the photographer”, I was the photographer of eggs. I had this idea of being the first one to do things, not with figurines, but little stories with eggs, and it was that wonderful draughtsman who subsequently committed suicide who did the faces for me… The first was the romantic story of a carrot and a potato. The carrot declared its love to the potato. He always did the faces and I staged the scenes. I took the photos with my big camera with 4 x 5 negatives.
Kati Horna
Born in Hungary to a family of bankers of Jewish origin during a period of political and social instability, Kati Horna would always be deeply marked by the violence, injustice and danger around her. This situation helped to forge her ideological commitment, her perpetual search for freedom, her particular way of denouncing injustice, as well as her compassionate and human vision, like that of Lee Miller and her pictures of the Second World War. As was the case for her great childhood friend Robert Capa, to whom she would remain close throughout her life, photography became a fundamental means of expression.
At the age of 19 she left Budapest to live in Germany for a year, where she joined the Bertolt Brecht collective. She frequented photographer friends and compatriots Robert Capa and ‘Chiki’ Weisz, as well as other major figures in Hungarian photography, such as László Moholy-Nagy – who at the time was a teacher at the Bauhaus school – and Simon Guttman, founder of the Dephot agency (Deutscher Photodienst). On her return from Budapest, she enrolled in the studio of József Pécsi – the famous Hungarian photographer (1889-1956) – before leaving her birth country again, in 1933, to settle in Paris.
It was during this period of apprenticeship that her own aesthetic took shape, which marked her entire career, with the production of collages and photomontages inspired by the avant-garde movements of the 1930s (the Bauhaus, Surrealism, German Neue Sachlichkeit, Russian Constructivism). Paris was a cosmopolitan capital and Surrealism was at its height at the time. This movement heavily influenced Kati Horna’s style, both through its themes and its techniques, be it the narrative collage, superimposition or photomontage. Her photography was closely linked to the arts of the image, used as an illustrative technique and as a support for a poetics of the object. Her taste for stories and staged images are clearly evident. From 1933 she worked for the Lutetia-Press agency, for whom she did her first photo stories: Mercado de pulgas [Flea Market] (1933), which would not be published until 1986 in the Mexican periodical Foto Zoom, and Cafés de París (1934).
Photography, with its various possibilities, enables one to show, liberate and develop one’s own sensibility which can be expressed in graphic images.
And at the moment of pressing the shutter you had to keep the image, let your emotion, discovery and visual surprise flow, the moment had to be kept in your head. That’s what I call developing one’s visual memory.
Kati Horna
Between 1937 and 1939, Kati Horna covered the Spanish Civil War with great sensitivity. The Spanish Republican government asked her to produce images on the Civil War. Thus, between 1937 and 1939 she photographed the places where the major events of the war took place, in the Aragon province, in the country’s cities (Valencia, Madrid, Barcelona and Lerida), as well as a number of strategic villages in Republican Spain.
A collection of more than 270 negatives has survived from this period, today conserved in the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica de España, Salamanca. They bear witness to the reality of the conflict at the front as well as, and above all, everyday life for the civilian population through a vision that was in empathy with the environment and the people. Committed to the anarchist cause, she became the editor of the periodical Umbral, where she would meet her future husband, the Andalusian anarchist José Horna – and worked on the cultural periodical of the National Confederation of Labour, Libre-Studio. She also collaborated on the periodicals Tierra y Libertad, Tiempos Nuevos and Mujeres Libres, publications that are being exhibited for the first time. At the time, her work was distinguished by its photomontages, which have both a symbolic and metaphorical character.
I am in an existential crisis. Today everyone is running, today everyone is driving. My pictures? They were the product of a creative love, linked to my experiences and the way they were taken. I was never in a hurry.
S.nob was a joy… I don’t know why I enjoyed myself so much, but the facility that Salvador [Elizondo] and the team, and Juan [García Ponce] gave me, a great creativity came out of me.
Kati Horna
Kati Horna returned to Paris in 1939. Her husband, the Andalusian artist José Horna, enlisted in the Ebra division that covered the retreat of the Spanish civilians to France. In October, as soon as he reached Prats-de-Mollo, in the French Pyrenees, he was incarcerated in a camp for Spanish refugees. Kati Horna succeeded in getting him freed. They left for Paris where they were again harassed, obliging them to flee France for Mexico. Mexico would become her final homeland.
During her everyday life she came into contact with some of the extraordinary figures of Surrealism (Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret and Edward James) and the Panic movement (Alejandro Jodorowsky), as well as avant-garde Mexican artists, writers and architects (Mathias Goeritz, Germán Cueto, Pedro Friedeberg, Salvador Elizondo, Alfonso Reyes and Ricardo Legorreta).
Kati Horna established herself as a chronicler of the period, leaving for posterity a unique corpus. In Mexico, she worked as a reporter for periodicals such as Todo (1939), Nosotros (1944-1946), Mujeres (1958-1968), Mexico this Month (1958-1965), S.nob (1962) and Diseño (1968-1970). During the last 20 years of her life, she also taught photography at the Universidad Iberoamericana and the San Carlos Academy (Univesidad Nacional Autónoma de México), where she trained an entire generation of contemporary photographers.
Horna’s quotes come from the catalogue, co-published by the Jeu de Paume and the Museo Amparo
Curators: by José Roca and María Wills Londoño (adjunct curator)
Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) El juego de las probabilidades [The Game of Probabilities]
2007
12 colour photographs
47 x 40cm each with frame
Courtesy of the artist and Sicardi Gallery, Houston
Another artist investigating the medium of photography in totally fascinating ways… breaking the glass, deconstructing the support, fragmenting the image, questioning the imprint of photography – in memory, in the photographs physicality, in what leaves an impression, in what remains. The un/stable image, in flux, in sediment, investigated through “work [that] defies systematic classification because he works in so many different media: photography, printmaking, drawing, installations, video and sculpture.”
Such inventiveness over such a long period of time “developing special techniques to produce images that reveal themselves as a kind of counterpoint to photography and the “decisive moment” it once claimed to capture.”
Ephemeral photography that is truly remarkable.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
This summer, the Jeu de Paume, which is celebrating 10 years devoted to the image, will be inviting the public to discover Oscar Muñoz (born in 1951), Colombia’s most emblematic artist, who has been producing a body of work for nearly forty years that centres on the capacity of images to preserve memory.
CALI-DOSCOPE: CITY FRAGMENTS
Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) Ambulatorio [Ambulatory] 1994 Aerial photograph enclosed in security glass, wood and aluminium, 36 units 100 x 100cm each Courtesy O.K. Centrum, Linz
Muñoz emerged on the Colombian art scene with his series of large-format hyperrealist drawings in charcoal on paper that revealed his interest in the social implications of empty or deteriorating spaces. This group includes drawings from the series entitled Inquilinatos [Tenement Houses] (1979) and Interiores [Interiors] (1980-1981). Also on display are works referring to Cali’s urban life, such as Ambulatorio [Ambulatory] (1994), El Puente [The Bridge] (2004), Archivo Porcontacto [Bycontact Archive] (2004-2008), which are images of a specific period and specific places in the city, and A través del cristal [Through the Glass] (2008-2009), the latter a way of introducing an absent cultural reference through sound.
Cali recurs in Muñoz’s work as a contextual reference or a support. This is literally the case with Ambulatorio, an aerial photograph of the city blown up to a monumental scale and laid out in a regular grid. Each segment of the photograph is fixed to a piece of security glass, which breaks into pieces when the viewer walks on the work. Each break creates another random mesh of lines over the urban image of a chaotic city in which rational planning and the unstructured coexist in a way typical of all modern South American cities.
THE SUPPORT RECONSIDERED
Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) Cortinas de Baño [Shower curtains] 1985-1986 Acrylic on plastic, 5 elements 190 x 140 cm and 190 x 70cm each, dimensions variable Banco de la República collection, Bogotá
Having achieved international renown as an exceptional draughtsman, in the 1980s Muñoz gradually abandoned paper as a support and experimented with new techniques of drawing and printmaking, using unconventional materials and supports such as acrylic applied to damp plastic and charcoal dust on water. This group includes the series Cortinas de Baño [Shower Curtains] (1985-1986), Tiznados [Tainted] (1990), Narcisos secos [Dry Narcissi] (1994-1995) and Simulacros [Simulacra] (1999).
In Cortinas de baño Muñoz experimented for the first time with an unconventional support, in this case an everyday plastic shower curtain, in order to construct an image from a photograph transferred onto a silkscreen mesh. In the printing process, executed with an airbrush through previously prepared silkscreen, the image was transferred onto an unstable surface, with the artist preventing the pigment from being totally fixed by sprinkling water on it.
Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) Narcisos(en proceso)[Narcissi (in process)] 1995-2011 Charcoal dust and paper on water, Plexiglas, 6 elements 10 x 50 x 50cm each Overall dimensions: 10 x 70 x 400cm Courtesy of the artist
Narcisos was a key series in the artist’s quest to dematerialise the support of the photographic image. Muñoz developed a new technique unprecedented in the history of art and probably never to be encountered again – that of printing on water. The earliest photographic images emerged from water, from the chemical baths that fixed the silver salts in different gradations of intensity produced by the action of light. The support was an incidental necessity. Muñoz has referred to the three phases in the process of Narcissi as allegories of an individual’s progress through life: creation, at the moment when the charcoal dust touches the surface of the water; the changes that come about during evaporation; and death, at the moment when the dried out dust finally settles at the bottom of the container. The result, which the artist has called Narcisos secos, is both the final image and the death of the process: the remains of a photograph that possessed a life after it was fixed for posterity. In this sense, Dry Narcissi are the record of a double death of the image.
Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) Narciso [Narcissus]
2001
Single-channel video 4:3, colour, sound, 3 min
Courtesy of the artist
Muñoz’s first work in video was Narciso, in which he dramatically presented the processes developed in his Narcissi of the 1990s (in which the evaporation was invisible to the naked eye) by making the water disappear in a few minutes. As in those earlier works, a self-portrait floats on the surface of the water but the drain in the sink and the sound of running water foretell for the viewer what the image’s final fate will be. In reality, there are two images here: that of the subject and that of its shadow on the white bottom of the basin. The images gradually come closer together, as if to suggest that life is a constant quest for self-understanding. However, at the moment when the two images are about to coincide, it is already too late: they fuse into a single distorted stain that disappears down the drain.
Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) Re/trato [Portrait/I Try Again] 2004 Single-channel video projection 4:3, colour, no sound, 28 min Courtesy of the artist
About the exhibition
“Through a multifaceted body of work that moves freely between photography, printmaking, drawing, installation, video and sculpture, eliminating the borderlines between these disciplines through innovative practices, Oscar Muñoz (Popayán, Colombia, 1951) explores the capacity of images to retain memory.
In 1826, for the first time in history the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce succeeded in fixing the elusive image produced by the camera obscura, a device known since antiquity. In contrast to painting or drawing, the camera obscura was able to obtain an image from life without the assistance of the human hand and in real time: what it could not do was freeze it or fix it onto a support in order to extract it from the passing of time. It could thus be said that the essence of the photographic act does not lie in taking the image but in permanently fixing it. What, then, is the status of the image in the instant prior to the moment when it is fixed for posterity?
If the ontology of photography lies in fixing a moving image for all time, extracting it from life, we might say that Oscar Muñoz’s work is located in the temporal space prior (or subsequent) to the true decisive moment when the image is fixed: that proto-moment when the image is finally about to become photography. In that sense, it could be said that Muñoz’s work is protographic.
The exhibition
Born in 1951 in Popayán (Colombia), Oscar Muñoz is regarded as one of the country’s most important contemporary artists, whilst also garnering attention on the international art scene. A graduate of the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Cali, he has built up over a period of four decades a body of work whose images deal with the realm of memory, loss and the precarious nature of human life. Muñoz’s work defies systematic classification because he works in so many different media: photography, printmaking, drawing, installations, video and sculpture.
“Protographs” (a term coined to evoke the instant just before or just after that split-second when the photographic image is captured and frozen for ever) presents his major series grouped by theme. These themes poetically and metaphorically juxtapose Muñoz’s own past and the different material states of the image. For example, he combines the dissolution, deterioration or disintegration of the image with the inherent fragility of memory and the impossibility of making time stand still; or the image’s evaporation and transformation with the tension between rationality and chaos in our urban societies. Finally, in the main part of his work, he creates ephemeral images that, as they disappear, invite the spectator to share in an experience that is simultaneously rational and sensual.
Oscar Muñoz began his career in the 1970s in Cali in a period when a whirlwind of cultural and cross-disciplinary activity saw the emergence of a generation of writers, photographers and filmmakers who today play a leading role in the contemporary art scene (with Carlos Mayolo, Luis Ospina, Fernell Franco and Andrés Caicedo to name but a few). At that time, Muñoz was drawing with charcoal on large-format supports presenting a cast of sad and sometimes sordid characters with a deep emotional charge. The main characteristics of his work emerged at an early stage. These include a profound and tireless interest in social questions, an original approach to materials, the use of photography as an aid to memory and the exploiting of the dramatic possibilities afforded by the play of shadow and light in defining the image. Moreover, the artist developed a phenomenological approach to minimalism by insisting on the relationship between the artwork, the spectator and the surrounding exhibition space.
In the mid-1980s, Oscar Muñoz moved away from traditional artistic methods and began to experiment with innovative processes that created a real interactive exchange with the spectator. This was the time of a radical reassessment of his artistic practices, whether drawing, printmaking, or photography, and a questioning of the relationship between the artwork and its surroundings. He abandoned traditional formats and techniques, whilst preserving something of their roots and wellsprings, to investigate ephemerality, highlighting the very essence of the materials themselves and their poetic associations. His use of the fundamental elements – water, air and fire – refers to the processes, the cycles and the transcendental manifestations of life, our very existence and death itself. “My work attempts to understand why the past and the present are so full of violent acts,” says the artist. By choosing to use a diverse selection of media and to apply innovative and unique processes, Oscar Muñoz blurs the boundaries between artistic disciplines.
The “Protographs” exhibition showcases a career that has lasted nearly forty years. It presents series of works grouped around the artist’s major themes, starting with his works on paper and his series of large format hyperrealist drawings in charcoal (1976-1981) – bearing witness to his deep interest in social context – and the drawings and engravings that he started making in the 1980s, which marked the relinquishing of paper for an exploration of unconventional materials and processes (printing on damp plastic, the use of sugar and coffee, etc.); continuing with his experiments in the 1990s and 2000s on the stability of the image and its relationship to the processes of memory; and including his latest works (2009-2014), characterised by a continual process of appearance and disappearance, including a new work produced specifically for the exhibition.”
Text by José Roca and María Wills Londoño
IMPRINTS
Over the last decade, Muñoz has created a series of works on the indicative relationship between the object and its image, making use of contact printing, a characteristic printmaking process. This was the case with La mirada del Cíclope [The Cyclops’ Gaze] (2001-2002), Intervalos (mientras respiro) [Intervals (While I Breathe)] (2004) and Paístiempo [Countrytime] (2007), as well as series from a number of other periods.
Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951)
Aliento [Breath]
1995
Metal mirrors, screen-printed with grease, 7 mirrors Diameter: 20 cm each
Courtesy of the artist
The series Aliento comprises portraits printed in photo-silkscreen with grease on small round metal mirrors located at eye level. The mirrors initially seem blank and the printed image only reveals itself when the viewer, having recognised himself / herself, breathes onto the circular mirror. During this brief moment the reflected image is replaced by the printed image (photographs taken from obituaries) of a deceased person who fleetingly returns through the viewer’s breath.
Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) La mirada del cíclope [The Cyclops’ Gaze]
2002
Digital print on paper, 6 photographs
50 x 50 cm each one
Courtesy of the artist
La mirada del cíclope, in which the subject is considered in relation to death, uses one of the oldest techniques of portraiture and printmaking: a mould made by direct contact, in this case of the artist’s own face. This sculptural object (inspired by the ancient Roman tradition of funerary masks) becomes two-dimensional when it is captured by the camera’s single eye (hence the title). Lacking references to volume, the viewer’s eye cannot decide if the object represented is concave or convex, in a play of perceptual opposites: negative / positive, presence / absence, reality or illusions. Quoting Pierre Bourdieu, Muñoz has noted that “the imagines of ancient Rome are exactly equivalent to the social nature of some modern photographs; they play an important role in the tortuous act of mourning: we accept a reality by ‘becoming accustomed to the unreality of its images’.”
Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) Horizonte [Horizon] 2011 From the series Impresiones débiles [Weak Impressions] Charcoal dust print on methacrylate 4 elements, 85 x 73.5cm each Galerie mor. charpentier, Paris
The earliest successful images taken by Niépce were proto-photographs that did not survive intact as images because the light that had created them continued to affect them until they eventually succumbed to darkness in an inexorable fade to black. This is what happens in film photography when a photograph is not properly rinsed and the developing agent continues to act, or when the photographic paper is directly exposed to the action of light. However, the image can also move towards clarity. In Impresiones débiles, Muñoz employs photographs of great historical and political significance for Colombia and subjects them to a process that makes them seem like “washed out” photos in which over-exposure to light has made the image deteriorate to the point of near invisibility. The works that make up this series are in fact prints rather than photographs, given that they are silkscreens made with charcoal dust on acrylic. The variable distance between the silkscreen mesh and the support allows the artist to single out a different element from the original photograph in each print, making it more highly defined than the rest. The “variable focus” in this series questions another of the supposedly essential characteristics of photography, namely the camera’s systematic, technical objectivity in relation to its subjects.
THE IMAGE IN FLUX
In his most recent works, Muñoz depicts images in a process of continual appearance and disappearance. These are subtle impressions with varying emphases on the different parts of the image that are literally in flux and cannot be fixed, such as those produced by a camera obscura. This section includes the video Cíclope [Cyclops] (2011), the installation Editor solitario [Solitary Editor] and the work Sedimentaciones [Sedimentations] (2011), the latter comprising three tables with projections of documents that are constantly created and destroyed. The exhibition ends with the highly personal Fundido al blanco [Fade to White] (2010).
Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) Fundido a blanco (dos retratos)[Fade to White (Two Portraits)] 2010 HD Video, colour, sound, 7 min 40 s Courtesy of the artist
Fundido a blanco (dos retratos) is an autobiographical work: a family portrait with Muñoz behind the camera, constituting the third side of a temporal triangle that includes his mother and father. It is, in other words, a memorial. Rather than making their features more clear, the strong light that bathes the scene makes them imprecise and ethereal. Muñoz has referred to the intense light in Cali at a certain time of day, when people seem to “disintegrate”, and also to the blinding brilliance of the sun when the artist came out after seeing a film at the city’s film club. The central figure in Fundido a blanco momentarily falls asleep now and then, entering into the light. Rather than fixing that figure at a precise moment of its existence, in the manner of a photographic portrait or snapshot, Muñoz creates a portrait that develops in time. Fundido a blanco is one of the artist’s most moving works, an image that touches the viewer. Its power may perhaps lie in the fact that for the first time in his extensive output, we are here seeing a specific subject rather than the generic representation of one.
Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) Sedimentaciones [Sedimentations] 2011 2 HD video projections, colour, sound, 42 min 27 s, 41 min 42 s, on wooden tables Courtesy of the artist
The strategy of dissolving the image reappears in Sedimentaciones, a photographic development table on which there are numerous photographs arranged in lines, with various blank sheets between them. The photos are extremely varied in nature, ranging from universally known images to others that are very specific to a Colombian context, personal portraits by the artist and anonymous, generic images. There are two developing trays at opposite corners. A hand takes a photograph from the table and puts it in a plastic tray filled with liquid in which the image dissolves. The paper emerges white and is then randomly placed in one of the lines. On the other side of the table another hand takes up one of the empty sheets and slides it into another tray. On taking out the sheet, the image has magically re-formed on it and the hand places it in the line of photographs. The process starts again in the other corner. Through this alternation we thus witness the ceaseless life and death of the image (see video below).
More work
Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) Línea del destino [Line of Destiny] 2006 Single-channel video 4:3, black and white, no sound, 1 min 54 s Courtesy of the artist
Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) Pixeles [Pixels] 1999-2000 Coffee stains on sugar cubes, Plexiglas 9 panels 35 x 35 x 3cm each Courtesy of the artist and Sicardi Gallery, Houston
The magazine’s camera has gone behind the scenes of Oscar Muñoz’ exhibition Protographs at the Jeu de Paume. It attempts to show how the artist and his assistant, Juliana Guevara, produce unstable images, using unconventional materials and supports such as water, charcoal dust, grease on metal, the spectator’s breath, and shower curtains. Since the early 80s, Muñoz has been developing special techniques to produce images that reveal themselves as a kind of counterpoint to photography and the “decisive moment” it once claimed to capture.
Narcissi (1995), Breath (1995), Simulacra (1999), The Collector (2014): all these works question the fragile status of images and the way they live - and die – in our memory.
Jeu de Paume 1, Place de la Concorde 75008 Paris métro Concorde Phone: 01 47 03 12 50
Installation view of Cindy Sherman – Untitled Horrors at Kunsthaus Zürich Photo: Lena Huber
Horrors Untitled
I remember some time in the dim distant past when Cindy Sherman’s photographs actually had relevance and were important in and of themselves… but perhaps my memory is playing tricks with me. Memory is a strange thing for we remember only fragments of fragments, like an echo chamber, a distant echo of something (the construction of identity and gender) that was once cutting edge, now overtaken by reality itself – on the red carpet, in the cosmetic surgery offices, in the media mags. Once there may have been an original, an original Cindy Sherman, an original idea, but now there just seems to be pastiche after pastiche of a Sherman nobody is sure ever really existed.
There are certainly some horrors among this posting, images that I wish I had never seen, and never really wish to see again. As the amount of ‘Untitled’ works rises (untitled is such a cop out!) the numbers, and the body count, become irrelevant. The early work, through the 80s to the early 90s, had important things to say but now the artist formally known as Sherman is earth mother goddess to all, and ancestral trickster to many. Enough please!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Kunsthaus Zürich for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
From 6 June to 14 September 2014, the Kunsthaus Zürich plays host to a major retrospective featuring American artist Cindy Sherman (b. 1954). Sherman is one of the leading exponents of staged photography. In her work she deals with issues of identity, (gender) roles and physicality, almost always using herself as the model. Cindy Sherman’s earliest works were created in 1975. Preceding the celebrated Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), these photographs were produced at home using an external shutter release, yet they were already concerned with the issues of identity and role play that are central to her oeuvre. The exhibition Cindy Sherman – Untitled Horrors includes a selection of these early and rarely shown works as well as her latest pieces, some of them monumental and covering entire walls. Sherman references the techniques and forms of advertising, cinema and classical painting.
THE THREATENING HEART OF UNTITLED HORRORS
The principal focus of the overview, which has been compiled by the Kunsthaus together with the artist, is the threatening and grotesque. The retrospective’s subtitle, Untitled Horrors, is partly a reference to the exhibition’s content, but also a play on the fact that Cindy Sherman invariably labels her photos Untitled. She leaves it to the viewer to read the pictures in their own way, inviting them to develop the stories behind them as they see fit, and come up with their own titles.
110 WORKS IN TOTAL
The presentation includes all the key works from the various phases of Cindy Sherman’s artistic career. Iconic pieces from the early period, such as the famous Untitled Film Stills series, reminiscent of Italian Neo-Realism and American film noir, appear alongside the later photographs of Hollywood / Hampton Types (2000-2002), while the Clowns (2003-2004) encounter the Sex Pictures series from 1992. These juxtapositions reveal the remarkable consistency with which, throughout her long career, the artist has engaged with fundamental issues of human existence and repeatedly explored new avenues of formal expression. Curated by Mirjam Varadinis and created in association with the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the 110-work presentation dispenses with a linear or chronological approach, choosing instead to create unexpected combinations that shed new light on the oeuvre of this important artist and her exploration of the self through film and photography.
Exhibition dates: 21st March – 14th September, 2014
Curator: Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Composition Nd Gelatin silver print
When I started experimenting with a camera in the early 80s, my first experiments were with mirrors, shoes, tripod legs, cotton buds and reflections of myself in mirrors (with bright orange hair). I still have the commercially printed colour photos from the chemist lab!
Henri’s sophisticated, avante-garde, sculptural compositions have an almost ‘being there’ presence: a structured awareness and way of looking at the world, a world in which the artist questions reality. She confronts the borders of an empirical reality (captured by a machine, the camera) through collage and mirrors, in order to take a leap of faith towards some form of transcendence of the real. Here she confronts the limitless freedom of creativity, of composition, to go beyond objectivity and science, to experience Existenz (Jaspers) – the realm of authentic being.*
These photographs are her experience of being in the world, of Henri observing the breath of being – the breath of herself, the breath of the objects and a meditation on those objects. There is a stillness here, an eloquence of construction and observation that goes beyond the mortal life of the thing itself. That is how these photographs seem to me to live in the world. I may be completely wrong, I probably am completely wrong – but that is how these images feel to me: a view, a perspective, the artist as prospector searching for a new way of authentically living in the world.
I really like them.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
*For his own existential philosophy, [Karl] Jaspers’ aim was to indirectly outline the metaphysical features of human Existenz – which means, what it’s like to experience being human in our full freedom – and to encourage every individual to realise his or her own authentic self-being by a subjective existential activity of thought which isn’t objectively describable.
“Existence in one sense refers to the sum total of reality, and in another sense, the elusive characteristic of being which differentiates real things from fictional ones.7 For Jasper, Existence as it pertains to Being is called Encompassing. It is the form of our awareness of being which underlies all our scientific and common-sense knowledge and which is given expression in the myths and rituals of religion. This awareness is not that of an object, but reflection on the subjective situation of being. Thus existence is about reflection upon the horizon of life, accepting the limitless possibilities in reality and also accepting that even though we can enlarge the extent of our knowledge, we can never escape the fact that it is fragmentary and has a limit.
He says:
“By reflecting upon that course (the limitless horizon of reality) we ask about being itself, which always seems to recede from us, in the very manifestation of all the appearances we encounter. This being we call the encompassing. But the encompassing is not the horizon of our knowledge at any particular moment. Rather, it is the source from which all new horizons emerge, without itself ever being visible even as a horizon.9″”
Jaspers Karl, Philosophy of Existence. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvanian Press, 1971), p. 18 quoted in Onyenuru Okechukwu. P. “The Theme of Existence in the Philosophy of Karl Jaspers,” No date, pp. 3-4 on the PhilPapers website [Online] Cited 16/06/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Thankx to the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich for allowing me to publish five of the photographs in the posting. The other images have all been sourced from the internet. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Composition 1931 Gelatin silver print
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Composition No 10 1928 Gelatin silver print
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Abstract Composition 1928 Gelatin silver print Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
The photographs and photo-montages of Florence Henri (1893-1982) attest to her broad artistic education and an unusual openness for new currents in the art of the time.
The artist, who had studied the piano under Ferruccio Busoni in Rome and painting in Paris under Fernand Léger, in Berlin under Johann Walter-Kurau and in Munich under Hans Hofmann, spent a brief semester as a guest at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1927. Although photography was not part of the curriculum at the Bauhaus at this time, lecturers such as László Moholy-Nagy and Georg Muche, as well as pupils including Walter Funkat and Edmund Collein experimented intensively with this medium. It was here that Florence Henri gained the inspiration to become a photographer herself.
That same year she returned to Paris, stopped painting and devoted herself thoroughly to photography. She created extensive series of still lifes and portrait and self-portrait compositions, in which the artist divided up the pictorial space using mirrors and reflective spheres, expanding it structurally. The fragmented images created this way point to the inspiration Florence Henri gained from Cubist and Constructivist pictorial concepts.
Through her experimental photography Florence Henri swiftly became a highly respected exponent of modern photography and participated in numerous international shows such as the trailblazing Werkbund exhibition ‘Film und Foto’ in 1929. After World War II, however, the artist no longer pursued her photographic interest with the same intensity as before, devoting herself instead almost exclusively to painting. This most certainly also contributed to her photographs largely falling into oblivion after 1945.
The emphasis in the exhibition Florence Henri. Compositions in the Pinakothek der Moderne has been placed on the artist’s compositions using mirrors and her photo-montages, It comprises some 65 photographs, including the portfolio published in 1974, as well as documents and historical publications from the holdings of the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation. As such, Ann and Jürgen Wilde significantly contributed towards the rediscovery of this exceptional artist’s work. Her photographic oeuvre now has a permanent place within the art of the avant-garde.
Press release from the Pinakothek der Moderne website
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Still-Life Composition 1929 Gelatin silver print
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Abstract Composition 1932 Gelatin silver print
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Still-life with Lemon and Pear c. 1929 Gelatin silver print
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Little Boot 1931 Gelatin silver print
Florence Henri was born in New York on 28 June 1893; her father was French and her mother was German. Following her mother’s death in 1895, she and her father moved first to her mother’s family in Silesia; she later lived in Paris, Munich and Vienna and finally moved to the Isle of Wight in England in 1906. After her father’s death there three years later, Florence Henri lived in Rome with her aunt Anni and her husband, the Italian poet Gino Gori, who was in close touch with the Italian Futurists. She studied piano at the music conservatory in Rome.
During a visit to Berlin, Henri started to focus on painting, after meeting the art critic Carl Einstein and, through him, Herwarth Walden and other Berlin artists. In 1914, she enrolled at the Academy of Art in Berlin, and starting in 1922, trained in the studio of the painter Johannes Walter-Kurau. Before moving to Dessau, Henri studied painting with the Purists Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne in Paris. She arrived at the Bauhaus in Dessau in April 1927. She had already met the Bauhaus artists Georg Muche and László Moholy-Nagy and had developed a passion for Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel furniture. Up to July 1927, Henri attended the preliminary course directed by Moholy-Nagy, lived in the Hungarian artist’s house, and became a close friend of his first wife,Lucia Moholy, who encouraged her to take up photography. From the Moholy-Nagys, Henri learned the basic technical and visual principles of the medium, which she used in her initial photographic experiments after leaving Dessau. In early 1928, she abandoned painting altogether and from then on focused on photography, with which she established herself as a professional freelance photographer with her own studio in Paris – despite being self-taught.
Even during her first productive year as a photographer, László Moholy-Nagy published one of her unusual self-portraits, as well as a still life with balls, tyres, and a mirror, in i10. Internationale Revue. The first critical description of her photographic work, which Moholy-Nagy wrote to accompany the photos, recognises that her pictures represented an important expansion of the entire ‘problem of manual painting’, in which ‘reflections and spatial relationships, overlapping and penetrations are examined from a new perspectival angle’.
Mirrors become the most important feature in Henri’s first photographs. She used them both for most of her self-dramatisations and also for portraits of friends, as well as for commercial shots. She took part in the international exhibition entitled Das Lichtbild [The Photograph] in Munich in 1930, and the following year she presented her images of bobbins at a Foreign Advertising Photography exhibition in New York. The artistic quality of her photographs was compared with Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy and Adolphe Baron de Mayer, as well as the with winner of the first prize at the exhibition, Herbert Bayer. Only three years after the new photographer had taken her first pictures, her self-portrait achieved the equal status with her male colleagues that she had been aiming for.
Up to the start of the Second World War, Henri established herself as a skilled photographer with her own photographic studio in Paris (starting in 1929). When the city was occupied by the Nazis, her photographic work declined noticeably. The photographic materials needed were difficult to obtain, and in any case Henri’s photographic style was forbidden under the Nazi occupation; she turned her attention again to painting. With only a few later exceptions, the peak of her unique photographic experiments and professional photographic work was in the period from 1927 to 1930.
Even in the 1950s, Henri’s photographs from the Thirties were being celebrated as icons of the avant-garde. Her photographic oeuvre was recognised during her lifetime in one-woman exhibitions and publications in various journals, including N-Z Wochenschau. She also produced photographs during this period, such as a series of pictures of the dancer Rosella Hightower. She died in Compiègne on 24 July 1982.
Text from the Florence Henri web page on the Bauhaus Online website [Online] Cited 06/07/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use for the purposes of education and research
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Parisian Window 1929 Gelatin silver print
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) The Forum 1934 Gelatin silver print
Florence Henri (French born USA, 1893-1982) Rome 1933-1934 Gelatin silver print
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Abstract Composition 1929 Gelatin silver print
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Self-portrait in a mirror 1928 Gelatin silver print
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) A Bunch of Grapes c. 1934 Gelatin silver print
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Composition 1932 Gelatin silver print Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Untitled, USA 1940 Gelatin silver print
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Paris Window 1929 Gelatin silver print Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Portrait 1928 Gelatin silver print Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982) Self Portrait 1928 Gelatin silver print Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
One of the greats – mainly for his series Gypsies, Invasion and Exiles.
Powerful images: strong, honest, respectful, beautifully composed but above all gritty, gritty, gritty. There is a dark radiance here, an ether/reality, as though the air was heavy with melancholy, emotion, loss, violence, isolation and, sometimes, love. No wonder he describes his work as a “theater of the real.” Humanism, and photography at its most essential.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
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.
“I try to be a photographer. I cannot talk. I am not interested in talking. If I have anything to say, it may be found in my images. I am not interested in talking about things, explaining about the whys and the hows. I do not mind showing my images, but not so much my contact sheets. I mainly work from small test prints. I often look at them, sometimes for a long time. I pin them to the wall, I compare them to make up my mind, be sure of my choices. I let others tell me what they mean. [To Robert Delpire] My photographs, you know them. You have published them, you have exhibited them, then you can tell whether they mean something or not.”
“There is still an enormous amount of hostility and racial prejudice towards Roma, especially in Eastern Europe, but not just there. It does not matter on which political spectrum you are, left or right, it is very universal, people are often very discriminatory against them.”
Czech-born French artist Josef Koudelka belongs in the firmament of classic photographers working today. Honoured with the French Prix Nadar (1978), the Hasselblad Prize (1992), and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award (2004), Koudelka is also a leading member of the world-renowned photo agency Magnum. This exhibition, his first retrospective in the United States since 1988, is also the first museum show ever to emphasise his original vintage prints, period books, magazines, and significant unpublished materials.
Koudelka became famous in anonymity through the worldwide publication of his daring photographs of the Soviet-led invasion of Prague in August 1968. Just 30 years old at the time, Koudelka had already worked for a decade, principally on Gypsies, for which he visited Roma populations for weeks at a time in his home country and later abroad over the course of years. This ambitious series beautifully combines a sense of modern history with timeless humanism.
Choosing exile to avoid reprisals for his Invasion photographs, Koudelka travelled throughout Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, camping at village festivals from spring through fall and then printing in wintertime. His photographs of those decades became the series Exiles. Since the late 1980s Koudelka has made panoramic landscape photographs in areas massively shaped by industry, territorial conflict, or – in the case of the Mediterranean rim – the persistence of Classical civilisation.
Tracing this long and impressive career, this exhibition draws on Koudelka’s extensive holdings of his own work and on recent major acquisitions by the Art Institute, including the complete surviving contents of the debut presentation of Gypsies in 1967 (22 photographs), as well as ten Invasion images printed by the photographer just weeks after the event. Also on display are early experimental and theatre photographs and some of the photographer’s beautifully produced books – which stretch dozens of feet when unfolded. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, which after its debut at the Art Institute travels to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.
Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website
Gypsies exists as an invaluable documentation of a people during a tumultuous time in their history. From an image of a trio of suited musicians engrossed in their instruments, to stirring portraits of families in cramped living conditions, the photoessay is both a testament to the strength of Roma culture and a stark document of the realities of these people’s lives. Having fully immersed himself in the project, Koudelka’s work presents an unbiased and honest portrait of a community whose nomadic way of life has been contested throughout history.
Anonymous text from the Magnum Photos website [Online] Cited 15/06/2021
Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) Festival of gypsy music. Straznice, Czechoslovakia 1966 From the series Gypsies Gelatin silver print
Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) Slovakia 1967 From the series Gypsies Gelatin silver print
Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) Slovakia 1967 From the series Gypsies Gelatin silver print
Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) Reconstruction of a homicide. In the foreground: a young gypsy suspected of being guilty. Jarabina, Czechoslovakia 1963 From the series Gypsies Gelatin silver print
Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) Jarabina, Czechoslovakia 1963 From the series Gypsies Gelatin silver print
Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) Slovakia 1963 From the series Gypsies Gelatin silver print
Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) Velka Lomnica, Slovakia, Czechoslovakia 1963 From the series Gypsies Gelatin silver print
Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) Velka Lomnica, Slovakia, Czechoslovakia 1966 From the series Gypsies Gelatin silver print
Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) Slovakia. Zehra 1967 From the series Gypsies Gelatin silver print
Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) Gypsy. Okres Poprad, Slovakia, Czechoslovakia 1967 From the series Gypsies Gelatin silver print
Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) Images from the series Gypsies Gelatin silver print Book printed 1975; new Aperture edition 2011
Josef Koudelka(Czech-French, b. 1938) Spain 1971 From the series Gypsies Gelatin silver print
Aperture’s new edition of Koudelka: Gypsies (2011) rekindles the energy and astonishment of this foundational body of work by master photographer Josef Koudelka. Lavishly printed in a unique quadratone mix by artisanal printer Gerhard Steidl, it offers an expanded look at Cikáni (Czech for “gypsies” ) – 109 photographs of Roma society taken between 1962 and 1971 in then-Czechoslovakia (Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia), Romania, Hungary, France and Spain. The design and edit for this volume revisits the artist’s original intention for the work, and is based on a maquette originally prepared in 1968 by Koudelka and graphic designer Milan Kopriva. Koudelka intended to publish the work in Prague, but was forced to flee Czechoslovakia, landing eventually in Paris. In 1975, Robert Delpire, Aperture and Koudelka collaborated to publish Gitans, la fin du voyage (Gypsies, in the English-language edition), a selection of 60 photographs taken in various Roma settlements around East Slovakia.
The unforgettable photographs of acclaimed Czech-born, French photographer Josef Koudelka (b. 1938), including eyewitness images of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, have not been shown at a major U.S. museum since 1988. These documentary works as well as extensive selections from the photographer’s work going back to 1958 – including his renowned series Gypsies, Exiles, and a variety of recent panoramic photographs – will feature in the major retrospective exhibition Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful, from June 7 through September 14, 2014. It is the first museum show ever to emphasise Koudelka’s original vintage prints, period publications and unpublished study materials.
Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful, which takes place in the Abbott (182-4) and Bucksbaum (188) galleries on the ground floor of the Modern Wing, draws primarily on Koudelka’s extensive holdings of his own work. For decades, the photographer has exhibited new and recent prints of images that have grown iconic through frequent exhibitions and reproductions, while holding back the earliest, vintage prints – until now. For example, over the years there have been more than one dozen solo exhibitions of Gypsies and numerous reprints of the book of the same name, which has appeared in two editions and six languages. Among the rarities that will be included in Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful is the only surviving maquette for the first book version of Gypsies, which Koudelka had to leave unfinished at his exile from Prague in 1970.
Koudelka’s habit of revisiting past projects while simultaneously advancing into new territory will be squarely on view in Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful. Twenty-two original photographs from the very first show of Gypsies, held in Prague in 1967, will be displayed for the first time since that date. In an adjacent room, a different selection from the series, printed at a different size and in another way, will also be shown. Similarly, extremely rare vintage prints of Invasion, made and circulated anonymously to the press directly following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, will be shown alongside much larger prints commissioned soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when Koudelka returned from exile and had his first post-Soviet exhibition in Prague.
Also on display will be selections from his early experimental photographs and years of work with Prague theatre companies, made during the flowering of the Czech stage and cinema in the 1960s.
Koudelka was born in a small Moravian town in 1938 and moved to Prague, then the capital of Czechoslovakia, in the 1950s. He studied aeronautical engineering while practicing photography obsessively from 1958; in 1966, he turned full-time to a photographic career. Already in 1961, Koudelka had begun his most ambitious life project, Gypsies, for which he visited Roma populations for weeks at a time, principally in Slovakia. The rigorously humanist pictures became his calling card at home and internationally in the later 1960s after being published in the Swiss magazine Camera and shown to curators and photography representatives around Western Europe and the United States. Meanwhile, Koudelka’s Invasion photographs became famous after they appeared worldwide to commemorate the first anniversary of the events of August 1968. Worried about reprisals even though the images had been published anonymously, Koudelka chose to leave his country in May 1970.
In exile Koudelka adopted a semi-nomadic existence. He followed village festivals, pilgrimages, and Roma gatherings throughout the United Kingdom (his country of asylum in the 1970s), Spain, Italy, and France (his principal residence from 1981, and country of citizenship from 1986), photographing throughout the year and printing largely in wintertime. The world-famous photography agency Magnum, which had stewarded publication of the Invasion photographs, became Koudelka’s home base and as he says his “family.” Koudelka’s photographs of these years were gathered together in 1988 as Exiles, which will also be part of the exhibition.
Since the late 1980s Koudelka has made panoramic landscape photographs in areas massively shaped by industry, territorial conflict, or – in the case of the Mediterranean rim – the persistence of Classical civilisation. The final gallery of Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful will showcase six of these mural-size black-and-white images, as well as three of the impressive accordion-fold books that Koudelka has made of them since 1989, some of which stretch to more than 100 feet long.
Despite his peripatetic life, Koudelka’s moving and stunning photographs have made him one of the most sought-after figures in print and at exhibition. Honoured with the French Prix Nadar (1978), the Hasselblad Prize (1992), and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award (2004), Koudelka remains today a leading member of Magnum.
A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, overseen closely by the artist and designed by the Czech firm Najbrt Studio. Edited by Matthew S. Witkovsky, the Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator of Photography at the Art Institute, the book provides extensive new information on Koudelka’s formative years in Prague during the thaw of the 1960s, as well as the first complete history of Gypsies, its twists and turns from 1961 through 2011. Amanda Maddox, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which has co-organised the exhibition, provides fresh knowledge on Koudelka’s underrepresented decade in England and the UK. Stuart Alexander and Gilles Tiberghien, two longtime friends of the photographer, have contributed illuminating essays on Koudelka’s years in France and his fascination for panoramic landscape, respectively.
Press release from the Art Institute of Chicago
Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) France 1987 Gelatin silver print
Josef Koudelka (Czech-French, b. 1938) Lisbon, Portugal 1975 Gelatin silver print
Drama was an important part of Koudelka’s early career: In a literal sense, because he worked for a theatre magazine in the ’60s, creating fantastically emotive images, but also because theatricality was, and still is, deeply embedded in the photographer’s world view. The week in 1968 when young Czechoslovakians stood up against invading Soviet forces occurred when he was working as a stage photographer, and so it became not only a tragedy but also a drama to be recorded. Likewise, his “Gypsies” series, created in the same period, is described by Koudelka as a “theater of the real.”
Through dynamic composition and juxtaposition, Koudelka’s work challenges us to differentiate between spectacle and reality, and while there is no positive indication that one is valued over the other, this is not at all the same as the disbelief in reality that is characteristic of postmodernism. As he puts it, “You form the world in your viewfinder, but at the same time the world forms you.”
In a sense, Koudelka does not want us to become too comfortable with his works as definitive statements. Instead, he crops bodies in images abruptly; we often see people cut off at the knees or ankles, visually and figuratively separating them from the Earth. In other works, disembodied arms and legs jut into the space of the photograph, making scenes surreal and reminding us that whatever coherency the composition has, we can never see the whole picture of what’s really going on. Even with the more poetic and purposefully aesthetic panorama prints of his later “Chaos” series – monumental testaments to the violence we enact both on the natural world and upon each other – through the pitted insistence of film grain and the lack of bright tones or highlights, we are not permitted redemption through “art” or the creation of “beautiful” objects.
In this respect Koudelka’s work, in its celebration of the imperfect, has more in common with the aesthetics of the haiku poet Basho, or the tea master Sen no Rikyu, than with the luscious highly detailed colour images that largely dominate the world of contemporary art photography.”
John L. Tran. “Josef Koudelka: the theatrics of life” on The Japan Times website 18 December 2013 [Online] Cited 15/06/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
![Agustí Centelles (Catalan, 1909-1985) 'Barcelona, España. Guardería infantil en Vía Layetana' [Babysitting in Layetana Road] 1936-1939](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/agusti_centelles-guarderia_infantil-web.jpg "Agustí Centelles (Catalan, 1909-1985) 'Barcelona, España. Guardería infantil en Vía Layetana' [Babysitting in Layetana Road] 1936-1939")
![Fernand Léger (French, 1881-1951) 'Les Loisirs - Hommage à Louis David' [Leisure - Homage to Louis David] 1948-1949](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/leger-les_loisirs-web.jpg "Fernand Léger (French, 1881-1951) 'Les Loisirs - Hommage à Louis David' [Leisure - Homage to Louis David] 1948-1949")
![Louis Sciarli (French, b. 1925) 'Le Corbusier. Marseille: Unité d'habitation, École Maternelle' [Le Corbusier. Marseille: housing unit, Kindergarten] 1945/2014](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/sciarli-le_corbusier_marseille-web.jpg "Louis Sciarli (French, b. 1925) 'Le Corbusier. Marseille: Unité d'habitation, École Maternelle' [Le Corbusier. Marseille: housing unit, Kindergarten] 1945/2014")
![Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'Invierno en el patio' [Winter in the Courtyard] Paris, 1939](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/invierno-en-el-patio-web.jpg "Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'Invierno en el patio' [Winter in the Courtyard] Paris, 1939")
![Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'Subida a la catedral [Ascending to the Cathedral], Spanish Civil War' Barcelona 1938](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/subida-a-la-catedral-web.jpg "Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'Subida a la catedral [Ascending to the Cathedral], Spanish Civil War' Barcelona 1938")
![Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'Los Paraguas, mitin de la CNT' [Umbrellas, Meeting of the CNT], Spanish Civil War Barcelona, 1937](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/los-paraguas-mitin-de-la-cnt-web.jpg "Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'Los Paraguas, mitin de la CNT' [Umbrellas, Meeting of the CNT], Spanish Civil War Barcelona, 1937")
![Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'Untitled, Oda a la necrofília series [Ode to Necrophilia]' Mexico 1962](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/necrophilia-web.jpg "Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'Untitled, Oda a la necrofília series [Ode to Necrophilia]' Mexico 1962")
![Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'El botellón' [The Bottle] Mexico, 1962](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/el-botellc3b3n-web.jpg "Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'El botellón' [The Bottle] Mexico, 1962")
![Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'Antonio Souza y su esposa Piti Saldivar' [Antonio Souza and his Wife Piti Saldivar] Mexico, 1959](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/souza-web.jpg "Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'Antonio Souza y su esposa Piti Saldivar' [Antonio Souza and his Wife Piti Saldivar] Mexico, 1959")
![Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'José Horna elaborando la maqueta de la casa de Edward James' [José Horna Working on the Maquette for Edward James's House] Mexico, 1960](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/josc3a9-horna-elaborando-web.jpg "Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'José Horna elaborando la maqueta de la casa de Edward James' [José Horna Working on the Maquette for Edward James's House] Mexico, 1960")
![Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'Mujer y máscara' [Woman with Mask] Mexico, 1963](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/woman-with-mask-web.jpg "Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) 'Mujer y máscara' [Woman with Mask] Mexico, 1963")
![Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'El juego de las probabilidades' [The Game of Probabilities] 2007 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Oscar Muñoz: Protographies' at Jeu de Paume, Paris, June - September, 2014](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/el-juego-de-las-probabilidades-web.jpg "Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'El juego de las probabilidades' [The Game of Probabilities] 2007 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Oscar Muñoz: Protographies' at Jeu de Paume, Paris, June - September, 2014")
![Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Ambulatorio' [Ambulatory] 1994](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ambulatorio-web.jpg "Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Ambulatorio' [Ambulatory] 1994")
![Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Cortinas de Baño' [Shower curtains] 1985-1986](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/cortinas-de-bac3b1o-web.jpg "Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Cortinas de Baño' [Shower curtains] 1985-1986")
![Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Narcisos (en proceso)' [Narcissi (in process)] 1995-2011](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/narcisos-web.jpg "Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Narcisos (en proceso)' [Narcissi (in process)] 1995-2011")
![Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Narciso' [Narcissus] 2001](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/narciso-web.jpg "Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Narciso' [Narcissus] 2001")
![Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Re/trato' [Portrait/I Try Again] 2004](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/re_trato-web.jpg "Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Re/trato' [Portrait/I Try Again] 2004")
![Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Aliento' [Breath] 1995](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/aliento-web.jpg "Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Aliento' [Breath] 1995")
![Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'La mirada del cíclope' [The Cyclops' Gaze] 2002](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/la-mirada-del-cc3adclope-web.jpg "Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'La mirada del cíclope' [The Cyclops' Gaze] 2002")
![Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Horizonte [Horizon]' 2011](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/horizonte-web.jpg "Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Horizonte [Horizon]' 2011")
![Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Fundido a blanco (dos retratos)' [Fade to White (Two Portraits)] 2010](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/fade-to-white-web.jpg "Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Fundido a blanco (dos retratos)' [Fade to White (Two Portraits)] 2010")
![Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Sedimentaciones' [Sedimentations] 2011](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/sedimentaciones-web.jpg "Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Sedimentaciones' [Sedimentations] 2011")
![Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Línea del destino' [Line of Destiny] 2006](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/lc3adnea-del-destino-web.jpg "Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Línea del destino' [Line of Destiny] 2006")
![Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Línea del destino' [Line of Destiny] 2006](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/lc3adnea-del-destino-b-web.jpg "Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Línea del destino' [Line of Destiny] 2006")
![Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Línea del destino' [Line of Destiny] 2006](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/lc3adnea-del-destino-c-web.jpg "Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Línea del destino' [Line of Destiny] 2006")
![Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Pixeles' [Pixels] 1999-2000](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/pixeles-web.jpg "Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951) 'Pixeles' [Pixels] 1999-2000"){kind=tracking}
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.