Exhibition: ‘Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome’ at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Exhibition dates: 16th October 2011 – 8th January 2012

Simon Vouet (French, 1590-1649)
The Fortune Teller
c. 1620
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Observe if you will:

1/ The treatment of the background behind Boy Bitten by a Lizard (1594-1596)

2/ The tension of the hands in this painting

3/ The pallor of the skin of Sick Bacchus (1593-1594)

4/ The colour of the bunch of grapes in the same painting

5/ The critical distance between the two apricots and the bowed sash resting on the pediment in the same painting

6/ The youthful innocence of the dupe in The Cardsharps (c. 1595)

7/ The deep, foreboding shadows under the eyes of Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1604-1605)

8/ The astonishingly beautiful skin tones in Gerrit van Honthorst’s Saint Sebastian (c. 1623) and how the blood from the leg wound at left runs in two directions: one direction when Saint Sebastian was standing up, one when he has slumped down. Inspired.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“Not since Michelangelo or Raphael had one artist affected so many of his contemporaries and so irrevocably changed the course of European painting. Caravaggio created a new kind of art: dramatic, deeply emotional, grounded in the vivid details of everyday life, and overwhelmingly human. He used live models, sometimes prostitutes and the very poor, who posed in the studio for his powerful religious scenes as if the events were happening on the streets of Rome. Breaking the boundaries between art and life, he overturned the artistic conventions of the day. He played down details of the setting of a scene, focused on the expressive human figure, and invented a brand of stark realism that shocked many of his patrons.”

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Saint Francis in Ecstasy
c. 1594-1595
Oil on canvas
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
The Gypsy Fortune Teller
c. 1595
Oil on canvas
45 1/4 x 59 in. (115 x 150cm)
Pinacoteca Capitolina, Musei Capitolini, Rome
Public domain

One of the most influential figures in the history of art, Caravaggio (1571-1610) overturned the artistic conventions of the day and created stunningly dramatic paintings, both sacred and secular. This ambitious exhibition explores the profound impact of his work on the wide range of painters of Italian, French, Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish origin who resided in Rome. Arranged by theme, it includes over 50 paintings, with Caravaggio’s compelling images juxtaposed with those he inspired. This is the second largest display of his paintings in North America and only the third Caravaggio exhibition to be held in the United States.

Music and Youth

Many of Caravaggio’s early paintings feature handsome youths, whether singly or in groups. He seems to have used the same favorite models repeatedly – and sometimes his own features, which a contemporary tells us he studied in a mirror. The origins of these novel paintings lay in the types of pictures – portraits, still lifes, and allegories – that were painted in a realistic style in the artist’s native Lombardy, in the north of Italy, although he blurred the boundaries between genres to suggest real-life scenes. Caravaggio’s paintings of musicians would have appealed to Roman collectors who were passionate patrons of music, and likely were created to decorate rooms used for performances. They have a dreamy, slightly melancholy air. If the songs are about love, as we can assume they are, they are surely about the painful side of love rather than its joys. Caravaggio’s early paintings of youths are usually scenes of sensual pleasure but with a built-in warning against indulgence, as when a youth has his finger bitten by a lizard lurking in some fruit. He brings us close to his figures, often having them make eye contact with us, and includes lovingly observed still-life details that enhance the naturalism and immediacy of the scene. Even when there is a visitation from the beyond, like the winged Cupid in The Musicians, he treats this in a matter-of-fact way, attentive always to breaking down the boundaries between the painted world and our own. Caravaggio’s musical paintings caught on throughout Europe in the work of his followers, who brought their own innovations to the genre.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
The Musicians
c. 1595
Oil on canvas
36 1/4 x 46 5/8 in (92.1 x 118.4cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1952

In this scene, Caravaggio shows some young musicians preparing for a concert. We are brought very close to the figures, as if we share the same space. Caravaggio breaks down the boundaries between art and life, and our reality and the painted world become entwined. The instruments are modern, but the musicians wear antique-inspired dress. The lute player tunes his instrument, and the horn player (possibly a self-portrait) catches our gaze. Another youth studies the musical score; it is no longer legible, but doubtless featured love madrigals. The winged Cupid with a quiver of arrows who is handling some grapes makes explicit the bond between music and love. Wine, like music, makes the spirits light. This painting belonged to Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who hosted concerts at his palace and invited musicians to live in his household, along with artists like Caravaggio.

Theodoor Rombouts (Flemish, 1597-1637)
A Lute Player
c. 1620
Oil on canvas
43 7/8 x 39 1/4 in (111.1 x 99.7cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art. John G. Johnson Collection, 1917

Caravaggio’s paintings of musicians inspired Rombouts’s depiction of a musician tuning his lute. His intense expression suggests that he is both listening to the sound and sizing up the viewer, his audience. The vividly described carpet and still-life objects on the table recall Caravaggio’s similar close-up presentations. However, the colourful treatment of the costume and the robust delineation of the objects place Rombouts’s work within traditions of Flemish and Dutch painting. The still life, like ephemeral music, serves to remind us of the pleasures of life, but also that pleasure is fleeting. The artist also alludes to the five senses: hearing (the lute), taste (the tankard), smell (the pipe), sight (the musical scores), and touch (the knife).

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Boy Bitten by a Lizard
1594-1596
Oil on canvas
25 5/8 x 20 1/2 in (65 x 52cm)
Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell’Arte Roberto Longhi, Florence

One of Caravaggio’s biographers wrote that “he also painted a boy bitten by a lizard emerging from flowers and fruits; you could almost hear the boy scream, and it was done meticulously.” The picture has suggested various interpretations. As an allegory of touch, it provides the basis for a study of how emotion is expressed physically, and arguably Caravaggio alludes to all the five senses (flowers as smell and so on). With the still life of fruits and roses, common emblems of love, he invokes age-old adages – pain can follow pleasure, and love is a rose with thorns that prick. Poets from Petrarch onward played on the similarity of the Italian words for “love” and “bitter” – amore and amaro – to which Caravaggio adds ramarro (lizard), ingeniously enlarging the joke.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Sick Bacchus
1593-1594
Oil on canvas
Galleria Borghese, Rome

Cardsharps and Fortune Tellers

The young Caravaggio introduced another new kind of painting to the Roman art world with his scenes from the seamy side of life, its frauds and ruses. He painted these works on a large scale with half-length figures, and they were among his most widely imitated creations. His followers played countless variations on the same themes, trying various levels of subtlety and buffoonery in the humour and facial expressions. These highly animated compositions conjure up an underworld of wily cardsharps, soldiers of fortune, foolish dupes, sensuous and deceitful gypsy women, pickpockets, and thugs. They are based partly on everyday observations in the streets, partly on the stock characters and improvised comedies of the commedia dell’arte, partly on sheer fantasy. In such works, Caravaggio and his followers developed ingenious ways of involving us in the action. We read these amusingly moralising pictures through gestures and expressions – but to unravel the trickery takes time. Despite being frozen in a static image, the story seems to unfold before our eyes like one of the popular plays that were its inspiration. The artist extends the theme of deception by painting his subjects with such a high level of naturalism that the viewer is duped and astounded by his artistry.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
The Cardsharps
c. 1595
Oil on canvas
37 1/8 x 51 5/8 in (94.2 x 130.9cm)
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

The players are engaged in a game of primero, a forerunner of poker. Engrossed in his cards, the dupe is unaware that the older cardsharp signals his accomplice, who reaches to pull a hidden card from his breeches. The fingertips of the cheat’s gloved hand are exposed to better feel marked cards. According to an early biographer, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, a great patron of the arts, took the young Caravaggio into his household soon after purchasing this picture. It hung along with The Gypsy Fortune Teller in his palace. Together they would surely have reminded the cardinal and his guests of the story of the prodigal son, warning about the perils of greed and fraud. Caravaggio has treated this subject not as a caricature of vice but in a fresh way, in which the interaction of gesture and glance evokes the drama of deception and lost innocence in the most human of terms. He structures the picture to allow us to witness everything, implicating us in the trickery.

Saints

Caravaggio grounded his saints in everyday reality, indicating their spiritual states by means of natural phenomena, especially light. In his early painting of Saint Francis, he shows the saint’s ecstasy – his mystic identification with Christ – by directing a strong light upon his figure and the consoling angel. God’s grace is signalled by light in other images of the saints, such as the scene of Mary Magdalene’s conversion from her former life of sin. In paintings of Saints Matthew and Jerome in their studies, much emulated in Caravaggio’s circle, light is a metaphor of divine inspiration. Generally the saints seem to be emerging from darkness into light, which adds drama, symbolism, and also a sense of mass – as if they were sculpted, not merely painted. In a break from Roman and Florentine traditions, Caravaggio rejected the practice of refining his composition through drawings before he began to paint and instead worked directly from a live model in the studio, preserving that model’s particular appearance, never making the features or body conform to an ideal of beauty. The effect, central to Caravaggio’s art and that of many of his followers, was startling. At this time, many people believed that the painting of sacred personages such as saints called for a special, elevated style that set them apart from the mundane reality of the here and now. Caravaggio’s radical departure from this principle brought him much harsh criticism. He was accused of merely copying and so failing to capture a higher truth. But others recognised in his work a new kind of religious art that directly engaged the faithful and made old subjects new and alive.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness
1604-1605
Oil on canvas
68 x 52 in (172.7 x 132.1cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase William Rockhill Nelson Trust

Caravaggio’s practice of painting a live model in his studio brings this young, brooding saint to life – as if his image were inhabited by the model’s being. Ottavio Costa, a Roman banker, commissioned this painting for a chapel on a pilgrimage route in the countryside outside of Genoa, where his family had its origins. We can imagine what a powerful experience it would have been to encounter the image of the scarlet-robed saint there, dramatically emerging from the shadows into a strong light. When Caravaggio delivered the painting, Costa decided to keep it and placed a copy in the chapel. But even the copy proved inspiring. An early guide described how it “moves not only the members of the brotherhood but also visitors to penitence.”

Gerrit van Honthorst (Dutch, 1592-1656)
Saint Sebastian
c. 1623
Oil on canvas
The National Gallery, London

The Sacred Narrative

Caravaggio was a masterful storyteller who could bring home the drama and significance of a biblical event with tremendous power. In his scenes from the Old and New Testaments, he created a new kind of painting – dramatic, even theatrical, yet grounded in the observation of ordinary reality – and it proved infectious among his contemporaries in Rome. His approach was to make the scene clear and simple, with the main actors in the drama seen close-up and caught in mid-action at a decisive moment, embodying the whole meaning of the event. He played down the setting, sometimes to the point that it is a mere pool of darkness from which the figures emerge. It was the actions and states of mind of the characters in the story that counted, and Caravaggio presented these with sometimes shocking directness and intensity, breaking all the rules of decorum that restrained more conventional painters. He mastered the art of concealing art, re-creating a scene with such a flavour of reality that it comes across as an eyewitness account. It was his power to draw viewers into the emotion and importance of a scene that made his work an essential object of study, even for such an independent genius as the great Peter Paul Rubens.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Martha and Mary Magdalene
c. 1598
Oil and tempera on canvas
38 1/2 x 52 1/4 in (97.8 x 132.7cm)
Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of the Kresge Foundation and Mrs. Edsel B. Ford

Martha’s expressive hands, intensely illuminated, underscore her attempt to convert her sister Mary Magdalene from a life of worldly pleasures to one of spirituality. Several details recall Mary’s life of indulgence: the elegant dress, the ivory comb, the alabaster cosmetic jar. The mirror, a powerful symbol of vanity, becomes here an instrument reflecting the divine light that is penetrating Mary’s soul. Martha’s words seem to have been convincing, and her open mouth signals her amazement as she witnesses Mary’s transformation. The orange blossom in Mary’s right hand and the ring on her left indicate her new status as the blessed bride of Christ.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610)
Sacrifice of Isaac
1602-1603
Oil on canvas
41 x 53 1/8 in (104 x 135cm)
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Orazio Gentileschi (Italian, 1563-1639)
Saint Francis in Ecstasy
c. 1607
Oil on canvas
49 5/8 x 38 5/8 in. (126 x 98 cm)
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577-1640)
The Entombment
c. 1612-1614
Oil on panel
34 3/4 x 26 1/8 in. (88.3 x 66.5 cm)
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Purchased 1956
Public domain

Bartolomeo Manfredi (Italian, 1582-1622)
David and Goliath (The Triumph of David)
c. 1615
Oil on canvas
50 3/8 x 38 1/4 in. (128 x 97cm)
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Acquired in 1990

Jusepe de Ribera (Spanish, 1591-1652)
Saints Peter and Paul
c. 1616
Oil on canvas
49 5/8 x 44 1/8 in. (126 x 112cm)
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg
Public domain

Valentin de Boulogne (French, 1591-1632)
Fortune Teller with Soldiers
c. 1620
Oil on canvas
58 7/8 x 93 7/8 in. (149.5 x 238.5cm)
Toledo Museum of Art
Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment. Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey
Public domain

Valentin de Boulogne (French, 1591-1632)
David with the Head of Goliath and Two Soldiers
1620-1622
Oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Public domain

Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (Italian, 1587-1625)
The Sorrows of Aminta
c. 1625
Oil on canvas
39 3/8 x 47 1/4 in. (100 x 120cm)
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Gift of Paul Jamot, 1937
Public domain

Kimbell Art Museum
3333 Camp Bowie Boulevard,
Fort Worth, TX 76107

Opening hours:
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Closed Mondays

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Exhibition: ‘After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 22nd March, 2011 – 2nd January, 2012

Many thankx to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Hans Haacke (German, b. 1936)
Thank You, Paine Webber
1979
Gelatin silver print and chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010
© Hans Haacke

Since the early 1970s Haacke has taken on the intertwined political and corporate forces that use cultural patronage as a smokescreen to advance interests that are often antithetical to the vitality of free speech and expression in democracies. Haacke made this work just as the strategy of appropriation – lifting an image out of its original context and re-presenting it in critical fashion – began to make waves in the New York art world of the late 1970s. Like all effective appropriation, it exposes a prior instance of borrowing – in this case, how the investment firm Paine Webber used a documentary photograph to give its annual report the veneer of social concern. The artist then pointedly contrasted it with an image from the same annual report of a beaming trio of executives in a painting-lined gallery. As a counterpoint to the protestor’s signboard, Haacke dropped in text from a different Paine Webber ad campaign to show on whose backs the “risk management” is taking place – a biting indictment, the relevance of which has only increased since the recent economic downturn.

Wall text

Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946)
The Storyteller
1986
Silver dye bleach transparency in light box
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Charlene and David Howe, Henry Nias Foundation Inc., Jennifer and Robert Yaffa, Harriet Ames Charitable Trust, and Gary and Sarah Wolkowitz Gifts, 2006
Image courtesy of the artist
© Jeff Wall

Wall’s staged tableaux straddle the worlds of the museum and the street. His subjects are scenes of urban and suburban disarray that he witnessed firsthand – the kinds of things anyone might see while wandering around a city and its outskirts. Working like a movie director, he restages the scene using nonprofessionals as actors and presents his photographs as colour transparencies in light boxes such as those of large-scale public advertisements found at airports and bus stops. The scale and ambition of his pictures – scenes of everyday life shot through with larger intimations of political struggle – equally evoke the Salon paintings of nineteenth century French painters such as Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, which were themselves brazen combinations of canonical and contemporary subjects.

The Storyteller is set in a barren, leftover slice of land next to a highway overpass in Vancouver, where the artist lives. Various groupings of modern urban castaways – perhaps descendants of the Native Americans who occupied the land before the arrival of Europeans – are dispersed around the hillside, a mini-catalogue of art-historical reference. Like the upside-down, half-submerged figure of Icarus in the background of Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the woman speaking and gesticulating to the two men listening at the lower left becomes the key to unifying the fractured and alienating environment from which Wall’s picture is constructed.

Wall text

Laurie Simmons (American, b. 1949)
Walking Gun
1991
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 1998
© Laurie Simmons

The early 1990s marked the last moment when a wide swath of women artists responded to the sexism they saw as pervasive in the culture – from the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith to the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Clarence Thomas. A pioneer of set-up photography, Simmons dramatically expanded the scale of her constructed tableaux for a series of spotlighted puppet-like objects perched atop doll legs: revolvers, houses, cameras, and cakes. This armed and dangerous example refers to the old-movie cliché where a man carrying a gun is shown in shadow profile. Here, Simmons offers instead the death-dealing seductress – also familiar from film noir – in monumental miniature, a doll capable of turning on its master at a moment’s notice.

Wall text

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (American, b. 1953)
Todd M. Brooks, 22 Years Old, from Denver, Colorado, $40
1991
Chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991
Image courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
© Philip-Lorca diCorcia

In the middle of the 1990’s, diCorcia gained international recognition for his large color photographs of street scenes and passersby. For an earlier series, he traveled to Los Angeles on a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and worked on a part of Santa Monica Boulevard frequented by male prostitutes and drug addicts. For each picture he made there, he carefully composed his setting, then asked young men to pose for him, giving them a small fee (from twenty to fifty dollars) that was negotiated each time.

At that time, NEA support of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe was highly controversial, and diCorcia had to sign a document stating that he would not produce any “obscene” work while on his fellowship. He set up the whole negotiating procedure as a symbolic way of sharing his grant with people whose behavior would surely have been condemned by the censors. The titles always mention the name, the age and the origin of the model, as well as the amount paid. The staged situation interacts with the raw reality of the exchange of money, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, yet preserving an authentic emotional charge.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (American, b. 1953)
Eddie Anderson, 21 Years Old, from Houston, Texas, $20
1991
Chromogenic print
Image: 39.2 x 57.8 cm (15 7/16 x 22 3/4 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991
Image courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
© Philip-Lorca diCorcia

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection from March 22, 2011, through January 2, 2012, in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition features 25 photographs dating from 1979 to the present by 15 contemporary artists.

The exhibition’s title, After the Gold Rush, is taken from a classic 1970 song by Neil Young, whose verses contrast a romanticised past with a present of squandered plenty and an uncertain future. Inspired by the recent political and economic upheavals in America and abroad, this selection juxtaposes new photographs that take the long view of the world’s current condition with prescient works from the 1980s and 1990s that remain startlingly relevant today.

This is the first occasion for the Museum to present recently acquired works by: Gretchen Bender, James Casebere, Moyra Davey, Katy Grannan, Hans Haacke, An-My Lê, Curtis Mann, Trevor Paglen, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Also featured are photographs by: Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Robert Gober, Adrian Piper, Laurie Simmons, Jeff Wall, and Christopher Williams.

After the Gold Rush begins with Hans Haacke’s Thank You, Paine Webber (1979) – the first work by this legendary provocateur of Conceptual art to enter the Metropolitan’s collection. Haacke’s biting photo-diptych is so pertinent to the recent economic downturn that it seems as if it could have been made yesterday. In this work, the artist appropriated images from the investment firm’s annual report to convey his viewpoint that big business provides a veneer of social concern to mask the brutal effects of the “risk management” they offer their clients.

Other works in After the Gold Rush use varying degrees of artifice and photographic realism to reflect on marginalised and repressed voices. Measuring over 14 feet long and presented as a backlit transparency in a light box, The Storyteller (1986) is Jeff Wall’s signature image and is typical of his method. Working from memory, the artist uses nonprofessional actors and real locations to meticulously restage a scene of urban blight that he witnessed in his native Vancouver. Wall plays this photographic verisimilitude against compositions and figural poses indebted to French painters such as Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and Georges Seurat. A comparison of Wall’s Storyteller with Courbet’s Young Ladies of the Village (1852), on view in the Museum’s galleries for Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture, reveals parallels: in both, a keenly observed moment of telling social interaction taking place on a sloping landscape. Each artist has combined a daringly modern subject with references to earlier art.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia is another key figure in the development of staged photography. In the early 1990s, the artist created a series of works in response to the political attacks on gays and federal funding of the arts in the U.S. DiCorcia hired male hustlers to pose for their portraits out on the streets – and paid them with grant money he received from the National Endowment for the Arts. At the same moment, a wide swath of women artists addressed issues of sexism and racism: examples of this politically pointed art are represented by Laurie Simmons’ Walking Gun (1991) – a spotlighted puppet of doll legs and a revolver that seems capable of turning on its master at a moment’s notice – and Adrian Piper’s 1992 work Decide Who You Are #24 (A Moving Target), which includes a childhood image of Anita Hill as part of a blistering meditation in word and image on racial politics. Such works are missives from a time not so long ago when artists regularly commented on present-day politics and culture through their art. (Because of light sensitivity, this work by Adrian Piper will be on view through Sunday, September 26.)

Although the recently made photographs in After the Gold Rush seem at first glance to be less overtly political than their predecessors, they nevertheless address vital issues about contemporary society. James Casebere’s epic vision of America, Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1, (2009), is based on a tabletop model that the artist spent 18 months building. The photograph shows a suburban subdivision of the kind recently ravaged by the foreclosure crisis, and its sunny sense of “Morning in America” comments ironically on the country’s future prospects. An-My Lê’s similarly sweeping five-part photographic piece Suez Canal Transit, USS Dwight Eisenhower, Egypt (2009) will also be featured. Lê is interested in the way in which U.S. armed forces come into contact with the rest of the world. This major new work – which seems at first to be a straightforward panorama of military might overseas – subtly undercuts the viewer’s expectations to question the current position of the U.S. on the global stage.

Trevor Paglen is a young artist whose works plot the “black world” of covert military operations, from telephoto images of predator drones taken from miles away, to software that follows planes used for the extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists. Paglen’s 2008 photograph KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite; USA 186) shows the ghostly white streak of an American reconnaissance satellite bisecting star trails above Yosemite’s Half Dome, a rock formation photographed in the 1860s by artists including Carleton Watkins. To make these and other photographs, Paglen collaborated with amateur astronomers who were originally trained by the U.S. government to look out for Soviet satellites during the Cold War, but turned their attention to American surveillance in recent years.

The final piece in After the Gold Rush is a suite of five recently acquired photographs from 2007-2009 by the celebrated photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. The grouping shifts focus from macro to micro: from expansive aerial views of Shanghai and Dubai to close ups that suggest the smallest increments of sustenance and regeneration. Taken together, they evoke the interconnectedness of all things and a grounding of the political in the personal as a way for an engaged yet expressive art.

Press release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Moyra Davey (American born Canada, b. 1958)
Copperhead Grid (detail)
1990
Chromogenic prints
Image: 8 3/4 in. × 6 in. (22.3 × 15.3cm) each
Sheet: 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.3cm) each
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2011
© Moyra Davey

It was in 1990 – at the height of a worldwide economic recession that also marked the end of the 1980s art bubble – that Davey began photographing the scratched, worn-away surfaces of pennies, the most devalued and lowest form of currency. Her accumulation of one hundred micro-photographic specimens is constructed around the readymade patterns of decay that countless anonymous owners have unconsciously wrought upon their surfaces; their base materiality is incisively contrasted with the most elevated of national symbols. As with all of Davey’s work, there is a melancholic sense of loss that connects subject and form: like pennies, photographs are objects of exchange imprinted by contact with the world around them.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Adrian Piper (American, b. 1948)
Decide Who You Are #24: A Moving Target
1992
Photo-mechanical processes on three panels
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Peter Norton Family Foundation, 1994
© Adrian Piper

Piper is an artist and a philosophy professor who works in a variety of media, including performance, video, sound pieces, photography, drawing, and writing. She often explores issues of autobiography, racism, and stereotyping. For her 1992 series Decide Who You Are, the artist used a triptych format in which a different appropriated photograph is flanked by an image of the “three wise monkeys” maxim advocating “See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil” at left, and at right a photograph of a young girl who, though not identified, is Anita Hill – who had recently been thrust into the spotlight for accusing then-nominee for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. The verse in the left panel changes in each individual work in the series, while that on the right is unchanging – what the artist once described as “a comprehensive, textbook compendium of commonly invoked litanies of denial and intimidation, from the bland to the vaguely menacing” and “a must for novices and aspiring leaders in business, politics, and culture.”

Wall text

Christopher Williams (American, b. 1956)
3 White (DG’s Mr. Postman) Fourth Race, Phoenix Greyhound Park, Phoenix, Arizona, August 22, 1994
1994
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Charina Foundation Inc. and Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gifts, 2003
© Christopher Williams

Robert Gober (American, b. 1954)
Page 12 / Untitled (Detail from 1978-2000)
1978-2000
Gelatin silver print
40.6 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Charina Foundation Inc. Gift, 2002
© Robert Gober

Robert Gober works primarily in sculpture, installations, and photography. He is perhaps best known for his delicate, ghostly hand crafted versions of domestic fixtures, such as drains, beds, doors, and sinks. Through these uncanny replicas, Gober invests mass produced objects with personal meaning – the private, unruly desires and memories of the individual. This image appeared in the book (his first in the genre) that Gober created to accompany his installation representing the United States at the 2000 Venice Biennale. In it, the artist interweaves his own journey to New York in 1978 as a young gay man with the toxic fallout of homophobic recrimination that accompanied the murder of the Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard twenty years later.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Robert Gober superimposes a man’s hand between two newspaper articles, clipped neatly and placed on a shell-strewn beach. Below his hand, the article refers to Matthew Shepard’s death. Above it, a letter to the editor argues that “Orthodox Jews, conservative Christians and others have a right to speak out against homosexuality without being placed in the category of thuggery.” While the piece obviously precedes Jonathan Rauch’s provocative and important piece in the December issue of the Advocate arguing that gay people should tolerate a certain amount of anti-gay sentiment as a sign that they’re legally and socially secure enough to practice tolerance, it’s a useful encapsulation of the dilemma behind that argument. It’s hard to cast off past threats if you’re not entirely sure they’re past.

Alyssa Rosenberg. “Gay Americans, Censorship, And ‘After The Gold Rush’ At The Metropolitan Museum Of Art,” on the Think Progress website November 28, 2011 [Online] Cited 11/12/2024

Robert Gober (American, b. 1954)
Untitled (Detail from “1978-2000”)
2000
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 2002
© Robert Gober

James Casebere (American, b. 1953)
Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1
2009
Chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2011
© James Casebere

Trevor Paglen (American, b. 1974)
KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satelltte; USA 186)
2008
Chromogenic print
Image: 95.3 x 76.2cm (37 1/2 x 30 in.)
Frame: 96.5 × 77.5cm (38 × 30 1/2 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2011
© Trevor Paglen

Trained as a geographer, Paglen is an artist who plots the topography of a new global and celestial space – the “black world” of covert military operations. Examples of his subjects include the supposed sites used for the extraordinary rendition of prisoners, which he shoots with specially designed cameras from up to forty miles away, and the network of private planes used to transport them under the radar. This image shows the ghostly white streak of an American reconnaissance satellite bisecting star trails above Yosemite’s Half Dome, a rock formation photographed in the 1860s by the photographer Carleton Watkins when the West was still being explored. In order to track such spacecraft, Paglen uses a database created by amateur astronomers who were trained by the U.S. government to search the skies for Soviet sputniks but continued their hobby after the end of the Cold War by tracking our own satellites. In this work, the artist brings into one composition two historically disparate moments in geographic and celestial colonisation.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Oriental Pearl
2009
Inkjet print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010
Image courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
© Wolfgang Tillmans

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New York, New York 10028-0198
Phone: 212-535-7710

Opening hours:
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Friday and Saturday: 10am – 9pm
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Exhibition: ‘Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs’ at the The Denver Art Museum (DAM)

Exhibition dates: 25th September 2011 – 1st January 2012

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

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Burning oil sludge, north of Denver, Colorado
1973-1974
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
North of Keota, Colorado
1973 printed 1989
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Mobile home park, north edge of Denver, Colorado
1973-1974
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is the first U.S. venue for Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs. The exhibition features more than 200 black-and-white photos spanning Adams’s 45-year career, showcasing the artistic legacy of the American photographer and his longstanding engagement with the contemporary Western landscape. Adams lived and worked in Colorado for nearly 30 years. Many of his most acclaimed images were taken in the Rocky Mountain region and will strike a familiar chord with visitors. The exhibition, organised by the Yale University Art Gallery, will be on view September 25, 2011 – January 1, 2012 in the museum’s Gallagher Family Gallery.

“We’re excited to host the work of one of the foremost photographers of our time,” said Eric Paddock, the DAM’s curator of photography. “Robert Adams’s striking yet quiet photos provoke thought about current economic, political and environmental issues Westerners confront every day. We think visitors will see something very familiar in his work.”

Since becoming a photographer in the mid-1960s, Adams has been widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential chroniclers of the American West. Adams’s photographs and writing insist that the realities of everyday landscapes are as beautiful as idealised scenes from nature. They ask questions about the ways people change and interact with nature, and what it means to live simply and quietly in today’s world. This commitment earned Adams prominence in photography’s “New Topographics” movement of the late 20th century and lends authority to his ongoing work. His photographs of Colorado suburban growth and clear cut forests in the Pacific Northwest, for example, express shock at mainstream social and economic values.

“The Denver Art Museum is pleased to be the first U.S. venue for The Place We Live, showcasing our continued commitment to our photography program,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the DAM. “Colorado has a rich photography history and we’re excited to have visitors engage with these artworks that provide a narrative to the American experience and take a fresh look at their surroundings.”

Featuring more than 200 gelatin silver prints, The Place We Live weaves together four decades of Adam’s work into a cohesive, epic narrative of American experience in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Each of the photographer’s major projects is represented, from early pictures of quiet buildings and monuments erected by prior settlers of his native Colorado to his most recent images of forests and migratory birds in the Pacific Northwest.

Biography

Born in Orange, N.J., in 1937, Robert Adams moved with his family from Madison, Wis., to Denver, Colo., at the age of 15. He earned a doctorate degree from the University of Southern California and, intent on pursuing an academic career, returned to Colorado in 1962 as an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. Disturbed by the rapid transformation of the Colorado Springs and Denver areas, Adams began photographing a landscape transformed by tract housing, highways, strip malls and gas stations. “The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid and what we could not buy,” Adams wrote. “They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love.” Since 1997, he has lived and worked in Oregon.”

Press release from The Denver Art Museum

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Lakewood, Colorado
1968-1971
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
In a New Subdivision, Colorado Springs, Colorado
1969
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Frame for a Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado
1969
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, Colorado
1969
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Denver, Colorado
c. 1970
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Longmont, Colorado
1973-1974, printed 2007
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Eden, Colorado
1968
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery
Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Colorado Springs, Colorado
1968
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery
Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Edge of San Timoteo Canyon, looking toward Los Angeles, Redlands, California
1978
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery
Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Quarried Mesa Top, Pueblo County, Colorado
1978
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery
Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Longmont, Colorado
1979, printed 1985
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Santa Ana Wash, Redlands, California
1983, printed 1991
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Sitka spruce, Cape Blanco State Park, Curry County, Oregon
1999-2000
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

The Denver Art Museum
Civic Center Cultural Complex
located on 13th Avenue between Broadway and Bannock in downtown Denver

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

The Denver Art Museum website

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Review: ‘The mad square: Modernity in German Art 1910-37’ at The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 25th November 2011 – 4th March 2012

Irene Bayer (American, 1898-1991)
No title (Man on stage)
c. 1927
Gelatin silver photograph
Printed image 10.6 h x 7.6 w cm
Purchased 1983
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

This is one of the best exhibitions this year in Melbourne bar none. Edgy and eclectic the work resonates with the viewer in these days of uncertainty: THIS should have been the Winter Masterpieces exhibition!

The title of the exhibition, The mad square (Der tolle Platz) is taken from Felix Nussbaum’s 1931 painting of the same name where “the ‘mad square’ is both a physical place – the city, represented in so many works in the exhibition, and a reference to the state of turbulence and tension that characterises the period.” The exhibition showcases how artists responded to modern life in Germany in the interwar years, years that were full of murder and mayhem, putsch, revolution, rampant inflation, starvation, the Great Depression and the rise of National Socialism. Portrayed is the dystopian, dark side of modernity (where people are the victims of a morally bankrupt society) as opposed to the utopian avant-garde (the prosperous, the wealthy), where new alliances emerge between art and politics, technology and the mass media. Featuring furniture, decorative arts, painting, sculpture, collage and photography in the sections World War 1 and the Revolution, Dada, Bauhaus, Constructivism and the Machine Aesthetic, Metropolis, New Objectivity and Power and Degenerate Art, it is the collages and photographs that are the strongest elements of the exhibition, particularly the photographs. What a joy they are to see.

There is a small 2″ x 3″ contact print portrait of Hanna Höch by Richard Kauffmann, Penetrate yourself or: I embrace myself (1922) that is an absolute knockout. Höch is portrayed as the ‘new women’ with short bobbed hair and loose modern dress, her self-image emphasised through a double exposure that fragments her face and multiplies her hands, set against a contextless background. The ‘new women’ fragmented and broken apart (still unsure of herself?). The photograph is so small and intense it takes your breath away. Similarly, there is the small, intimate photograph No title (Man on Stage) (c. 1927) by Irene Bayer (see above) that captures performance as ‘total art’, a combination of visual arts, dance, music, architecture and costume design. In contrast is a large 16 x 20″ photograph of the Bauhaus balconies (1926) by László Moholy-Nagy (see below) where the whites are so creamy, the perspective so magnificent.

No title (Metalltanz) (c. 1928-1929) by T. Lux Feinenger, a photographer that I do not know well, is an exceptional photograph and print. Again small, this time dark and intense, the image features man as dancer performing gymnastics in front of reflective, metal sculptures. The metal becomes an active participant in the Metalltanz or ‘Dance in metal’ because of its reflective qualities. The print, from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles is luminous. In fact all the prints from the Getty in this exhibition are of the most outstanding quality, a highlight of the exhibition for me. Another print from the Getty that features metal and performance is Untitled (Spiral Costume, from the Triadic Ballet) by T Grill c. 1926-1927 (see below) where the spiral costume becomes an extension of the body, highlighting its form. Also highlighting form, objectivity and detachment is a wonderful 3 x 5″ photograph of the New Bauhaus Building, Dessau (1926) by Lucia Moholy from the Getty collection, the first I have ever seen in the flesh by this artist. Outstanding.

Following, we have 4 photograms by Lucia’s husband, László Moholy-Nagy which display formalist experimentation “inspired by machine aesthetic, exploring a utopian belief that Constructivism and abstract art could play a role in the process of social reform.” Complimenting these photograms is a row of six, yes six! Moholy-Nagy including Dolls (Puppen) 1926-1927 (Getty), The law of the series 1925 (Getty), Lucia at the breakfast table 1926 (Getty), Spring, Berlin 1928 (George Eastman House), Berlin Radio Tower 1928 (Art Institute of Chicago) and Light space modulator 1930 (Getty). All six photographs explore the fascinating relationship between avant-garde art and photography, between they eye and perspective, all the while declaiming what Moholy-Nagy called the “new vision”; angles, shadows and geometric patterns that defy traditional perspective “removing the space from associations with the real world creating a surreal, disjointed image.” This topographic mapping flattens perspective in the case of the Berlin radio tower allowing the viewer to see the world in a new way.

Finally two groups of photographs that are simply magnificent.

First 8 photographs in a row that focus on the order and progressive nature of the modern world, the inherent beauty of technology captured in formalist studies of geometric forms. The prints range from soft pictorialist renditions to sharp clarity. The quality of the prints is amazing. Artists include the wonderful E. O. Hoppé, Albert Renger-Patzsch (an outstandingly beautiful photograph, Harbour with cranes 1927 that is my favourite photograph in the exhibition, see below), Two Towers 1937-1938 by Werner Mantz and some early Wolfgang Sievers before he left Germany for Australia in 1938 (Blast furnace in the Ruhr, Germany 1933, see below). These early Sievers are particularly interesting, especially when we think of his later works produced in Australia. Lucky were many artists who survived in Germany or fled from Nazi persecution at the last moment, including John Heartfield who relocated to Czechoslovakia in 1933 and then fled to London in 1938 and August Sander whose life and work were severely curtailed under the Nazi regime and whose son died in prison in 1944 near the end of his ten year sentence (Wikipedia).

August Sander. Now there is a name to conjure with. The second magnificent group are 7 photographs that are taken from Sander’s seminal work People of the 20th Century. All the photographs have soft, muted tones of greys with no strong highlights and, usually, contextless backgrounds. The emphasis is on archetypes, views of people who exist on the margins of society – circus performers, bohemians, artists, the unemployed and blind people. In all the photographs there is a certain frontality (not necessarily physical) to the portraits, a self consciousness in the sitter, a wariness of the camera and of life. This self consciousness can be seen in the two photographs that are the strongest in the group – Secretary at West German radio in Cologne, 1931 and Match seller 1927 (see below).

There is magic here. Her face wears a somewhat quizzical air – questioning, unsure, vulnerable – despite the trappings of affluence and fashionability (the smoking of the cigarette, the bobbed hair). He is wary of the camera, his face and hands isolated by Sander while the rest of his body falls into shadow. His right hand is curled under, almost deformed, his shadow falling on the stone at right, the only true brightness in this beautiful image the four boxes of matches he clutches in his left hand: as Sander titles him ironically, The Businessman.

Working as I do these days with lots of found images from the 1940s-1960s that I digitally restore to life, I wonder what happened to these people during the dark days of World War 2. Did they survive the cataclysm, the drop into the abyss? I want to know, I want to reach out to these people to send them good energy. I hope that they did but their wariness in front of the camera, so intimately ‘taken’ by Sander, makes me feel the portent of things to come. How differently we see images armed with the hindsight of history!

In conclusion, this is a fantastic exhibition that will undoubtedly be in my top ten of the year for Melbourne in 2011.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Michael Thorneycroft for his help and The National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the accredited photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Felix Nussbaum (German, 1904 – after September 1944)
The mad square (Der tolle Platz)
1931
Oil on canvas
97 x 195.5cm
Berlinische Galerie
Public domain

László Moholy-Nagy (American born Hungary, 1895-1946)
Berlin Radio Tower
1928
Gelatin silver print
36 × 25.5cm
Julien Levy Collection, Special Photography Acquisition Fund
© 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Over the winter and spring of 1927-1928, Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy took a series of perhaps nine views looking down from the Berlin Radio Tower, one of the most exciting new constructions in the German capital. Moholy had already photographed the Eiffel Tower in Paris from below, looking up through the tower’s soaring girders. In Berlin, however, Moholy turned his camera around and pointed it straight down at the ground. This plunging perspective showed off the spectacular narrowness of the Radio Tower, finished in 1926, which rose vertiginously to a height of 450 feet from a base seven times smaller than that of its Parisian predecessor (which opened in 1889). Moholy attached exceptional importance to this, his boldest image: he hung it just above his name in a room devoted to his work at the Berlin showing of Film und Foto, a mammoth traveling exhibition that he had helped to prepare. Moholy also chose this view and one other to offer Julien Levy, the pioneering art dealer, when Levy visited him in Berlin in 1930. The following year the pictures went on view at the Levy Gallery in New York, in Moholy’s first solo exhibition of photographs.

Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website

László Moholy-Nagy (American born Hungary, 1895-1946)
Das Lichtrequisit (The light prop)
1930
Gelatin silver print
24 × 18.1cm (9 7/16 × 7 1/8 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© 2014 Estate of László Moholy-Nagy / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Light-Space Modulator is the most spectacular and complete realisation of László Moholy-Nagy’s artistic philosophy. Machine parts and mechanical structures began to appear in his paintings after his emigration from Hungary, and they are also seen in the illustrations he selected for the 1922 Buch neuer Künstler (Book of new artists), which includes pictures of motorcars and bridges as well as painting and sculpture. Many contemporary artists incorporated references to machines and technology in their work, and some, like the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin, even designed plans for fantastic structures, such as the ambitious Monument to the Third International, a proposed architectural spiral of glass and steel with moving tiers and audiovisual broadcasts. (See Tatlin’s Tower.)

In the Light-Space Modulator, Moholy-Nagy was able to create an actual working mechanism. Although he censured capitalism’s inhumane use of technology, he believed it could be harnessed to benefit mankind and that the artist had an important role in accomplishing this. Moholy had made preliminary sketches for kinetic sculptures as early as 1922 and referred to the idea for a light machine in his writings, but it was not until production was financed by an electric company in Berlin in 1930 that this device was built, with the assistance of an engineer and a metalsmith. It was featured at the Werkbund exhibition in Paris the same year, along with the short film Light Display Black-White-Gray, made by Moholy-Nagy to demonstrate and celebrate his new machine.

The Light-Space Modulator is a Moholy-Nagy painting come to life: mobile perforated disks, a rotating glass spiral, and a sliding ball create the effect of photograms in motion. With its gleaming glass and metal surfaces, this piece (now in the collection of the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University) is not only a machine for creating light displays but also a sculptural object of beauty, photographed admiringly by its creator.

Albert Renger-Patzsch (American born Hungary, 1895-1946)
Harbour with crane
c. 1927
Gelatin silver photograph
Printed image 22.7 h x 16.8 w cm
Purchased 1983
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Wolfgang Sievers (Germany 1913 – Australia 2007)
Blast furnace in the Ruhr, Germany
1933
Gelatin silver photograph
27.5 h x 23 w cm
Purchased 1988
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

The Ruhr region was at the centre of the German acceleration of industry in pre-war Germany, with rapid economic growth creating a heavy demand for coal and steel. In keeping with Modernist trends in photography, Sievers shot this blast furnace – the mechanism that transforms ore into metal – from an unusual, dynamic angle. It dominates the frame, appearing menacing and strange. Despite being imprisoned and beaten by the Gestapo, Sievers studied and taught at a progressive private art school until graduation in 1938. In that year he escaped Germany after being called up for military service, ending up in Australia.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Match seller
1927
From the portfolio People of the 20th century, IV Classes and Professions, 17 The Businessman

Robert Wiene, Director (German 1873-1938)
Still from from the Cabinet of Dr Caligari
1919
5 min excerpt, 35mm transferred to DVD, Black and White, silent, German subtitles
Courtesy Transit Film GmbH
Production still courtesy of the British Film Institute and Transit Film GmbH

Felix H Man (German, 1893-1985)
Luna Park
1929
Gelatin silver photograph
18.1 x 24cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased, 1987
© Felix H Man Estate

Hannah Höch (German, 1889-1978)
Love
1931
From the series Love
Photomontage
21.8 x 21cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased, 1983

Hannah Höch made some of the most interesting Dada collages and photomontages, including Love, an image of two strange composite female. Höch’s technique of pasting images together from magazine clippings and advertisements was a response to the modern era of mass media, and a way of criticising the bourgeois taste for ‘high art’. In many of her works, Höch explores the identity and changing roles of women in modern society.

The Mad Square takes its name from Felix Nussbaum’s 1931 painting which depicts Berlin’s famous Pariser Platz as a mad and fantastic place. The ‘mad square’ is both a physical place – the city, represented in so many works in the exhibition, and a reference to the state of turbulence and tension that characterises the period. The ‘square’ can also be a modernist construct that saw artists moving away from figurative representations towards increasingly abstract forms.

The exhibition features works by Max Beckman, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad, Kurt Schwitters and August Sander. This group represents Germany’s leading generation of interwar artists. Major works by lesser known artists including Karl Hubbuch, Rudolf Schlichter and Hannah Höch are also presented in the exhibition in addition to works by international artists who contributed to German modernism.

The Mad Square brings together a diverse and extensive range of art, created during one of the most important and turbulent periods in European history, offering new insights into the understanding of key German avant‐garde movements including – Expressionism, Dada, Bauhaus, Constructivism, and New Objectivity were linked by radical experimentation and innovation, made possible by an unprecedented freedom of expression.

World War 1 and the Revolution

The outbreak of war in 1914 was met with enthusiasm by many German artists and intellectuals who volunteered for service optimistically hoping that it would bring cultural renewal and rapid victory for Germany. The works in this section are by the generation of artists who experienced war first hand. Depictions of fear, anxiety and violence show the devastating effects of war – the disturbing subjects provide insight into tough economic conditions and social dysfunction experienced by many during the tumultuous early years of the Weimar Republic following the abdication of the Kaiser

Dada

The philosophical and political despair experienced by poets and artists during World War 1 fuelled the Dada movement, a protest against the bourgeois conception of art. Violent, infantile and chaotic, Dada took its name from the French word for a child’s hobbyhorse or possibly from the sound of a baby’s babble. Its activities included poetry readings and avant‐garde performances, as well as creating new forms of abstract art that subverted all existing conditions in western art. Though short‐lived, in Germany the Dada movement has profoundly influenced subsequent developments in avant-garde art and culture. The impact of the Dada movement was felt throughout Europe – and most powerfully in Germany from 1917-21.

Bauhaus

The Bauhaus (1919‐1933) is widely considered as the most important school of art and design of the 20th century, very quickly establishing a reputation as the leading and most progressive centre of the international avant‐garde. German architect Walter Gropius founded the school to do away with traditional distinctions between the fine arts and craft, and to forge an entirely new kind of creative designer skilled in both the conceptual aesthetics of art and the technical skills of handicrafts. The Bauhaus was considered to be both politically and artistically radical from its inception and was closed down by the National Socialists in 1933

Constructivism and the Machine Aesthetic

Having emerged in Russia after World War I, Constructivism developed in Germany as a set of ideas and practices that experimented with abstract or non-representational forms and in opposition to Expressionism and Dada. Constructivists developed works and theories that fused art and with technology. They shared a utopian belief in social reform, and saw abstract art as playing a central role in this process.

Metropolis

By the 1920s Berlin has become the cultural and entertainment capital of the world and mass culture played an important role in distracting a society traumatised by World War 1, the sophisticated metropolis provided a rich source of imagery for artists, it also come to represent unprecedented sexual and personal freedom. In photography modernity was emphasised by unusual views of the metropolis or through the representation of city types. The diverse group of works in this section portray the uninhibited sense of freedom and innovation experienced by artists throughout Germany during the 1920s

New Objectivity

By the mid 1920s, a new style emerged that came to be known as Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity. After experiencing the atrocities of World War 1 and the harsh conditions of life in postwar Germany, many artists felt the need to return to the traditional modes of representation with portraiture becoming a major vehicle of this expression, with its emphasis on the realistic representation of the human figure

Power and Degenerate Art

After the seizure of power by the National Socialists in 1933 modern artists were forbidden from working and exhibiting in Germany, with their works confiscated from leading museums and then destroyed or sold on the international art market. Many avant‐garde artists were either forced to leave Germany or retreat into a state of ‘inner immigration’.

The Degenerate art exhibition, held in Munich in 1937, represented the culmination of the National Socialists’ assault on modernism. Hundreds of works were selected for the show which aimed to illustrate the mental deficiency and moral decay that had supposedly infiltrated modern German art. The haphazard and derogatory design of the exhibition sought to ridicule and further discredit modern art. Over two million people visited the exhibition while in contrast far fewer attended the Great German art exhibition which sought to promote what the Nazis considered as ‘healthy’ art.

Karl Grill (German active Donaueschingen, Germany 1920s)
Untitled (Spiral Costume, from the Triadic Ballet)
c. 1926-1927
Gelatin silver print
22.5 x 16.2cm
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

In 1922, Oskar Schlemmer premiered his “Triadic Ballet” in Germany. He named the piece “Triadic” because it was literally composed of multiples of three: three acts, colours, dancers, and shapes. Concentrating on its form and movement, Schlemmer explored the body’s spatial relationship to its architectural surroundings. Although an abstract design, the spiral costume derived from the tutus of classical ballet.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Secretary at West German radio in Cologne
1931, printed by August Sander in the 1950s
From the portfolio People of the 20th century, III The woman, 17 The woman in intellectual and practical occupation
Gelatin silver photograph
29 x 22cm
Die Photographische Sammlung /SK Stiftung Kultur, August Sander Archiv, Cologne (DGPH1016)
© Die Photographische Sammlung /SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Timeline

1910

~ Berlin’s population doubles to two million people

1911

~ Expressionists move from Dresden to Berlin

1912

~ Social Democratic Party (SPD) the largest party in the Reichstag

1913

~ Expressionists attain great success with their city scenes

1914

~ World War I begins
~ George Grosz, Oskar Schlemmer, Otto Dix, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann and Franz Marc enlist in the army

1915

~ Grosz declared unfit for service, Beckmann suffers a breakdown and Schlemmer wounded

1916

~ Marc dies in combat
~ Dada begins at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich

1917

~ Lenin and Trotsky form the Soviet Republic after the Tzar is overthrown

1918

~ Richard Huelsenbeck writes a Dada manifesto in Berlin
~ Kurt Schwitters creates Merz assemblages in Hanover
~ Revolutionary uprisings in Berlin and Munich
~ Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates and flees to Holland
~ Social Democratic Party proclaims the Weimar Republic
~ World War I ends

1919

~ Freikorps assassinates the Spartacist leaders, Karl Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg
~ Bauhaus established in Weimer by Walter Gropius
~ Cologne Dada group formed
~ Treaty of Versailles signed

1920

~ Berlin is the world’s third largest city after New York and London
~ Inflation begins in Germany
~ National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) founded
~ Kapp Putsch fails after right‐wing forces try to gain control over government
~ First International Dada fair opens in Berlin

1921

~ Hitler made chairman of the NSDAP

1922

~ Schlemmer’s Triadic ballet premiers in Stuttgart
~ Hyperinflation continues

1923

~ Hitler sentenced to five years imprisonment for leading the Beer Hall Putsch
~ Inflation decreases and a period of financial stability begins

1924

~ Hitler writes Mein Kampf while in prison
~ Reduction of reparations under the Dawes Plan

1925

~ New Objectivity exhibition opens at the Mannheim Kunsthalle
~ The Bauhaus relocates to Dessau

1926

~ Germany joins the League of Nations

1927

~ Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis released
~ Unemployment crisis worsens
~ Nazis hold their first Nuremburg party rally

1928

~ Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The threepenny opera premieres in Berlin
~ Hannes Meyer becomes the second director of the Bauhaus

1929

~ Street confrontations between the Nazis and communists in Berlin
~ Young Plan accepted, drastically reducing reparations
~ Stock market crashes on Wall Street, New York
~ Thomas Mann awarded the Nobel Prize for literature

1930

~ Resignation of Chancellor Hermann Müller’s cabinet ending parliamentary rule
~ Minority government formed by Heinrich Brüning, leader of the Centre Party
~ Nazis win 18% of the vote and gain 95 seats in the National elections
~ Ludwig Miles van der Rohe becomes the third director of the Bauhaus
~ John Heartfield creates photomontages for the Arbeiter‐Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ)

1931

~ Unemployment reaches five million and a state of emergency is declared in Germany

1932

~ Nazis increase their representation in the Reichstag to 230 seats but are unable to form a majority coalition
~ Miles van der Rohe moves the Bauhaus to Berlin
~ Grosz relocates to New York as an exile

1933

~ Hindenberg names Hitler as Chancellor
~ Hitler creates a dictatorship under the Nazi regime
~ The first Degenerate art exhibition denouncing modern art is held in Dresden
~ Miles van der Rohe announces the closure of the Bauhaus
~ Nazis organise book burnings in Berlin
~ Many artists including Gropius, Kandinski and Klee flee Germany
~ Beckmann, Dix and Schlemmer lose their teaching positions

1934

~ Fifteen concentration camps exist in Germany

1935

~ The swastika becomes the flag of the Reich

1936

~ Spanish civil war begins
~ Germany violates the Treaty of Versailles
~ Olympic Games held in Garmisch‐Partenkirchen and Berlin
~ Thomas Mann deprived of his citizenship and emigrates to the United States

1937

~ German bombing raids over Guernica in Spain in support of Franco
~ The Nazi’s Degenerate art exhibition opens in Munich and attracts two million visitors
~ Beckmann, Kirchner and Schwitters leave Germany
~ Purging of ‘degenerate art’ from German museums continues 1

1/ Timeline credit: Chronology compiled by Jacqueline Strecker and Victoria Tokarowski from the following sources:

~ Catherine Heroy ‘Chronology’ in Sabine Rewald, Glitter and Doom: German portraits from the 1920s, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, exh cat, 2006, pp. 39‐46
~ Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg, eds, ‘Political chronology’, The Weimar Republic sourcebook, Berkely 1994, pp. 765‐71
~ Jonathan Petropoulos and Dagmar Lott‐Reschke ‘Chronology’ in Stephanie Barron, ‘Degenerate Art’: the fate of the avant‐garde in Nazi Germany, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, exh cat, 1991, pp. 391‐401

László Moholy-Nagy (American born Hungary, 1895-1946)
Bauhaus Balconies
1926
Silver gelatin photograph

John Heartfield (German, 1891-1968)
Adolf, the superman: swallows gold and spouts rubbish
1932
From the Workers Illustrated Paper, vol 11, no 29, 17 July 1932, p. 675
Photolithograph
38 x 27cm
John Heartfield Archiv, Akademie der Künste zu Berlin
Photo: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Kunstsammlung, Heartfield 2261/ Roman März
© The Heartfield Community of Heirs /VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

John Heartfield’s photomontages expose hidden agendas in German politics and economics of the 1920s and 30s. This image was published six months before the National Socialist Party came to power, and shows Hitler with a spine made of coins and his stomach filled with gold. The caption says that he ‘swallows gold’, alluding to generous funding by right-wing industrialists, and ‘spouts rubbish’.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German, 1880-1938)
Woman in hat
1911
Oil on canvas
Art gallery of Western Australia, Perth

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
Suicide (Selbstmörder)
1916
Oil on canvas
100 × 77.5cm
Tate Modern
Public domain

Rudolf Schlichter (German, 1890-1955)
Tingle tangel
1919-1920
Oil on canvas

George Grosz (German, 1890-1945)
Tatlinesque Diagram
1920
Watercolour, collage and ink on paper
41 x 29.2cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969)
Dr Paul Ferdinand Schmidt
1921
Oil on canvas
63 x 82cm
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany

El Lissitzky (Russian, 1890-1941)
New Man (Neuer)
1923
Color lithograph on wove paper
12 × 12 1/2 in. (30.5 × 31.8cm)

Max Beckmann (German, 1884-1950)
The trapeze
1923
Oil on canvas
196.5 x 84cm
Toledo Museum of Art
Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey
Photo: Photography Incorporated, Toledo

Werner Graul (German, 1905-1984)
UFA (Universum-Film-Aktiengesellschaft) (publisher)
Metropolis
1926
Lithographic poster

Christian Schad (German, 1894-1982)
Self-Portrait with Model (Selbstbildnis mit Modell)
1927
Oil on wood
29 15/16 x 24 3/16 in. (76 x 61.5cm)
Private collection, courtesy of Tate
© 2015 Christian Schad Stiftung Aschaffenburg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Heinrich Hoerle (German, 1895-1936)
Three invalids
c. 1930
Oil on canvas

NGV International
180 St Kilda Road

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Photographs: ‘Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound’ by Kaho Yu

December 2011

Kaho Yu (Hong Kong)
Untitled
from the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound
2009-2011

I like these photographs. There is a stillness to them that is intoxicating. The wonderful quotation by Charles Babbage (the air as a form of perpetual palimpsest) coupled with Yu’s insight that he sought to capture – through long time exposure – those infinitesimal residual movements of voice and sound trapped in the diffused movements of all the particles in the atmosphere, compliment the work. These are intelligent, emotive, quiet photographs.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Kaho Yu for allowing me to publish the photographs and text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All photographs © Kaho Yu and courtesy of the artist.

Kaho Yu (Hong Kong)
Untitled
From the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound
2009-2011

Kaho Yu (Hong Kong)
Untitled
Fom the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound
2009-2011

“The air is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the unified movements of each particle, the testimony of man’s changeful will.”

Charles Babbage, 1837

The photographs in this series were taken during a period when I was feeling existentially bored. Instead of distracting myself with activities and accumulating new sensations, I decided to “look” at boredom, to study, and perhaps to understand it. The most natural strategy was to observe the immediate environments where my daily activities take place – train stations, cubicles, copy machines room, etc. I carried a medium format camera on a tripod and spent the odd hours wandering alone through those familiar spaces.

My “study” did not lead me to any revelation or answer. Instead, I found myself spending a lot of time waiting in a long silence, between the opening and the closing of the camera shutter.

Charles Babbage, a scientist in 1837, postulated that every voice and sound, once imparted on the air particles, does not dissipate but remains in the diffused movements of all the particles in the atmosphere. Thus, there might one day come a person equipped with the right mathematical knowledge of these motions who will be able to capture the infinitesimal vibrations and to trace back to their ultimate source.

Taking a long exposure, letting the light slowly accumulate an image on the celluloid surface, to me, is not unlike a sound seeker searching in the air particles, for the tiny residual movements that have been conveyed through the history of mankind, from the beginning of time.

Kaho Yu artist statement

Kaho Yu (Hong Kong)
Untitled
From the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound
2009-2011

Kaho Yu (Hong Kong)
Untitled
From the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound
2009 – 2011

Kaho Yu website

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Exhibition: ‘Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection’ at the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide

Exhibition dates: 14th October – 16th December 2011

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

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 1977/78
1977-1978
From the Untitled sequence 1977/78 series 1977-1978
From a series of 16 gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by James Mollison AO through the
Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008

Untitled 1977 is a series of black-and-white photographs that depict a naked adolescent male seemingly lost in a state of private reverie.

This early series highlights Henson’s interest in states of existence that are
indeterminate or ambiguous, which has remained a central concern of his practice over the years. In this body of work, a slightly androgynous youth seems to float in and out of consciousness. In later work, Henson continues to explore borderline states between night and day, dream and reality, childhood and adulthood.

Henson’s interest in ambiguity is also apparent at a formal level, with his use of lighting. Shadows swallow the figure’s contours and highlights dissolve the details, giving the youth a ghostly quality.

Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills. “Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection Education Resource,” on the University of South Australia website 2010 [Online] Cited 18/12/2024

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 1980-82
1980-82
From a series of 220 gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection

These five works come from a series that includes a total of 220 photographs, which are printed at various sizes. When exhibiting the full series, Henson arranges the works into small groupings that create an overall effect of aberrant movement and fragmentation. From within these bustling clusters of images, individual faces emerge like spectres of
humanity that will once again dissolve into the crowd.

Henson shot this series over several years in different cities around the world, capturing images of individuals, crowds and architectural details, all apparently adrift in the flow of urban life. The people in these images have an anonymity that allows them to represent universal human experiences of alienation, mortality and fatigue. The views of buildings, however, are more specific. They were photographed in Dresden and East Berlin in the 1970s, when Henson travelled to Germany specifically for the purpose of
documenting these world-weary structures. Taken together, the images remind us of how tragically fleeting a sense of belonging can be.

Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills. “Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection Education Resource,” on the University of South Australia website 2010 [Online] Cited 18/12/2024

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 1980-82
1980-82
From a series of 220 gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection

Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection draws on work from the Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection. MGA holds one of the largest collections of Bill Henson’s photography. With its concentration of work from 1977-92, the collection provides a significant survey of Henson’s early career.

Bill Henson is one of Australia’s best-known artists. Many of us have heard his name. Some of us may also be familiar with his photographs. For many, the experience of Henson’s extraordinary work has probably been through reproduction of it in the media. However, it is important to view Henson’s actual photographs. This offers a much richer visual experience, and a deeper appreciation of his art. Henson printed all of the work in this exhibition in the darkroom by hand, using chemicals and carefully chosen paper stock. The uneven surfaces of the early black-and-white photographs are a result of this wet-printing process, and give the photographs a mysterious, almost alchemic quality. The larger colour photographs display a richness of tone and palette that is an artefact of the artist’s meticulous approach to the printing process. These material properties are not evident in reproductions of Henson’s images.

The other aspect that is lost in reproduction is the physical difficulty of seeing Henson’s pictures clearly. The darkness of Henson’s photographs appeals to the artist’s romantic sensibility. He tends to let shadows obscure visual detail so that enigmas lurk at the threshold of perception. Publishers like to override this quality of Henson’s work by adjusting the contrast and brightness of the images for print. Viewers of this exhibition will find themselves drawn into an inscrutable visual space of shadows and deep, reflective blacks.

Born in 1955, Bill Henson grew up in Glen Waverley, a burgeoning suburb of
Melbourne. From the 1950s to the 1970s the area swelled beyond the termination of the Glen Waverley train line, urged on by the relative affordability, ease and comfort of car travel. Self-serve petrol stations appeared at major intersections, their brightly coloured signage adding their glow to the landscape.

The influence of expanding American suburbia on Australia continued with Glen Waverley becoming home to the first McDonalds restaurant in Victoria (1971). The 1980s saw an expansion of large international chains that offered ‘drive-thru’ services (from fast food to alcohol) favouring prominent roadside locations and large signage to stamp their corporate identities on the landscape.

It is from within this ever changing and expanding landscape, between the end of the train line and country, that Henson’s vision was founded; a place where listless youth claim the vacant lots and preservations between estates as their own private worlds, lost in the evening shadows.

The youth that populate Henson’s images take on a strange, almost hollow look, their eyes becoming dark holes in their ghostly facades. Light and shadow compete to pull their bodies from one plane to the other, Henson seeks to capture this moment, the hovering between child and adult.

These liminal zones, the “intervals in the landscape”1 provided a backdrop for the developing artist. Bill Henson’s early work is undeniably – and perhaps unintentionally – a discussion of the changing landscape of suburbia and in turn the influence of international trends on what it meant to be growing up in Australia at that time. Henson’s early work is significant in Australian photography because of its depiction of this change in both this suburban landscape and the human condition.

1/ Bill Henson as quoted in Dominic Sidhu. “Nocturne: The photographs of Bill Henson (Interview with Bill Henson),” in EGO Magazine, New York, August 29, 2005. No longer available online.

Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills. “Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection Education Resource,” on the University of South Australia website 2010 [Online] Cited 18/12/2024

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 57
1985-1986
From the series Untitled 1985-86
Chromogenic print
106 x 86cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 61
1985-1986
From the series Untitled 1985-86
Chromogenic print
128 × 100cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Monash Gallery of Art (MGA) holds one of the largest collections of photographs by Bill Henson. With its concentration on work made between 1977 and 1992, the MGA collection represents a significant survey of Henson’s early career, from which twenty-nine works have been selected for the Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection exhibition.

Henson has been described as a ‘passionate and visionary explorer’, and has been exhibited extensively nationally and internationally for over three decades, yet this is the first exhibition dedicated to this major artist’s work to be presented in Adelaide.

Passionate discussion about Henson’s work in the Australian media in recent times, has served to illuminate an important debate about the nature of art. But while many of us may be familiar with Henson’s images through reproduction, to view a museum exhibition of the artist’s photographs offers a much deeper appreciation of his art, and is a rare opportunity for audiences to themselves experience his work first hand.

The ‘in conversation’ event is a highlight to accompany a very special exhibition at the Samstag Museum from one of Australia’s most distinguished artists. Bill Henson: early work from the MGA Collection, with selected recent landscapes offers South Australians a unique opportunity to experience the power and beauty of the work of Bill Henson, Australia’s best-known contemporary photographer. This is the first exhibition dedicated to this major artist’s work ever to be presented in Adelaide.

The exhibition features twenty-nine iconic images from many of Henson’s major series from the 1970s through to the early 1990s, all drawn from the Monash Gallery of Art, who hold one of the largest collections of Henson’s work in the country.

For many, the experience of Henson’s extraordinary work has been through its reproduction in the media. However, it is important to view the actual photographs as this offers a much richer visual experience. All of the early work in the exhibition was printed by hand in the darkroom, and consequently the uneven surfaces of the black and white photographs have a mysterious, alchemic quality not present in reproductions of Henson’s images.

Alongside the MGA Collection exhibition, the Samstag Museum is presenting a selection of recent landscape photographs by Henson. These are works of compelling power and continue the artist’s fascination with a diverse range of subject matter. Through them we explore an island of rocky outcrops, monoliths rising dramatically from the ocean and waterfalls captured in a blaze of light.

Text and press release from the Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art website

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 63
1985-1986
From the series Untitled 1985-86
Chromogenic print
106 x 86cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1991
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 72
1985-1986
From the series Untitled 1985-86
Chromogenic print
106 x 86cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1991
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

The series Untitled 1985-86 is constructed of 154 photographs that explore the psychological space of Henson’s youth. Henson grew up in Glen Waverley, in Melbourne’s South-east, and he has often spoken about the importance of maintaining a connection with the suburban environment that shaped his sensibilities. This series includes a range of specific references to the streetscapes of the area, often shot at night or dusk,
with fluorescent lights investing the darkness with a wistful glow.

Henson’s emphasis on nocturnal life alludes to his interest in treating real landscape as if it is a dreamscape, an idea that is underscored by the use of sleeping figures in this series. And, by juxtaposing suburbia with photographs of summertime girls and Egyptian temples, Henson takes us into the dreamy imaginings of an adolescent boy living on the outskirts of the city.

Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills. “Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection Education Resource,” on the University of South Australia website 2010 [Online] Cited 18/12/2024

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 73
1985-1986
From the series Untitled 1985-86
Chromogenic print
106 x 86cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by the artist 1989
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 137
1985-1986
From the series Untitled 1985-86
Chromogenic print
106 x 86cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled
1990-1991
From the series Paris Opera Project
Type C photograph
130 × 130cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

In 1990 Bill Henson was commissioned to produce a body of work that responded to the world-renown Opéra de Paris. He decided to focus on the audience, and while at the Opéra photographed the faces of people while they sat enveloped in darkness, their features softly illuminated by the reflected glow of stage lighting. The photographs shot in Paris subsequently became Henson’s source material, as he restaged the portraits in his Melbourne studio to accentuate the mood and atmosphere of an evening at the opera.

When the subsequent series of fifty photographs was first exhibited in Melbourne during 1991, they were hung floor-to-ceiling as if to suggest an auditorium of spectators. With their far-away eyes, gazing off toward something that is not revealed in the photographs, these faces express the sublime sensuality of a musical experience. And the atmospheric cloudscapes that punctuate the series allude to the rich horizons being opened up in the imaginations of the audience.

Stephen Zagala and Stella Loftus-Hills. “Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection Education Resource,” on the University of South Australia website 2010 [Online] Cited 18/12/2024

Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955)
Untitled 1-5 B
1990-1991
From the series Paris Opera Project
Type C photograph
130 × 130cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art
Hawke Building, City West campus
University of South Australia
55 North Terrace, Adelaide
Phone: (08) 8302 0870

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 5pm

Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art website

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Photographs: Marcus Bunyan. ‘Vertical’ 2011

December 2011

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Vertical

More planes, this time a series of work titled Vertical (2011). The series is now online on my website.

There are 22 images in the series formed as a sequence. Below is a selection of images from the series. I hope you like the work!

Marcus

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

Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.

Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958)
Untitled
2011
From the series Vertical
Digital prints

Marcus Bunyan website

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Exhibition: ‘Renaissance Faces. Masterpieces of Italian Portraiture’  at the  Bode Museum, Berlin

Exhibition dates: 25th August – 20th November 2011

Filippo Lippi (Italian, 1406-1469)
Portrait of a Man and a Woman at a Casement
c. 1440
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Legend of the Surface, the Facies

“Facies simultaneously signifies the singular air of a face, the particularity of its aspect, as well as the genre or species under which this aspect should be subsumed. The facies would thus be a face fixed to a synthetic combination of the universal and the singular: the visage fixed to the regime of representation, in a Helgian sense.

Why the face? – Because in the face the corporeal surface makes visible something of the movements of the soul, ideally.”

Didi-Huberman, Georges. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere (trans. Alisa Hartz). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003, p. 49

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Bode Museum for allowing me to publish the artwork in the posting. Please click on the images for a larger version.

Jacopo Bellini (Italian, 1400-1470)
Saint Bernardino of Siena
Between c. 1450 and c. 1455
Tempera and gold leaf on panel
Weber Collection, New York

Pisanello (Antonio Pisano) (Italian, 1395-1455)
Portrait of Leonello d’Este
c. 1444
Bergamo, Accademia Carrara
© Accademia Carrara, Bergamo

Pisanello (c. 1395 – c. 1455), known professionally as Antonio di Puccio Pisano or Antonio di Puccio da Cereto, also erroneously called Vittore Pisano by Giorgio Vasari, was one of the most distinguished painters of the early Italian Renaissance and Quattrocento. He was acclaimed by poets such as Guarino da Verona and praised by humanists of his time, who compared him to such illustrious names as Cimabue, Phidias and Praxiteles.

Filippo Lippi (Italian, 1406-1469)
Portrait of a Lady
c. 1445
Paint on poplar panel
Height: 49.5 cm (19.4 in)
Width: 32.9 cm (12.9 in)
Gemäldegalerie

Andrea del Castagno (Italian, 1420-1457)
Portrait of a Man
c. 1450
Tempera on panel
Height: 54cm (21.2 in)
Width: 40.5cm (15.9 in)
Andrew W. Mellon collection
National Gallery of Art

Andrea Mantegna (Italian, 1431-1506)
Portrait of Cardinal Ludovico Trevisano
c. 1459
Berlin, National Museums in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
© National Museums in Berlin, Jörg P. Anders

Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431 – September 13, 1506) was an Italian painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son-in-law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g. by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality. His flinty, metallic landscapes and somewhat stony figures give evidence of a fundamentally sculptural approach to painting. He also led a workshop that was the leading producer of prints in Venice before 1500.

Antonio del Pollaiuolo (Italian, 1429-1498)
Portrait of a Young Lady
c. 1465
Berlin, National Museums in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
© National Museums in Berlin, Jörg P. Anders

Piero del Pollaiuolo (Italian, 1443–1496)
Portrait of Galeazzo Maria Sforza
c. 1471
Tempera on panel
Height: 65cm (25.5 in)
Width: 42cm (16.5 in)
Uffizi Gallery

Piero Pollaiuolo painted this portrait during one of Galeazzo Maria Sforza’s visits to Florence. The work is based on a similar portrait by his brother, Antonio. That the portrait is of Sforza is beyond doubt, as copies exist bearing Sforza’s name. Restored in 1994.

Sandro Botticelli (Italian, 1445-1520)
Profile Portrait of a Young Lady (Simonetta Vespucci?)
c. 1476
Berlin, National Museums in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
© National Museums in Berlin, Jörg P. Anders

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (c. 1445 – May 17, 1510), known as Sandro Botticelli, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterise less than a hundred years later in his Vita of Botticelli as a “golden age”. Botticelli’s posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then, his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting.

The Gemäldegalerie – National Museums in Berlin and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, have joined forces in organising a major exhibition on the genesis of the Italian portrait. For Berlin, the Bode Museum presents itself as the ideal location to hold such an exhibition: on its opening in 1904, it was conceived by its founder, Wilhelm von Bode, as a ‘Renaissance Museum’ on the Museum Island. The Bode Museum will host the first stage of the exhibition, running from 25 August to 20 November 2011, before it subsequently goes on show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, from 19 December 2011 to 18 March 2012.

More than 150 key works, including paintings, drawings, medals and busts, are about to go on display for the first time together. The more than 50 lenders include the Uffizi in Florence, the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in London. Among the exhibition’s many highlights is Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine from the Czartoryski Collection, Cracow.

The exhibition highlights depictions of the appearance and personality of real people. Portraits of feminine beauty vie with portraits of generals, princes and humanists, offering us a fascinating insight into the age of the early Renaissance.

At the heart of the exhibition stands the Italian Renaissance portrait. The Italian art of portraiture evolved under the influence of antique models. However, it was equally shaped by the innovations of the great Netherlandish painters. The history of the art of portraiture, from Pisanello up to Verrocchio, Botticelli, Bellini and Leonardo, is retold in a selection of magnificent and sensational key works, including paintings, sculptures, medals and drawings. The exhibition focuses both on the art produced at the Italian courts, as well as the development of the portrait in Florence and Venice.

A unique architectural and lighting concept, especially designed for the exhibition, takes into account the individual qualities of each exhibit in its presentation. Of crucial importance here is the aesthetic experience, both of the quality of the artworks and of the materials used in creating them.

The artistic diversity evident in these early portraits, the various roles the images served and their historical contexts all resonate with suspense. The Gemäldegalerie – National Museums in Berlin and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York embarked on an intense collaboration to present this to the general public. Masterpieces from New York and the rich collections of the National Museums in Berlin, not just from the Gemäldegalerie itself but also from the Sculpture Collection, Kupferstichkabinett and Numismatic Collection, offer visitors an unprecedented insight into this epoch. Furthermore, for the first time the show in the Bode Museum also encompasses all media of Italian Renaissance portraiture – medals, drawings, sculptures and panel paintings.

Portraits – either in the form of a painting, photograph and less often a medal – have become commonplace today, but between the 5th and 15th century independent portraits of individual people were rare and the exclusive reserve of rulers and historic figures. Only in the 15th century did it again become customary for artists on both sides of the Alps to produce independent portraits of men and women. Today’s exhibition Renaissance Faces pays homage to Italy’s contribution to this first great age of European portraiture and conveys a sense of the innovative ways in which artists responded to the challenge of creating individual portraits and how they explored questions of identity that arose as a result.

When selecting the exhibits, the organisers’ chief aim was to highlight the prevailing conventions and decisive innovations in a period spanning more than eight decades. Set against the backdrop of Italy’s geographical, political and cultural complexities in the 15th century, the exhibition is divided into three clearly outlined thematic sections. The first of these is Florence, as it was here that the independent portrait first appeared on a significant scale. The visitor’s gaze is then directed to the courts of Ferrara, Mantua, Bologna, Milan, Urbino, Naples and finally papal Rome. The circle is then completed in Venice, where a portrait tradition only established itself remarkably late in the century. In each section, works in all media are juxtaposed with each other to give visitors the chance to see for themselves how the various art forms mutually influenced each other with their own unique qualities.

In a society dominated by family descent and social hierarchies, conventions were binding. And it is precisely these conventions that are depicted in profile portraits from 15th-century Italy. Profile portraits were equally popular as reliefs or paintings. Compared with the far more naturalistic art produced north of the Alps, which people in 15th-century Italy were definitely familiar with, this form of portrait seems at first a little surprising, as the Italian artists present the sitters in a soft light and at a slight angle to the picture plane. The sitters are seen standing either at a window or behind a parapet and gaze at the viewer. Sometimes a hand is seen resting on the edge of the painted frame. When looking at these images, it is clear that Italian portraits are not primarily concerned with achieving an accurate likeness, at least not in the conventional sense. Italian portraits do not so much reveal personality, rather convey social conventions and cultural identity.

The profile portrait was frequently given such exceptional importance in Italy, because it largely drew from Roman coins and reliefs for inspiration. But the profile portrait has always been the most elementary form of capturing someone’s likeness. Informal, direct and frontal views have become so familiar to us in portraits today thanks to photography that we first have to be resensitised to the unique possibilities inherent in the profile portrait. For one, it makes it possible to objectify a person’s outer appearance and allows physiognomies to convey cultural meaning. The pleasing aspect of a high forehead, the refinement or contemptuousness expressed in a raised brow, the aristocratic curve of a nose and the severity or gentleness of a chin and jawline – all these are physiognomical characteristics that come to stand as emblems for beauty, rank and power.

Press release from the Bode Museum website quoting the exhibition catalogue

Sandro Botticelli (Italian, 1445-1520)
Portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici
c. 1478
Washington, National Gallery of Art
© Art Resource, New York

Antonello da Messina (Italian, 1430-1479)
Portrait of a Young Man
1478
Berlin, National Museums in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
© National Museums in Berlin, Jörg P. Anders

Antonello da Messina, properly Antonello di Giovanni di Antonio, but also called Antonello degli Antoni and Anglicised as Anthony of Messina (c. 1430 – February 1479), was an Italian painter from Messina, Sicily, active during the Early Italian Renaissance. His work shows strong influences from Early Netherlandish painting although there is no documentary evidence that he ever travelled beyond Italy. Giorgio Vasari credited him with the introduction of oil painting into Italy. Unusually for a south Italian artist of the Renaissance, his work proved influential on painters in northern Italy, especially in Venice.

Hans Memling (Italian, c. 1433-1494)
Portrait of a Man at a Loggia
c. 1480
Oil on panel
Height: 40cm (15.7 in)
Width: 28cm (11 in)
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Davide Ghirlandaio (Italian, 1452-1525)
Selvaggia Sassetti (born 1470)
Between 1487 and 1488
Tempera on panel
Height: 57.2cm (22.5 in)
Width: 44.1cm (17.3 in)
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519)
Lady with an Ermine (portrait of Cecilia Gallerani)
1489-1490
Kraków, owned by Princes Czartoryski Foundation, at the National Museum
© bpk / Scala

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci,known as Leonardo da Vinci , was an Italian polymath of the Renaissance whose areas of interest included invention, drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, paleontology, and cartography. He has been variously called the father of palaeontology, ichnology, and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time (despite perhaps only 15 of his paintings having survived).

Lorenzo di Credi (Italian, 1459-1537)
Portrait of a Young Woman
c. 1490s
Oil on panel
Height: 58.7cm (23.1 in)
Width: 40cm (15.7 in)
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gentile Bellini (Italian, 1429-1507)
Self-portrait
c. 1496
Black chalk and charcoal on paper
Height: 23 cm (9 in)
Width: 19.4 cm (7.6 in)
Kupferstichkabinett Berlin

Sandro Botticelli (Italian, 1445-1510)
Portrait of Michael Tarchaniota Marullus
1497
Tempera from wood transferred to canvas
Height: 49cm (19.2 in)
Width: 35cm (13.7 in)
Institut Cambó

Bode Museum
Museum Island Berlin,
Am Kupfergraben 1, 10117 Berlin

Opening hours:
Monday closed
Tuesday – Sunday 10.00am – 6.00pm

Bode Museum website

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Review: ‘Selina Ou: New York’ at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond

Exhibition dates: 25th October – 19th November 2011

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Tim, Hair Stylist, Lower East Side, New York
2011
C-type print
100 x 100cm

A strong, nuanced body of work by Selina Au at Sophie Gannon Gallery in Richmond. In the flesh these large colour photographs have a wonderful, polyvocal presence. The solo portraits are stronger in terms of composition and intertextuality than the double portraits.

Derived from the Latin intertexto, meaning to intermingle while weaving, intertextuality is a term first introduced by French semiotician Julia Kristeva in the late sixties.1 Intertextuality “is always an iteration which is also a re-iteration, a re-writing which foregrounds the trace of the various texts it both knowingly and unknowingly places and dis-places.”2 Intertexuality is how a text is constituted. It fragments singular readings. The reader’s own previous readings, experiences and position within the cultural formation influences these re-inscriptions.

Reminding me of a contemporary redefinition of the work of Diane Arbus, Ou’s reconceptualisations of space “produce a plurality of meanings and signifying / interpretive gestures that escape the reduction of knowledge to fixed, monological re-presentations, or presences.”3 Through a process of materialisation, using the technique of assemblage, Ou weaves a lack of fixity into her photographs. She creates a kind of tapestry in the surfaces of her images, a play of pattern / randomness that redefines the significations of the body in the fold of inscription.

Take the first three portraits in this posting, for example. The photograph Tim, Hair Stylist, Lower East Side, New York weaves space, time and memory within the pictorial frame. The physical space between the portrait on the wall at rear, Tim and the clock at right is crucial to a reading of this photograph, as is the disjuncture between the appearance of the man in the framed photograph (in jacket and tie) and the casual attire of Tim. Just as important is the memorialisation of both men within the same space (where both presumably work/ed), the collapsing of past and present into a fluid space that is neither here nor there (the past of the man in the framed photograph, the moment of passing of Tim when the photograph was ‘taken’ and the present of the photograph being looked at). There is no fixed, monological representation here: the reading of this photograph hovers between past and present, between memory and reality and haunts the body of the subject, Tim.

Similarly, Raquel, Waitress and Fashion Designer, Nolita, New York and Jerome, Retail Assistant and Fashion Designer, Soho, New York offer radical re-iterations of space, this time with less temporal associations. In Raquel, two red chevrons at top left and right frame the face of the subject, playing off the colour-changing hair of the waitress/fashion designer, the title of the photograph an ironic comment on the intertextual nature of contemporary life: a waitress (low paid, menial labourer) and a fashion designer (famous, highly visible entrepreneur). The nonchalantly limp-wristed, ringed hand and over large glasses, coupled with the bedraggled threads of the black shorts – echoing the tousled nature of the subjects hair – also belies the statement “fashion designer.” The word Cervesas (beer) offers a dichotomy with the coloured bottles of flavoured water that surround the lower half of the subject while the reflection in the window behind Raquel provides a metaphorical vista into this distorted world view.

In Jerome, the same problem in a person’s relationship with self and others is evident: the context of Jerome as both a retail assistant (low paid, menial labourer) and a fashion designer (famous, highly visible entrepreneur). The narcissistic, self-importance of Jerome is beautifully portrayed by Ou as she balances the context of his body in space – his polka-dot shirt reflecting the dotted neon of the shops name, his logo emblazoned necklace doing the same, while the reflections in the shop window again hint at outside forces (the car and consumerism) and other worlds. The defiant, could not give a shit gaze of the subject into the camera lens hints at years of subjugation and unrequited ambition for this is not his shop, these are not his clothes despite the label “fashion designer.” He is just a retail assistant, the subject of his own con(text).

The strength of these photographs is that they blur the outlines of the fixed image dispersing an image of totality, “into an unbounded, illimitable tissue of connections and associations, paraphrases and fragments, texts and con-texts.”4 In this sense the solo portraits are much more successful than the rest of the work as Ou magically weaves the tapestry of life into her compositions, ready for the reader to bring their own experiences to these re-inscriptions. In a word these photographs are, literally, breath-taking.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Endnotes

1/ Keep, Christopher, McLaughlin, Tim and Parmar, Robin. “Intertextuality,” on The Electronic Labyrinth website [Online] Cited 13/11/2011. No longer available online

2/ Ibid.,

3/ Thumlert, Kurt. Intervisuality, Visual Culture, and Education. [Online] Cited 10/08/2006. No longer available online

4/ Keep Op cit.,

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Raquel, Waitress and Fashion Designer, Nolita, New York
2011
C-type print
100 x 100cm

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Jerome, Retail Assistant and Fashion Designer, Soho, New York
2011
C-type print
100 x 100cm

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Darren, Model and Carlito, Artist, Soho, New York
2011
C-type print
100 x 100cm

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Carolyn and Jane, Lolitas, Brooklyn Botanical Garden, New York
2011
C-type print
100 x 100cm

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Issa and Lamine, Taxi Mechanics, Upper West Side, New York
2011
C-type print
100 x 100cm

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Clementine, Liz and Billy Bob, Mercer-Houston Dog Run, Greenwich Village, New York
2011
C-type print
100 x 100cm

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Derek, Student, Chrystie st, New York
2011
Chromogenic photograph
100 x 100cm

Sophie Gannon Gallery
2, Albert Street
Richmond, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Tues – Saturday 11am – 5pm

Sophie Gannon Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘Joel Meyerowitz – Aftermath’ at the Miami Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 19th August – 6th November 2011

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Searchers in Rubble
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross

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

Frederick Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Sadness. And light. Hope. Amidst the inferno. Study the masterpiece Finding More Fireman (below) in the enlarged version and you cannot fail to be moved. It is all there: monumental, intimate, hellish, redemptive – a modern, “disastrous” form of the Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Flower Offering
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Pit Looking North
2002
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Smoke and Spray
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Jeffrey Hugh Newman

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Moving the Monument
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Jeffrey Hugh Newman

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Finding More Fireman
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Charles S. and Elynne B. Zucker

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Searchers
2002
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Charles S. and Elynne B. Zucker

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Welders in South Tower
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Charles S. and Elynne B. Zucker

In commemoration of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Miami Art Museum presents Focus Gallery: Joel Meyerowitz – Aftermath, an exhibition of photographs taken by the only photographer granted right of entry into Ground Zero after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. For nine months during the day and night, Meyerowitz photographed “the pile,” as the World Trade Center came to be known, and the over 800 people a day that were working in it. The exhibition consists of 24, recently-donated photographs, presented in the Focus Gallery section of the Museum’s Permanent Collection installation. Admission to Miami Art Museum will be free to all emergency personnel, including police and firefighters, and their guests throughout the exhibition’s run, August 19 – November 6, 2011. A special preview for emergency personnel will be held on Thursday, August 18, 2011, 4-7pm. Author and photography critic Vicki Goldberg will give a lecture entitled “What Remains” on Thursday, September 8, 2011, beginning at 6:30pm.

After September 11, 2001, the Ground Zero site in New York City was classified as a crime scene and only those directly involved in the recovery efforts were allowed inside. The press was prohibited from the site. Influenced by Walker Evans’s and Dorothea Lange’s work for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, Meyerowitz, long recognised as one of the pioneers of colour photography, was convinced that if a photographic record of the unprecedented recovery efforts was not made, “there would be no history.” With the help of sympathetic officials, he managed to become the only photographer granted right of entry into Ground Zero.

“I was making photographs for everyone who didn’t have access to the site,” says Meyerowitz, “I wanted to communicate what it felt like to be in there as well as what it looked like: to show the pile’s incredible intricacy and visceral power. I could provide a window for everyone else who wanted to be there, too, to help, or to grieve, or simply to try to understand what had happened to our city.”

Armed with a large-format wooden camera, Meyerowitz spent nine months photographing the site. In the first few weeks, he was chased off the site repeatedly, but over time, with the help of officials on and off site, the use of forged workers’ passes, and by assuming the “uniform” of hard hat, goggles, respirator, gloves, boots and duct taped pants, Meyerowitz became “woven into the fabric of the site.”

About the experience, Meyerowitz has written, “The nine months I worked at Ground Zero were among the most rewarding of my life. I came in as an outsider, a witness bent on keeping the record, but over time I began to feel a part of the very project I’d been intent on recording… the intense camaraderie I experienced at Ground Zero inspired me, changing both my sense of myself and my sense of responsibility to the world around me. September 11th was a tragedy of almost unfathomable proportions. But living for nine months in the midst of those individuals who faced that tragedy head-on, day after day, and did what they could to set things right, was an immense privilege.”

The photographs in MAM’s collection are from a unique set of contact prints (photographs printed on a 1:1 scale from the negatives) issued by the artist in 2006. As a group, they span the entire nine month period that Meyerowitz was on site, presenting a poignant, condensed view of the clean up effort, including portraits of the workers involved. The set is introduced by a single image of the World Trade Center towers taken by the artist in the 1980s from his apartment window.

The entire set of more than 8,000 photographs taken by Meyerowitz form an archive at the Museum of the City of New York. The Aftermath series was the focus of a 2006 book, Aftermath: World Trade Center Archives published by Phaidon (reissued this year in a special 10th anniversary edition) and an exhibition organised by the US Department of State that traveled worldwide from 2002 to 2005.

Press release from the Miami Art Museum website

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Explosion Squad Detective
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Steps Down to Plaza
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Jeffrey Hugh Newman

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Fireman at Last Column
2002
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Charles S. and Elynne B. Zucker

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Building #5 and Woolworth
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Simon and Bonnie Levin

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Welder and Rubble
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross

Miami Art Museum
101 W Flagler St., Miami, FL 33130

Opening hours:
Monday 11am – 6pm
Tuesday – Wednesday Closed
Thursday 11am – 9pm
Friday – Sunday 11am – 6pm

Miami Art Museum website

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