The premise, spelt out in the intelligent and articulate catalogue essay by Laura Skerlj (below), is the holistic connection between an Aboriginal stone circle of the Western Victorian Volcanic Plains used for astronomy > the moles on the artists back as lexias or nodal points of energy > and the energy of celestial bodies in the cosmic sky, arranged by humans into pictures.
Evans precariously suspends pieces of rock (taken from near the site of the Aboriginal stone circle) in the air on the end of long poles in the position of the moles on her back – and then maps out the energy lines between them, connecting them with translucent Sellotape on the gallery wall. These lines become a trans/figured form of ley line, those lines of energy that exist within the earth that link spiritual places together. The lines could also be linked to reflexology, chakras, the positioning of stones on the body in reiki healing and Kundalini: a form of feminine shakti or “corporeal energy”, an unconscious, instinctive or libidinal force.
As the press release notes, “Standing Stone encompasses both the geographic and the corporeal time scales in order to examine the latent histories of these materials – that traverse the mineral to organic, the human and geologic, the infinite to the micro. At once personal and universal, Standing Stone opens up compelling new dialogues about the body and materiality.”
The work traverses both time and space, macro and micro. It undermines dichotomies and makes liminal connections which allows the viewer to embrace a quality of ambiguity or disorientation. Ultimately this lets them see the world and the cosmos from different, multiple perspectives via new associations and energies.
There are a couple of missed steps. The colour pink (associated with the flesh of the body) on the poles did not really work for me. It was too didactic. Better some translucent perspex rods that would have continued the theme of the Sellotape and would have made the rocks seem to float in the air more, made the balancing more ambiguous. Both the press release (“the raw materials of photography, such as unprocessed photographic paper exposed to ambient light”) and the catalogue essay (“Flesh-pink geometric shapes, made from unprocessed (and still-processing) photographic paper, provide platforms for rock-relics: two materials accumulating time at vastly different rates”) make reference to elements that were not in the exhibition. Flesh pink geometric shapes were to be placed under rocks on the ground and this would have made the flesh pink rods seem more logical and tied the exhibition together… but they were not necessary. While the installation of such a work is always going to be a fluid process, and the pared down version is ultimately a lot better, it is unfortunate that the catalogue had been printed and the press release not amended to reflect the changes. Such is energy and life.
The other element that envisioned a jarring note was the image of the bruise on the thigh of the artist (which I initially thought was an elbow). A beautifully ambiguous image in its own right I can see why Catherine included it in the exhibition (as it links specifically to the energy of the moles on her back), but it brought to my mind issues of domestic violence, control and power, and I don’t know whether these additional thoughts needed to be placed in the mind of the viewer. I loved the image, I liked some of its energies but others, not so much.
Having said all that, this is a fascinating, intelligent, thoughtful and beautiful installation. Like the artist herself, it has great energy and presence. I really enjoyed spending time with both.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Catherine Evans for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting and to Laura Skerlj for allowing me to publish the catalogue essay. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All artworks courtesy of the artist, installation documentation by Matthew Stanton, 2014
Standing Stone is an exhibition of photographs and sculpture that transposes the marks on our own bodies into a large-scale map using basalt boulders, sticky tape and the raw materials of photography, such as unprocessed photographic paper exposed to ambient light.
In this exhibition the artist will create a large-scale constellation where precariously suspended volcanic rocks collected from the Western Victorian Volcanic Plains mark the positions of moles on the artist’s own back. With reference to the Indigenous stone arrangement, Wurdi Youang,* that is situated on these plains, Standing Stone encompasses both the geographic and the corporeal time scales in order to examine the latent histories of these materials – that traverse the mineral to organic, the human and geologic, the infinite to the micro. At once personal and universal, Standing Stone opens up compelling new dialogues about the body and materiality.
This exhibition is the outcome of a mentorship with artist Susan Jacobs, supported by the Victorian College of the Arts and Arts Victoria through its Graduate Mentorship program. Accompanying the exhibition will be an essay by Laura Skerlj.
About the artist
Catherine Evans is a Melbourne-based artist who incorporates photography, video and sculpture to explore the latent history of materials. Often working with volcanic rocks and the raw materials of photography, she juxtaposes and isolates them against images of the body, testing the limits of scale and gravity.
Since completing first class Honours at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2011, Catherine has participated in many group and solo exhibitions. She is a current recipient of the inaugural VCA Graduate Mentorship (2013-2014) and was selected as a finalist in the Substation Contemporary Art Prize (2013 and 2011). Grants include an Australia Council ArtStart grant (2012) and a National Gallery of Victoria Trustee Award (2010).
Press release from Blindside
This exhibition and research took place on the lands of both the Wurundjeri and Wathaurong people who have been the traditional custodians of these lands for thousands of years, and whose sovereignty was never ceded. This exhibition is supported by the Victorian College of the Arts and Arts Victoria through its Graduate Mentorship program.
*The Wurdi Youang stone arrangement in Victoria was built by the Wathaurung people before European settlement, but all records of its use have now disappeared. This egg-shaped ring of stones, about 50m in diameter, has its major axis almost exactly East-West. In a paper published in May 2013 in Rock Art Research, Ray Norris and his colleagues confirm a suggestion (originally made by John Morieson) that some outlying stones seem to indicate the setting positions of the Sun at the equinoxes and solstices, and have shown that these same astronomically significant directions are built into the shape of the main ring. They also show, using a Monte Carlo statistical test, that this is unlikely to have occurred by chance, but instead the builders of this stone ring intentionally aligned it on the setting Sun on these astronomically significant dates.
We have long looked skyward, consumed by a desire to arrange celestial bodies into pictures. Sometimes these formations are difficult to see amid the city’s night-haze of light and pollution. Yet, on a drive out of town, these cosmic arrangements come into view. Constellations describe a visual relationship between groups of stars, which, over time, become culturally recognisable. To make a constellation, a dreamer must draw a line from one bright body to the next: the stars implicated in this formation need not be close to one another in reality, but merely form a visual engagement when viewed from an Earthly vantage point. For millennia, ancient cultures have made these connections, constructing apparitions in the ether that recall existential stories. However, these cosmic sketches have also served as insightful gauges of time.
In the volcanic plains of Western Victoria – the third largest of its kind in the world – lies a geological constellation. It is an Indigenous ‘map’ made of ancient stones, named by the Wathaurong people as Wurdi Youang. This egg-shaped arrangement is relatively humble in size, and up until recently was thought to be an initiation site. However, Wurdi Youang is now being considered a geological record of equinoxes and solstices, with each stone set at a considered angle, marking the movements of the sun over time.1 For artist Catherine Evans, this cosmic calendar held within it a latent agency that was both intimate and expansive. Through its very construction, the Indigenous peoples of the area had used a prehistoric material to articulate a schema that connected themselves, and their activities, with the unreachable workings of the universe: “I find the contrast in time scales at this site fascinating – that on the one hand we have an ancient time scale of the land (geologic), and on the other the human time scale, which in comparison is only a blip.”2
In Evans’ current exhibition, Standing Stone, the artist has used rocks from the plains nearby Wurdi Youang to recreate a constellation of markings found on her own body. The layout for these marks was initially realised on an inverted black and white photograph Evans took of her back: in this image, her usually pale skin appears darker than its illuminated blemishes. Using a biro and ruler, moles and freckles were connected with diagrammatic lines, just as planets, stars and dark nebula are drawn to one another in astronomical illustrations. In the exhibition, this exact configuration of blemishes is re-presented using volcanic rocks in a sculptural installation. Across the walls and floor, each point is connected with a gleaming line of transparent cello-tape.
Here, two seemingly opposing containers of time – the body and the universe – are depicted as insulated, yet reflexive, systems. Just as skin imperfections are reminders of age, trauma, exposure and adaptation, the individual rocks at Wurdi Youang are conscious notations of the sun’s movements in the sky. Each rock or blemish represents a passed event that, in conjunction, forms the schema for a cosmos. Although more commonly understood as the extraterrestrial zone outside the Earth’s atmosphere (and therefore, outside of ourselves), the etymology of ‘cosmos’ is derived from the less-boastful ‘ornament’: a sphere seen as ultimately expansive is reined into a handheld trinket. This oscillation becomes an underlying consideration in Evans’ new work, as temporality swings between what is known, even embodied, and what is all encompassing.
In understanding these holistic systems, we can draw on biosemiotician Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of ‘umwelt’. Umwelt describes the ‘phenomenal world’ or ‘self world’ of an animal, as shaped by a series of functions necessary for survival. These sets of functions are programmed to suit each specific organism, creating a harmonious motion, or pattern, for existence. In consequence, all animals, from the simplest to the most complex, are fitted into their unique worlds with equal completeness: “A simple world corresponds to a simple animal, a well-articulated world to a complex one.”3 From this theory, both the humble body and the celestial sphere could be seen to exist within an umwelt, or environment, tuned to its innate processes.
In Evans’ work, it is the configuration of a constellation that represents these sets of motions as markers on a temporal scale. For example, the blemishes found on our bodies, or the rocks moved by Indigenous people at Wurdi Youang thousands of years ago, exist in perfect accord with each organism, or system’s, relative lifespan. That could be a sunspot the artist developed one summer, 17 years into her life, or the fusion of gases that combined to form a star 13 billion years ago in the Milky Way’s galactic halo. As Uexküll explains, the animal or subject creates time through its own set of harmonious processes, no matter how simple or complex: “Instead of saying… that without time, there can be no living subject, we shall now have to say that without a living subject, there can be no time.”4
The visualisation of these essential movements is euphonious. Feminist and cultural theorist Elizabeth Grosz articulated Uexküll’s umwelt as nature set to counterpoint.5 In her interpretation, the environment works in a similar way to a musical melody, following a set of instructions that can be syncopated with another. She recalls one of Uexküll’s most examined specimens, the tick, describing the way in which it “lives in a simplified world, a harmonic world of its own rhythms and melody.”6 This melody, according to Grosz, is composed of the animal’s umwelt, as the conjunction of its three most vital processes: moving up a twig following the warmth of the sun; smelling the butyric acid expelled from the sweat of an animal; dropping onto the animal to suck its blood. In turn, the tick becomes what she describes as “a connective, an instrument.”7
This musicality is innate within Evans’ new work. Here, rocks intonate the room, propped at varied heights like notes on musical score, while reflective tape connects the specimens to one another in directional locomotion. Flesh-pink geometric shapes, made from unprocessed (and still-processing) photographic paper, provide platforms for rock-relics: two materials accumulating time at vastly different rates. Just as the vision of celestial space seen at night expands our image of the natural world, the constellation found on the artist’s back is magnified out into the gallery as an assemblage that connects ancient time with personal time. It is within this singular temporal frame that the intimate (that nebula-birthmark on your wrist) is a reflection of the processes that, even now, evade us (tangible stars imagined into dream shapes).
Consequently, Standing Stone envisions landscape as a phenomenological site, where the body and the universe share the same harmonic processes. As British archaeologist Chris Tilley explains, to perceive landscape as phenomenological resists any precise topographical boundary: as we have seen, landscape in its holistic form – as a cosmos – can transcend terrestrial limitations. Instead, he perceives landscape as “embodied sets of relationships between places, a structure of human feeling, emotion, dwelling, movement and practical activity.”8 In this way, Evans presents a landscape that is both intimate and expansive. Just as the celestial exterior looks down upon us, it shifts into us, reflecting back the documents we make. These documents are many, printed on our bodies and arranged in sophisticated groupings in the environment. The constellation, therefore, flips and folds, not just across a horizontal plane, but vertically, between what is cast in the night sky and its earthen recollection.”
Laura Skerlj is a Melbourne-based artist and writer
Curators: Francesco Stocchi and Peter van der Coelen
Installation photograph of the exhibition Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray – Framing Sculpture Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2014 Foto / Photo: Gert-Jan de Rooij, Amsterdam
What a magnificent exhibition. We all know Brancusi and Man Ray but it is the work of Medardo Rosso that surprises and delights here, an artist I admit I knew nothing about before this posting. What a revelation, both his sculptures and photographs. I must try and do a whole posting just on his photographs!
The two self-portraits of the artists in the studio are telling… Rosso, pensive, brooding, with a stack of chopped wood surrounding him, face wreathed in shadow, head titled slightly down and hands stuffed in pockets; Brancusi, seated on a plinth, legs crossed, swarthy arms folded replete with large hands, staring directly at the camera and surrounded by his work. Rosso in malleable darkness, Brancusi in towering light. The photographs reflect their respective personalities and inform the art which represents them.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the image for a larger version of the art.
Alessio delli Castelliconsiders the Italian sculptor’s photographic legacy.
“Medardo Rosso was born in Turin in 1858 and died in Milan 1928. However, he spent most of his life away from Italy, in Paris especially, from where he travelled to all the major European capitals. It was in Paris that, towards the close of the 19th century, he emerged alongside Auguste Rodin as a serious contender for the title of father of modern sculpture. Yet it was Rodin who achieved universal recognition. In spite of Rosso’s influence on sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi – whose Sleeping Muse (1909-10), with its radically abstracted features of a female head, is strongly reminiscent of Rosso’s Madame X (1896) – he was long held hostage by a provincial criticism which saw his practice confined, chronologically, thematically and formally, to the 19th century. Although it is true that Rosso only created two original sculptural works in the 20th century, to claim that he was no longer a practicing artist would be to overlook the variations he made of his sculptures, and the copies from antiquity. More importantly, it would be to dismiss his photographic work of that period merely as images of sculptures that already existed. This would mean ignoring the fact that his photography showed all the signs of rigorous artistic investigation – and was not, as critics in the 20th century often declared, indicative of either an accident that injured his leg and made him weak or a more general creative block.
It is only in recent years that Rosso’s photographs have acquired the status of art objects in and of themselves…”
Installation photographs of the exhibition Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray – Framing Sculpture Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2014 Foto / Photos: Gert-Jan de Rooij, Amsterdam
In mythology, Leda is a girl who is seduced by Zeus who turns her into a swan. In the Brancusi sculpture, Leda (foreground, above) is that metamorphosis. The swan is an animal whose body is often associated with a hybrid identity between male and female. His neck is close to a phallic shape while her body has feminine attributes. The bird and woman, male and female mingle in the same sculptural movement. This transfiguration is reflected in the complex forms of sculpture, asymmetrical contours, the offset top shape intersecting with the lower form, giving rise to multiple passages and perceptions.
In 1932, Brancusi sculpture adds a large polished steel disc which suggests the presence of water and Leda is reflected in the mirror which changes its shape. Modifications qu’accentuera still provide a motor and a ball bearing arranged in the circular plate. Within the workshop, the body of Leda is in a state of constant metamorphosis. The shimmer of light on the surface of polished bronze sculpture blends with its reflection in the steel circle and absorbs its environment. Leda becomes a pure luminous presence. Weight and lightness, balance and imbalance are the same event within a continuous time duration in the sculptures of Constantin Brancusi.
Translated from the French on the Constantin Brancusi web page of the Centre Pompidou website [Online] Cited 05/05/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Installation photograph of the exhibition Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray – Framing Sculpture Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2014 Foto / Photo: Gert-Jan de Rooij, Amsterdam
In the spring of 2014 Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen brings together works from all over the world by three artists who were decisive for the development of modern art. This is the first exhibition to combine sculptures by Brancusi, Rosso and Man Ray together with their photographs, affording a unique insight into the artists’ working methods.
Masterpieces that have rarely or never been seen in the Netherlands will be lent by important museums such as the Centre Pompidou, MoMA and Tate. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen will show more than 40 sculptures and hundred photographs by Constantin Brancusi (Hobita 1876 – Paris 1957), Medardo Rosso (Turin 1858 – Milan 1928) and Man Ray (Philadelphia 1890 – Paris 1976). The exhibition will feature sculptures such as Brancusi’s Princesse X (1915-1916) and Rosso’s Ecce Puer (1906) alongside works by Man Ray from the museum’s collection, including the sculpture L’Énigme d’Isidore Ducasse (1920 / 1971). Presenting the sculptures together with the artists’ photographs of their sculptures reveals their often-surprising perspectives on their own works.
Framing Sculpture
Brancusi, Rosso and Man Ray employed photography not so much as a means of recording their work. The photographs show how they interpreted their sculptures and how they wanted them to be seen by others. Brancusi is considered the father of modern sculpture with his highly simplified sculptures of people and animals. In his photographs he experimented with light and reflection so that his sculptures absorb their environment and appear to come to life. Rosso is the artist who introduced impressionism in sculpture. The indistinct contours of his apparently quickly modelled figures in plaster and wax make them appear to fuse with their surroundings. Rosso cut up the soft-focus photographs of his work, made them into collages and reworked them with ink so that the sculptures appear even flatter and more contourless. Man Ray is best known as a photographer but was also a painter and sculptor. His choice of materials was unconventional: he combined existing objects to create new works, comparable to the ‘readymades’ of his friend Marcel Duchamp. Man Ray’s experimental use of photography led him to make photographs without the use of a camera. He made these so-called ‘rayographs’ by placing objects directly on photographic paper and exposing them briefly to light, leaving behind a ghostly impression.
Press release from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Medardo Rosso (Italian, 1858-1928) Enfant à la Bouchée de pain (Child in the soup kitchen) 1897 (1892-1893) Wax over plaster 46 x 49 x 37cm Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome
Medardo Rosso (Italian, 1858-1928) Enfant à la Bouchée de pain in the Cézanne room at the Salon d’Automne 1904 Felatin silver print 12.3 x 15.5cm Private collection
The Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso (1858-1928) is the oldest and most traditional of the three artists. He stands in the Impressionist tradition of French sculptor August Rodin. Rosso has made many portraits of children, which he adored. They were one of his favourite subjects. Rosso kept working on the same pieces throughout his career, making changes to their titles, shapes or materials. Sometimes he combined materials or poured another substance over the original. A work of plaster then became a wax sculpture. Other times he made two different versions of the same image, using different materials…
Rosso… used his camera to present his art in the way he preferred. By taking pictures and displaying them next to the actual sculptures he could show the audience what was, in his opinion, the right angle to look at his piece. Of course, everyone is free to walk around the sculpture, but the photographs show what the artist had in mind when he created it. Many times he would cut up his pictures, tear away corners or colour them with ink. This way he even reinterpreted his interpretations. Together the sculptures, photographs and collages give a complete picture of the work by Medardo Rosso. Never before have there been so many of his works on display in the Netherlands.
Text by Evita Bookelmann on the Kunstpedia website [Online] Cited 05/05/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Constantin Brancusi (Romanian, 1876-1957) Tête d’enfant endormi (Head of a Sleeping Child) 1906-1907 Plaster, coloured dark brown 10.8 x 13.6 x 15.2cm Private collection
A previously unknown sculpture by Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) can be seen in Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray – Framing Sculpture, the exhibition opening at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen on Saturday. The museum is especially delighted by the arrival of Tête d’enfant endormie (Head of a Sleeping Child, 1906-07). This early sculpture is an important key work in Brancusi’s development of his famous ‘ovoid’.
The exhibition, which features more than forty sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, Medardo Rosso and Man Ray and a hundred vintage photographs taken by them, runs in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen for three months from 8 February. The plaster sculpture was purchased at a sale by a French private collector. Leading expert Friedrich Teja Bach has recently confirmed that it is a version of the ‘head of a sleeping child’. Curators Francesco Stocchi and Peter van der Coelen remarked, “It is unusual for a previously unknown work by Brancusi to turn up at a sale. Works by Brancusi are rare and almost all of them are in prominent museum collections like those of the Centre Pompidou, the Tate and MoMA.”
The Road to Abstraction
The child’s head with natural features is in the tradition of the contemporary Impressionists Auguste Rodin and Medardo Rosso. At the same time, this early work is a starting point in Brancusi’s journey towards a more abstract style, which culminated in an entirely smooth oval form, devoid of any facial features. This process can also be seen in the photographs taken by Brancusi himself, in which he pictured Tête d’enfant endormie in his studio with Le Nouveau-Ne II, a work he made ten years later. The exhibition in Rotterdam examines the artistic practices and development of Brancusi, Rosso and Man Ray by showing the sculptures alongside the photographs they took of them.
Painted Bronze
Brancusi’s oeuvre contains a number of recurring subjects, which the artist executed in a variety of materials, including plaster, marble and bronze. This allowed Brancusi to explore various effects, such as the reflection of light. The signed Tête d’enfant endormie is an early version in the series. It is unusual that Brancusi painted the plaster, making it look like bronze.
Press release from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Man Ray’s Noire et blanche is a photograph exemplary of Surrealist art. The striking faces of the pale model and the dark mask have a doubling effect. This repetition is a reminder that a photograph is a double of what it represents, namely, a sign or an index of reality. In Surrealism the act of doubling indicates that we are all divided subjects made up of the conscious and unconscious. In reading this photograph as typical of primitivism, the woman can be understood as European civilisation and the mask as “primitive” Africa. The image draws a parallel between the two faces presenting them as related to each another. The title “black and white” is a word play because the order is reversed when reading the image left to right. The artist also printed a negative version of this image. The photograph was first published in Vogue. It is a portrait of Kiki of Montparnasse, Man Ray’s lover and model at the time the photograph was taken.
Text from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam website [Online] Cited 05/05/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Medardo Rosso (Italian, 1858-1928) Enfant malade (Ziek kind) c. 1909 Aristotype 7.9 x 6.3cm Private collection
Medardo Rosso (Italian, 1858-1928) Enfant malade (Ziek kind) 1895 (1903-1904) Bronze 25.5 x 14.5 x 16.5cm Collectie Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan
Con una coerenza assoluta, insensibile alle polemiche e alle controversie che la sua arte suscitava, e più ancora al disprezzo oltraggioso di cui lo faceva segno la cultura ufficiale, il Rosso deduceva alle estreme conseguenze le premesse fondamentali della sua visione. Davanti ai nostri occhi una sgomentante superficie d’ombra da cui emerge la lama trepida e vibrante di un essere vivente, che contesta al nulla misterioso che lo incalza e in cui in un soffio si dissolverà, il suo diritto alla luce, cioè all’essenza vitale. Le premesse letterarie, le suggestioni filosofiche o vagamente esoteriche sono totalmente assorbite nella suprema qualità stilistica: lo scultore modula ed assottiglia la materia al limite del possibile, sull’orlo dell’astrazione assoluta, ricercandone spasmodicamente ogni vibrazione musicale; l’equazione scultura-luce-pittura poteva dirsi verificata.”
“With absolute consistency, insensitive to the controversies and disputes that his art aroused, and even more outrageous contempt of which he did hold official culture, Rosso deduced to the extreme the basic premises of his vision. Before our eyes a daunting shadow surface which shows the blade trembling and vibrating of a living being, which criticises the mysterious anything that presses him and when you blow in a dissolver, its right in the light, that all ‘vital’ essence. The premises literary, philosophical or vaguely esoteric suggestions are totally absorbed in the supreme quality of style: the sculptor modulation and tapering the matter to the extent possible, the absolute brink of abstraction, seeking spasmodically every musical vibration; the equation of light-sculpture-painting could be said to be verified.
Terrible translation by Google translate of an anonymous text = but so beautiful at the same time!
Princess X is a sculptured rendering of the French princess, Marie Bonaparte, by the artist Constantin Brâncusi. Princess Bonaparte was the great-grand niece of the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte…
According to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brâncusi had been “at the center of two of modern arts most notorious scandals.” One of the scandals being that the Salon des Indépendants, in Paris where Brâncusi practiced his trade, discontinued the display of Princess X from its establishment for its apparent obscene content, as some thought it looked like a penis. After having his art taken off display, Brâncusi was shocked. He declared the incident a misunderstanding. He had created Princess X not as a sculpture depicting a more masculine subject, but the object of feminine desire and vanity.
After much accusation, Brâncuși insisted the sculpture had been his rendition of Marie Bonaparte. Brâncusi discussed the comparison of the bronze figure to the princess. He described his detest of Marie, as a “vain woman.” He claimed she went as far as placing a hand mirror on the table at mealtimes, so she could gaze upon herself. The sculpture’s C-like form reveals a woman looking over and gazing down, as if looking into an object. The large anchors of the sculpture resemble the “beautiful bust” which she possessed. Without knowing the context, to a viewer Princess X could look like an erect penis. Brâncusi allows the princess to gaze upon herself in an eternal loop locked in the bronze sculpture.
The style of Brâncusi is one that “was largely fuelled by myths, folklore, and primitive culture,” this combined with the modern materials and tools Brâncuși used to sculpt, “formed a unique contrast… resulting in a distinctive kind of modernity and timelessness.” The technique Brâncusi was known for and used on Princess X could be mistaken for a penis, but in fact it was the simple form of a woman.
“What my art is aiming at, is above all realism; pursue the inner hidden reality, the very essence of objects in their own intrinsic fundamental nature: this is my only preoccupation.” – Constantine Brâncusi.
According to Constantin Brancusi’s own testimony, his preoccupation with the image of the bird as a plastic form began as early as 1910. With the theme of the Maiastra (1910-18), he initiated a series of about thirty sculptures of birds.
The word maïastra means “master” or “chief” in Brancusi’s native Romanian, but the title refers specifically to a magically beneficent, dazzlingly plumed bird in Romanian folklore. Brancusi’s mystical inclinations and his deeply rooted interest in peasant superstition make the motif an apt one. The golden plumage of the Maiastra is expressed in the reflective surface of the bronze; the bird’s restorative song seems to issue from within the monumental puffed chest, through the arched neck, out of the open beak. The heraldic, geometric aspect of the figure contrasts with details such as the inconsistent size of the eyes, the distortion of the beak aperture, and the cocking of the head slightly to one side. The elevation of the bird on a saw-tooth base lends it the illusion of perching. The subtle tapering of form, the relationship of curved to hard-edge surfaces, and the changes of axis tune the sculpture so finely that the slightest alteration from version to version reflects a crucial decision in Brancusi’s development of the theme.
Seven other versions of Maiastra have been identified and located: three are marble and four bronze…
Extract from Lucy Flint. “Constantin Brancusi: Maiastra,” on the Guggenheim website [Online] Cited 17/03/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Medardo Rosso (Italian, 1858-1928) Self-portrait in the studio c. 1906 Modern contact print of the original glass negative 12.7 x 13cm Private collection
Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray – Framing Sculpture exhibition poster
Exhibition dates: 23rd November 2013 – 11th May, 2014
Curator: Russell Storer, Curatorial Manager, Asian and Pacific Art at GOMA
Cai Guo-Qiang (China, b. 1957) Heritage 2013 99 life-sized replicas of animals, water, sand, drip mechanism Installed dimensions variable Commissioned for the exhibition Falling Back to Earth, 2013 Purchased 2013 with funds from Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Diversity Foundation through and with the assistance of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation Photo: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
99 wolves a leaping 99 replicas of animals a drinking 31-metre suspended eucalyptus tree a leaning 170 tonnes of water a seeping 3,000 square metres of GOMA’s ground floor a taking and not a partridge in a pear tree in sight…
FANTASTIC ART!
Many thankx to the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Cai Guo-Qiang (China, b. 1957) Heritage 2013 99 life-sized replicas of animals, water, sand, drip mechanism Installed dimensions variable Commissioned for the exhibition Falling Back to Earth, 2013 Purchased 2013 with funds from Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Diversity Foundation through and with the assistance of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation Photos: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Thought-provoking and spectacular new installations inspired by Queensland landscapes will premiere in the first Australian solo exhibition of leading international contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang, opening tomorrow at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA). Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling Back to Earth, on display from November 23 to May 11, 2014, builds on a longstanding working relationship between the artist and the Gallery, which dates back to Cai’s participation in the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibitions in 1996 and 1999.
For the first time ever, all 3,000 square metres of GOMA’s ground floor will be dedicated to an exhibition of work by a single living artist. Falling Back to Earth features installations of 99 replicas of animals drinking from a pristine lake; 99 wolves leaping en masse and colliding with a glass wall; a suspended 31-metre eucalyptus tree, creating a space for contemplation; and a tea pavilion where visitors can pause, drink tea, and find out more about the artist and the exhibition. There will also be an interactive installation for children and a chronological display of the artist’s career, with photographs, ephemera, and original art works selected by the artist.
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) Director Chris Saines said Cai Guo-Qiang’s ground-breaking practice over 25 years used unexpected materials to create transformative event-based and social projects. “This exhibition is a significant evolution for one of today’s most compelling and highly respected global artists, realised with a level of ambition unprecedented for an Australian art museum,” Mr Saines said. “Cai is shifting his focus from the cosmos to the Earth and to humanity’s complex relationship with nature, while maintaining his keen eye on both the seen and unseen forces that impact life.”
Cai Guo-Qiang said the exhibition title Falling Back to Earth was inspired by fourth-century poet Tao Yuanming’s well-known prose poem, Ah, homeward bound I go! “The text captures the concept behind the exhibition, and expresses the idea of going home, returning to the harmonious relationship between man and nature, and re-embracing the tranquillity in the landscape,” he said.
Exhibition curator Russell Storer, Curatorial Manager of Asian and Pacific Art, QAGOMA, said the new commissions drew on the striking beauty of Queensland landscapes and the exquisite imagery in historical Chinese painting and poetry, to express concerns regarding the ecological and social issues of our time. “Heritage 2013 is an installation of 99 replicas of animals including pandas, tigers, bears, giraffes and kangaroos, lowering their heads to drink water together from a lake that is surrounded by white sand, evoking the islands of Brisbane’s Moreton Bay,” Mr Storer said. “Seemingly a peaceful gathering of predator and prey, the menagerie of Heritage conveys an almost reverential solemnity, in a lyrical utopian vision loaded with uncertainty. It embodies Cai’s image of a ‘last paradise’ and his awareness of a sense of crisis in contemporary societies across the world.”
The first single artwork to take up the entire 1,100m2 of GOMA’s largest gallery space, Heritage presents animals drinking from a lake filled with 170 tonnes of water, which is viewable from a walkway that circles the entire installation. The Gallery will acquire Heritage thanks to a generous contribution from benefactor Win Schubert, through the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Diversity Foundation with the assistance of the QAGOMA Foundation.
“Eucalyptus 2013, a 31-metre tree suspended along GOMA’s central Long Gallery, came from a plantation earmarked for clearing for urban community development. The work was inspired by the ancient trees of Lamington National Park, and creates a meditative, immersive experience for visitors,” Mr Storer said. “Drawing on his history of socially provocative projects, Cai presents Eucalyptus as an unfinished work to be completed by the audience, who are invited to draw and write their ideas on the tree’s past and future. A third major installation, Head On 2006 – Cai’s signature work of 99 life-size sculptures of wolves, which was commissioned by Deutsche Bank, Berlin – is appearing in Australia for the first time.”
In the free interactive installation, Let’s Create an Exhibition with a Boy Named Cai 2013, Cai Guo-Qiang and the QAGOMA Children’s Art Centre invite children to participate, using the artist’s working methods to create their own exhibition through hands-on and multimedia activities, which include an online ‘gunpowder drawing’ making program. An illustrated storybook written by the artist and created in collaboration with the Children’s Art Centre will be available from the QAGOMA Store.
The Tea Pavilion in the River Room invites visitors to pause, rest and reflect on the works in the exhibition. Visitors can sample Tie Guan Yin tea from Cai’s home province of Fujian and watch a documentary created especially for ‘Falling Back to Earth’ to learn more about the processes behind the exhibition. A detailed chronology of Cai’s work, including early works, ephemera, photographs and artefacts selected by the artist from his private collection and the QAGOMA Research Library, will be presented in the GOMA Foyer. The display will offer insights into the artist’s history with QAGOMA and the complexity and risk involved in Cai’s work. The exhibition will be fully documented in a major publication, available in January 2014. The book will feature photography of the new works and essays from leading curators, as well as reflections from Cai Guo-Qiang on his collaboration with children throughout his career.
Cai’s recent solo exhibitions and projects have included the retrospective Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe, presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in 2008 and the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2009. He was Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and his first exhibition in the Middle East was staged in Doha, Qatar, in 2011. In 2012, the artist appeared in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Hangzhou and Copenhagen. His first South American exhibition toured to Brasília, São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil in 2013.
Press release from the Gallery of Modern Art website
Cai Guo-Qiang (China, b. 1957) Tea Pavilion 2013 Spotted gum (Corymbia maculata), wooden stools, Fujian Tie Guan Yin tea and video documentary Commissioned for the exhibition Falling Back to Earth, 2013 Photo: Yuyu Chen, courtesy Cai Studio
Cai Guo-Qiang (China, b. 1957) Eucalyptus 2013 Spotted gum (Corymbia maculata), wooden stools, paper and pencils Length: 3150cm (approx.) Commissioned for the exhibition Falling Back to Earth, 2013 Photos: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Cai Guo-Qiang (China b. 1957) Head On 2006 99 life-sized replicas of wolves and glass wall. Wolves: gauze, resin, and hide Dimensions variable Deutsche Bank Collection, commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG Photos: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA)
The Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) and Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) are located 150 metres from each other, on the south bank of the Brisbane River. Entrance to both buildings is possible from Stanley Place, and the river front entrance to the Queensland Art Gallery is on Melbourne Street. The Galleries are within easy walking distance to the city centre and South Bank Parklands.
Opening hours: Daily 10.00am – 5.00pm Closed Christmas Day, Good Friday, open from 12.00 noon ANZAC Day
Matthew Brandt b. 1982, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles. Marco Breuer b. 1966, Landshut, Germany; lives and works in New York State. Liz Deschenes b. 1966, Boston; lives and works in New York City. Adam Fuss b. 1961, London; lives and works in New York City. Owen Kydd b. 1975, Calgary, Canada; lives and works in Los Angeles. Floris Neusüss 1937-2020, German. Marlo Pascual 1972-2020, American. Sigmar Polke 1941-2010; Germany. Eileen Quinlan b. 1972, Boston; lives and works in New York City. Jon Rafman b. 1981, Montreal; lives and works in Montreal. Gerhard Richter b. 1932, Dresden; lives and works in Cologne. Mariah Robertson b. 1975, Indianapolis, Indiana; lives and works in Brooklyn. Alison Rossiter b. 1953, Jackson, Mississippi; lives and works in the metro New York area. Lucas Samaras 1936-2024, Macedonia, Greece; lives and works in New York City. David Benjamin Sherry b. 1981, Woodstock, New York; lives and works in Los Angeles. Travess Smalley b. 1986, Huntington, West Virginia; lives and works in New York City. Kate Steciw b. 1978, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; lives and works in Brooklyn. Artie Vierkant b. 1986, Breinerd, Minnesota; lives and works in New York City. James Welling b. 1951, Hartford, Connecticut; lives and works in Los Angeles. Christopher Williams b. 1956, Los Angeles; lives and works in Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Amsterdam. Letha Wilson b. 1976, Honolulu; lives and works in Brooklyn.
A Vocabulary of Photography: representation and the original, the ‘I can’ of sight
What is a photograph? These days, it can be anything your imagination desires, any imag(in)ing that takes your fancy…
The images in this posting are a case in point. In a postmodern, post-photographic world where there is (allegedly) no centre and periphery, these art works are photography playing at the edges of photography. They examine “the range of creative experimentation that has occurred in photography since the 1970s,” reconsidering and reinventing, “the role of light, color, composition, materiality, and the subject in the art of photography.”
In an earlier posting I talked about A Vocabulary of Printing and the Syntax of the Image. Here we could equally posit a Vocabulary of Photography, a compendium of techniques and imaginings, noting that technology and imagination should never delimit the creativity of the photographer/artist. In other words visions, boundaries and technologies are there to be pushed!
All well and good. To solidify meaning in such a nebulous world, there is penchant for (ambiguous) numbers – titles such as 6236; Untitled (C-1189); 154 – or definitive titles that try to fix ambiguity in a specific time, place or typology (a classification according to general type) eg Image Object Friday 7 June 2013 4:33 PM, 2013 or Supplement ’13 (Mixed Typologies) #3.
However, what is produced by this experimentation, this voluminous vocabulary, seldom leads to satisfying results. When you actually look at this type of work, really look at it with a clear and aware mind (as Krishnamurti would say), a large proportion of it is blather, noise for the sake of making noise, tinkering for a terrestrial world saturated in meaningless images. No wonder I get disillusioned with the “contemporary” in photography. The art work seems to mean very little and takes me nowhere I particularly want to go.
While photographs are no longer necessarily “points of view” analogous to Littré’s rigorous definition: ‘The point of view is a collection of objects to which the eye is directed and on which it rests within a certain distance’,1 and “the image has nothing to do with signification, meaning, as implied by the existence of the world, the effort of truth, the law and the brightness of the day”2 – meaning that there is no single truth, there are only competing narratives and interpretations of a world that cannot be wholly, accurately described3 – for me there still needs to be a re(as)semblance towards some form of inherent truth in the image, ideally manifested in some form of human imagination, creativity and happiness.
The ‘I can’ of site (representation) / sight (vision) …
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine (trans. Julie Rose). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 19
2/ Blanchot, Maurice. The Gaze of Orpheus. New York: Barrytown, 1981, p. 85
3/ Townsend, Chris. Vile Bodies: Photography and the Crisis of Looking. Munich: Prestel, 1998, p. 10
Many thankx to the International Center of Photography for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Vision is ordered according to a mode that may be generally called the function of images. This function is defined by a point-by-point correspondence of two unities in space. Whatever optical intermediaries may be used to establish their relation, whether their image is virtual, or real, the point-by-point correspondence is essential. That which is the mode of the image is therefore reducible to the simple schema that enables us to establish anamorphosis, that is to say, to the relation of an image, in so far as it linked to a surface, with a certain point that we shall call the ‘geometrical’ point. Anything that is determined by this method, in which the straight line plays its role of being the path of light, can be called an image.”
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (trans. Alan Sheridan). London: The Hogarth Press, 1977, p. 86
“With the industrial proliferation of visual and audiovisual protheses and unrestrained use of instantaneous-transmission equipment from earliest childhood onwards, we now routinely see the encoding of increasingly elaborate mental images together with a steady decline in retention rates and recall. In other words we are looking at the rapid collapse of mnemonic [aiding memory] consolidation.
This collapse seems only natural, if one remembers a contrario that seeing, and its spatio-temporal organisation, precede gesture and speech and their co-ordination in knowing, recognising, making known (as images of our thoughts), our thoughts themselves and cognitive functions, which are never passive… (Romains, Jules. La Vision extra-rétinienne et le sens paroptique. Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
Everything I see is in principle within my reach, at least within reach of my sight, marked on the map of the ‘I can’. In this important formulation, Merleau-Ponty pinpoints precisely what will eventually find itself ruined by the banalisation of a certain teletopology. The bulk of what I see is, in fact and in principle, no longer with in my reach. And even if it lies within reach of my sight, it is no longer necessarily inscribed on the map of the ‘I can’. The logistics of perception in fact destroy what earlier modes of representation preserved of the original, ideally human happiness, the ‘I can’ of sight… “
Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine (trans. Julie Rose). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 7 (my bold)
On view at the International Center of Photography from January 31 through May 4, 2014, What Is a Photograph? explores the range of creative experimentation that has occurred in photography since the 1970s.
This major exhibition brings together 21 emerging and established artists who have reconsidered and reinvented the role of light, colour, composition, materiality, and the subject in the art of photography. In the process, they have also confronted an unexpected revolution in the medium with the rise of digital technology, which has resulted in imaginative reexaminations of the art of analog photography, the new world of digital images, and the hybrid creations of both systems as they come together.
“Artists around the globe have been experimenting with and redrawing the boundaries of traditional photography for decades,” said ICP Curator Carol Squiers, who organised the exhibit. “Although digital photography seems to have made analog obsolete, artists continue to make works that are photographic objects, using both old technologies and new, crisscrossing boundaries and blending techniques.”
Among those included in the exhibition is Lucas Samaras, who adopted the newly developed Polaroid camera in the late 1960s and early 1970s and immediately began altering its instant prints, creating fantastical nude self-portraits. Another artist who turned to photography in the 1970s was Sigmar Polke. Although better known as a painter, Polke explored nontraditional ways of photographing and printing, manipulating both his film and prints in the darkroom and often drawing and painting on his images.
More recently, Liz Deschenes has used camera-less photography in a subtle investigation of nonrepresentational forms of expression and the outmoded technologies of photography. And, James Welling has created a heterogeneous body of work that explores optics, human perception, and a range of photographic genres both abstract and representational.
Press release from the International Center of Photography website
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents James Turrell: A Retrospective, the first major U.S. survey of Los Angeles-native James Turrell since 1985. The exhibition features approximately fifty works tracing five decades of the artist’s career. In addition to early light projections, holograms, and an entire section devoted to his masterwork-in-progress, the Roden Crater project, the exhibition features numerous immersive light installations that address our perception and how we see. LACMA’s retrospective is complemented by concurrent, independently curated exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) (June 9 – September 22, 2013); and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (June 21 – September 25, 2013). Additional Turrell exhibitions on view this year include the Academy Art Museum, Easton (April 20 – July 7, 2013); and Villa Panza, Varese, Italy (October 24, 2013 – May 4, 2014).
“The theme of light has preoccupied artists for centuries,” says Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of LACMA and exhibition co-curator. “No one, however, has so fully considered the ‘thing-ness’ of light itself – as well as how the experience of light reflects the wondrous and complex nature of human perception – as James Turrell has for nearly five decades.” Christine Y. Kim, exhibition co-curator and Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA adds, “There is nothing quite like the experience of a Turrell work, which is truly about and for the viewer and his or her perception. Perception is the medium for Turrell, as his work provokes viewers to see themselves see.”
Turrell’s revolutionary use of light in art makes for an experience that is both physical and optical – requiring visitors to spend anywhere from five to twenty minutes with one artwork, often alone in a gallery or with a limited number of fellow viewers.
Exhibition overview
In the mid-1960s, James Turrell was inspired by a beam of light from a slide projector while sitting in the darkened room of an undergraduate art history class at Pomona College. The sight provoked a question: what if light wasn’t the tool that enabled people to see something else but rather became the thing people look at? Thus began an inquiry that has led to a vast, prolific career.
James Turrell: A Retrospective comprises works that range in scale from an intimate watercolour made in 1969 to a 5,000-square-foot “Ganzfeld” installation – designed to entirely eliminate the viewer’s depth perception – offering visitors multiple entry points into Turrell’s practice. Evident in the array of works is the artist’s interest in perception, psychology, religion, astronomy, meditation, and science. The exhibition also draws connections between the artist’s light installations, architectural projects, and his famous masterwork-in progress at Roden Crater, in the high desert of Arizona. James Turrell: A Retrospective presents the most expansive installation of Roden Crater works shown to date, presented in the form of models, drawings, photographs, holograms, and other documents from the 1980s through the present.
Exhibition Organisation
The work of James Turrell requires a vast amount of exhibition space. James Turrell: A Retrospective presents nearly fifty works exhibited in 33,000 square feet populating two venues across LACMA’s campus: the 2nd floor of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) and the east galleries of the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion (Resnick Pavilion). BCAM’s east galleries begin with works that Turrell completed at his Mendota Studio in Santa Monica from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, followed by a succession of full-room installations that feature projections, holograms, a “Shallow Space” – a large room designed to challenge a viewer’s depth perception – and a “Cross Corner Projection,” in which light is projected in a way that suggests weight and mass. A subsequent gallery contains information and media highlighting a selection of site-specific projects and commissions around the world. BCAM’s west wing is populated with a “Magnatron” work – consisting of an aperture in the shape of an old television screen – followed by three full-scale installations: Key Lime, a “Wedgework” in which the illusion of walls are created through light and architecture; a “Wide Glass,” a type of work that adds a temporal element to Turrell’s light-based installations; and St. Elmo’s Breath, a “Space Division Construction,” which appears to be a flat surface but upon closer inspection reveals itself to be light emitted from a seemingly bottomless cavity in the wall.
Upon entering the Resnick Pavilion, visitors first encounter work that resulted from Turrell’s collaboration with artist Robert Irwin and Dr. Ed Wortz as part of the Art and Technology program at LACMA in 1969, namely a “Perceptual Cell” called Light Reignfall; Dark Matters, a “Dark Space” that presents a seemingly blacked-out room with only a minimally perceivable trace of light; and Breathing Light, a “Ganzfeld.” The Resnick Pavilion also holds an expansive gallery dedicated to the Roden Crater project, including large-scale mixed media drawings and a model contoured with actual cinder from the crater, as well as other models for autonomous spaces.
Press release from the LACMA website
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) 5905 Wilshire Boulevard (at Fairfax Avenue) Los Angeles, CA, 90036 Phone: 323 857-6000
Curator: Britt Salvesen, Department Head and Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and Prints and Drawings at LACMA
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Articles of China c. 1844 Calotype 5 3/8 x 7 1/8 in. (13.65 x 18.1cm) The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of The Annenberg Foundation, acquired from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin
It is a real joy to bring these beautiful images to you!
Frederick H. Evans A Sea Of Steps – Wells Cathedral(England, 1903, below) is one of my favourite photographs of all time, up there in my top 20 or so. But you wouldn’t knock back any of these for your collection, especially Imogen Cunningham’s Magnolia Blossom(1925, below) and Edward Steichen’s Three Pears & An Apple(1921, below).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Los Angeles County 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.
Linnaeus Tripe (English, 1822-1902) The Elliot Marbles, Central Museum, Madras India, 1858 Albumen photograph 10 1/2 × 13 in. (26.67 × 33.02cm) The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of The Annenberg Foundation, acquired from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents See the Light – Photography, Perception, Cognition: The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, an exhibition celebrating an extraordinary collection and exploring parallels between photography and the science of vision. Since the invention of photography in the late 1830s, the medium has evolved in relation to theories about vision, perception, and cognition. The exhibition takes a historical perspective, identifying correlations between photography and the science of vision during four chronological periods. See the Light is comprised of 220 works by more than 150 artists, including Ansel Adams, Julia Margaret Cameron, Imogen Cunningham, William Henry Fox Talbot, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, Minor White, and many more.
The exhibition draws entirely from the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, a key collection within LACMA’s Wallis Annenberg Photography Department. Acquired in 2008, the collection represents the diversity of photographic processes from the medium’s invention in 1839 to the 21st century. See the Light is accompanied by a free mobile-phone multimedia tour featured on mobile.lacma.org with commentary by the Vernons’ daughter, Carol Vernon; curator Britt Salvesen; artist James Welling; expert in computational vision Pietro Perona; and others. A 208-page catalogue, published by LACMA and DelMonico Books / Prestel, includes an essay by Britt Salvesen with contributions from Todd Cronan, Antonio Damasio, Alan Gilchrist, Pietro Perona, Barbara Maria Stafford, and James Welling. A new web page features excerpts from LACMA’s Vernon Oral History Project, an ongoing series of interviews with prominent artists, curators, dealers, and scholars who worked closely with the Vernons.
“Photography is often approached from either the artistic or the technological point of view, but these two aspects of the medium have been intertwined since its invention,” said Britt Salvesen, Department Head and Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department. “As a scientific instrument, the camera operates as an infallible eye, augmenting physiological vision, and as an artist’s tool, it channels the imagination, recording creative vision. The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection offers unparalleled scope to the spirit of both science and art.”
The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection
Through a groundbreaking gift from Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation, and with the support of Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin, LACMA acquired the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection in 2008. Comprising of more than 3,600 prints by almost 700 artists, the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection at LACMA constitutes one of the finest collections of photography spanning the 19th and 20th centuries. LACMA’s acquisition of this collection makes it possible for the museum to represent photography’s breadth in the context of its encyclopaedic collections.
Marjorie and Leonard Vernon were avid collectors in the Los Angeles and Southern California communities. The Vernons built their collection beginning around 1975, cultivating a group of works with global significance, with a special emphasis on West Coast photography of the early and mid-20th century. The collection grew over the years to include works by international photographers, with the earliest photographs dating from the 1840s and the latest to 2001.
Exhibition organisation
See the Light is organised thematically and traces the trajectory of advanced research on cognition and perception in relation to the art of photography. Four approaches within photography are identified: descriptive naturalism, subjective naturalism, experimental modernism, and romantic modernism.
Descriptive naturalism
Early advocates of photography (from the 1840s through around 1880) were eager to recruit the authority of science without sacrificing the romance of art. The notion that the camera could make a pure transcription of nature, undistorted by human error, took hold at precisely the moment with research in physiological optics revealed the complexities of the human visual system. The depiction of far-off landscapes was one of photography’s key functions in its descriptive naturalist phase, as in Carleton Watkins’s commanding views of the American West, which recorded the natural splendour of the landscape and its settlement.
Subjective naturalism
In the late 19th century, experimental psychology, a newly defined scientific discipline, addressed the progression of sensation into interpretation. At the same time, champions of artistic photography introduced the possibilities of expression, ambiguous form, and abstraction into a medium previously valued for its descriptive functions. Heinrich Kühn’s mastery of painterly techniques, for example, led to the creation of photographs on par with paintings or charcoal drawings. Ultimately Kühn’s photographs depict dreams or memories as much as physical reality.
Experimental Modernism
After World War I, photography became a key tool for avant-garde artists determined to deploy technology in a positive rather than destructive manner, thus restoring balance within the individual psyche and within society at large. The abstract works of György Kepes, influenced by Gestalt psychology, represent a European version of this tendency, which he and other emigrés brought to the United States. A later heir to this tradition is Barbara Kasten, who uses photography to explore key interests including transparency, colour, light, and structure.
Romantic Modernism
Inspired by nature, romantic modernism isolated moments of direct personal contact with the world, and explored the specific capabilities of photography. Despite an apparent divergence of art and science following World War II, photography was a site of connection. Ansel Adams believed in the artist’s unique vision, while also advocating technical precision to realise it. Concurrently, scientists were focusing on contrast perception, the neurological mechanisms by which we distinguish objects and make sense of spatial arrangements. Scientists and photographers alike had to understand the visual system and its responses to black and white.”
William Henry Fox Talbot (England, 1800-1877) Lace 1841 Calotype 7 1/2 × 9 1/4 in. (19.05 × 23.5cm) The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of The Annenberg Foundation and promised gift of Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin
Andrew Young (English, active 1870-1879) Plane at Aberdour, in Old Avenue Scotland, late 1870s Woodbury type 9 1/8 × 7 3/8 in. (23.18 × 18.73cm) The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of The Annenberg Foundation, acquired from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin
Jaroslav Rössler (Bohemia, Havlíčkův Brod, 1902-1990) Still Life with Small Bowl Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic), 1923 Gelatin silver print 8 7/8 × 9 3/8 in. (22.54 × 23.81cm) The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of The Annenberg Foundation and promised gift of Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin
Curator: Hilarie Faberman (Cantor Arts Center), Nancy J. Troy (Stanford University), and Janet Bishop, Caitlin Haskell, and Corey Keller from SFMOMA
Featured artists include Margaret Bourke-White, Constantin Brancusi, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Germaine Krull, Fernand Léger, Wyndham Lewis, László Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Man Ray, Alexander Rodchenko, and Charles Sheeler, among others.
Many thankx to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the art work for a larger version of the image.
“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing; – it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?”
Erich Maria Remarque. All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929
Germaine Krull (29 November 1897 – 31 July 1985), was a photographer, political activist, and hotel owner. Her nationality has been categorised as German, Polish, French, and Dutch, but she spent years in Brazil, Republic of the Congo, Thailand, and India. Described as “an especially outspoken example” of a group of early 20th-century female photographers who “could lead lives free from convention”, she is best known for photographically-illustrated books such as her 1928 portfolio Métal…
Having met Dutch filmmaker and communist Joris Ivens in 1923, she moved to Amsterdam in 1925. After Krull returned to Paris in 1926, Ivens and Krull entered into a marriage of convenience between 1927 and 1943 so that Krull could hold a Dutch passport and could have a “veneer of married respectability without sacrificing her autonomy.”
In Paris between 1926 and 1928, Krull became friends with Sonia Delaunay, Robert Delaunay, Eli Lotar, André Malraux, Colette, Jean Cocteau, André Gide and others; her commercial work consisted of fashion photography, nudes, and portraits. During this period she published the portfolio Métal (1928) which concerned “the essentially masculine subject of the industrial landscape.” Krull shot the portfolio’s 64 black-and-white photographs in Paris, Marseille, and Holland during approximately the same period as Ivens was creating his film De Brug (“The Bridge”) in Rotterdam, and the two artists may have influenced each other. The portfolio’s subjects range from bridges, buildings and ships to bicycle wheels; it can be read as either a celebration of machines or a criticism of them. Many of the photographs were taken from dramatic angles, and overall the work has been compared to that of László Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Rodchenko. In 1999-2004 the portfolio was selected as one of the most important photobooks in history.
By 1928 Krull was considered one of the best photographers in Paris, along with André Kertész and Man Ray. Between 1928 and 1933, her photographic work consisted primarily of photojournalism, such as her photographs for Vu, a French magazine. Also in the early 1930s, she also made a pioneering study of employment black spots in Britain for Weekly Illustrated (most of her ground-breaking reportage work from this period remains immured in press archives and she has never received the credit which is her due for this work). Her book Études de Nu (“Studies of Nudes”) published in 1930 is still well-known today.
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (November 23, 1890 – December 30, 1941), better known as El Lissitzky, was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, polemicist and architect. He was an important figure of the Russian avant garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the Soviet Union. His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus and constructivist movements, and he experimented with production techniques and stylistic devices that would go on to dominate 20th-century graphic design.
Lissitzky’s entire career was laced with the belief that the artist could be an agent for change, later summarised with his edict, “das zielbewußte Schaffen” (goal-oriented creation). Lissitzky, of Jewish origin, began his career illustrating Yiddish children’s books in an effort to promote Jewish culture in Russia, a country that was undergoing massive change at the time and that had just repealed its antisemitic laws. When only 15 he started teaching; a duty he would stay with for most of his life. Over the years, he taught in a variety of positions, schools, and artistic media, spreading and exchanging ideas. He took this ethic with him when he worked with Malevich in heading the suprematist art groupUNOVIS, when he developed a variant suprematist series of his own, Proun, and further still in 1921, when he took up a job as the Russian cultural ambassador to Weimar Germany, working with and influencing important figures of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements during his stay. In his remaining years he brought significant innovation and change to typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and book design, producing critically respected works and winning international acclaim for his exhibition design. This continued until his deathbed, where in 1941 he produced one of his last works – a Soviet propaganda poster rallying the people to construct more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany. In 2014, the heirs of the artist, in collaboration with Van abbemuseum and the leading worldwide scholars, the Lissitzky foundation was established, to preserve the artist’s legacy and prepare a catalogue raisonné of the artists oeuvre.
Raoul Ubac (31 August 1910, Cologne – 24 March 1985, Dieudonne, Oise) was a French painter, sculptor, photographer and engraver. Ubac’s mother’s family ran a tannery and his father was a magistrate. In his early years he traveled through some parts of Europe on foot. He originally intended to become a waterways and forestry inspector. His interest in art was aroused when he made his first visit to Paris in 1928 and met several artists, including Otto Freundlich.
After returning to Malmédy he read the Manifeste du Surréalisme (1924) by André Breton. He met that document’s author André Breton and other leading Surrealists in 1930, and dedicated himself to capturing the movement’s dream aesthetic in photography after settling in Paris, attending the first showing of Luis Buñuel’s film L’Age d’or (1931). He attended the Faculté des Lettres of the Sorbonne briefly but soon left to frequent the studios of Montparnasse. About 1933-34 he attended the Ecole des Arts Appliqués for more than a year, studying mainly drawing and photography. In the course of a visit to Austria and the Dalmatian coast in 1933, he visited the island of Hvar where he made some assemblages of stones, which he drew and photographed, for example Dalmatian Stone (1933). Disillusioned with Surrealism, Ubac abandoned photography after the Second World War in favour of painting and sculpture, and died in France in 1985.
Text from various sources
Co-organised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Flesh and Metal: Body and Machine in Early 20th-Century Art presents more than 70 artworks that explore a central dynamic of art making in Europe and the Americas between the 1910s and the early 1950s. On view from November 13, 2013 to March 16, 2014 at the Cantor Arts Center, the exhibition includes a rich group of paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, prints, and illustrated books from the collection of SFMOMA. Taken together, the works offer a fresh view of how artists negotiated the terrain between the mechanical and the bodily – two oppositional yet inextricably bound forces – to produce a wide range of imagery responding to the complexity of modern experience.
The exhibition is part of the collaborative museum shows and extensive off-site programming presented by SFMOMA while its building is temporarily closed for expansion construction. From the summer of 2013 to early 2016, SFMOMA is on the go, presenting a dynamic slate of jointly organised and traveling exhibitions, public art displays and site-specific installations, and newly created education programs throughout the Bay Area.
“We are thrilled to pair SFMOMA’s world-class collection with Stanford’s renowned academic resources,” said Connie Wolf, the John and Jill Freidenrich Director of the Cantor Arts Center. “Cantor curators and the distinguished chair of the Department of Art and Art History guided seminars specifically for this exhibition, with students examining art of the period, investigating themes, studying design and display issues, and developing writing skills. The students gained immeasurably by this amazing experience and added new research and fresh perspectives to the artwork and to the exhibition. We are proud of the results and delighted to present a unique and invaluable partnership that will enrich the Stanford community, our museum members, and our visitors.”
SFMOMA’s Curator of Photography Corey Keller concurred: “The opportunity to work with our colleagues at Stanford has been a remarkable experience both in the galleries and in the classroom. We couldn’t be prouder of the exhibition’s unique perspective on a particularly rich area of SFMOMA’s collection that resulted from our collaboration.”
Exhibition overview
The exhibition is organised into four thematic sections dealing with the human figure, the imagination, the urban landscape, and the object, which together reveal a range of artists’ responses to the conditions of modernity. At the beginning of the 20th century, many hailed the machine as a symbol of progress. “Speed” and “efficiency” entered the vocabularies of art movements such as Futurism (in Italy), Purism (in France), Vorticism (in England), and Constructivism (in Russia), all of which adapted the subject matter and formal characteristics of the machine. Factories and labourers were presented positively as emblems of modernity, and mechanisation became synonymous with mobility and the possibility of social improvement. Countering this utopian position were proponents of the Dada and Surrealist movements (based largely in Germany and France), who found mechanical production problematic. For many of these artists who had lived through the chaos and destruction of World War I, the machine was perceived as a threat not only to the body, but to the uniquely human qualities of the mind as well. These artists embraced chance, accident, dream, and desire as new paths to freedom and creativity, in contrast to their counterparts who maintained their faith in an industrially enhanced future.
Though art from the first half of the 20th century is often viewed as representing an opposition between the rational, impersonal world of the machine and the uncontrollable, often troubling realm of the human psyche, the work in this exhibition suggests a more nuanced tension. In fact, artists regularly perceived these polarities in tandem. The codes of the bodily and the industrial coalesce in Fernand Léger’s machine aesthetic, on view in his 1927 painting Two Women on a Blue Backgound and an untitled collage from 1925. For his “rayographs,” Man Ray made use of mass-produced objects, but deployed them in a lyrical and imaginative manner – placing them on photosensitised paper and exposing it to light. Constantin Brancusi’s The Blond Negress (1927) and Jacques Lipchitz’s Draped Woman (1919) update the tradition of the cast bronze figure by introducing impersonal geometries. And even the seemingly formulaic surfaces of Piet Mondrian’s abstract paintings eventually reveal the artist’s sensitive hand.”
Press release from SFMOMA and the Cantor Arts Center
Hans Bellmer (13 March 1902 – 23 February 1975) was a German artist, best known for the life sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer.
Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he’d been working as a draftsman for his own advertising company. He initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. Bellmer was influenced in his choice of art form by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925).
Bellmer’s doll project is also said to have been catalysed by a series of events in his personal life. Hans Bellmer takes credit for provoking a physical crisis in his father and brings his own artistic creativity into association with childhood insubordination and resentment toward a severe and humourless paternal authority. Perhaps this is one reason for the nearly universal, unquestioning acceptance in the literature of Bellmer’s promotion of his art as a struggle against his father, the police, and ultimately, fascism and the state. Events of his personal life also including meeting a beautiful teenage cousin in 1932 (and perhaps other unattainable beauties), attending a performance of Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann (in which a man falls tragically in love with an automaton), and receiving a box of his old toys. After these events, he began to actually construct his first dolls. In his works, Bellmer explicitly sexualised the doll as a young girl. The dolls incorporated the principle of “ball joint”, which was inspired by a pair of sixteenth-century articulated wooden dolls in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.
Bellmer produced the first doll in Berlin in 1933. Long since lost, the assemblage can nevertheless be correctly described thanks to approximately two dozen photographs Bellmer took at the time of its construction. Standing about fifty-six inches tall, the doll consisted of a modelled torso made of flax fibre, glue, and plaster; a mask-like head of the same material with glass eyes and a long, unkempt wig; and a pair of legs made from broomsticks or dowel rods. One of these legs terminated in a wooden, club-like foot; the other was encased in a more naturalistic plaster shell, jointed at the knee and ankle. As the project progressed, Bellmer made a second set of hollow plaster legs, with wooden ball joints for the doll’s hips and knees. There were no arms to the first sculpture, but Bellmer did fashion or find a single wooden hand, which appears among the assortment of doll parts the artist documented in an untitled photograph of 1934, as well as in several photographs of later work.
Bellmer’s 1934 anonymous book, The Doll (Die Puppe), produced and published privately in Germany, contains 10 black-and-white photographs of Bellmer’s first doll arranged in a series of “tableaux vivants” (living pictures). The book was not credited to him, as he worked in isolation, and his photographs remained almost unknown in Germany. Yet Bellmer’s work was eventually declared “degenerate” by the Nazi Party, and he was forced to flee Germany to France in 1938. Bellmer’s work was welcomed in the Parisian art culture of the time, especially the Surrealists around André Breton, because of the references to female beauty and the sexualization of the youthful form. His photographs were published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure, 5 December 1934 under the title “Poupée, variations sur le montage d’une mineure articulée” (The Doll, Variations on the Assemblage of an Articulated Minor).
He aided the French Resistance during the war by making fake passports. He was imprisoned in the Camp des Milles prison at Aix-en-Provence, a brickworks camp for German nationals, from September 1939 until the end of the Phoney War in May 1940. After the war, Bellmer lived the rest of his life in Paris. Bellmer gave up doll-making and spent the following decades creating erotic drawings, etchings, sexually explicit photographs, paintings, and prints of pubescent girls… Of his own work, Bellmer said, “What is at stake here is a totally new unity of form, meaning and feeling: language-images that cannot simply be thought up or written up … They constitute new, multifaceted objects, resembling polyplanes made of mirrors … As if the illogical was relaxation, as if laughter was permitted while thinking, as if error was a way and chance, a proof of eternity.
With zippers for eyes and a filmstrip collar around its neck, this figure composes an anxious portrait, but its tactile surface of black cloth, faded red velvet, and zippers is charged with the eroticism of imagined touch. Jean originally called this work Secret of the Gardenia after an old movie reel he discovered, along with the velvet stand, at a Paris flea market. As the artist later recalled, Surrealism’s leader André Breton “always pressed his friends to center their interest on Surrealist objects,” and “he made a certain number himself.” Chance discoveries like the movie reel and velvet stand that inspired this work provided a trove of uncanny items for Surrealists to include, combine, and transform in their works.
Text from the MoMA website [Online] Cited 01/03/2014
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #028a 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
A solid exhibition by Simon Harsent to open the year at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne.
Things I felt and observed
~ Harsent shows me sculptural photographs of icebergs as I have never seen them before
~ The photographs are well printed and framed, have great colour variation and work at both sizes the images are presented at
~ The horizon line of the sea rises and falls throughout the series, allowing the viewer to levitate and drop as you walk around the gallery
~ The ecological component of the exhibition, while inherent, is not overpowering. Which is a good thing
~ The non-chronological hang benefits the exhibition immensely. If the exhibition had been hung from large to small iceberg, the effect would have been too didactic
~ The Brancusi-esque forms held more interest for me, such as Melt #029, Melt #036 and Melt #039 (seen with a photograph of Brancusi’s The Newborn 1920, below), together with the intense, close-up abstract forms such as Melt #014 and Melt #023. These are superb!
Things I wanted to feel and observe
~ When viewing the series I didn’t feel Harsent’s metaphorical reflection upon his own mortality. Only in two images, Melt #042 and Melt #09 (where the sunlight hits the top of the iceberg deliciously) did I feel an anthropomorphic link to humanity
~ I didn’t feel the grandeur of these icebergs. Perhaps just one image at the largest size possible would have shook me from my reverie
~ I didn’t feel the personality of each iceberg in its own journey. In the exhibition I never knew which large iceberg had metamorphosed into which smaller iceberg. Therefore I was unsure of each iceberg’s life-span and story. For that reason these are not ontological portraits concerned with the nature and relations (the relation of one photograph and the next) of being
~ Finally, I wanted the images to push forward, to take me further on the journey. Taking the adage that two-thirds of the iceberg is always below water, I never really felt the psychological power of these objects, something dark that is hidden beneath the sea. All the icebergs are photographed in clear, calm weather. Some photographed in storms, in mist or fog, or at night would have added ineffably to the atmosphere
These are not sublime photographs. I never got that feeling from viewing the work. They come nowhere close to Alain de Botton’s wonderful prose on the significance of sublime places:
“If the world is unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest it is not surprising things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. Sublime places acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming, but it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time with them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.”(de Botton, Alain. The Art of Travel. London: Penguin, 2002, p. 178-179.)
I never felt that the photographs transported the viewer on an emotional journey that furthers our understanding of the fragility of life both of the planet and of ourselves. And that is the one thing I wished they had of done.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Edmund Pearce Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #026 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #029 2008 Archival Pigment Print 110 x 160cm Edition of 10
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #039 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 10
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #036 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Used under conditions of fair use for the purpose of art criticism
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #037 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #042 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
After successful exhibitions in Australia and abroad, Simon Harsent’s sublime photographic series Melt: Portrait of an Iceberg makes its Melbourne premiere at Edmund Pearce this February. The exhibition and accompanying monograph present portraits of icebergs as they travel Greenland’s Ilulissat Icefjord. The ecological story is self-evident; more sections are breaking away from the arctic ice cap and melting faster due to global warming. But the chronicle of the iceberg is, for the artist, a metaphorical reflection upon his own mortality.
Harsent states; “Seeing them first overpowering in grandeur and then, later, about to be absorbed back into the flux from which they came, is both beautiful and humbling: a metamorphosis that endows them with a life-span, each with its own personality, each with its own story.”
Born in England Simon Harsent studied photography at Watford College before moving to Australia in 1988 to establish himself as one of the country’s leading photographers. Currently based in New York, Harsent’s career has seen him win numerous national and international awards including, Cannes Lions, One Show, Clio, D&AD, and Australia’s first Cannes Grand Prix – making him one of the most awarded photographers in the world. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Queensland Art Gallery and The Powerhouse Museum. Melt: Portrait of an Iceberg was published in late 2009 to critical acclaim, reinforced by its inclusion in the prestigious D&AD and PDN Photo Annuals.
Text from the Edmund Pearce Gallery website
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #023 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #014 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #021 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #010 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #09 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #020 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #05 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #03 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #07 2008 Archival Pigment Print 110 x 160cm Edition of 10
Research experience on the charles marville photographs at the state library of victoria further update
Dear readers
An interesting email arrived from the Collection Services Manager further questioning why I actually want to see the Marville prints in the State Library’s Collection.
In part the email says, and I precis: the prints are fragile and very rare; the Library has digitised all the prints and provided high resolution images available for free download from our website; the careful storage of the original prints and the provision of digital files is the Library’s standard approach to achieve that delicate balance between access and preservation. The email goes on to ask, “I would be interested to understand more about your research needs with this collection and why it is important for you to view the original prints out of their protective enclosures.”
They still don’t get it do they?
Vintage prints have to be seen in the flesh. Anyone who knows anything about photography understands this but not, apparently, the State Library of Victoria. Why do you even need to explain this to them? When looking at vintage photographs you actually have to see the physical print, the surface of the print, not some simulacra hidden behind plastic or a high res scan online!
As Bill Henson insightfully observes in an interview about his current selection of images at the Monash Gallery of Art in the exhibition Wildcards,
“One of those preoccupations is an interest in the photograph as an object, in the physical presence of the print or whatever kind of technology is being used to make it. Part of the reason for that is that photography, more than any other medium, suffers from a mistake or misunderstanding people have when they’ve seen a reproduction in a magazine or online: they think they’re seeing the original. A certain amount of photography is made with its ultimate intention being to be seen in a magazine or online, but most photography, historically, ended up in its final form as a print – a cyanotype, or a tin type or a daguerreotype or whatever it might be… [This] continues to interest me about photography: how these things inhabit the world as objects. And indeed we read them not just with our eyes but with how our whole bodies read and encounter and negotiate these objects, which happen to be photographs.”
“They’ve seen a reproduction in a magazine or online: they think they’re seeing the original… we read them not just with out eyes but with how our whole bodies read and encounter and negotiate these objects, which happen to be photographs.”1
Well said.
Perhaps the State Library needs to read Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in which he discusses the aura of the original and
“the concept of authenticity, particularly in application to reproduction. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” He argues that the “sphere of authenticity is outside the technical” so that the original artwork is independent of the copy, yet through the act of reproduction something is taken from the original by changing its context. He thus introduces the idea of the “aura” of a work and its absence in a reproduction.”2
In other words, there is nothing like standing in front of a jewel-like Vermeer and feeling the aura of the original, not one shielded behind glass (or plastic in this case). By making many reproductions, including online copies, you substitute a plurality of copies for a unique existence. This is why I was so looking forward to seeing the Marville’s, to FEEL THEIR PRESENCE…
Of course I am as guilty as anyone through this archive of disseminating reproductions around the world, and I freely admit that. The photographs I reproduce are not the originals and should never stand for them. Even in this age of infinitely reproducible digital images there is still that aura of standing in front of a print in a gallery and feeling its eternal value and mystery.
As Walter Benjamin writes, “the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.”
And you need to see and feel that history.
Finally, I wonder how many people the State Library of Victoria have coming in to see these prints? When was the last time anyone actually physically saw them that wanted to? I would think very, very, few people indeed. The “delicate balance” between access and conservation is obviously well weighted towards the former.
It will be interesting to see how the State Library of Victoria responds and whether they can “Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the photographs of Marville.” Even for an instant. To facilitate my research in this time, in this space where one can admire the beauty of an object without compromising the need to preserve – no, lets think of better words: retain, possess, guard, protect, shield – the prints.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Bill Henson. “Wildcards: Bill Henson shuffles the deck,” Monash Gallery of Art, 1 February – 30 March 2014 quoted on the Art Guide Australia website Nd [Online] Cited 20/02/2014. No longer available online
1/ Walter Benjamin (1968). Hannah Arendt, ed. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Illuminations. London: Fontana. pp. 214-218 quoted in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” on the Wikipedia website
Charles Marville (French, 1813-1879) Parc Monceau c. 1853 – c. 1870 In collection: Photographic views of Paris Undated, dates assigned from time of Haussman’s renovation of Paris Photographic print mounted on cardboard : albumen silver 32 x 26cm Gift; Government of France; 1880 In the State Library of Victoria Pictures Collection
State Library of Victoria 328 Swanston St, Melbourne VIC 3000 Phone: (03) 8664 7000
Curators: Sarah Greenough, Senior Curator and head of the department of photographs, and Nancy Anderson, head of the department of American and British paintings
William Earle Williams (American, b. 1950) Folly Beach, South Carolina, 1999 1999 Gelatin silver print Image: 19.05 x 19.05cm (7 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Mary and Dan Solomon Fund
This photograph is part of William Earle Williams’ series Unsung Heroes: African American Soldiers in the Civil War, depicting locations where black troops served, fought, and died.
“A man’s face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man’s thoughts and aspirations.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
Now this is portrait photography, and all done with relatively long exposures. By god did they know how to take a photograph that has some presence, some frame of mind that evidences a distinct point of view. I had the best fun assembling this posting, even though it took me many hours to do so. The details are exquisite – the hands clasped on the lap, the hands holding the pipe and, best of all, the arched hand with the fingers gently touching the patterned fabric – such as you don’t observe today. The research to find out as much as I could about these people was both fascinating and tragic: “Abraham Brown accidentally killed himself while cleaning his gun on July 11, 1863.”
It is interesting to see the images without an over-mat so that you can observe the backdrop and props in the photographers studio, captured on the whole plate. The narrative external to the matted image, outside the frame. But this view of the image gives a spurious reading of the structure and tension points of the photograph. Any photographer worth his salt previsualises the image and these photographers would have been no different. They would have known their studio, their backdrops and props, and would have known which over-mat they were going to place the finished image in (chosen by themselves or the client). Look at any of the images I have over-matted in white and see how the images come alive in terms of their tension points and structure. How the body takes on a more central feature of the image. How props such as the American flag in Private Abraham F. Brown (1863, below) form a balancing triangle to the figure using the flag, the chair and the trunk as anchor points. This is how these images were intended to be seen and it is this form that gives them the most presence and power.
While it is intriguing to see what lies beyond the over-mat this continuum should not be the centre of our attention for it is the histories, subjectivities and struggles of these brave men that should be front and centre, just as they appear within this cartouche of their life.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. I have just noticed that the Ambrotype by an unknown photographer Unidentified Private, Company I, 54th Massachusetts Regiment (1863, below) and the Albumen print by an unknown photographer Private James Matthew Townsend (1863, below) are taken in the same studio – notice the table and fabric and the curtain at right hand side. They were probably taken at the same sitting when both men were present. One obviously chose an Ambrotype and the other an Albumen print, probably because of cost?
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art, Washington for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Unknown photographer Unidentified Private, Company I, 54th Massachusetts Regiment (details) 1863 Ambrotype Overall: 11.2 x 8.6cm (4 7/16 x 3 3/8 in.) Image: 8.7 x 6.4cm (3 7/16 x 2 1/2 in.) The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Unknown photographer Private Abraham F. Brown 1863 Tintype Mat: 17.8 x 12.7cm (7 x 5 in.) Image: 8 x 7cm (3 1/8 x 2 3/4 in.) Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society
This photograph depicts Private Abraham F. Brown, a member of Company E, part of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the first black regiment raised in the North during the Civil War.
Unknown photographer Private Abraham F. Brown(with over-mat) 1863 Tintype
Portrait as it would have originally been mated. The outline of the original mat can be seen in the image above.
Unknown photographer Private Abraham F. Brown (inverted with over-mat to show background extraneous to portrait) 1863 Tintype
Obscured image without overmat in order to show the original painted backdrop behind the figure in isolation.
Unknown photographer Private Abraham F. Brown (detail) 1863 Tintype
Obscured image without overmat in order to show the original painted backdrop behind the figure in isolation – detail of writing on wheel
Unknown photographer Private Abraham F. Brown 1863 Tintype Mat: 17.8 x 12.7cm (7 x 5 in.) Image: 8 x 6.5cm (3 1/8 x 2 9/16 in.) Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society
Abraham F. Brown (American, b. c. 1833-1863)
Private Abraham F. Brown probably had his portrait made shortly after the 54th arrived in SC in June 1863. A sailor born in Toronto, Canada, Abraham Brown accidentally killed himself while cleaning his gun on July 11, 1863, on James Island, northwest of Fort Wagner.
During the Civil War, he served as a Private in Company E of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry of the Union Army, the first regiment in the United States made up entirely of enlisted men of color. He was about 30 years old, single and working as a seaman when he enlisted on 4 April 1863 from Toronto, New York [sic]. He was killed on 11 July 1863 “accidentally by himself” on James Island in South Carolina one week before the Second Battle of Fort Wagner.
Unknown photographer Private Abraham F. Brown (with over-mat) 1863 Tintype
Portrait as it would have originally been mated. The outline of the original mat can be seen in the image above.
Unknown photographer Private Richard Gomar c. 1880 Tintype Mat: 17.8 x 12.7cm (7 x 5 in.) Image: 8.5 x 6cm (3 3/8 x 2 3/8 in.) Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society
Richard Gomar (aka Gomes) (American, 1846-1895)
Richard Gomar enlisted in Company H on 17 April 1863 at the age of seventeen and was mustered in on 13 May. He was a labourer from Battle Creek, Michigan. He was mustered out after the regiment’s return to Boston on 20 August 1865. He received a state bounty of $50, and his last known address was Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Portrayed here in a half-length study, Gomar is in civilian clothes and on his waistcoat is wearing a membership badge of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans’ organisation. This version of the badge was adopted in 1880. According to regulation, Gomar wears the badge on the left breast of his waistcoat, but the tintype process has reversed the image.
Richard Gomar (aka Gomes) was born on August 12, 1846 in Battle Creek Michigan to Joseph Gomar and Hannah Teabelt. He was working as a laborer before traveling to Boston to enlist on April 17, 1863, and was mustered in as a Private in Company H, 54th Massachusetts Infantry on May 13, 1863, receiving a state bounty of $50. The regiment fought famously at Fort Wagner on James Island, South Carolina where they suffered over 300 casualties, but they also fought bravely in the Battles of Olustee, Florida, Honey Hill, South Carolina, and Boykin’s Mills, South Carolina, as well as many other skirmishes in Florida and South Carolina. Private Gomar was sick at Morris Island, South Carolina from January to March 1865. He mustered out with his company on August 20, 1865 at Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
Gomar enlisted in Troop K, 10th U.S. Cavalry, one of the original “Buffalo Soldier” regiments on August 14, 1867, at Fort Riley, Kansas serving through his discharge on August 14, 1872. The regiment transferred HQ to Fort Gibson, Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma), fighting during the Indian Wars, including against Black Kettle’s band of Cheyenne, and the Comanches out of Camp Wichita.
Following his service in the 10th U.S. Cavalry, he moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa where he worked as a janitor, married Amelia Kelly in 1886 and they adopted a son. Richard Gomar passed away on July 28, 1895 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
David Lay. “Richard Gomar,” on the Stories of the United States Colored Troops Facebook page December 18, 2023 [Online] Cited 24/03/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
H. C. Foster (?) Private John Gooseberry, musician 1864 Tintype Mat: 17.8 x 12.7cm (7 x 5 in.) Image: 10 x 6.8cm (3 15/16 x 2 2/3 in.) Plate: 10.7 x 8.1cm (4 3/16 x 3 3/16 in.) Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society
John Gooseberry (American, c. 1838-1876)
One of the twenty-one Black recruits from Canada, twenty-five-pear-old Goosberry, a sailor of St. Catharines, Ontario, was mustered into Company E on July 16, 1863, just two days before the fateful assault on Fort Wagner. He was mustered out of service on August 20, 1865, at the disbanding of the regiment. Born in New Orleans, he survived the war but died destitute at about age 38.
Goosberry appears in this full-length photograph wearing his uniform as a company musician, holding a fife and standing before a plain backdrop. The buttons and buckle of the uniform have been hand coloured, and there is an impression remaining on the tintype from an earlier oval frame.
H. C. Foster (?) Private John Gooseberry, musician (detail) 1864 Tintype
H. C. Foster (?) Private Alexander H. Johnson, musician 1864 Tintype Mat: 17.8 x 12.7cm (7 x 5 in.) Image: 8 x 6.5cm (3 1/8 x 2 9/16 in.) Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society
Johnson served as a musician in Co. C. of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Colonel Shaw referred to Private Alexander Johnson, a 16-year-old recruit from New Bedford, Massachusetts, as the “original drummer boy.” He was with Shaw when the colonel died at Fort Wagner and carried important messages to other officers during the battle.
Alexander H. Johnson enlisted at the age of 16 as a drummer boy in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. He was the first black musician to enlist during the Civil War, and is depicted as the drummer leading the column of troops on the memorial honouring Colonel Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts in front of the Massachusetts state house in Boston. Alex was adopted by William Henry Johnson, the second black lawyer in the United States and close associate of Frederick Douglass. Johnson’s original surname was Howard and his mother was a Perry. His grandfather was Peter Perry, a native Hawaiian whaler who married an Indian woman.
After the war, Alex Johnson was a member of both the Grand Army of the Republic General George H. Ward Post #10 and of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is frequently mentioned in the book We All Got History by Nick Salvatore. Alexander Johnson died 19 March 1930, at the age of 82, just a few weeks after the 67th anniversary of his enlistment in the 54th.
H. C. Foster (?) Private Alexander H. Johnson, musician(detail) 1864 Tintype
Alexander H. Johnson (American, 1846-1930)
Of all the pictures of 54th Regiment soldiers that we exhibited, the tintype of Private Alexander Howard Johnson, who played the drum, was one of the most haunting. He looks so young, vulnerable, and hesitant. Only 17 years old when he enlisted in 1863, he was, like many other drummers, younger than the regulation minimum age of 18. But the army, desperate for recruits, turned a blind eye.
Although today we tend to think of drummers in their ceremonial role, leading troops in parade, in fact they served a critical function in battle. During the deafening noise and chaos, when it was often impossible to hear an officer’s commands, the drummers issued orders through different drumbeats – one sequence for advance, another for attack, and still others to signal retreat and imminent danger. They also helped carry wounded soldiers to field hospitals and aided medical personnel in amputations and other procedures.
Despite his youth, Private Johnson was probably well prepared to assume such an important and dangerous job. Born Alexander Howard in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he was, for unknown reasons, separated from his parents before the age of five and adopted by William Henry Johnson, a local, influential Black man. Before he enlisted, Alexander was a seaman, another perilous profession that required physical strength along with the ability to work well with others and quickly assess rapidly changing situations. This experience served Private Johnson well. Colonel Shaw singled him out in his letters as “the original drummer boy,” and he was with the colonel when he died in the Battle of Fort Wagner. Private Johnson went on to participate in several other battles, including Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s infamous March to the Sea.
Unlike many of his comrades, Private Johnson survived the Civil War and returned home to New Bedford. A few years later he moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, where he married Mary Johnson in 1870. They had 17 children, but sadly only five survived into adulthood – a troubling indication of the poor healthcare afforded to African Americans. In 1907 Private Johnson was honored by a local newspaper that proclaimed him one of the best drummers in Massachusetts and noted that there was “hardly a drummer who marches the streets of Worcester who has not received instruction from him.” When Johnson died in 1930, another newspaper noted that he had been an active member of the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal order of Union army veterans and one of the first advocacy groups to support voting rights for Black veterans. The obituary also referenced his nickname. While African Americans had not been allowed to be officers during the Civil War, Johnson had always worn a military cap, prompting his neighbours to call him Major.
In 1904 Private Johnson, along with other members of the Grand Army of the Republic, visited the bronze version of The Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial installed across from the State House in Boston, Massachusetts. All agreed that the drummer in the memorial strongly resembled Private Johnson, even though he had never posed for Saint-Gaudens.
They also recognised, as so many others have before and since, that the figure of the drummer – the first in line, the smallest in stature, and the youngest in age – was a compelling symbol of the bravery of even the most vulnerable in the fight for freedom. If not in fact, then in spirit, The Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial is a commanding monument to the heroism of Private Alexander Howard Johnson and all the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.
Sarah Greenough. “Remembering Private Alexander Howard Johnson,” on the National Gallery of Art website, November 9, 2021 [Online] Cited 24/03/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Unknown photographer Private William J. Netson, musician c. 1863-1864 Tintype Mat: 17.8 x 12.7cm (7 x 5 in.) Image: 8.5 x 6.5cm (3 3/8 x 2 9/16 in.) Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society
William J. Netson (American, b. c. 1836 – 1912)
Netson served as a Musician, in Co. E, of the 54th Massachuetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment.
Born about 1836, Netson enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts on April 4, 1863. He served in Company E as a musician. While helping a wounded soldier at the Battle of Olustee, horses pulling an artillery caisson knocked him over. Netson sustained an injury to his left eye and back that bothered him for the rest of his life. He died in 1912 in Connecticut.
William Netson was born at sea about 1836. His father was born in the West Indies.
During the Civil War, he was a private in the all Black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, Company K. Enlisted on 4 April 1863 from Niagara, New York. He was 27 years old, single and working as a labourer when he enlisted. Mustered out 20 August 1865 and settled in Norwich, Connecticut.
Unknown photographer Private William J. Netson, musician (with over-mat) c. 1863-1864 Tintype
Portrait as it would have originally been mated. The outline of the original mat can be seen in the image above.
Unknown photographer Private Charles A. Smith c. 1880 Tintype Overall: 8.7 x 6.2cm (3 7/16 x 2 7/16 in.) Image: 8.7 x 6cm (3 7/16 x 2 3/8 in.) Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society
Charles A. Smith (American, b. c. 1844 – d. unknown)
Smith served as a Private in Co. C. of the 54th Massachuetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment.
During the Civil War, he served as a Private in Company C of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry of the Union Army, the second regiment in the United States made up entirely of enlisted men of color. He was about 19 years old, single and working as a laborer when he enlisted. Mustered out 20 August 1865 with his regiment.
Company C participated in the Second Battle of Fort Wagner on 18 July 1863, the Battle of Olustee on 20 February 1864, and picketed at the Coosawhatchie crossroads during the Battle of Honey Hill.
Unknown photographer Sergeant Henry F. Steward 1863 Ambrotype Mat: 17.8 x 12.7cm (7 x 5 in.) Image: 10.5 x 8cm (4 1/8 x 3 1/8 in.) Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society
A twenty-three year old farmer from Adrian, Michigan, Henry Steward enlisted on 4 April 1863 and was mustered in on April 23. As a non-commissioned officer, as were all Black officers, Steward was actively engaged in the recruiting of soldiers for the regiment. He died of disease at the regimental hospital on Morris Island, South Carolina, on 27 September 1863, and his estate was paid a $50 state bounty. Standing at attention with his sword drawn in this full-length study, Steward is posed in front of a plain backdrop, but a portable column has been wheeled in to add detail on the left. Hand-coloured trousers and buttons highlight the uniform in this Ambrotype of Sergeant Steward.
Beginning in March 1863, African American recruits streamed into Camp Meigs on the outskirts of Boston, eager to enlist in the 54th. By May, the regiment numbered more than 1,000 soldiers. Most were freemen working as farmers or labourers; some were runaway slaves. Many of the new enlistees, proud of their professions and uniforms, had photographs of themselves taken. Their pictures recall Frederick Douglass’ 1863 speech before an audience of potential recruits: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”
Henry F. Steward, shown here, actively recruited for the 54th in Michigan. He had been promoted to sergeant soon after he arrived at Camp Meigs and probably had this portrait made shortly after he received his rifle and uniform. Proud of his new career, Stewart paid an extra fee to have the photographer tint his cap, sword, breastplate, and pants with paint to highlight their importance. Steward survived the Battle of Fort Wagner but died just over two months later, most likely of dysentery.
Unknown photographer Sergeant Henry F. Steward (with over-mat) 1863 Ambrotype
Portrait as it would have originally been mated. The outline of the original mat can be seen in the image above.
Continuing its year-long celebration of African American history, art, music, and culture, the National Gallery of Art announces a major exhibition honouring one of the first regiments of African Americans formed during the Civil War. Tell It with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial will be on view in the American galleries on the West Building’s Main Floor from September 15, 2013, through January 20, 2014. The 54th Massachusetts fought in the Battle of Fort Wagner, South Carolina, on July 18, 1863, an event that has been documented and retold in many forms, including the popular movie Glory, released in 1989.
“Then, as today, the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment captured the imagination: they were common men propelled by deep moral principles, willing to sacrifice everything for a nation that had taken much from them but now promised liberty,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. “This exhibition celebrates the brave members of the 54th, Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial commemorating their heroism, and the works of art they and the monument continue to inspire.”
The magisterial Shaw Memorial (1900) by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), on long-term loan to the Gallery from the U.S. Department of the Interior, the National Park Service, and the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, is considered by many to be one of the finest examples of 19th-century American sculpture. This monument commemorates the July 18, 1863, storming of Fort Wagner by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts, a troop of African American soldiers led by white officers that was formed immediately after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Although one-third of the regiment was killed or wounded in the assault, including Shaw himself, the fierce battle was considered by many to be a turning point in the war: it proved that African Americans could be exemplary soldiers, with a bravery and dedication to country that equaled the nation’s most celebrated heroes.
Part of the exhibition’s title, “Tell It with Pride,” is taken from an anonymous letter written to the Shaw family announcing the death of Robert Gould Shaw. The letter is included in the exhibition and the catalogue accompanying the show.
When Saint-Gaudens created the figures in the memorial, he based his depiction of Shaw on photographs of the colonel, but he hired African American models, not members of the 54th Massachusetts, to pose for the other soldiers. This exhibition seeks to make real the anonymous African American soldiers of the 54th, giving them names and faces where possible. The first section of the exhibition shows vintage photographic portraits of the soldiers, the people who recruited them – including the noted abolitionists Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, Charles Lenox Remond, and Sojourner Truth – and the women who nursed, taught, and guided them, such as Clara Barton, Charlotte Forten, and Harriet Tubman. In addition, the exhibition presents a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, a recruiting poster, a letter written by a soldier, Corporal James Henry Gooding, to President Lincoln arguing for equal pay, and the Medal of Honor awarded to the first African American to earn this distinction, Sergeant William H. Carney, as well as other documents related to both the 54th Massachusetts and the Battle of Fort Wagner. Together, these works of art and documents detail critical events in American history and highlight both the sacrifices and the valour of the individual soldiers.
The second half of the exhibition looks at the continuing legacy of the 54th Massachusetts, the Battle of Fort Wagner, and the Shaw Memorial. By presenting some of the plaster heads Saint-Gaudens made in preparation for his work on the Shaw Memorial, the exhibition discusses its development from 1883, when Saint Gaudens’ concept began to take shape, through the installation of the bronze monument on Boston Common in 1897, to the artist’s final re-working in the late 1890s of the original plaster now on view at the National Gallery of Art. The exhibition concludes by showing how the Shaw Memorial remains a deeply compelling work that continues to inspire artists as diverse as Lewis Hine, Richard Benson, Carrie Mae Weems, and William Earle Williams, who have reflected on these people, the event, and the monument itself in their own art.”
For over a century, the 54th Massachusetts, its famous battle at Fort Wagner, and the Shaw Memorial have remained compelling subjects for artists. Poets such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Robert Lowell praised the bravery of these soldiers, as did composer Charles Ives. Artists as diverse as Lewis Hine, Richard Benson, Carrie Mae Weems, and William Earle Williams have highlighted the importance of the 54th as a symbol of racial pride, personal sacrifice, and national resilience. These artists’ works illuminate the enduring legacy of the 54th Massachusetts in the American imagination and serve as a reminder, as Ralph Ellison wrote in an introduction to Invisible Man, “that war could, with art, be transformed into something deeper and more meaningful than its surface violence.
Press release from the National Gallery of Art website
Unknown photographer Private Charles H. Arnum 1864 Tintype Mat: 17.8 x 12.7cm (7 x 5 in.) Image: 10 x 6.5cm (3 15/16 x 2 9/16 in.) Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society
Charles H. Arum (American, b. c. 1843 – 1943)
Listed as a teamster and a resident of Springfield, Massachusetts, the twenty-one year old Arnum enlisted at Littleton and was mustered in as a private into Company E on November 4, 1863. He served with the regiment until it was disbanded on August 20, 1865. He received $325 as a state bounty, and his last known address was North Adams, Massachusetts.
This full-length study of Arnum shows him in uniform with his hand resting upon the American flag, which is draped over a table in the foreground. Behind him is a painted backdrop representing a seashore military camp.
Unknown photographer Second Lieutenant Ezekiel G. Tomlinson, Captain Luis F. Emilio, and Second Lieutenant Daniel Spear October 12, 1863 Tintype Overall: 8.6 x 6.5cm (3 3/8 x 2 9/16 in.) Image: 8.3 x 6.2cm (3 1/4 x 2 7/16 in.) Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Ezekiel G. Tomlinson (American, 1841-1885)
Born to John and Catherine Tomlinson within the Quaker faith, Ezekiel, along with his 9 siblings grew up without a Father, as John died about 1850. To assist support of his family, he enlisted as a Seaman in the Port of Philadelphia at the age of 18. Ezekiel volunteered early during the Civil War and enlisted as First Sergeant and then Sergeant Major, 29th Penn Infantry July 9, 1861. This was followed by being mustered in to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry as a 2nd Lieutenant on 15 September 1863. He was quickly recommended for promotion to 1st Lieutenant by the Governor of Massachusetts, taking effect 6 January 1864. During the Florida campaign, he was injured and resigned (disability) May 3, 1864.
During the Civil War, he served as a white commissioned officer – Second Lieutenant – in the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry of the Union Army, the second regiment in the United States made up entirely of enlisted men of color. He was about 23 years old, single and working as a sailmaker when he enlisted as a Second Lieutenant on 19 July 1863 from Boston, Massachusetts. He did not muster, however, until 13 March 1864. Resigned 12 June 1865.
Prior to his service with the 54th, he also served in Company H of the 24th Massachusetts in 1861 and again briefly at the beginning of 1864.
John Adams Whipple (American, 1822-1891) Colonel Robert Gould Shaw 1863 Albumen print Image: 8.4 x 5.8cm (3 5/16 x 2 5/16 in.) Boston Athenaeum
Death at the Battle of Fort Wagner
The 54th Regiment was sent to Charleston, South Carolina to take part in the operations against the Confederates stationed there. On July 18, 1863, along with two brigades of white troops, the 54th assaulted Confederate Battery Wagner. As the unit hesitated in the face of fierce Confederate fire, Shaw led his men into battle by shouting, “Forward, Fifty-Fourth, forward!” He mounted a parapet and urged his men forward, but was shot through the heart and died almost instantly. According to the Colors Sergeant of the 54th, he was shot and killed while trying to lead the unit forward and fell on the outside of the fort.
The victorious Confederates buried him in a mass grave with many of his men, an act they intended as an insult. Following the battle, commanding Confederate General Johnson Hagood returned the bodies of the other Union officers who had died, but left Shaw’s where it was. Hagood informed a captured Union surgeon that “had he been in command of white troops, I should have given him an honourable burial; as it is, I shall bury him in the common trench with the niggers that fell with him.” Although the gesture was intended as an insult, it came to be seen as an honour by Shaw’s friends and family that he was buried with his soldiers.
Efforts were made to recover Shaw’s body (which had been stripped and robbed prior to burial), but his father publicly proclaimed that he was proud to know that his son was interred with his troops, befitting his role as a soldier and a crusader for emancipation. In a letter to the regimental surgeon, Lincoln Stone, Frank Shaw wrote:
“We would not have his body removed from where it lies surrounded by his brave and devoted soldiers… We can imagine no holier place than that in which he lies, among his brave and devoted followers, nor wish for him better company – what a body-guard he has!”
Annie Haggerty Shaw, a widow at the age of 28, never remarried. She lived with her family in New York, Lenox and abroad, a revered figure and in later years an invalid. She died in 1907 and is buried at the cemetery of Church-on-the Hill in Lenox.
John Adams Whipple (September 10, 1822 – April 10, 1891) was an American inventor and early photographer. He was the first in the United States to manufacture the chemicals used for daguerreotypes; he pioneered astronomical and night photography; he was a prize-winner for his extraordinary early photographs of the moon; and he was the first to produce images of stars other than the sun (the star Vega and the Mizar-Alcor stellar sextuple system), which was thought to be a double star until 2009.
Unknown photographer Captain Luis F. Emilio c. 1863-1865 Tintype Overall: 12.7 x 7.62cm (5 x 3 in.) Image: 6.6 x 5.33cm (2 5/8 x 2 1/8 in.) Pamplin Historical Park and The National Museum of the Civil War Soldier
Luis F. Emilio (American, 1844-1918)
Luis F. Emilio (December 22, 1844 – September 16, 1918) was a Captain in the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, an American Civil War Union regiment. Emilio was born on December 22, 1844 in Salem, Massachusetts, the son of a Spanish immigrant who made his living as a music instructor. Although the minimum age for service in the Union army was 18, in 1861 – at age 16 – Emilio gave his age as 18 and enlisted in Company F of the 23rd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He was noticeably brave and steadfast, and by September, 1862 he had been promoted to the rank of Sergeant.
Emilio was among the group of original officers of the 54th selected by Massachusetts War Governor John Albion Andrew. He mustered in as a 2nd Lieutenant on March 30, 1863. Two weeks later, he was promoted to 1st Lieutenant, and on May 27, he was made Captain of Company E. Captain Emilio emerged from the ferocious assault on Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863 as the regiment’s acting commander, since all of the other ranking officers had been killed or wounded. He fought with the 54th for over three years of dangerous combat, mustering out of the Union army on March 29, 1865, still not yet 21 years old.
Following the war, he went into the real estate business, first in San Francisco, and later in New York. After assisting two old comrades documenting the history of the 23rd Massachusetts regiment in the mid-1880s, he began work on his own documentation of the 54th, publishing the first edition of Brave Black Regiment in 1891, and the revised edition in 1894. He died in New York on September 16, 1918 after a long illness, and was buried in the Harmony Grove Cemetery in Salem, Massachusetts.
Unknown photographer Unidentified Private, Company I, 54th Massachusetts Regiment 1863 Ambrotype Overall: 11.2 x 8.6cm (4 7/16 x 3 3/8 in.) Image: 8.7 x 6.4cm (3 7/16 x 2 1/2 in.) The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Major J. W. Appleton (American, 1832–1913) Diary of Major J. W. Appleton open to tintype of Private Samuel J. Benton c. 1865-1885 Handwritten journal with clippings, drawings, and photographic prints Page size: 35.56 x 20.96 cm (14 x 8 1/4 in.) Image: 6.5 x 5.2cm (2 9/16 x 2 1/16 in.) West Virginia University Libraries, West Virginia and Regional History Collection
John W.M. Appleton (1832–1913) was a prominent Union officer in the American Civil War, best known as a captain (later Major) in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first African American regiment recruited in the North. He led Company A in key combat actions across South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.
Samuel J. Benton (b. c. 1845 – d. unknown) was a private in Company A of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry of the Union Army, the first regiment in the United States made up entirely of enlisted men of color. He was about 18 years old, single and working as a waiter when he enlisted on 11 March 1863 in New York, New York. On 30 April 1863, during a private quarrel, he shot and killed Corporal William Wilson. He was tried and sentenced to imprisonment or hanging commuted to ten years imprisonment and served time until December 1865 when he was pardoned by order of the War Department. Discharged 4 December 1865 from Boston, Massachusetts.
On March 11, 1863, eighteen-year-old Samuel J. Benton enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. Benton was from Charlton, New York, a small farming community in Saratoga County. The 54th Massachusetts began recruiting in Boston in mid-February, however more soldiers were needed and recruiters turned their attention to states throughout the Northeast and Midwest and even into Canada to locate enough eligible black men to fill the regiment. At the time of his enlistment, Benton was working as a waiter in New York City, and was recruited by Lieutenant John W.M. Appleton. (For his efforts, Appleton was promoted and given command of Company A of the 54th Massachusetts.)
About a month later, William Wilson, a twenty-nine-year-old laborer, also enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts in Indianapolis, Indiana. Wilson joined Benton as a private in Company “A” of the regiment, and was soon promoted to corporal. Together they went off to war after the regiment was fully recruited on May 14, 1863. After a period of intense training under Colonel Robert G. Shaw, the 54th Massachusetts experienced its first heavy combat in July 1863 at Battery Wagner, at the tip of Morris Island, South Carolina. As members of Company “A”, Private Benton, Corporal Wilson, and Captain Appleton were in the thick of the fighting, which cost Colonel Shaw his life, and resulted in 281 casualties for the regiment.
Captain Appleton, who was wounded twice in the fighting at Battery Wagner, was promoted and sent to recuperate in a hospital in Boston. (He eventually resigned his commission in November 1864 due his wounds.) Benton and Wilson survived the battle unscathed, and continued to campaign in Florida and South Carolina with the 54th Massachusetts until April 1865. Their last campaign, commanded by General Edward E. Potter, consisted of raid through South Carolina’s Low Country, from their base in Georgetown towards Camden. The 54th Massachusetts was tasked with destroying railroads and capturing the “vast amount of rolling stock” that had been trapped during Sherman’s March to the Sea. Sherman’s instructions were blunt, “[The] food supplies in that section should be exhausted [and] those cars and locomotives should be destroyed if to do it costs you 500 men.”
Potter’s Raid began on April 5, 1865, and continued until April 21st, when news of a general cease fire was received. Potter’s Raid consisted of some of the last engagements of the Civil War, including a battle at Boykin’s Mill on April 18th. The 54th Massachusetts lost two men killed and 13 wounded in the fighting, including Private James P. Johnson, a twenty-one-year-old from Owego, New York, and Company “A” commander Lieutenant Edward L. Stevens, who was the last Union officer killed in action during the war. (Stevens had replaced Lieutenant Frederick Rogers as Company “A” commander, who was wounded earlier in the raid. Stevens was killed by a fourteen-year-old Confederate Home Guardsman.) Upon their return to Georgetown, on March 25th, Potter reported that his men had marched over 300 miles, destroyed 16 locomotives and 245 rail cars, burned 51,000 bales of cotton, and liberated approximately 5,000 slaves. The war for the 54th Massachusetts, was over.
A few days after their return, the troops in Georgetown began to depart for other posts. Unfortunately, the end of the war did not mean the end of the killing. On March 30th, in what was described officially as a “private quarrel,” Private Benton shot and killed Corporal Wilson. Benton was court-martialed and sentenced to be hanged. (There is no record of where Wilson was buried.) Shortly afterwards, Benton’s sentence was commuted to ten years imprisonment. In August 1865, Benton and eight other civilian inmates of the Charleston Jail escaped. However, he was swiftly recaptured and sent to Fort Delaware, on Pea Patch Island in the Delaware River, in September 1865. Benton also had friends at the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy in Charleston, as Mother Superior Teresa Barry and Sister Xavier Dunn wrote a letter on October 16, 1865, asking for a “pardon of Samuel J. Benton, colored, 54th Massachusetts Volunteers, imprisoned in Fort Delaware for the crime of murder.”
Edward Townsend, the acting Adjutant General of the U.S. Army replied to the letter from the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, assuring him that the “release of Benton” had been ordered “by letter from this office.” However, what Townsend didn’t reveal was that on December 4th, the War Department had directed the “release and discharge without pay” of all the convicts at Fort Delaware. (The War Department wanted to close Fort Delaware to save money.) As a result, Benton was returned to Boston and officially discharged by the State of Massachusetts in January 1866. The last known information about Benton is from the 1870 Census, where Benton is listed as a boat porter in Ward 10 of New Orleans, Louisiana.
Anonymous text from the This Week in the Civil War Facebook page, March 12, 2025 [Oline] Cited 24/03/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Unknown photographer Sergeant Major John Wilson June 3, 1864 Albumen print Image: 9.1 x 5.8cm (3 9/16 x 2 5/16 in.) West Virginia University Libraries, West Virginia and Regional History Collection
John Wilson, a painter from Cincinnati, Ohio, had this portrait made a month after he was promoted to sergeant major in May 1864. One of only five African American non-commissioned officers in the regiment at the time, Wilson proudly displayed his stripes and cap with its horn and the number “54.”
Unknown photographer Private James Matthew Townsend 1863 Albumen print Image: 8.6 x 5.8cm (3 3/8 x 2 5/16 in.) Collection of Greg French
Abraham Bogardus (American, 1822-1902) Major Martin Robison Delany c. 1865 Albumen print Image: 8.6 x 5.3cm (3 3/8 x 2 1/16 in.) Courtesy of the National Park Service, Gettysburg National Military Park
Martin Robison Delany (May 6, 1812 – January 24, 1885) was an African-American abolitionist, journalist, physician, and writer, arguably the first proponent of American black nationalism. He was one of the first three blacks admitted to Harvard Medical School. Trained as an assistant and a physician, he treated patients during the cholera epidemics of 1833 and 1854 in Pittsburgh, when many doctors and residents fled the city. Active in recruiting blacks for the United States Colored Troops, he was commissioned as a major, the first African-American field officer in the United States Army during the American Civil War.
Abraham Bogardus (November 29, 1822 – March 22, 1908) was an American Daguerreotypist and photographer who made some 200,000 daguerreotypes during his career.
Unknown photographer Captain Norwood P. Hallowell c. 1862-1863 Albumen print Overall: 10.16 x 6.35cm (4 x 2 1/2 in.) Image: 8.8 x 5.9cm (3 7/16 x 2 5/16 in.) Pamplin Historical Park and The National Museum of the Civil War Soldier Courtesy of Pamplin Historical Park & The National Museum of the Civil War Soldier
Norwood Penrose “Pen” Hallowell (April 13, 1839 – April 11, 1914) was an officer in the Union Army during the American Civil War. One of three brothers to serve with distinction during the war, he and his brother Edward Needles Hallowell both became commanders of the first all-black regiments. He is also remembered for his close friendship with and influence upon future Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who was his classmate at Harvard and his comrade during the war.
Hallowell’s fervent abolitionism led him to volunteer for service in the Civil War, and he inspired Holmes to do the same. He was commissioned a first lieutenant on July 10, 1861, joining the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry with his brother, Edward, and Holmes. Hallowell fought in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff on October 21, 1861, in which he distinguished himself by leading a line of skirmishers to hold off Confederate forces. Hallowell then swam across the Potomac River, constructed a makeshift raft, and made several trips to the Virginia bank to rescue trapped Union soldiers before his raft fell apart. Hallowell was promoted to captain on November 26, 1861. He was wounded in the Battle of Glendale on June 30, 1862, and suffered more severe wounds in the Battle of Antietam on September 17. His left arm was shattered by a bullet but later saved by a surgeon; Holmes was shot in the neck. Both took refuge in a farmhouse (a historic site now known as the Royer-Nicodemus House and Farm) and were eventually evacuated.
On April 17, 1863, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel, as second-in-command (after Colonel Robert Gould Shaw) of the 54th Massachusetts, one of the first all-black regiments in the U.S. On May 30, he accepted Governor John A. Andrew’s personal request that he be made colonel in command of the 55th Massachusetts, another all-black regiment. He and his regiment were stationed at Charleston Harbor and participated in the siege and eventual taking of Fort Wagner; Hallowell was one of the first to enter the fort after its abandonment. Hallowell faced continuing disability due to his wounds, and was discharged on November 2, 1863.
J. E. Farwell and Co. To Colored Men. 54th Regiment! Massachusetts Volunteers, of African Descent 1863 Ink on paper Overall: 109.9 x 75.2cm (43 1/4 x 29 5/8 in.) Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society
The Massachusetts 54th Regiment was the first military unit consisting of black soldiers to be raised in the North during the Civil War. Prior to 1863, no concerted effort was made to recruit black troops as Union soldiers. At the beginning of the war, black men offered to serve as soldiers for the Union cause, however these offers were rejected by the military establishment and the country as a whole. A few makeshift regiments were raised – including the First South Carolina Regiment with whom the 54th Regiment would serve at Fort Wagner – however most were raised in the South and consisted primarily of escaped and abandoned slaves. (Footnote 1) The passage of the Emancipation Proclamation in December of 1862 provided the impetus for the use of free black men as soldiers and, at a time when state governors were responsible for the raising of regiments for federal service, Massachusetts was the first to respond with the formation of the 54th Regiment. (Footnote 2)
Soon after Governor John A. Andrew was allowed to begin recruiting black men for his newly formed 54th Regiment, Andrew realised the financial costs involved in such an undertaking and set out to raise money. He appointed George L. Stearns as the leader of the recruiting process, and also appointed the so-called “Black Committee” of prominent and influential citizens. The committee and those providing encouragement included Frederick Douglass, Amos A. Lawrence, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips, and $5000 was quickly raised for the cause. Newly appointed officers in the regiment also played an active part in the recruiting process. (Footnote 3)
An advertisement was placed in the Boston Journal for February 16, 1863 addressed “To Colored Men” recruiting “Good men of African descent.” It, like the recruiting posters, offered a “$100 bounty at the expiration of the term of service, pay $13 per month, and State aid for families”; it was signed by Lieutenant William J. Appleton of the 54th. (Footnote 4) Twenty-five men enlisted quickly, however the arrival of men at the recruiting stations and at Camp Meigs, Readville, soon slowed down. Stearns soon became aware that Massachusetts did not have enough eligible black men to fill a regiment and recruiters were sent to states throughout the North and South, and into Canada.
Pennsylvania proved to he a fertile source for recruits, with a major part of Company B coming from Philadelphia, despite recent race riots there. New Bedford and Springfield, Massachusetts, blacks made up the majority of Company C, while approximately seventy men recruited from western Massachusetts and Connecticut formed much of Company D. (Footnote 5) Stearns’s line of recruiting stations from Buffalo to St. Louis produced volunteers from New York, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Canada. Few of the men were former slaves; most were freemen working as seamen, farmers, labourers, or carpenters. By May 1863, the regiment was full with 1000 enlisted men and a full complement of white officers. The remaining recruits became the nucleus of the 55th Massachusetts Regiment, commanded by Norwood P. Hallowell, who, for a short time, had served as second-in-command to Robert Gould Shaw of the 54th. (Footnote 6)
The question of pay to the volunteers became an important issue, even before the regiment’s departure from Boston on May 18. When Governor Andrew first proposed the idea to Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War, Andrew was assured that the men would be paid, clothed, and treated in the same way as white troops. As the recruiting posters and newspaper advertisements stated, this included a state bounty and a monthly pay of $13. In July of 1863, an order was issued in Washington fixing the compensation of black soldiers at the labourers’ rate of $10 per month. This amount was offered on several occasions to the men of the 54th, but was continually refused. Governor Andrew and the Massachusetts legislature, feeling responsible for the $3 discrepancy in pay promised to the troops, passed an act in November of 1863 providing the difference from state funds. The men refused to accept this resolution, however, demanding that they receive full soldier pay from the federal government. It was not until September of 1864 that the men of the 54th received any compensation for their valiant efforts, finally receiving their full pay since the time of enlistment, totalling $170,000. (Footnote 7) Each soldier was paid a $50 bounty before leaving Camp Meigs and this is the extent of the bounty that many received. By a later law, $325 was paid to some men, however most families received no State aid. (Footnote 8)
Although the Massachusetts 54th Regiment was the first to enlist black men as soldiers in the North, it was only the beginning for blacks as Union soldiers. By the end of the war, a total of 167 units, including other state regiments and the United States Colored Troops, were raised, totalling 186,097 men of African descent recruited into federal service. (Footnote 9)
Text from the project “Witness to America’s Past” on the Massachusetts Historical Society Collections Online website [Online] Cited 15/01/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Footnotes
1/ Burchard, Peter. One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965, p. xi.
2/ Hargrove, Hondon B. Black Union Soldiers in the Civil War. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1988, p. xi.
3/ Ibid., pp. 77-78.
4/ Emilio, Luis F. History of the fifty-fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863-1865. 2nd ed. Boston Boston Book Co., 1894, pp. 8-9.
5/ Ibid., pp. 9-10.
6/ Burchard, Peter. One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965, pp. 83-90.
7/ Massachusetts Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines in the Civil War.. 8 vols. Norwood, Mass.: Printed at The Norwood Press, 4:657.
8/ Emilio, Luis F. History of the fifty-fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863-1865. 2d ed. Boston Boston Book Co., pp. 327-328.
9/ Hargrove, Hondon B. Black Union Soldiers in the Civil War. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1988, p. 2.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens (American, 1848-1907) Shaw Memorial 1900 Patinated plaster Overall (without armature or pedestal): 368.9 x 524.5 x 86.4cm (145 1/4 x 206 1/2 x 34 in.) Overall (with armature & pedestal): 419.1 x 524.5 x 109.2cm (165 x 206 1/2 x 43 in.) U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire, on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Art
Even before the war’s end in April 1865, the courage and sacrifice that the 54th Massachusetts demonstrated at Fort Wagner inspired artists to commemorate their bravery. Two artists working in Boston, Edward Bannister and Edmonia Lewis, were among the first to pay homage to the 54th in works they contributed to a fair that benefited African American soldiers. Yet it was not until the late 19th century that Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial solidified the 54th as an icon of the Civil War in the American consciousness.
Commissioned by a group of private citizens, Saint-Gaudens first conceived the memorial as a single equestrian statue of Colonel Shaw, following a long tradition of military monuments. Shaw’s family, however, uncomfortable with the portrayal of their 25-year-old son in a fashion typically reserved for generals, urged Saint-Gaudens to rework his design. The sculptor revised his sketch to honour both the regiment’s famed hero and the soldiers he commanded – a revolutionary conception at the time. Saint-Gaudens worked on his memorial for 14 years, producing a plaster and a bronze version.
When the bronze was dedicated on Boston Common on Memorial Day 1897, Booker T. Washington declared that the monument stood “for effort, not victory complete.” After inaugurating the Boston memorial, Saint-Gaudens continued to modify the plaster, reworking the horse, the faces of the soldiers, and the appearance of the angel above them. The success of his final plaster earned the artist the grand prize for sculpture when it was shown at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. It was installed at the National Gallery of Art in 1997, on long-term loan from the U.S. Department of the Interior, the National Park Service, and the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, New Hampshire.
In 1973 Richard Benson and Lincoln Kirstein published Lay This Laurel, a book with photographs by Benson, an essay by Kirstein, and poems and writings by Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman, among others. It was intended to focus renewed attention on the bronze version of the Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, which had fallen into disrepair.
Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) Restless After the Longest Winter You Marched & Marched & Marched From the series, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried 1995-1996 Chromogenic colour print with etched text on glass Overall: 67.31 x 57.79cm (26 1/2 x 22 3/4 in.) Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
In this piece Carrie Mae Weems appropriated and altered one of Richard Benson’s photographs of the Shaw Memorial. Printed with a blood red filter, it is placed beneath glass etched with words that allude to African Americans’ quest for freedom and equal rights as well as their long struggle to attain them.
National Gallery of Art National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets Constitution Avenue NW, Washington
![Hans Bellmer (German, 1902-1975) 'La mitrailleuse en état de grâce' (The Machine Gun[neress] in a State of Grace) 1937](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/fleshandmetal_01_bellmer-web.jpg "Hans Bellmer (German, 1902-1975) 'La mitrailleuse en état de grâce' (The Machine Gun[neress] in a State of Grace) 1937")
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