Exhibition: ‘Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang’ at Cleveland Museum of Art

Exhibition dates: 25th October, 2020 – 28th February, 2021

 

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959 from the exhibition 'Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang' at Cleveland Museum of Art, Oct 2020 - Feb 2021

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

 

For a few brief moments, rebels with a cause

This is one of my favourite photo essays of all time. The story Davidson tells of this male-orientated Brooklyn gang and its culture through his photographs is one of brotherhood, friendship, rivalry, love, longing, agony, depression and death at a time of utter poverty and rock ‘n roll rebellion. He produced “unflinchingly honest images of these American youths.” Now, all these years later, the photographs possess a powerful nostalgia for the era mixed with the desolation of destroyed lives and lost youth.

Davidson gets under the skin of his subjects, embeds himself firmly in their milieu. The subjects allow him to photograph their most intimate moments, seemingly free from worry or anxiety. There is an insouciance to their attitude, a knowing insouciance. In one photograph inside Helen’s Candy Store, Bob Powers stares directly and disarmingly at the camera while the girl playing with the yo-yo and the youth in the background also stare directly into the lens, forming a strong compositional triangle of the gaze. Powers said he was voted “most likely to die before I was 21 years old.” He lived with his seven siblings and alcoholic parents in a three-bedroom apartment that had a coal-powered cookstove and no hot water or central heating.

There is a dark undertone to the narrative. While there are moments of joy and happiness, you can sense the isolation and despair of these disaffected youths. Cathy O’Neal, seen in front of a cigarette machine at Coney Island, committed suicide by shotgun. Jimmie and his family were wiped out by drugs. Junior Rice became a heroin dealer. Lefty od’d in bed at 19. “He was the first in the group to die from a drug overdose… within a few years, drugs would claim the lives of many in the gang and in the neighbourhood.” In picturing their lives, the photographs gather moments (in time), enunciating how the gang members railed against the conformity and materialism of 1950s America whilst imbibing its rebellious iconography. Only occasionally does the artist pull back to show us the wider picture, the context of the action, with photographs of New York skyscrapers seen in the distance and the Statue of Liberty.

Davidson does not let his spontaneity slip. He is informed, aware, absent (but present) in all of these photographs waiting for that special moment. In the photograph above, a bird-like creature swoops down on something invisible on the ground. In informal yet tightly focused photographs – of sunbathing or walking the boardwalks of Coney Island, gang members fixing their hair, rolling up their sleeves, dead beat(s) in the back of the bus, making out in the back seat of a car, walking in the park or hooning around on the Metro – Davidson is there to capture the off-beat moments of gang existence and the members relationship to each other.

Through a superb eye, a feeling, a sensibility and connection towards the gang members desperation and isolation, universally acknowledged by the photographer himself, Davidson sets them all on the path to immortality. Do not forget, these photographs seem to be saying. For a few brief moments these people did exist, their lives were valuable, these rebels with a cause.

Dr Marcus Bunyan


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

 

 

One of Davidson’s best-known series, Brooklyn Gang was inspired by a news story he read about a teenage gang called the Jokers.

Davidson contacted the Jokers, one of Brooklyn’s roughest gangs, through their social worker. In the summer of 1959, Davidson roamed the streets of New York with these teens, loitered in stores that the Jokers called their own, and sunbathed with them on the beach at Coney Island. Eventually they allowed him to photograph even their most intimate, private moments. He responded by producing unflinchingly honest images of these American youths.

Gang membership was exclusively male, but the members’ girlfriends appear frequently in Davidson’s photographs. Some of the pictures depict the teenagers exploring lust and love and the boys struggling to define and prove their masculinity. Looking back at the series in 1998, Davidson said that he felt “the reason that body of work has survived is that it’s about emotion. That kind of mood and tension and sexual vitality, that’s what those pictures were really about.”

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959 from the exhibition 'Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang' at Cleveland Museum of Art, Oct 2020 - Feb 2021

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

The pleasures and agonies of teenage romance are captured in Bruce Davidson’s photographs of the gang’s dance parties, which were held variously in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, at a neighbourhood school, and in members’ homes. The basement wallpaper seen here – with its fairy-tale figures, including horses, queens, knights, marionettes, and jokers – suggests a domestic setting. The event could have been a farewell party for an older gang member going off to join the army, which was a common occurrence.

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 16 x 23.9cm (6 5/16 x 9 7/16 in.)
Paper: 20.3 x 25.2cm (8 x 9 15/16 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

This rooftop view in Park Slope, Brooklyn, was taken from a building in the gang’s “turf,” which was a block anchored by the intersection of 17th Street and 8th Avenue. Davidson spent the summer hanging out with the gang and photographing them. Describing his process, the artist said, “I stay a long time. … I am an outsider on the inside.” Park Slope, now one of New York’s most desirable neighbourhoods, was then a poor, mostly Irish area.

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 21.9 x 14.6cm (8 5/8 x 5 3/4 in.)
Paper: 25.1 x 20.2cm (9 7/8 x 7 15/16 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

Davidson contacted the Jokers, one of Brooklyn’s roughest gangs, through their social worker. In the summer of 1959, Davidson roamed the streets of New York with these teens, loitered in stores that the Jokers called their own, and sunbathed with them on the beach at Coney Island. Eventually they allowed him to photograph even their most intimate, private moments. He responded by producing unflinchingly honest images of these American youths.

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

The pleasures and agonies of teenage romance are captured in Bruce Davidson’s photographs of the gang’s dance parties, which were held variously in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, at a neighbourhood school, and in members’ homes.

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 16.1 x 24.1cm (6 5/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
Paper: 20.2 x 25.3cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

Childhood pastimes like playing yo-yo were a thing of the distant past for 15-year-old Bob Powers, a Joker seen here leaning against a fixture in Helen’s Candy Store. He had already been in and out of the court system numerous times by 1959. Powers stabbed someone when he was 12 and had been incarcerated for bringing zip guns (homemade firearms) and chains to school, where, Powers said, he was voted “most likely to die before I was 21 years old.”

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

The gang members, most of whom were 15 or 16 years old, thought tattoos made them look older and might help them get served at bars. Tattoos were also a demonstration of masculinity and a rite of passage. Bob Powers, seen here at age 15 displaying his first tattoo, recalled years later that “the first time you get a tattoo it’s scary. I was sitting back with a cigarette like it’s nothing. Meanwhile, it was killing me. … I got ‘Bobby’ with stars around it. … They said, ‘Get your name.’ … I hated it forever.”

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 61 x 50.8cm (24 x 20 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

One of the gang members – Bob Powers – suggested that Davidson follow him to a rooftop on the gang’s block. “I remember thinking,” said Davidson, “‘This kid’s going to throw me off the roof and then rob me,’ but he’s pointing down at the stickball game (an informal form of baseball played in the street) and saying, ‘Get that,’ and saying: ‘Oh, there’s the Statue of Liberty. You can see it through all these television antennas.'”

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6 cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

The gang members were very concerned with their appearance, although they did not have much money to spend on grooming or clothes. “If you see a picture of me,” said former gang member Bob Powers, “the broken tooth, my teeth were green because I didn’t go to the dentist. We never had any money even though my father worked. … We used Vaseline petroleum jelly to make our hair stick like iron in a pompadour. We combed our hair constantly, wore sunglasses, and all thought we were Marlon Brandos.”

The Jokers’ slicked-back pompadours … and their clothing echoed the greaser style, a rebellious youth subculture that was promoted by cinematic antiheroes of the era. Role models included Marlon Brando’s portrayal of a motorcycle gang member in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean as a troubled teen in Rebel without a Cause (1955). The “bad boy” image flouted the aspirational role model of the time, the upwardly mobile white-collar worker in a business suit and short haircut.

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

Petey, a Jokers member who looks out the second-story window here, was injured in that fight. Petey’s best friend, fellow Jokers member Bob Powers, walks by the house. Housing in the gang’s neighbourhood, the then-impoverished Park Slope, Brooklyn, was overcrowded and rundown. Powers lived with his seven siblings and alcoholic parents in a three-bedroom apartment that had a coal-powered cookstove and no hot water or central heating.

 

 

One of the most highly respected and influential American documentary photographers of the past half century, Bruce Davidson spent several months photographing the daily lives of a teenage street gang for his 1959 series Brooklyn Gang. A new exhibition in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery, Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang features 50 black-and-white photographs from that series, which are part of a recent anonymous gift to the museum of extensive selections from the artist’s archives. The exhibition is on view now through February 28, 2021.

Brooklyn Gang was Davidson’s first major project after joining the distinguished photo agency Magnum and was the fruit of several months spent immersing himself in the daily lives of the Jokers, one of the many teenage street gangs worrying New York City officials at the time. He recorded the teenagers’ pleasures and frustrations as they attempted to define masculinity and mimic adult behaviour. The photographs reflect the group’s camaraderie but also their alienation from societal norms. While many officials and commentators at the time saw the gangs as evidence of social deterioration resulting from poverty, others regarded them as the most visible manifestations of a socially disengaged generation of males – rebels without a cause.

“Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang presents an intimate portrayal of the teens’ lives,” said William Griswold, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “Davidson was an outsider, but one who spent so much time with the gang that he became, as he liked to say, ‘an outsider on the inside.’ Davidson offered an independent look at the lives of these disadvantaged youths; this view of society was quite different from the age of visual and social homogenisation of the 1950s presented in mainstream magazines such as Life and Look and predicts the social turmoil of the 1960s.”

The images reflect the time Davidson spent with the teens hanging out on street corners and in the local candy store and accompanying them to the beach at Coney Island with their girlfriends. Included are several sets of variant images, affording a rare glimpse into Davidson’s working process.

“Despite a more than ten-year age difference, Davidson describes recognising his own repression in his subjects and feeling a connection to their desperation,” said Barbara Tannenbaum, the CMA’s chair of prints, drawings, and photographs and curator of photography.

Press release from the Cleveland Museum of Art

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 40.6 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

The museum owns several groups of images from the series taken during the same shoot at Coney Island. They provide a rare glimpse of the artist’s selection process (see 2018.688, 2018.696, 2018.697, 2018.701, 2018.706, and 2018.735). The size of these prints, and the fact that the artist printed them long after they were shot, suggest he considered all four images worthwhile. In an exhibition print, the white marks on the woman’s cheek here, made by dust on the negative, would have been covered up with ink or dye, a process known as spotting. This may be a work print, made to aid in decisions on exactly how to print this picture. It has become one of the better-known images from Brooklyn Gang.

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

In this photograph, gang member Bob Powers talks with friends in one of the many Coney Island bathhouses where people could change, shower, or swim in pools. “We’d come down on a Friday and sometimes we’d stay the whole weekend till Monday, down on the beach, me, Lefty, Junior,” Powers recalled. “The girls would stay too… We would light fires and bury all the cans of beer. I remember stealing cars and driving down there. We’d drive the car under the boardwalk and bring it right onto the bay and leave it there.”

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 50.8 x 61cm (20 x 24 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

Shown here on the Coney Island boardwalk, from left to right, are gang members Junior Rice, Bob Powers, and Lefty, who “was a pretty tough guy in the gang and then he went to jail for about a year,” according to Powers. “He came out and he just lost it. He wasn’t the same guy. Something happened and nobody knew what. … We protected him a bit, but he caught a couple of bad beatings and lost his reputation. He ate a lot of pills one night and never woke up. His mother found him dead. OD’d in bed at 19. He was the first in the group to die from a drug overdose.”

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 16.1 x 24.1 cm (6 5/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
Paper: 20.2 x 25.3 cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

This print is vintage – made soon after the picture was shot – and its 8 x 10-inch size was typical of the period and preferred for making reproductions for magazines and books. As photography began gaining acceptance into the gallery and museum world in the 1980s, larger prints became the norm. The museum also owns an unusually large print of the same image, made in the 1990s or 2000s, which was created to be exhibited in galleries and museums. The two may look the same on the computer screen, but do not feel the same when viewed in real life.

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 15.8 x 24.1 cm (6 1/4 x 9 1/2 in.)
Paper: 20.1 x 25.4 cm (7 15/16 x 10 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

After a day at the beach at Coney Island, the teens “would take the long bus ride back to their neighbourhood,” remembered Bruce Davidson. “As they sat in the rear of the bus, the sunlight burned through the windows, giving them an angelic glow. They would drift into their dreams and awake alert to the mean streets awaiting them.”

 

Bruce Davidson

Barbara Tannenbaum

Curator of Photography

A hot topic in the 1950s, gangs were avidly analysed by sociologists, the press, and artists. Gordon Parks’s photographs of a young black Harlem gang leader were published in Life magazine in 1948. The musical West Side Story, which pitted a Polish gang against a Puerto Rican one, debuted on Broadway in 1957. The following year, a seven-part series in the New York Times analysed the social, economic, and psychological causes of this juvenile delinquency.

In the summer of 1959, Bruce Davidson went to Brooklyn to meet and photograph a teenage street gang called the Jokers. Davidson’s series Brooklyn Gang provided an in-depth view into the daily activities of an Irish and Polish gang whose turf was a block in the impoverished Park Slope neighbourhood. The Jokers were teenagers who were mostly students at the neighbourhood Catholic school or dropouts. They shoplifted and fought with members of rival gangs in rumbles that involved bricks, bats, knives, and occasionally zip (homemade) guns.

At age 25, Davidson was an outsider to them. He had been raised in a Jewish family in suburban Chicago and held an MFA in photography from Yale University. His images were being published in major magazines, and he had just joined Magnum, a distinguished, artist-run photographic agency. The Jokers’ role models were the greasers, a rebellious youth subculture promoted by cinematic antiheroes such as Marlon Brando’s motorcycle gang member in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean’s troubled teen in Rebel without a Cause (1955). The gang members’ “bad boy” image, replete with Vaseline-slicked pompadours and blue-collar clothing, flouted the era’s aspirational role model of an upwardly mobile white-collar worker in a business suit and short haircut.

Davidson did not sport a pompadour, but making a living as a freelance photojournalist was itself a rebellion against the nine-to-five office world. He spent the summer with the Jokers, hanging out on street corners, in the local candy store, and on the beach at Coney Island. His images reflect their alienation and anxieties but also their camaraderie. The boys explore male bonding rituals and act out their visions of maleness and adulthood. They may roughhouse, but gang ethics dictated that they were not to hurt each other. Real violence was reserved for rival gangs and, like their criminal acts, was not shown by Davidson.

He did capture the teens’ early experiences with lust and love. The Lothario in the back seat of a car is Lefty, of whom Bob Powers, a gang member who wrote a memoir 40 years later, remarked, “We never thought he was good-looking, but all the girls loved him.” This well-known image of Lefty is joined in the exhibition by three others from that same make-out session. Together they form an almost cinematic progression. Several other groups of related images of events are also included in the exhibition. These rare glimpses into the artist’s shooting and editing processes are all drawn from the recent anonymous gift to the museum of 367 works from Davidson’s archive, selections that span his 70-year career.

Davidson was careful not to pass judgment in his Brooklyn Gang photographs. The youngsters’ hairstyles, tattoos, and underage drinking, smoking, and sex were considered ruinous behaviour at the time. The memoirs of Bob Powers and the reminiscences of other members give the Jokers’ story a dark tone. The best-known image in the series, taken in front of a cigarette machine at Coney Island, shows Artie Giammarino, who later became a transit police detective, and Cathy O’Neal, whom the boys considered “beautiful like Brigitte Bardot.” Cathy is seen here at age 13 or 14, around the time she began dating the “coolest” of the gang, Junior Rice. At 14 she got pregnant. Though they were both under the legal age, they married. They later divorced, and Junior became a heroin dealer and user; within a few years, drugs would claim the lives of many in the gang and in the neighbourhood. Years after their divorce, Cathy committed suicide by shotgun.

Davidson would always remain an outsider to the gang, but his working process allowed for intimacy and trust to grow between the gang members and the photographer. By the end of the summer, Davidson realised that he and the Jokers were all considered outsiders in the conformist, materialistic 1950s. “I could see my own repression in them, and I began to feel a connection to their desperation,” he remembered. “I began to feel their isolation and even my own.”

Cleveland Art, Fall 2020

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 61 x 50.8cm (24 x 20 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

Although most of the gang members’ time was spent in their neighbourhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, the Jokers sometimes took excursions. Few had access to cars, so most travel was by bus and subway. The subway fare of 15 cents – the equivalent of $1.33 today – would take them anywhere in New York City. Here a gang member and his girlfriend wait for a train on the neighbourhood subway platform. The beach at Coney Island was a favourite summer destination for the gang.

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

“We used to hang out in [Brooklyn’s] Prospect Park all the time,” recalled Jokers member Bob Powers. “We did a lot of drinking and sleeping overnight in the park. … The cops with their bats would push us along, tell us to move. We were very defiant. If we moved, we moved ten feet. Then they had to tell us to move another ten feet. We’d kind of like move around in a circle and come back to where we originally started. The cops were mean at that time, but then we weren’t the best of kids either.”

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 13.9 x 17.6cm (5 1/2 x 6 15/16 in.)
Image: 11.4 x 16.9cm (4 1/2 x 6 5/8 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

The Jokers roughhoused and fought among themselves but were not allowed to hurt each other. Real violence was reserved for those in other gangs or occasionally for civilians. “Did we fight with chains and pipes and knives? Yeah,” gang member Bob Powers reminisced years later. “Did people get stabbed? Yeah, people got stabbed. And people got their heads cracked open with bats.”

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

The gang member making out in the back seat of a car on the way home from Coney Island is Lefty, identifiable by his tattoo. “We always wondered why the girls liked him,” recalled Jokers member Bob Powers. “We never thought he was good-looking, but all the girls loved him. It was amazing.”

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Untitled' 1959

 

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
Paper: 61 x 50.8cm (24 x 20 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

Jimmie, an older member of the gang, watched over the younger members with his brother Johnny. In 1998, Jokers member Bob Powers recalled, “Later, the whole family, all six of them … died, wiped out, mostly from drugs. It’s amazing because at this particular time, if you see Jimmie, he’s like the ‘Fonz,’ like James Dean – handsome. He was good-looking, he had the women, and he was always working on cars.”

 

 

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European art research tour exhibition: ‘Cy Twombly: Sculpture’ at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London

Exhibition dates: 30th September – 21st December, 2019, posted December 2020

 

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Cy Twombly: Sculpture' at Gagosian, London

 

Installation view of the exhibition Cy Twombly: Sculpture at Gagosian, London
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Recovered time

For my friend and mentor Ian Lobb, who is a Twombly aficionado. I posted him back three Twombly posters from the pop up shop…

“Twombly made his sculptures from found materials such as plaster, wood, and iron, as well as objects that he habitually used and handled in the studio. Often modest in scale, they embody his artistic language of handwritten glyphs and symbols, evoking narratives from antiquity and fragments of literature and poetry.”

“This thought, that within each piece there is an underlying poetry, an underlying history, to be uncovered, elucidates the potential within each sculpture.”

A Time To Remain, A Time To Go Away.

Marcus


All iPhone images © Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

“I would like to think in the sculptures there is a tendency towards the fundamental principle in Homer’s world. That poetry belongs to the defeated and to the dead.”

“White paint is my marble.”


Cy Twombly

 

 

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Cy Twombly: Sculpture' at Gagosian, London

Installation view of the exhibition 'Cy Twombly: Sculpture' at Gagosian, London

Installation view of the exhibition 'Cy Twombly: Sculpture' at Gagosian, London

Installation view of the exhibition 'Cy Twombly: Sculpture' at Gagosian, London

 

Installation views of the exhibition Cy Twombly: Sculpture at Gagosian, London
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of Cy Twombly’s sculptures, in association with the Cy Twombly Foundation. The exhibition marks the publication of the second volume of the catalogue raisonné of sculptures, edited by Nicola Del Roscio, President of the Cy Twombly Foundation, and published by Schirmer/Mosel.

Twombly made his sculptures from found materials such as plaster, wood, and iron, as well as objects that he habitually used and handled in the studio. From 1946 onward, he created many assemblages, though they were rarely exhibited before the 1997 publication of the first volume of his catalogue raisonné. Often modest in scale, they embody his artistic language of handwritten glyphs and symbols, evoking narratives from antiquity and fragments of literature and poetry.

Many of Twombly’s sculptures are coated in white paint, which unifies and neutralises the assembled materials and renders the newly formed object into a coherent whole. In referring to white paint as his “marble,” Twombly recalls traditions of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculpture while also subverting marble’s classical connotation of perfection through his roughly painted surfaces. The intimate scale of these works, together with their textural coats of paint, underscores their fundamentally haptic nature.

Some of Twombly’s sculptures allude to architecture, geometry, and Egyptian and Mesopotamian statuary, as in the rectangular pedestals and circular structures of Untitled (1977) and Chariot of Triumph (1990-98). Untitled (In Memory of Álvaro de Campos) (2002) comprises a rounded wooden trough stacked with a rectangular box, an elongated mound, and a vertical wooden board – all accumulating into a form that resembles a headstone or cenotaph. Thickly daubed in white, the sculpture bears the titular inscription scrawled in the graffiti-like hand so typical of Twombly’s drawings and paintings, and below it, the words “to feel all things in all ways.” Drawn from a poem by Álvaro de Campos (one of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s pseudonyms), the inscription suggests the legibility of the sculpture itself, and positions the three-dimensional object as a surface to be worked on.

In 1979, Twombly began casting some of his assemblages in bronze. The first iteration of Untitled (2002), on view in this exhibition, was made in 1955, soon after his return to New York from Europe and North Africa. Like other works from this period, this sculpture makes reference to the ancient artefacts the artist encountered in his travels. Consisting of bundled sticks, it evokes an object of private devotion or fetish. By casting this work in bronze in 2002, Twombly literally and figuratively substantiated the small sculpture into something like an archeological treasure recovered from the past.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany this exhibition.

Press release from the Gagosian website [Online] Cited 08/11/2020

 

Twombly made his sculptures from found materials such as plaster, wood, and iron, as well as objects that he habitually used and handled in the studio. Often modest in scale, they embody his artistic language of handwritten glyphs and symbols, evoking narratives from antiquity and fragments of literature and poetry.

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Untitled (To Apollinaire)' 2009 (installation view)

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Untitled (To Apollinaire) (installation view)
2009
Painted bronze
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Untitled (To Apollinaire)' 2009 (installation view)

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Untitled (To Apollinaire) (installation view)
2009
Painted bronze
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Humul' 1986 (installation view) from the exhibition 'Cy Twombly: Sculpture' at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, Sept - Dec, 2019

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Humul (installation view)
1986
Painted bronze
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Untitled' 2004 (installation view) from the exhibition 'Cy Twombly: Sculpture' at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, Sept - Dec, 2019

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Untitled (installation view)
2004
Bronze, edition 4/6
31 7/8 × 15 1/4 × 11 5/8 inches (81 × 38.5 × 29.5cm)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Untitled (In Memory Of Babur)' 2009 (installation view)

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Untitled (In Memory Of Babur) (installation view)
2009
Bronze
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Babur (14 February 1483 – 26 December 1530), born Zahīr ud-Dīn Muhammad, was the founder of the Mughal Empire and first Emperor of the Mughal dynasty (r. 1526-1530) in the Indian subcontinent. He was a descendant of Timur and Genghis Khan through his father and mother respectively.

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Turkish Delight' 2000 (installation view)

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Turkish Delight (installation view)
2000
Wood, plaster, acrylic, and brass
45 1/2 × 18 × 16 1/2 inches (115.6 × 45.7 × 41.9cm)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Cy Twombly: Sculpture' at Gagosian, London

 

Installation view of the exhibition Cy Twombly: Sculpture at Gagosian, London showing from left to right, Herat (1998) and Batrachomyomachia (1998)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Herat' 1998

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Herat (installation view)
1998
Painted bronze
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Herāt is the third-largest city of Afghanistan.

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Batrachomyomachia' 1998 (installation view)

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Batrachomyomachia (installation view)
1998
Painted bronze
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

The Batrachomyomachia or Battle of the Frogs and Mice is a comic epic, or a parody of the Iliad, commonly attributed to Homer, although other authors have been proposed.

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Untitled' 1998 (installation view)

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Untitled (installation view)
1998
Painted bronze
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'A Time To Remain, A Time To Go Away' 1998-2001

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
A Time To Remain, A Time To Go Away (installation view)
1998-2001
Painted bronze
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'A Time To Remain, A Time To Go Away' 1998-2001 (installation view detail)

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
A Time To Remain, A Time To Go Away (installation view detail)
1998-2001
Painted bronze
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Untitled (AOEDE)' Nd (installation view)

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Untitled (AOEDE) (installation view)
Nd
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Untitled (AOEDE)' Nd (installation view detail)

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Untitled (AOEDE) (installation view detail)
Nd
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Aoede

In Greek mythology, Aoede was one of the three original Boeotian muses, which later grew to five before the Nine Olympian Muses were named. Her sisters were Melete and Mneme. She was the muse of voice and song. According to Greek mythology, she is the daughter of Zeus, the King of the Gods, and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory.

She lends her name to the moon Jupiter XLI, also called Aoede, which orbits the planet Jupiter.

Text from the Wikipedia website

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Cy Twombly: Sculpture' at Gagosian, London

 

Installation view of the exhibition Cy Twombly: Sculpture at Gagosian, London
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Chariot of Triumph' 1990-98 (installation view)

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Chariot of Triumph (installation view)
1990-98
Wood, paint, cloth, and nails
42 1/2 × 20 7/8 × 74 3/8 inches (108 × 53 × 189cm)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Untitled' 2005 (installation view)

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Untitled (installation view)
2005
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Untitled' 2005 (installation view)

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Untitled (installation view)
2005
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Untitled' 2009 (installation view)

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Untitled
2009
Bronze, edition 2/3
94 3/4 × 15 7/8 × 12 3/8 inches (240.4 × 40.3 × 31.5cm)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) 'Untitled' 2009 (installation view detail)

 

Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011)
Untitled (installation view detail)
2009
Bronze, edition 2/3
94 3/4 × 15 7/8 × 12 3/8 inches (240.4 × 40.3 × 31.5cm)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly Shop

Gagosian is pleased to announce a pop-up shop devoted to Cy Twombly at Gagosian, Davies Street, London, to open on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly: Sculpture at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London.

The shop will celebrate the newly published Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonne of the Sculpture, vol. 2, 1998-2011, and Cy Twombly: Homes & Studios, both from Schirmer / Mosel, and will feature an extensive selection of historically important reference books on the artist. Rare ephemera from many of Twombly’s exhibitions in Italy from the 1960s will also be included, alongside vintage and contemporary posters and a selection of prints and photographs by the artist.

Text from the Gagosian website [Online] Cited 08/11/2020

 

Cy Twombly shop

 

Cy Twombly Shop
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly shop

 

Cy Twombly Shop
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Cy Twombly Shop interior showing posters

Cy Twombly Shop interior showing posters

 

Cy Twombly Shop interior showing posters
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Heiner Bastian (ed.,). 'Cy Twombly: The Printed Graphic Work Catalogue Raisonné' 2017 book cover (installation view)

 

Heiner Bastian (ed.,). Cy Twombly: The Printed Graphic Work Catalogue Raisonné 2017 book cover

Along with his celebrated drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs, Cy Twombly has left an imposing body of graphic work as well. As early as 1984, the Berlin-based art writer and Twombly expert, Heiner Bastian, compiled the first catalogue raisonné of the artist’s printed graphics which has been out of print for 18 years. Now back in print for the first time, this new edition of the catalogue raisonné has been updated and includes the graphic works Twombly created since 1984 until his death in 2011.

Cy Twombly’s graphic oeuvre is characterised by a variety of graphic and printing techniques. Along with monotypes, etchings, lithographs, and silkscreens, the artist tested his expertise using offset lithographs and the combination of various print and reproduction techniques.

 

Cy Twombly: Camino Real 2010 catalogue front cover (installation view)

 

Cy Twombly: Camino Real 2010 catalogue front cover

Published in 2010, on the occasion of the exhibition “Cy Twombly: Camino Real” at Gagosian Gallery Paris
Text by Marie-Laure Bernadac
10 7/8 x 13 1/2 inches (27.6 x 34.3cm); 32 pages; Fully illustrated
Designed by Graphic Thought Facility, London; Printed by Shapco Printing, Minneapolis, MN

 

Carlos Basualdo. 'Cy Twombly: Fifty Days at Iliam' 2018 book cover (installation view)

 

Carlos Basualdo. Cy Twombly: Fifty Days at Iliam, 2018 book cover.

This revelatory publication provides a comprehensive and multifaceted account of Cy Twombly’s masterpiece Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), a series of ten paintings based on Alexander Pope’s 18th-century translation of Homer’s Iliad. Essays by a team of both art historians and scholars of Greco-Roman studies explore topics including the paintings’ literary and cultural references to antiquity and Twombly’s broader engagement with the theme of the Trojan War, which first appeared in his work in the early 1960s and was a subject to which he would return throughout his career. Firsthand accounts of the artist at work complement the essays. Images of the canvases and related drawings and sculptures are joined by previously unpublished photographs showing Fifty Days at Iliam in the artist’s studio at the time of their completion.

 

Eva Keller and Heiner Bastian. 'Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros' 2002 (installation view)

Eva Keller and Heiner Bastian. 'Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros' 2002 (installation view)

Eva Keller and Heiner Bastian. 'Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros' 2002 (installation view)

Eva Keller and Heiner Bastian. 'Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros' 2002 (installation view)

Eva Keller and Heiner Bastian. 'Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros' 2002 (installation view)

Eva Keller and Heiner Bastian. 'Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros' 2002 (installation view)

 

Eva Keller and Heiner Bastian. Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros 2002

 

Cy Twombly. 'Gaeta Sets' 1987 (installation view)

Cy Twombly. 'Gaeta Sets' 1987 (installation view)

Cy Twombly. 'Gaeta Sets' 1987 (installation view)

 

Cy Twombly
Gaeta Sets
1987
Hine Editions
28.2 x 23.8cm (11.1 x 9.4 in.)

 

Colour photolithographs throughout. (4to) original cream wrappers, slipcase. One of 1500 copies

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Cy Twombly: Sculpture' at Gagosian, London

Installation view of the exhibition 'Cy Twombly: Sculpture' at Gagosian, London

Installation view of the exhibition 'Cy Twombly: Sculpture' at Gagosian, London

Installation view of the exhibition 'Cy Twombly: Sculpture' at Gagosian, London

 

Installation views of the Cy Twombly Shop at Gagosian, London
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

Edmund De Waal. 'Cy Twombly – Photographs. Gagosian Gallery' 2012 and Mary Jacobus. 'Cy Twombly – Photographs Volume II' Gagosian Gallery, 2015 (installation view)

 

Edmund De Waal. Cy Twombly – Photographs. Gagosian Gallery, 2012 and Mary Jacobus. Cy Twombly – Photographs Volume II. Gagosian Gallery, 2015 book covers

 

Cy Twombly. 'Fotografie di Gaeta'. Published by Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, 2014; Vincent Katz. 'Cy Twombly: Photographs 1951-1999'. Schirmer Mosel, 2004; and Laszlo Glozer. 'Cy Twombly: Photographs 1951-2007'. Schirmer Mosel, 2008 book covers (installation view)

 

Cy Twombly. Fotografie di Gaeta. Published by Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, 2014.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly. Fotografie di Gaeta on view at the Museo Diocesano, Gaeta (July 5 – September 28, 2014)

Vincent Katz. Cy Twombly: Photographs 1951-1999. Schirmer Mosel, 2004.

This world premiere is an aesthetic sensation. Since his student days in the early 50s, American painter and sculptor Cy Twombly, one of the greatest artists alive today, has concerned himself with photography. In this volume, he presents his photographic work of 50 years to the public for the first time ever. Taking up 19th-century Pictorialist traditions, Twombly’s photographs are, just like his paintings, drawings and sculptures, documents of a profound personal poetry. Studio shots, details of his own statuary, sculptures from his collection, romantic landscapes, flowers, and portraits of friends constitute the cosmos of his photographic oeuvre. Printed with matte colours on matte paper, a special “dryprint” process lends these images a velvety, porous, almost grainy quality. On the stage of today’s art, they touch long-lost chords. Resonant of the concepts of fin de siècle art they are, yet, thoroughly contemporary in their minimalism, creating an aesthetic vision by the commonest means.

Laszlo Glozer. Cy Twombly: Photographs 1951-2007. Schirmer Mosel, 2008.

Ever since his student days, Cy Twombly has concerned himself with photography, but only in recent years has he turned it into a unique artistic concept – and an aesthetic sensation. Twombly’s photographic pieces are documents of a fascinatingly enigmatic and personal poetry. His studios in Lexington and Gaeta, details of his own sculptures and collected sculptural items, landscape motifs, fruits and flowers appear in a mysteriously transformed manner on these delicate sheets. Printed in matte colours on matte paper using a dry-print process that imbues them with velvet and an almost grainy hue, the images are vaguely reminiscent of the pictorialist tradition in fin de siecle photography. In their minimalist way, however, generating aesthetic visions by the simplest of means, they are utterly contemporary. Photographs 1951-2007 presents Twombly’s photographic works of over fifty years- full of surprises and breathtaking beauty.

 

Hubertus von Amelunxen. 'Cy Twombly: Photographs 1951-2010'. Schirmer Mosel, 2011 and Achim Hochdörfer. 'Cy Twombly Vol. IV: Unpublished Photographs 1951-2011'. Schirmer Mosel, 2013 book covers (installation view)

 

Hubertus von Amelunxen. Cy Twombly: Photographs 1951-2010. Schirmer Mosel, 2011.

Cy Twombly’s photographs are a late revelation. The painter, world-famous for his scribbled abstract paintings and his nervous drawings, has been a prolific photographer from his early student days. In this late stage of his career, he unveils his poetic treasures step by step. The new volume Photographs III brings together early works and combines them with flower studies and studio interiors. Most interesting are Twombly’s photographic studies on his own paintings and sculptures, casting a special light on the interpretation of these works. The book features some 130 hitherto unpublished photographs. It accompanies an exhibition that starts off in Munich in 2011 and will then travel through Europe. With an essay by art and photo historian Hubertus Von Amelunxen.

Achim Hochdörfer. Cy Twombly Vol. IV: Unpublished Photographs 1951-2011. Schirmer Mosel, 2013.

As his final creative surprise, Cy Twombly, one of the greatest 20th-century artists, has given to the world a huge body of photographic works emphasising his unique artistic vision. Contrary to his sharp and teeming drawings his photographs are not sharp at all. They are colourful, soft, and warm and generate a painterly impression. Their colouring is as unique as their fine sense of composition. The photographs reveal the artist’s vision embedded both in the world of objects and the nature that surrounds him. His own artistic creations and collection of art objects in his various homes are a favourite subject of his photographic studies. Twombly’s photographic work offers a new dimension for understanding the artist’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures. The new book features some 120 photographic prints from the Cy Twombly Estate in Gaeta, most of them previously unpublished.

 

Nicholas Cullinan et al. 'Le Temps Retrouvé: Cy Twombly photographe & artistes invites'. Collection Lambert en Avignon musée d'art contemporain. Actes Sud, 2012 book cover (installation view)

 

Nicholas Cullinan et al. Le Temps Retrouvé: Cy Twombly photographe & artistes invites. Collection Lambert en Avignon musée d’art contemporain. Actes Sud, 2012.

Although world-famous for his paintings and sculptures, Cy Twombly (1928-2011) was also a photographer, and his practice of photographing interiors, the sea and still lifes, as well as his paintings and sculptures, spanned the duration of his 60-year career. This massive two-volume catalogue gathers this lesser-known aspect of the artist’s output, contextualising it through an exhibition that Twombly himself curated at the Collection Lambert in Avignon. His selection of works was both original and revealing: Jacques Henri Lartigue’s albums, the marine horizons of Hiroshi Sugimoto, the serial photographs of Ed Ruscha and Sol Lewitt, and the portraits of Diane Arbus and his close friend Sally Mann. With this publication, Twombly also draws a direct lineage between himself and earlier photographer-artists such as Édouard Vuillard and Edgar Degas (a lineage that provides this catalogue’s Proustian subtitle). The two volumes are held together with a blue printed ribbon.

 

 

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Photographs: Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Part 2

December 2020

 

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Seven Yachts in the Bay)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Seven Yachts in the Bay)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
29 x 37cm (11.4 x 14.6 in.)

 

 

A second tranche of photographs from the Australian photographer Max Dupain. This means that Art Blart has one of the largest groups of his work online with larger images.

In this posting I have grouped the images through ships and boats; surf and beach; nudes / montage / surrealism; city and Harbour Bridge; dance and abstraction; portraits and Pictorialism – finishing with two stunning bromoil landscapes.

View Max Dupain photographs Part 1

Dr Marcus Bunyan


All images are used under fair use conditions for the purpose of educational research. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Hero Towing Pamir to Sydney Heads' c. 1940s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Hero Towing Pamir to Sydney Heads
c. 1940s
Gelatin silver print
41 x 39.5cm

 

Pamir was a four-masted barque built for the German shipping company F. Laeisz. One of their famous Flying P-Liners, she was the last commercial sailing ship to round Cape Horn, in 1949. By 1957, she had been outmoded by modern bulk carriers and could not operate at a profit. Her shipping consortium’s inability to finance much-needed repairs or to recruit sufficient sail-trained officers caused severe technical difficulties. On 21 September 1957, she was caught in Hurricane Carrie and sank off the Azores, with only six survivors rescued after an extensive search.

Text from the Wikipedia website

 

A model of Pamir, a four-masted barque

 

A model of Pamir, a four-masted barque that was one of the famous Flying P-Liner sailing ships of the German shipping company F. Laeisz

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Rigging Sails' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Rigging Sails
Nd
Gelatin silver print
25.5 x 25cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Life at the Spit' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Life at the Spit
Nd
Gelatin silver print
23.5 x 22cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Aerial of Waters Edge)' 1930s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Aerial of Waters Edge)
1930s
Gelatin silver print
26 x 24cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Aerial View of Manly Beach)' 1938

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Aerial View of Manly Beach)
1938
Gelatin silver print
23 x 31cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Life Guards Marching with Reel)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Life Guards Marching with Reel)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
34.5 x 30cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Sunbaking by the Wall)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Sunbaking by the Wall)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
30.5 x 32cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Surfboard, Umbrella and Crowds)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Surfboard, Umbrella and Crowds)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
29 x 25.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Stiff Nor'Easter' 1940s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Stiff Nor’Easter
1940s
Gelatin silver print
38 x 40.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Beach Watchers, Bondi' 1940s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Beach Watchers, Bondi
1940s
Gelatin silver print
28.5 x 25.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Surf Race Start' 1947

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Surf Race Start
1947
Gelatin silver print
36 x 37cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Picnicker Leaving the Beach' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Picnicker Leaving the Beach
Nd
Gelatin silver print
30 x 34.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Beach Play' 1937

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Beach Play
1937
Gelatin silver print
30.5 x 36cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Nude Figures)' 1930s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Nude Figures)
1930s
Gelatin silver print
24 x 20cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Nude in Shadow on the Sand)' 1937

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Nude in Shadow on the Sand)
1937
Gelatin silver print
35.5 x 30cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Nude Montage)' 1930s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Nude Montage)
1930s
Gelatin silver print
34.5 x 33cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Standing Nude on Sand)' 1930s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Standing Nude on Sand)
1930s
Gelatin silver print
39 x 33.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Nude Sunbaker)' 1939

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Nude Sunbaker)
1939
Gelatin silver print
35 x 46.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Rhythmic Form)' 1935

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Rhythmic Form)
1935
Gelatin silver print

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Debussy Quartet in G' 1937

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Debussy Quartet in G
1937
Gelatin silver print
30.5 x 23.5cm

 

Max Dupain. '(Solarised Nude and Rays of Light)' 1935

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Solarised Nude and Rays of Light)
1935
Gelatin silver print
12.5 x 9.5cm

 

Max Dupain. '(Nude and Pole)' 1934

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Nude and Pole)
1934
Gelatin silver print
45.5 x 36cm

 

Max Dupain. 'Little Nude' 1938

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Little Nude
1938
Gelatin silver print
41 x 31cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Spontaneous Composition' 1935

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Spontaneous Composition
1935
Gelatin silver print
38 x 41cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Moira in the Mirror)' 1931

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Moira in the Mirror)
1931
Gelatin silver print
25.5 x 28cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Elizabeth Street, Melbourne)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Elizabeth Street, Melbourne)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
40.5 x 39cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Angel Statue, 392 Bus and Terraces)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Angel Statue, 392 Bus and Terraces)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
28 x 38cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Australian Hotel, The Rocks)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Australian Hotel, The Rocks)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
31 x 38cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Hickson Road)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Hickson Road)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
39 x 50.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Darling Harbour from Studio Window' 1940s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Darling Harbour from Studio Window
1940s
Gelatin silver print
32 x 45cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Brooms for Sale' 1950

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Brooms for Sale
1950
Gelatin silver print
31.5 x 44.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'George Street Silhouette' 1940

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
George Street Silhouette
1940
Gelatin silver print
30.5 x 29.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Central Station, Sydney' 1939

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Central Station, Sydney
1939
Gelatin silver print
40 x 39cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Collins Street, Melbourne' 1946

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Collins Street, Melbourne
1946
Gelatin silver print
42 x 39.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Morning, Kings Cross Ice Wagon' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Morning, Kings Cross Ice Wagon
Nd
Gelatin silver print
45 x 40.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Parking, Macquarie Street' 1930s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Parking, Macquarie Street
1930s
Gelatin silver print
39 x 48.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Suburban Terraces' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Suburban Terraces
Nd
Gelatin silver print
28 x 38cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Hobart Siesta' 1947

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Hobart Siesta
1947
Gelatin silver print
38.5 x 38cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Diver, Northbridge Baths' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Diver, Northbridge Baths
Nd
Gelatin silver print
23 x 18.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Milson's Point)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Milson’s Point)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
30.5 x 32.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Harbour Bridge at Dusk)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Harbour Bridge at Dusk)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
31 x 28.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Sydney from South Pylon' 1938

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Sydney from South Pylon
1938
Gelatin silver print
38 x 50.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Harbour Bridge Closed at Night)' 1946

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Harbour Bridge Closed at Night)
1946
Gelatin silver print
18 x 24cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Harbour Bridge with Traffic, Buses and Policeman)' 1940-1950s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Harbour Bridge with Traffic, Buses and Policeman)
1940-1950s
Gelatin silver print
17.5 x 24cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Observatory Hill, Looking North to the Sydney Harbour Bridge' 1940

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Observatory Hill, Looking North to the Sydney Harbour Bridge
1940
Gelatin silver print
40.5 x 40cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Four Graces)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Four Graces)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
37 x 48cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Four Graces)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Four Graces)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
24 x 30.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Design – Suburbia' 1933

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Design – Suburbia
1933
Gelatin silver print
29.5 x 23cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Design in Barred Light' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Design in Barred Light
Nd
Gelatin silver print
25 x 18.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Timelapse Nude Figure)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Timelapse Nude Figure)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
23.5 x 29.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Nude Figure and Light)' 1930s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Nude Figure and Light)
1930s
Gelatin silver print
30.5 x 36cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Portrait and Shadows)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Portrait and Shadows)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
50 x 40cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Domestic Poem, Douglas Stewart' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Domestic Poem, Douglas Stewart
Nd
Gelatin silver print
27 x 26cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Jean' 1936-1937

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Jean
1936-1937
Gelatin silver print
37 x 31cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Tired Soldier in Queensland Train' 1943

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Tired Soldier in Queensland Train
1943
Gelatin silver print
45 x 40.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Hostel Breakfast' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Hostel Breakfast
Nd
Gelatin silver print
31 x 41cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Three Men at Work)' 1940s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Three Men at Work)
1940s
Gelatin silver print
52 x 49cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Waiting for the Queen' 1954

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Waiting for the Queen
1954
Gelatin silver print
38.5 x 39.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Waiting for the Queen)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Waiting for the Queen)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
24.5 x 24cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Enter The Queen' 1954

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Enter The Queen
1954
Gelatin silver print
50 x 50cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Gloucester Landscape' 1951

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Gloucester Landscape
1951
Gelatin silver print
40.5 x 50.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Sundown, Mona Vale Marshes' 1932

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Sundown, Mona Vale Marshes
1932
18.5 x 24cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'The Flight of the Spectres' 1932

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
The Flight of the Spectres
1932
Bromoil
27.5 x 29cm

 

 

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European art research tour: Pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest

Visited September 2019 posted November 2020

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation. 'Scared Stiff' 1996 (detail) from the posting Pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983)
Scared Stiff (detail)
1996
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Pinball Wizard

Thanks to playing pinball, I’ve had my name up in lights as “highest scorer” in New York, Paris and London – just like the perfume bottles – and also Melbourne, Mentone (a suburb of the city), Adelaide and various other places around the world. As luck and skill would have it, on my recent trip around Europe, I scored highest score on Scared Stiff (1996, above and below) in a gay sauna – where else you might ask! – in Budapest. A surreal experience.

Along with my friends Jeff and Woody, I have been an addicted pinball playing wizard for many years. I love the sounds, the colour, the movement; the frenzy of the multiball (during which the flashing lights and noise serve to distract the player from the position of the balls), the exultation of the knocker when you score a replay; and the ultimate elation of becoming the highest scorer on the machine. Good fun is to be had, a test of skill and concentration in order to beat the machine and score a replay.

To say that I was in my element at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest is an understatement. Situated in a suitably dark underground cavern, and after paying the entry fee, you can play all the pinballs for free for as long as you want. There are “more than 140 machines, making the venue one of the biggest ongoing pinball collections in Europe… Some of the exhibition’s older pieces qualify as truly unique antiques, like the first pinball machines ever made with flippers, dating back to 1947.” Photographs of this pinball made by D. Gottlieb & Co. named Humpty Dumpty can be seen in the posting below. This is the oldest pinball I have ever played. Note that the flippers are not at the bottom of the machine, but in three pairs at the side of the machine. I found it very difficult to play, as the ball was easily lost between the large gap at the bottom, once the ball had made its way past the side mounted flippers. Other early idiosyncrasies were the outward facing flippers on Williams’ Jalopy (1951, below), and the fact that you got 5 balls for your money on the early machines, whereas today you only get 3.

The graphic art of the backglass and cabinet art add immeasurably to the playing experience. The art is linked to the theme of the particular machine and is often film, sci-fi, circus or mythically based – innovative, funny and sometimes lascivious – totally un-PC. In games up to the 1980s the eye-catching graphics would often objectify women, depicting them as playthings to be won (Genco’s Triple Action 1948, with graphic roots in the nose art of Second World War bombers), or portray them as available, large-breasted women in skimpy clothing (see Bally’s Wizard 1975; Bally’s Elvira and the Party Monsters 1989; and Bally’s Dr. Dude And His Excellent Ray 1990). In house jokes abound, such as the drum kit being named “The Bootles” in Williams’ Beat Time (1967) and “Gravestone Pizza Dig it!” in Bally’s Elvira and the Party Monsters 1989. My particular favourite graphic in this selection is Williams’ The Machine: Bride of Pinbot (1991) where humans work to repair the Metropolis-like robot, her leg lighting up in millions the closer you reach the jackpot. Completely sexist, completely over the top but fantastic, fantasy art nevertheless.

Ultimately for me, playing pinball is a complete melding between human and machine, a space where you loose yourself in the moment and movement of the ball(s), and the sights and sounds of the machine. On a good day when I am playing I become one with the machine, lost in time and space. Your concentration is so intense that nothing else matters. I remember playing a pinball up in Circular Quay in Sydney, and I was going so well that I had people two deep watching me play. What a blast!

Dr Marcus Bunyan


All iPhone images Dr Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

“Two kind of people in this world; pinball people and video game people. You, Freddy, you’re pinball people.”


Gary Figgis (Ray Liotta) in the movie Cop Land (1997)

 

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation 'Scared Stiff' 1996 (detail) from the posting Pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983)
Scared Stiff (detail)
1996
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation 'Scared Stiff' 1996

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983)
Scared Stiff (detail)
1996
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

“So fun, It’s Scary!”
“Elvira has the features that turn players on.”

 

 

Special scores

High score lists: If a player attains one of the highest scores ever (or the highest score on a given day), they are invited to add their initials to a displayed list of high-scorers on that particular machine. “Bragging rights” associated with being on the high-score list are a powerful incentive for experienced players to master a new machine.

Pinball designers also entice players with the chance to win an extra game or replay. Ways to get a replay might include the following:

Replay Score: An extra game is rewarded if the player exceeds a specified score. Some machines allow the operator to set this score to increase with each consecutive game in which the replay score is achieved, in order to prevent a skilled player from gaining virtually unlimited play on one credit by simply achieving the same replay score in every game.

Special: A mechanism to get an extra game during play is usually called a “special.” Typically, some hard-to-reach feature of the game will light the outlanes (the areas to the extreme left and right of the flippers) for special. Since the outlanes always lose the ball, having “special” there makes it worth shooting for them (and is usually the only time, if this is the case).

Match: At the end of the game, if a set digit of the player’s score matches a random digit, an extra game is rewarded. In earlier machines, the set digit was usually the ones place; after a phenomenon often referred to as score inflation had happened (causing almost all scores to end in 0), the set digit was usually the tens place. The chances of a match appear to be 1 in 10, but the operator can alter this probability – the default is usually 7% in all modern Williams and Bally games for example. Other non-numeric methods are sometimes used to award a match.

High Score: Most machines award 1-3 bonus games if a player gets on the high score list. Typically, one or two credits are awarded for a 1st – 4th place listing, and three for the Grand Champion.

When an extra game is won, the machine typically makes a single loud bang, most often with a solenoid that strikes a piece of metal, or the side of the cabinet, with a rod, known as a knocker, or less commonly with loudspeakers. “Knocking” is the act of winning an extra game when the knocker makes the loud and distinctive noise.

Text from the Wikipedia website

 

Scared Stiff pinball flyer

 

Bally flyer for the Scared Stiff pinball (1996)

“The Sexiest Vampire this side of Transylvania”

 

Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing from left to right, Williams Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991); Data East USA, Inc. Tales from the Crypt (1993); Data East USA, Inc. The Who's Tommy Pinball Wizard (1994)

 

Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing from left to right, Williams Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991); Data East USA, Inc. Tales from the Crypt (1993); Data East USA, Inc. The Who’s Tommy Pinball Wizard (1994)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing from left to right, Gottlieb's 'Caveman' (1982); Gottlieb's the 'Amazing Spiderman' (1980); Gottlieb's 'Circus' (1980); Gottlieb's 'Pink Panther' (1981); and Gottlieb's 'Rocky' (1982)

 

Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing from left to right, Gottlieb’s Caveman (1982); Gottlieb’s the Amazing Spiderman (1980); Gottlieb’s Circus (1980); Gottlieb’s Pink Panther (1981); and Gottlieb’s Rocky (1982)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest

 

Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing at left, Zaccaria's 'FarFalla' (1983); at second left, Game Plan, Inc. 'Attila the Hun' (1984); and at right back, Bally's 'Rolling Stones' (1980)

 

Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing at left, Zaccaria’s FarFalla (1983); at second left, Game Plan, Inc. Attila the Hun (1984); and at right back, Bally’s Rolling Stones (1980)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing from left to right, Gottlieb's 'Centigrade 37' (1977); Recel S. A. 'Criterium 75' (1978); Chicago Coin Machine Mfg. Co. 'Sound Stage' (1976)

 

Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing from left to right, Gottlieb’s Centigrade 37 (1977); Recel S. A. Criterium 75 (1978); Chicago Coin Machine Mfg. Co. Sound Stage (1976)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing at left, Bally's 'Medusa' (1981); and at second left, Bally's 'Xenon' (1980); and at right, Gottlieb's 'Haunted House' (1982)

 

Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing at left, Bally’s Medusa (1981); and at second left, Bally’s Xenon (1980); and at right, Gottlieb’s Haunted House (1982)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing from left to right, Williams 'Beat Time' (1967); Bally's 'Wizard! featuring Ann Margret and Roger Daltrey' (1975); and Bally's 'Capt. Fantastic and the Dirt Brown Cowboy featuring Elton John' (1976)

 

Installation view of the exhibition of pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest showing from left to right, Williams Beat Time (1967); Bally’s Wizard! featuring Ann Margret and Roger Daltrey (1975); and Bally’s Capt. Fantastic and the Dirt Brown Cowboy featuring Elton John (1976)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Budapest Pinball Museum magnet

 

Budapest Pinball Museum magnet

 

Budapest Pinball Museum

Budapest Pinball Museum deploys more than 140 machines (pinball, arcade video cabinets and other games), making the venue one of the biggest ongoing pinball collections in Europe. All of our games are set to free play. Some of the exhibition’s older pieces qualify as truly unique antiques, like the first pinball machines ever made with flippers, dating back to 1947. Some of pinball’s predecessors are also on display, such as the unique bagatelles from the 1880s. It is the most popular museum in Hungary, usually in the top 10 out of some 600 Budapest tourist attractions on Tripadvisor.

Pinballs are time machines

It might as well be the occasion of an anniversary. It was a quarter of a century ago that legendary Data East marketed a pinball called the Time Machine. This name has got a symbolic meaning ever since. Today all pinballs have transformed into a time machine, remnants of an old age. Their natural environment, the arcade has been outdated since then, yet we can find an ever increasing number of pinballs at collectors.

The moment that dwells in our memories will never pass, never fade away: the moment as we were standing in front of the machines or waiting our turn at the arcade. Beyond the lights, colours and sounds of pinballs, a mystical children’s dreamworld is still shaping for us. A dreamworld that is still alive in us adults, even as we read this.

This dreamworld, these lights, these colours and sounds will be reawaken by our ‘time machines’, at our carefully selected exhibition. Our inner Child is inviting us for an encounter we will never forget.

It was the 70’s: that’s where my love for pinball has really started, by the way. I have encountered first with these tinkling machines at camp sites and arcades of my childhood. Pinballs have been thrilling me ever since: anytime the opportunity arises, I try new ones out. I have met many people during the last four years who share my passion for pinball. This also encouraged me to set up an ‘institute’, with pinballs playing the main role, offering however, experiences also for those interested in the history of technology and for the pinball rookie.

In April 2013 I have finally succeeded in my endeavours: I was granted license to open the museum / exhibition. Pbal Gallery opened at last to the public on April 10th, 2014.

You’re welcome to join an unforgettable time travel at the gallery!

Balázs Pálfi (owner)

Text from the Flippermúzeum, Budapest [Online] Cited 03/11/2020

 

Gottlieb. 'Humpty Dumpty' 1947

Gottlieb. 'Humpty Dumpty' 1947 (detail)

Gottlieb. 'Humpty Dumpty' 1947 (detail)

Gottlieb. 'Humpty Dumpty' 1947 (detail)

 

D. Gottlieb & Co. (1931-1977)
Humpty Dumpty
1947
6,500 produced
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

“Announcing… The Greatest Triumph in Pin Game History – Sensationally New Player Controlled Flipper Bumpers..The player will Laugh! The Spectator will Roar! The operator will be Thrilled!”

The very first FLIPPER Game. Harry Mabs invented the Flipper with this machine.

This is the oldest pinball I have ever played. Note that the flippers are not at the bottom of the machine, but in three pairs at the side of the machine. I found it very difficult to play, as the ball was easily lost between the large gap.

 

Humpty Dumpty pinball flyer

 

Humpty Dumpty flyer

 

Williams Electronic Games, Inc. 'Jalopy' 1951 (detail)

Williams Electronic Games, Inc. 'Jalopy' 1951 (detail)

 

Williams Electronic Games, Inc. (1967-1985)
Jalopy
1951
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

Note the outward facing flippers, and the non-central exit lanes. Also, this is a five ball game, whereas later games are only 3 ball games. If you get a replay in 1 ball, you get 10 free replays. YOUR JALOPY is a WINNAH!

 

D. Gottlieb & Co. 'Roto Pool' 1958 (detail)

 

D. Gottlieb & Co. (1931-1977)
Roto Pool (detail)
1958
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Genco Manufacturing Company (Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1931-1958) 'Triple Action' 1948 (detail)

 

Genco Manufacturing Company (Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1931-1958)
Triple Action
1948
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Williams Electronic Games, Inc. 'Tic-Tac-Toe' 1959 (detail)

 

Williams Electronic Games, Inc. (1967-1985)
Tic-Tac-Toe (detail)
1959
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Gottlieb. 'Buckaroo' 1965 (detail)

 

D. Gottlieb & Co. (1931-1977)
Buckaroo (detail)
1965
2,600 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Sega. 'Basketball' 1966

 

Sega
Basketball
1966
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Sega Basketball flyer

 

Sega Basketball flyer

 

D. Gottlieb & Co. 'Dancing Lady' 1966

 

D. Gottlieb & Co. (1931-1977)
Dancing Lady
1966
2,675 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Dancing Lady exists in 2 versions – the Serial-Run had a new, larger Top with a completely new designed Glass in different colours (above). Test-Samples (approximately 100 to 150 Machines) from Summer / Autumn 1966 had slightly different Art on the lower Playboard and a complete different, more colourful and smaller Backglass, because the Serial-Run from December 1966 used the new and much higher Backbox. This new sort of Backbox was used for the Four-Players until 1977 while the Two-Players still used the smaller Backbox.

Text from the Pinside website [Online] Cited 04/11/2020

 

D. Gottlieb & Co. 'Masquerade' 1966 (detail)

 

D. Gottlieb & Co. (1931-1977)
Masquerade (detail)
1966
3,662 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Williams. 'Beat Time' 1967 (detail)

 

Williams Electronic Games, Inc. (1967-1985)
Beat Time (detail)
1967
2,802 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983) 'Wizard!' 1975 (detail)

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983) 'Wizard!' 1975 (detail)

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983)
Wizard! (details)
1975
10,005 produced
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

Wizard!, released in May 1975, was Bally’s highest production flipper game to that date with over 10,000 units produced. The game comes at the tail end of Bally’s electromechanical production schedule, and sets the stage for the company’s solid state success in the years to follow. Widely regarded as one of the first proper licensed games in pinball history, Wizard! features the likenesses of Ann Margret and Roger Daltrey, stars of the 1976 Ken Russell film Tommy (a screen adaptation of the Who’s rock opera of the same name). Other than its classic theme, Wizard! is notable as being the first game to showcase playfield “flip flags”, a feature used on only a handful of other Bally games.

Text from the Pinside website [Online] Cited 04/11/2020

 

Wizard! flyer

 

Wizard! flyer

 

Pinball

Pinball is a type of arcade game, in which points are scored by a player manipulating one or more metallic balls on a play field inside a glass-covered cabinet called a pinball machine. The primary objective of the game is to score as many points as possible. Many modern pinball machines include a “storyline” where the player must complete certain objectives in a certain fashion to complete the story, usually earning high scores for different methods of completing the game. Different numbers of points are earned when the ball strikes different targets on the play field. A drain is situated at the bottom of the play field, partially protected by player-controlled paddles called flippers. A game ends after all the balls fall into the drain a certain number of times. Secondary objectives are to maximise the time spent playing (by earning “extra balls” and keeping the ball in play as long as possible), and to earn bonus credits by achieving a high enough score or through other means.

Backglass

The backglass is a vertical graphic panel mounted on the front of the backbox, which is the upright box at the top back of the machine. The backglass contains the name of the machine and eye-catching graphics; in games up to the 1980s the artwork would often portray large-breasted women in skimpy clothing. The score displays (lights, mechanical wheels, an LED display, or a dot-matrix display depending on the era) would be on the backglass, and sometimes also a mechanical device tied to game play, for example, elevator doors that opened on an image or a woman swatting a cat with a broom such as on Williams’ 1989 “Bad Cats”. For older games, the backglass image is screen printed in layers on the reverse side of a piece of glass; in more recent games, the image is imprinted into a translucent piece of plastic-like material called a translite which is mounted behind a piece of glass and which is easily removable. The earliest games did not have backglasses or backboxes and were little more than playfields in boxes. Games are generally built around a particular theme, such as a sport or character and the backglass art reflects this theme to attract the attention of players. Recent machines are typically tied into other enterprises such as a popular film series, toy, or brand name. The entire machine is designed to be as eye-catching as possible to attract players and their money; every possible space is filled with colourful graphics, blinking lights, and themed objects, and the backglass is usually the first artwork the players see from a distance. Since the artistic value of the backglass may be quite impressive, it is not uncommon for enthusiasts to use a deep frame around a backglass (lighted from behind) and hang it as art after the remainder of the game is discarded.

Text from the Wikipedia website

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983) 'Capt. Fantastic and the Dirt Brown Cowboy' 1976 (detail)

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983)
Capt. Fantastic and the Dirt Brown Cowboy (detail)
1976
16,155 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

‘Capt. Fantastic’ was inspired by the movie ‘Tommy’ and includes a representation of Elton John, as his character from the movie, playing pinball on the backglass. The game name, however, is the title of Elton John’s 1975 autobiographical song and album where “Captain Fantastic” was Elton and “The Brown Dirt Cowboy” was his then-lyricist Bernie Taupin. Included in the song lyrics are the words “From the end of the world to your town” which appear at the very top center of the backglass.

Text from the The Internet Pinball Machine Database website [Online] Cited 04/11/2020

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983) 'Space Invaders' 1980 (detail)

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983)
Space Invaders (detail)
1980
11,400 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

The alien depicted on the backglass was deemed an unlicensed use of the one used in the 1979 Hollywood movie Alien. Some playfield art elements and game sounds were borrowed from the 1978 ‘Space Invaders’ video game which was still popular at the time that this pinball machine came out.

Text from the The Internet Pinball Machine Database website [Online] Cited 04/11/2020

 

D. Gottlieb & Company. 'The Amazing Spider-Man' 1980 (detail)

D. Gottlieb & Company. 'The Amazing Spider-Man' 1980 (detail)

 

D. Gottlieb & Company, a Columbia Pictures Industries Company (1977-1983)
The Amazing Spider-Man (details)
1980
7,625 produced
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

D. Gottlieb & Company (1977-1983) 'Circus' 1980 (detail)

 

D. Gottlieb & Company, a Columbia Pictures Industries Company (1977-1983)
Circus (detail)
1980
1,700 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

“The Greatest Pinball On Earth!”

 

Circus pinball flyer

 

Circus pinball flyer

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983) 'Xenon' 1980 (detail)

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983)
Xenon
1980
11,000 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983) 'Centaur' 1981 (detail)

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983)
Centaur (detail)
1981
3,700 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Centaur pinball flyer

 

Centaur pinball flyer

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983) 'Medusa' 1981

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983)
Medusa (detail)
1981
3,250 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

“Bally MEDUSA… A Legend of Features”

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983) 'Fathom' 1981 (detail)

 

Bally Manufacturing Corporation (1931-1983)
Fathom
1981
3,500 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Williams Electronics Incorporated (1967-1985) 'Hyperball' 1981 (detail)

Williams Electronics Incorporated (1967-1985) 'Hyperball' 1981 (detail)

 

Williams Electronics Incorporated (1967-1985)
Hyperball (details)
1981
5,000 produced
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

D. Gottlieb & Company. 'Rocky' 1982 (detail)

 

D. Gottlieb & Company, a Columbia Pictures Industries Company (1977-1983)
Rocky (detail)
1982
1,504 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Zaccaria. 'Farfalla' 1983 (detail)

Zaccaria. 'Farfalla' 1983 (detail)

 

Zaccaria (Bologna, Italy, 1974-1987)
Farfalla
1983
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

Farfalla is Italian for “butterfly”

 

Bally. 'Elvira and the Party Monsters' 1989 (detail)

Bally. 'Elvira and the Party Monsters' 1989 (detail)

 

Bally (Midway Manufacturing Company) (Chicago, 1988-1999)
Elvira and the Party Monsters (details)
1989
4,000 produced
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

“Monstrous Pinball”
“You’re Gonna Have a Ball!”
“When They Named a Game After Me, It Had to be Built!”

 

Williams Electronic Games (1985-1999) 'Diner' 1990 (detail)

 

Williams Electronic Games (1985-1999)
Diner (detail)
1990
3,552 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Bally (Midway Manufacturing Company) (Chicago, 1988-1999) 'Dr. Dude And His Excellent Ray' 1990 (detail)

Bally (Midway Manufacturing Company) (Chicago, 1988-1999) 'Dr. Dude And His Excellent Ray' 1990 (detail)

 

Bally (Midway Manufacturing Company) (Chicago, 1988-1999)
Dr. Dude And His Excellent Ray (details)
1990
4,000 produced
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

“Get Hip! Earn Respect! Be the Envy of your Friends!”

 

Dr. Dude And His Excellent Ray pinball flyer

 

Dr. Dude And His Excellent Ray flyer

 

Williams Electronic Games (1985-1999) 'FunHouse' 1990 (detail)

Williams Electronic Games (1985-1999) 'FunHouse' 1990 (detail)

Williams Electronic Games (1985-1999) 'FunHouse' 1990 (detail)

 

Williams Electronic Games (1985-1999)
FunHouse (details)
1990
10,750 produced
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

FunHouse backglass

 

FunHouse backglass

 

FunHouse pinball flyer

 

FunHouse pinball flyer

 

Williams Electronic Games (1985-1999) 'The Machine: Bride of Pinbot' 1991 (detail)

Williams Electronic Games (1985-1999) 'The Machine: Bride of Pinbot' 1991 (detail)

 

Williams Electronic Games (1985-1999)
The Machine: Bride of Pinbot (details)
1991
8,100 produced
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

“Here Comes the Bride!”
“Watch Her Turn Heads!”

Artist John Youssi provided us the following information:

“I painted the backglass based on a rough sketch Python [Anghelo] gave me. I re-sketched the whole thing, adding detail while tightening it up. Python was the artist for the cabinet while Kevin O’Connor inked only. I remember Python doing all the art except for the backglass. Plus it all looks like his style.”

Text from the The Internet Pinball Machine Database website [Online] Cited 04/11/2020

 

The Machine: Bride of Pinbot pinball flyer

 

The Machine: Bride of Pinbot flyer

 

Williams Electronic Games (1985-1999) 'Fish Tales' 1992 (detail)

 

Williams Electronic Games (1985-1999)
Fish Tales (detail)
1992
13,640 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

“Catch Em All – Hook Line and Sinker”

 

Bally. 'The Addams Family' 1992 (detail)

 

Bally (Midway Manufacturing Company) (Chicago, 1988-1999)
The Addams Family (detail)
1992
20,270 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Williams Electronic Games (1985-1999) 'The Getaway: High Speed II' 1992 (detail)

 

Williams Electronic Games (1985-1999)
The Getaway: High Speed II (detail)
1992
13,259 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Sega Pinball Incorporated. 'Mary Shelley's Frankenstein' 1995 (detail)

 

Sega Pinball Incorporated (Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1994-1999)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
1995
3,000 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Sega. 'Apollo 13' 1995 (detail)

 

Sega Pinball Incorporated (Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1994-1999)
Apollo 13
1995
2,000 produced
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

“I Believe this will be Our Finest Hour.”
“‘Apollo 13 the Pinball’ is on the Launch Pad with All Systems Go!”
“The First Game in the Universe with 13 Ball Multiball!”

 

 

Flippermúzeum
Radnóti Miklós utca 18.
1137, Budapest, Hungary

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Friday 16.00 – 24.00
Saturday 14.00 – 24.00
Sunday 10.00 – 22.00
Monday/Tuesday: CLOSED

Flippermúzeum website

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Exhibition: ‘Photography’s Last Century: The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 10th March – 30th November, 2020

Curator: Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs

 

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, Hungary' 1917 from the exhibition 'Photography's Last Century: The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - Nov, 2020

 

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, Hungary
1917
Gelatin silver print
1 1/2 in. × 2 in. (3.8 × 5.1cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© 2020 Estate of André Kertész/Higher Pictures

 

This tiny but iconic masterpiece of twentieth-century photography is the second earliest work in the exhibition, and a gem in the Tenenbaum and Lee collection. Made while André Kertész was convalescing from a gunshot wound received while serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, it prefigures by some fifteen years his renowned mirror distortions produced in Paris. Displaying both Cubist and Surrealist influences, the photograph reveals the artist’s commitment to the spontaneous yet analytic observation of fleeting commonplace occurrences – one of the essential and most idiosyncratic qualities of the medium.

 

 

It’s a mystery

There are some eclectic photographs in this posting, many of which have remained un/seen to me before.

I have never seen the above version of Kertész’s Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, Hungary (1917), with wall, decoration and water flowing into the pool at left. The usual image crops these features out, focusing on the distortion of the body in the water, and the lengthening of the figure diagonally across the picture frame. That both images are from the same negative can be affirmed if one looks at the patterning of the water. Even as the exhibition of Kertész’s work at Jeu de Paume at the Château de Tours that I saw last year stated that their version was a contact original… this is not possible unless the image has been cropped.

Other images by Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Outerbridge Jr., Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Pierre Dubreuil, Ilse Bing, Bill Brandt, Dora Maar, Joseph Cornell, Nan Goldin, Laurie Simmons, Robert Gober, Rachel Whiteread, Zanele Muholi have eluded my consciousness until now.

What I can say after viewing them is this.

I am forever amazed at how deep the spirit, and the medium, of photography is… if you give the photograph a chance. A friend asked me the other day whether photographs had any meaning anymore, as people glance for a nano-second at images on Instagram, and pass on. We live in a world of instant gratification was my answer to him. But the choice is yours if you take / time with a photograph, if it possesses the POSSIBILITY of a meditation from its being. If it intrigues or excites, or stimulates, makes you reflect, cry – that is when the photographs pre/essence, its embedded spirit, can make us attest to the experience of its will, its language, its desire. In our presence.

The more I learn about photography, the less I find I know. The lake (archive) is deep – full of serendipity, full of memories, stagings, concepts and realities. Full of nuances and light, crevices and dark passages. To understand photography is a life-long study. To an inquiring mind, even then, you may only – scratch the surface to reveal – a sort of epiphany, a revelation, unknown to others. Every viewing is unique, every interpretation different, every context unknowable (possible).

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. When Minor White was asked, what about photography when he dies? When he is no longer there to influence it? And he simply says – photography will do what it wants to do. This is a magnificent statement, and it shows an egoless freedom on Minor White’s part. It is profound knowledge about photography, about its freedom to change.


Many thankx to the Metropolitan 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.

 

 

This exhibition will celebrate the remarkable ascendancy of photography in the last century, and Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee’s magnificent promised gift of over sixty extraordinary photographs in honour of The Met’s 150th anniversary in 2020. The exhibition will include masterpieces by the medium’s greatest practitioners, including works by Paul Strand, Dora Maar, Man Ray, and László Moholy-Nagy; Edward Weston, Walker Evans, and Joseph Cornell; Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke, and Cindy Sherman.

The collection is particularly notable for its breadth and depth of works by women artists, its sustained interest in the nude, and its focus on artists’ beginnings. Strand’s 1916 view from the viaduct confirms his break with the Pictorialist past and establishes the artist’s way forward as a cutting-edge modernist; Walker Evans’s shadow self-portraits from 1927 mark the first inkling of a young writer’s commitment to visual culture; and Cindy Sherman’s intimate nine-part portrait series from 1976 predates her renowned series of “film stills” and confirms her striking ambition and stunning mastery of the medium at the age of twenty-two.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

 

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) 'Georgia O'Keeffe' 1918 from the exhibition 'Photography's Last Century: The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - Nov, 2020

 

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Georgia O’Keeffe
1918
Platinum print
9 1/2 × 7 1/2 in. (24.1 × 19.1cm)
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

This photograph marks the beginning of the romantic relationship between Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, which transformed each of their lives and the story of American art. The two met when Stieglitz included O’Keeffe, a then-unknown painter, in her first group show at his gallery 291 in May 1916. A year later, O’Keeffe had her first solo show at the gallery and exhibited her abstract charcoal No. 15 Special, seen in the background here. In the coming months and years, O’Keeffe collaborated with Stieglitz on some three hundred portrait studies. In its physical scope, primal sensuality, and psychological power, Stieglitz’s serial portrait of O’Keeffe has no equal in American art.

 

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1958) 'Telephone' 1922 from the exhibition 'Photography's Last Century: The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - Nov, 2020

 

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1958)
Telephone
1922
Platinum print
4 1/2 × 3 3/8 in. (11.4 × 8.5cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

A well-paid advertising photographer working in New York in the 1930s, Paul Outerbridge Jr. was trained as a painter and set designer. Highly influenced by Cubism, he was a devoted advocate of the platinum-print process, which he used to create nearly abstract still lifes of commonplace subjects such as cracker boxes, wine glasses, and men’s collars. With their extended mid-tones and velvety blacks, platinum papers were relatively expensive and primarily used by fine-art photographers like Paul Strand, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz. This modernist study of a Western Electric “candlestick” telephone attests to Outerbridge’s talent for transforming banal, utilitarian objects into small, but powerful sculptures with formal rigour and startling beauty.

 

Edward Weston. 'Anita ("Pear-Shaped Nude")' 1925

 

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Nude
1925, printed 1930s
Gelatin silver print
8 1/2 × 7 1/2 in. (21.6 × 19cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

 

Edward Weston moved from Los Angeles to Mexico City in 1923 with Tina Modotti, an Italian actress and nascent photographer. They were each influenced by, and in turn helped shape, the larger community of artists among whom they lived and worked, which included Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, and many other members of the Mexican Renaissance. In fall 1925 Weston made a remarkable series of nudes of the art critic, journalist, and historian Anita Brenner. Depicting her body as a pear-like shape floating in a dark void, the photographs evoke the hermetic simplicity of a sculpture by Constantin Brancusi. Brenner’s form becomes elemental, female and male, embryonic, tightly furled but ready to blossom.

 

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Boulevard de Strasbourg' 1926

 

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Boulevard de Strasbourg
1926
Gelatin silver print
8 7/8 in. × 7 in. (22.5 × 17.8cm)
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

Eugène Atget became the darling of the French Surrealists in the mid-1920s courtesy of Man Ray, his neighbour in Paris, who admired the older artist’s seemingly straight forward documentation of the city. Another American photographer, Walker Evans, also credited Atget with inspiring his earliest experiments with the camera. A talented writer, Evans penned a famous critique of his progenitor in 1930: “[Atget’s] general note is a lyrical understanding of the street, trained observation of it, special feeling for patina, eye for revealing detail, over all of which is thrown a poetry which is not ‘the poetry of the street’ or ‘the poetry of Paris,’ but the projection of Atget’s person.”

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) 'Self-portrait, Juan-les-Pins, France, January 1927' 1927

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Self-portrait, Juan-les-Pins, France, January 1927
1927
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) 'Shadow, Self-Portrait (Right Profile, Wearing Hat), Juan-les-Pins, France, January 1927' 1927

 

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Shadow, Self-Portrait (Right Profile, Wearing Hat), Juan-les-Pins, France, January 1927
1927
Film negative
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

 

Pierre Dubreuil (French, 1872-1944) 'The Woman Driver' 1928

 

Pierre Dubreuil (French, 1872-1944)
The Woman Driver
1928
Bromoil print
9 7/16 × 7 5/8 in. (24 × 19.3cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

 

Like many other European and American photographers, Pierre Dubreuil was indifferent to the industrialisation of photography that followed the invention and immediate global success of the Kodak camera in the late 1880s. A wealthy member of an international community of photographers loosely known as Pictorialists, he spurned most aspects of modernism. Instead, he advocated painterly effects such as those offered by the bromoil printing process seen here. What makes this photograph exceptional, however, is the modern subject and the work’s title, The Woman Driver. Dubreuil’s wife, Josephine Vanassche, grasps the steering wheel of their open-air car and stares straight ahead, ignoring the attention of her conservative husband and his intrusive camera.

 

Florence Henri (French, born America 1893-1982) 'Windows' 1929

 

Florence Henri (French, born America 1893-1982)
Windows
1929
Gelatin silver print
14 1/2 × 10 1/4 in. (36.8 × 26cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

A peripatetic French American painter and photographer, Florence Henri studied with László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus in Germany in summer 1927. Impressed by her natural talent, he wrote a glowing commentary on the artist for a small Amsterdam journal: “With Florence Henri’s photos, photographic practice enters a new phase, the scope of which would have been unimaginable before today… Reflections and spatial relationships, superposition and intersections are just some of the areas explored from a totally new perspective and viewpoint.” Despite the high regard for her paintings and photographs in the 1920s, Henri remains largely under appreciated.

 

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) '[Rue de Valois, Paris]' 1932

 

Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998)
[Rue de Valois, Paris]
1932
Gelatin silver print
11 1/8 × 8 3/4 in. (28.3 × 22.2cm)
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Estate of Ilse Bing

 

Ilse Bing trained as an art historian in Germany and learned photography in 1928 to make illustrations for her dissertation on neoclassical architecture. In 1930 she moved to Paris, supporting herself as a freelance photographer for French and German newspapers and fashion magazines. Known in the early 1930s as the “Queen of the Leica” due to her mastery of the handheld 35 mm camera, Bing found the old cobblestone streets of Paris a rich subject to explore, often from eccentric perspectives as seen here. She moved to New York in 1941 after the German occupation of Paris and remained here until her death at age ninety-eight.

 

Bill Brandt (British, 1904-1983) 'Soho Bedroom' 1932

 

Bill Brandt (British, 1904-1983)
Soho Bedroom
1932
Gelatin silver print
8 7/16 × 7 5/16 in. (21.4 × 18.5cm)
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

Bill Brandt challenged the standard tenets of documentary practice by frequently staging scenes for the camera and recruiting family and friends as models. In this intimate study of a couple embracing, the male figure is believed to be either a friend or the artist’s younger brother; the female figure is an acquaintance, “Bird,” known for her beautiful hands. The photograph appears with a different title, Top Floor, along with sixty-three others in Brandt’s second book, A Night in London (1938). After the book’s publication, Brandt changed the work’s title to Soho Bedroom to reference London’s notorious Red Light district and add a hint of salaciousness to the kiss.

 

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) '[Woman and Child in Window, Barcelona]' 1932-1934

 

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
[Woman and Child in Window, Barcelona]
1932-1934
Gelatin silver print
11 1/8 × 8 3/8 in. (28.2 × 21.2cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

 

When Dora Maar first traveled to Barcelona in 1932 to record the effects of the global economic crisis, she was twenty-five and still finding her footing as a photographer. To sustain her practice, she opened a joint studio with the film designer Pierre Kéfer. Working out of his parents’ villa in a Parisian suburb, he and Maar produced mostly commercial photographs for fashion and advertising – projects that funded Maar’s travel to Spain. With an empathetic eye, she documents a mother and her child peering out of a makeshift shelter. Adapting an avant-garde strategy, she chose a lateral angle to monumentalise her subjects.

 

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) 'Nude' 1934

 

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Nude
1934
Gelatin silver print
3 5/8 in. (9.2cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

 

The nude as a subject for the camera would occupy Edward Weston’s attention for four decades, and it is a defining characteristic of his achievement and legacy. This physically small but forceful, closely cropped photograph is a study of the writer Charis Wilson. Although presented headless and legless, Wilson tightly crosses her arms in a bold power pose. Weston was so stunned by Wilson when they first met that he ceased writing in his diary the day after he made this photograph: “April 22 [1934], a day to always remember. I knew now what was coming; eyes don’t lie and she wore no mask… I was lost and have been ever since.” Wilson and Weston immediately moved in together and married five years later.

 

 

The exhibition Photography’s Last Century: The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection celebrates the remarkable ascendancy of photography in the last hundred years through the magnificent promised gift to The Met of more than 60 extraordinary photographs from Museum Trustee Ann Tenenbaum and her husband, Thomas H. Lee, in honour of the Museum’s 150th anniversary in 2020. The exhibition will feature masterpieces by a wide range of the medium’s greatest practitioners, including Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Ilse Bing, Joseph Cornell, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Andreas Gursky, Helen Levitt, Dora Maar, László Moholy-Nagy, Jack Pierson, Sigmar Polke, Man Ray, Laurie Simmons, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, Edward Weston, and Rachel Whiteread.

The exhibition is made possible by Joyce Frank Menschel and the Alfred Stieglitz Society.

Max Hollein, Director of The Met, said, “Ann Tenenbaum brilliantly assembled an outstanding and very personal collection of 20th-century photographs, and this extraordinary gift will bring a hugely important group of works to The Met’s holdings and to the public’s eye. From works by celebrated masters to lesser-known artists, this collection encourages a deeper understanding of the formative years of photography, and significantly enhances our holdings of key works by women, broadening the stories we can tell in our galleries and allowing us to celebrate a whole range of crucial artists at The Met. We are extremely grateful to Ann and Tom for their generosity in making this promised gift to The Met, especially as we celebrate the Museum’s 150th anniversary. It will be an honour to share these remarkable works with our visitors.”

“Early on, Ann recognised the camera as one of the most creative and democratic instruments of contemporary human expression,” said Jeff Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs. “Her collecting journey through the last century of picture-making has been guided by her versatility and open-mindedness, and the result is a collection that is both personal and dynamic.”

The Tenenbaum Collection is particularly notable for its focus on artists’ beginnings, for a sustained interest in the nude, and for the breadth and depth of works by women artists. Paul Strand’s 1916 view from the viaduct confirms his break with the Pictorialist past and establishes the artist’s way forward as a cutting-edge modernist; Walker Evans’s shadow self-portraits from 1927 mark the first inkling of a young writer’s commitment to visual culture; and Cindy Sherman’s intimate nine-part portrait series from 1976 predates her renowned series of “film stills” and confirms her striking ambition and stunning mastery of the medium at the age of 22.

Ms. Tenenbaum commented, “Photographs are mirrors and windows not only onto the world but also into deeply personal experience. Tom and I are proud to support the Museum’s Department of Photographs and thrilled to be able to share our collection with the public.”

The exhibition will feature a diverse range of styles and photographic practices, combining small-scale and large-format works in both black and white and colour. The presentation will integrate early modernist photographs, including superb examples by avant-garde American and European artists, together with work from the postwar period, the 1960s, and the medium’s boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and extend up to the present moment.

Photography’s Last Century: The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection is curated by The Met’s Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs.

Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972) 'Tamara Toumanova (Daguerreotype-Object)' October 1941

 

Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972)
Tamara Toumanova (Daguerreotype-Object)
October 1941
Construction with photomechanical reproduction, mirror, rhinestones or sequins, and tinted glass in artist’s frame
Dimensions: 5 1/8 × 4 3/16 in. (13 × 10.6cm)
Frame: 9 3/4 × 8 3/4 × 1 7/8 in. (24.8 × 22.2 × 4.8cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© 2020 The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

 

Joseph Cornell is celebrated for his meticulously constructed, magical shadow boxes that teem with celestial charts, ballet stars, parrots, mirrors, and marbles. Into these tiny theatres he decanted his dreams, obsessions, and unfulfilled desires. Here, his subject is the Russian prima ballerina Tamara Toumanova. Known for her virtuosity and beauty, the dancer captivated Cornell, who met her backstage at the Metropolitan Opera and thereafter saw her as his personal Snow Queen and muse.

 

Tamara Toumanova (Georgian 2 March 1919 – 29 May 1996) was a Georgian-American prima ballerina and actress. A child of exiles in Paris after the Russian Revolution of 1917, she made her debut at the age of 10 at the children’s ballet of the Paris Opera.

She became known internationally as one of the Baby Ballerinas of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo after being discovered by her fellow émigré, balletmaster and choreographer George Balanchine. She was featured in numerous ballets in Europe. Balanchine featured her in his productions at Ballet Theatre, New York, making her the star of his performances in the United States. While most of Toumanova’s career was dedicated to ballet, she appeared as a ballet dancer in several films, beginning in 1944. She became a naturalised United States citizen in 1943 in Los Angeles, California.

Text from the Wikipedia website

 

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004) 'Noto, Sicily, September 5, 1947' September 5, 1947

 

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Noto, Sicily, September 5, 1947
September 5, 1947
Gelatin silver print
6 × 6 in. (15.2 × 15.2cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

Richard Avedon believed this early street portrait of a young boy in Sicily was the genesis of his long fashion and portrait career. On the occasion of The Met’s groundbreaking 2002 exhibition on the artist, curators Maria Morris Hambourg and Mia Fineman described the work as “a kind of projected self-portrait” in which “a boy stands there, pushing forward to the front of the picture. … He is smiling wildly, ready to race into the future. And there, hovering behind him like a mushroom cloud, is the past in the form of a single, strange tree – a reminder of the horror that split the century into a before and after, a symbol of destruction but also of regeneration.”

 

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) 'Philadelphia' 1961

 

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Philadelphia
1961
Gelatin silver print
12 1/16 × 17 15/16 in. (30.7 × 45.5cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

Philadelphia is the earliest dated photograph from a celebrated series of television sets beaming images into seemingly empty rooms that Lee Friedlander made between 1961 and 1970. The pictures provided a prophetic commentary on the new medium to which Americans had quickly become addicted. Walker Evans published a suite of Friedlander’s TV photographs in Harper’s Bazaar in 1963 and noted: “The pictures on these pages are in effect deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate… Taken out of context as they are here, that baby might be selling skin rash, the careful, good-looking woman might be categorically unselling marriage and the home and total daintiness. Here, then, from an expert-hand, is a pictorial account of what TV-screen light does to rooms and to the things in them.”

 

Edward Ruscha (American, b. 1937) 'Self-Service – Milan, New Mexico' 1962

 

Edward Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
Self-Service – Milan, New Mexico
1962
Gelatin silver print
4 11/16 × 4 11/16 in. (11.9 × 11.9cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Ed Ruscha

 

This intentionally mundane work by the Los Angeles–based painter and printmaker, Ed Ruscha, appears in Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), the first of sixteen landmark photographic books he published between 1963 and 1978. The volume established the artist’s reputation as a conceptual minimalist with a mastery of typography, an appreciation for seriality and documentary practice, and a deadpan sense of humour. Early on, he was influenced by the photographs of Walker Evans. “What I was after,” said Ruscha, “was no-style or a non-statement with a no-style.”

 

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953) 'Ivy in the Boston Garden: Back' 1973

 

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Ivy in the Boston Garden: Back
1973
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.6cm)
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
© Nan Goldin

 

While still in college, Nan Goldin spent two years recording performers at the Other Side, a Boston drag bar that hosted beauty pageants on Monday nights. This black-and-white study of Ivy, Goldin’s friend from the bar, walking alone through the Boston Common is one of the artist’s earliest photographs. The portrait evokes the glamorous world of fashion photography and hints at its loneliness. In all of her photographs, Goldin explores the natural twinning of fantasy and reality; it is the source of their pathos and rhythmic emotional beat. A decade after this elegiac photograph, she conceived the first iteration of her 1985 breakthrough colour series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which was presented as an ever-changing visual diary using a slide projector and synchronised music.

 

Laurie Simmons (American, b. 1949) 'Woman/Interior I' 1976

 

Laurie Simmons (American, b. 1949)
Woman/Interior I
1976
Gelatin silver print
5 3/4 × 7 1/2 in. (14.6 × 19.1cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© 2020 Laurie Simmons
Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York

 

Laurie Simmons began her career in 1976 with a series of enchantingly melancholic photographs of toy dolls set up in her apartment. The accessible mix of desire and anxiety in these early photographs resonates with, and provides a useful counterpoint to, Cindy Sherman’s contemporaneous “film stills” such as Untitled Film Still #48 seen nearby. Simmons and Sherman were foundational members of one of the most vibrant and productive communities of artists to emerge in the late twentieth century. Although they did not all see themselves as feminists or even as a unified group of “women artists,” each used the camera to examine the prescribed roles of women, especially in the workplace, and in advertising, politics, literature, and film.

 

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) 'Untitled Film Still #48' 1979

 

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled Film Still #48
1979
Gelatin silver print
6 15/16 × 9 3/8 in. (17.6 × 23.8cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

A lone woman on an empty highway peers around the corner of a rocky outcrop. She waits and waits below the dramatic sky. Is it fear or self-reliance that challenges the unnamed traveler? Does she dread the future, the past, or just the present? So thorough and sophisticated is Cindy Sherman’s capacity for filmic detail and nuance that many viewers (encouraged by the titles) mistakenly believe that the photographs in the series are reenactments of films. Rather, they are an unsettling yet deeply satisfying synthesis of film and narrative painting, a shrewdly composed remaking not of the “real” world but of the mediated landscape.

 

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946 - 1989) 'Coral Sea' 1983

 

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Coral Sea
1983
Platinum print
23 1/8 × 19 1/2 in. (58.8 × 49.5cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

This study of a Midway-class aircraft carrier shows a massive warship not actually floating on the ocean’s surface but seemingly sunken beneath it. The rather minimal photograph is among the rarest and least representative works by Robert Mapplethorpe, who is known mostly for his uncompromising sexual portraits and saturated flower studies, as well as for his mastery of the photographic print tradition. Here, he chose platinum materials to explore the subtle beauty of the medium’s extended mid-grey tones. By rendering prints using the more tactile platinum process, Mapplethorpe hoped to transcend the medium; as he said it is “no longer a photograph first, [but] firstly a statement that happens to be a photograph.”

 

Robert Gober (American, b. 1954) 'Untitled' 1988 (detail)

 

Robert Gober (American, b. 1954)
Untitled (detail)
1988
Gelatin silver print
6 1/2 × 9 7/16 in. (16.5 × 24cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Robert Gober, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

 

Although Robert Gober is not often thought of as a photographer, his conceptual practice has long depended on a camera. From the time of his first solo show in 1984 Gober has documented temporal projects in hundreds of photographs, and today many of his site-specific installations survive as images. His photography resists classification, seeming to split the difference between archival record and independent artwork. Here, across three frames, flimsy white dresses advance and recede into a deserted wood. Gober sewed the garments from fabric printed by the painter Christopher Wool in the course of a related collaboration. Seen together, Gober’s staged photographs record an ephemeral intervention in an unwelcoming, almost fairy-tale landscape.

 

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948) 'Imperial Montreal' 1995

 

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Imperial Montreal
1995
Gelatin silver print
20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61cm)
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

A self-taught expert on the history of photography and Zen Buddhism, Hiroshi Sugimoto posed a question to himself in 1976: what would be the effect on a single sheet of film if it was exposed to all 172,800 photographic frames in a feature-length movie? To visualise the answer, he hid a large-format camera in the last row of seats at St. Marks Cinema in Manhattan’s East Village and opened the shutter when the film started; an hour and a half later, when the movie ended, he closed it. The series (now forty years in the making) of ethereal photographs of darkened rooms filled with gleaming white screens presents a perfect example of yin and yang, the classic concept of opposites in ancient Chinese philosophy.

 

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955) 'Prada II' 1996

 

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955)
Prada II
1996
Chromogenic print
65 in. × 10 ft. 4 13/16 in. (165.1 × 317cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Andreas Gursky / Courtesy Sprüth Magers / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

To produce this quasi-architectural study of a barren luxury store display, Andreas Gursky used newly available software both to artificially stretch the underlying chemical image and to digitally generate the billboard-size print. At ten feet wide, the work is a Frankensteinian glimpse of what would transform the medium of photography over the next two decades. Gursky seems to have fully understood the Pandora’s box he had opened by using digital tools to manipulate his pictures, which put into question their essential realism: “I have a weakness for paradox. For me… the photogenic allows a picture to develop a life of its own, on a two-dimensional surface, which doesn’t exactly reflect the real object.”

 

Rachel Whiteread (English, b. 1963) 'Watertower Project' 1998

 

Rachel Whiteread (English, b. 1963)
Watertower Project
1998
Screenprint with applied acrylic resin and graphite
20 in. × 15 15/16 in. (50.8 × 40.5cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Rachel Whiteread

 

How might one solidify water other than by freezing it? In New York in June 1998, a translucent 12 x 9-foot, 4 1/2-ton sculpture created by Rachel Whiteread landed like a UFO atop a roof at the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street. The artist described the work – a resin cast of the interior of one of the city’s landmark wooden water tanks – as a “jewel in the Manhattan skyline.” This print is a poetic trace of the massive sculpture, which was commissioned by the Public Art Fund. The original work of art holds and refracts light just like the acrylic resin applied to the surface of this print.

 

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled' 2005

 

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled
2005
Chromogenic print
57 × 88 in. (144.8 × 223.5cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

Gregory Crewdson describes his highly scripted photographs as single-frame movies; to produce them, he engages teams of riggers, grips, lighting specialists, and actors. The story lines in most of his photographs centre on suburban anxiety, disorientation, fear, loss, and longing, but the final meaning almost always remains elusive, the narrative unfinished. In this photograph something terrible has happened, is happening, and will likely happen again. A woman in a nightgown sits in crisis on the edge of her bed with the remains of a rosebush on the sheets beside her. The journey from the garden was not an easy one, as evidenced by the trail of petals, thorns, and dirt. Even so, the protagonist cradles the plant’s roots with tender regard.

 

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961) 'Football Landscape #8 (Crenshaw vs. Jefferson, Los Angeles, CA)' 2007

 

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Football Landscape #8 (Crenshaw vs. Jefferson, Los Angeles, CA)
2007
Chromogenic print
48 × 64 in. (121.9 × 162.6cm)
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

High school football is not a conventional subject for contemporary artists in any medium. Neither are freeways nor surfers, each of which are series by the artist Catherine Opie. A professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, Opie spent several years traveling across the United States making close-up portraits of adolescent gladiators as well as seductive, large-scale landscape views of the game itself. Poignant studies of group behaviour and American masculinity on the cusp of adulthood, the photographs can be seen as an extension of the artist’s diverse body of work related to gender performance in the queer communities in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

 

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972) 'Vukani II (Paris)' 2014

 

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972)
Vukani II (Paris)
2014
Gelatin silver print
23 1/2 in. × 13 in. (59.7 × 33cm)
Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

The South African photographer Zanele Muholi is a self-described visual activist and cultural archivist. In the artist’s hands, the camera is a potent tool of self-representation and self-definition for communities at risk of violence. Muholi has chosen the nearly archaic black-and-white process for most of their portraits “to create a sense of timelessness – a sense that we’ve been here before, but we’re looking at human beings who have never before had an opportunity to be seen.” Challenging the immateriality of our digital age, Muholi has restated the importance of the physical print and connected their work to that of their progenitors. In this recent self-portrait, Muholi sits on a bed, sharing a quiet moment of reflection and self-observation. The title, in the artist’s native Zulu, translates loosely as “wake up.”

 

 

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Photographs: Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Part 1

November 2020

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Sydney Harbour Crepuscule' 1937

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Sydney Harbour Crepuscule
1937
Gelatin silver print
32.5 x 47cm

 

Noun. crépuscule m (plural crépuscules) twilight, dusk (the time of the day when the sun sets)

 

 

Iv’e been saving up these images for some time. This, the first of a two-part posting, features many images that are rare online, especially in a large size.

Dupain was a master of the use of light and form (Tea Towel Trio, 1934), an early proponent of Modernist photography in Australia (Silos at Pyrmont; Silos through windscreen, both 1935), an expert in night photography (Mosman Bay at dusk, 1937) and the use of chiaroscuro (Passengers Disembarking from Ferry, 1950s; Newsstand, Nd). He was an innovator in surrealist photography (Night with her train of stars and her gift of sleep, 1936-37), photomontage (Nude Figure with Shell Transposed, 1936), and advertising photography. His nude studies evidence an experimentation towards the representation of the human body (Jean with Wire Mesh, 1938; Nude Figure behind Wire Mesh, 1930s), his portraits possess a sensitivity and feeling towards subject matter (Portrait of Boy in Sunlight, 1936), while his portrayal of Australian culture –  the body as architecture (Bondi, 1939); the myth of the surf lifesaver (Life Guards with Flag and Reel March, Nd); and the bustling metropolis (Rush Hour, Kings Cross, 1938) address the burgeoning self confidence of the Australian nation in the 1930s.

Seemingly, there was nothing that Dupain could not turn his hand too, that he could not photograph.

What strikes me most when looking at his photographs is the precision of his visual inquiry. His focus, his previsualisation, in knowing exactly what he wanted to say in that image – even while shifting genres and points of view. Like the subtle camera positioning of Atget where the angles are not what you would expect, Dupain rarely puts his camera where a mere mortal would stand to take a photograph. He looks, down (Manly, 1940s), up (crouching on his haunches to make the Life Guards and the Bondi couple seem monumental) and across – framing his compositions with diagonals, arches, and waves of people, almost like musical annotation. Everything looks simple and eloquent, elegant, but beneath the surface these are sophisticated images.

Far from being nostalgic, I look at Dupain’s body of work, and then at an individual photograph like Buses, Eddy Avenue (Nd) – and marvel at Dupain’s contemporary rendition (rending?) of time and space. Placing his camera as far to the right as he dared, Dupain captures the diagonal line of the parked buses in sunlight framed by the dark arch of the tunnel, the tram passing from left to right, the perfectly positioned clocktower and willowy flag giving a sense of movement… and then that man, that man, standing stock still at right with his shadow falling in front of him. IF he was not there, the whole focus of the image, the punctum, would be gone. It would just be a serviceable image. But he IS there and Dupain recognised that!

Similarly, in one of my favourite photographs by Dupain, At Newport (1952) “Dupain’s viewpoint turns the top of the wall into a taught line across the picture and his five bathers are strung out along it and held in tension like forms on a wire. As one prepares to dive, his counterweight, the sinewy young man, descends on the dry side. At the picture’s edges, the girls in bathing caps counterbalance the boy with hunched shoulders.” Birds on a wire, notes on a musical stave. Can you imagine being Dupain standing there and recognising that composition and the distorted shadow, in that very instance of its emergence, its flowering, for that ever so brief second in the existence of the cosmos….

Simply put, Max Dupain is the greatest Australian male photographer that has ever lived.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

View Max Dupain photographs Part 2


All images are used under fair use conditions for the purpose of educational research. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Mosman Bay at dusk' 1937

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Mosman Bay at dusk
1937
Gelatin silver print
28 x 37.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Night with her train of stars and her gift of sleep' 1936-1937

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Night with her train of stars and her gift of sleep
1936-37
Gelatin silver print
30 x 36cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Rhythmic Form)' 1935

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Rhythmic Form)
1935
Gelatin silver print
22.5 x 30.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Nude Figure with Trombone Shadow)' 1930s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Nude Figure with Trombone Shadow)
1930s
Gelatin silver print
25 x 17.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Nude Figure with Shell Transposed)' 1936

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Nude Figure with Shell Transposed)
1936
Gelatin silver print
50 x 35.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Two forms' 1939

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Two forms
1939
Gelatin silver print
50.5 x 38.5cm

 

This photograph relates conceptually to Dupain’s experiments with photographs of nudes. According to the vitalist philosophies of the time, the spiralling rounded shell being shaped by nature is feminine, while the hard metallic tool is man-made and represents the masculine principle. Photographed on a plain surface and lit with raking light, the sense of space is ambiguous. Dupain retained an interest in still-lifes throughout his career, returning to them particularly towards the end of his life. In the 1930s his most well-known still-life was Shattered intimacy 1936 (AGNSW collection) where an image of broken glass and a broken classical statue has been solarised, producing a powerful narrative. Two forms is a more contemplative image as the shell and the head of a hammer lie side by side and are of similar scale. Interestingly, the two forms are distant from each other, rather than close together, and their scale gives them equality. It is not known whether Dupain necessarily subscribed to the contemporaneous anxiety about the ‘new woman’, but certainly one can read this image as an examination of difference.

© Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Tea Towel Trio' 1934

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Tea Towel Trio
1934
Gelatin silver print
29.5 x 22cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Still Life' 1935

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Still Life
1935
Gelatin silver print
29.5 x 21.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Blankets' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Blankets
Nd
Gelatin silver print
31 x 24cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Male Nude with Discus)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Male Nude with Discus)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
39 x 32cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Dart' 1935

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Dart
1935
Gelatin silver print
50 x 37.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Dart' 1935

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Dart
1935
Gelatin silver print

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Sleeping Boy' 1941

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Sleeping Boy
1941
Gelatin silver print

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Portrait of Boy in Sunlight' 1936

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Portrait of Boy in Sunlight
1936
Gelatin silver print
29 x 26cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Jean with Wire Mesh' 1938

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Jean with Wire Mesh
1938
Gelatin silver print
49.5 x 39.5cm

 

In 1937, [Jean] Bailey posed for Jean with wire mesh, which some experts hail as the single most powerful image ever taken by Max Dupain, generally regarded as Australia’s greatest lensman.

It’s more subtle than his most famous image, Sunbaker, also shot in 1937. It’s less frozen in time than his striking scenes of wartime Australians serving in New Guinea. It’s more universal than his evocative tableaux of shearers, cattle drovers, miners and “six o’clock swillers”. And it’s less contrived than the commissioned portraits he took of wealthier women for the equivalent of today’s social pages.

Of all the many women who posed for his camera, Bailey was regarded as Dupain’s muse. Even by her own admission, she was not the most beautiful woman in 1930s Sydney.

In some pictures, by other photographers, she looks quite plain. …

But Dupain saw something special in her, though even Bailey does not know what it was.

“It’s not enormously erotic,” says [Alan] Davies. “But it is incredibly sensual, masterful in its use of light and shade. To photograph someone with her forehead in full sunlight and the rest of her figure cloaked in shadow is an extraordinary technical achievement. Most photographers would regard it as professional suicide. They wouldn’t attempt it.”

The image, he says, “is an astonishing masterpiece of chiaroscuro”. Unlike so many of Dupain’s images, this – and another outstanding work in the exhibition of an unknown model called Nude with pole – are timeless, betraying none of the nostalgia for which Dupain is so often noted.

White, who under Dupain’s tutelage became an accomplished photographer herself, says simply, “I think Jean with wire mesh is his most beautiful image. It leaves Sunbaker for dead.”

Anonymous. “Portrait of a lady,” on The Sydney Morning Herald website, July 12, 2003 [Online] Cited 24/10/2020

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Nude Figure behind Wire Mesh)' 1930s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Nude Figure behind Wire Mesh)
1930s
Gelatin silver print
50.5 x 40 cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Hands of a Dancer' 1935

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Hands of a Dancer
1935
Gelatin silver print
29 x 27.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Artist and Model' 1938

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Artist and Model
1938
Gelatin silver print
35.5 x 30.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Super-Imposed Woman and Night Cityscape)' 1937

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Super-Imposed Woman and Night Cityscape)
1937
Gelatin silver print
46 x 35cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Fire Stairs at Bond Street Studio (Solarised)' 1935

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Fire Stairs at Bond Street Studio (Solarised)
1935
Gelatin silver print
30 x 21.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Fire Stairs at Bond Street Studio' 1930s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Fire Stairs at Bond Street Studio
1930s
Gelatin silver print
24.5 x 9cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Olive Cotton in Wheat Fields)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Olive Cotton in Wheat Fields)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
30 x 30cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Fire Stairs at Bond Street)' 1934

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Fire Stairs at Bond Street)
1934
Gelatin silver print
26 x 21cm

 

Max Dupain is Australia’s most celebrated modernist photographer. Born in the Sydney, Dupain practiced photography as a teenager, receiving his first camera in 1924. In 1929 he joined the New South Wales Photographic Society, and in 1930 was employed in the studio of prominent Pictorialist Cecil Bostock, where he received solid training in all aspects of photography. He established his own studio in Sydney in 1934, servicing commercial clients and producing still lifes, figure photography and portraits. In his personal work, he explored the surrealist aesthetic of Man Ray, experimenting with formal abstraction and montage. With the outbreak of World War II, Dupain worked with the Camouflage Unit in 1941, travelling to New Guinea and the Admiralty Islands. His photography of the 1960s and 70s was shaped by architectural interests and he fostered working relationships with several prominent architects, most notably Harry Seidler.

Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website [Online] Cited 24/10/2020

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Silos through windscreen' 1935

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Silos through windscreen
1935
Gelatin silver print
40 x 43cm

 

While cars and machinery were rarely Max Dupain’s personal choice of forms to photograph, his Silos through windscreen 1935 embraces the new age from a new perspective. It is an uncharacteristically complex composition. The view of the silos from the front seat shows off the car’s smart dashboard; at the same time his camera records a fragment of a brick factory reflected in the rear vision mirror.

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Silos at Pyrmont' 1935

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Silos at Pyrmont
1935
Gelatin silver print
49 x 37cm

 

Pyrmont silos is one of a number of photographs that Dupain took of these constructions in the 1930s. In all cases Dupain examined the silos from a modernist perspective, emphasising their monumentality from low viewpoints under a bright cloudless sky. Additionally, his use of strong shadows to emphasise the forms of the silos and the lack of human figures celebrates the built structure as well as providing no sense of scale. Another photograph by Dupain in the AGNSW collection was taken through a car windscreen so that the machinery of transport merges explicitly with industrialisation into a complex hard-edge image of views and mirror reflections. There were no skyscrapers in Sydney until the late 1930s so the silos, Walter Burley Griffin’s incinerators and the Sydney Harbour Bridge were the major points of reference for those interested in depicting modern expressions of engineering and industrial power.

Dupain was the first Australian photographer to embrace modernism. One of his photographs of the silos was roundly criticised when shown to the New South Wales Photographic Society but Dupain forged on regardless with his reading, thinking and experimentation. Some Australian painting and writing had embraced modernist principles in the 1920s, but as late as 1938 Dupain was writing to the Sydney Morning Herald:

“Great art has always been contemporary in spirit. Today we feel the surge of aesthetic exploration along abstract lines, the social economic order impinging itself on art, the repudiation of the ‘truth to nature criterion’ … We sadly need the creative courage of Man Ray, the original thought of Moholy-Nagy, and the dynamic realism of Edouard [sic] Steichen.”1

1/ Dupain, M. 1938, ‘Letter to the editor’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 March

© Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Bondi' 1939

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Bondi
1939
Gelatin silver print
37 x 37.5cm

 

Dupain was one of the first Australian photographers to embrace Modernism. The simplicity of form and unusually low vantage point of this picture reflect the influence of German photography that he saw in the journal Das Deutsche Lichtbild. At first Dupain preferred another version of the image; when it was published in 1948, the photograph shows the woman standing with her arms folded. Here, she leans toward the man, their bodies slightly overlapping. Standing parallel to the picture plane, their bodies and those of the young men at their sides form a pyramid – one of Dupain’s preferred forms at this time.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'At Newport' 1952

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
At Newport
1952
Gelatin silver print
25 x 29cm

 

There is a strong sense of masculinity found in many of Dupain’s beach works. In At Newport this is emphasised by the strong, angular lines of the figures, an image that seems to capture the essence of male youth at the beach. In this image, three male swimmers are positioned in the foreground of a beachside pool setting. The long shadows of the late summer sun place further emphasis on the angularity and thus the masculinity that is a feature of this image.

Text from the Annette Larkin Fine Art website

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'At Newport Baths' 1952

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
At Newport
1952
Gelatin silver print
45.0 x 40.0cm
National Gallery of Australia
Purchased 1976

 

Dupain took At Newport in 1952 at the Newport Baths, as it was then known, a sea-water pool next to the Pacific Ocean about 20 miles north of Sydney. It’s an ambiguous photograph in more ways than one because the angle of the shot makes it seem as if the tremendous weight of the sea is being held back by nothing stronger than a low wall, with the water rising almost to the brim. Dupain’s viewpoint turns the top of the wall into a taught line across the picture and his five bathers are strung out along it and held in tension like forms on a wire. As one prepares to dive, his counterweight, the sinewy young man, descends on the dry side. At the picture’s edges, the girls in bathing caps counterbalance the boy with hunched shoulders. The distant pillars along the side of the pool duplicate these intervals. There appears to be some indecision, though, about the crop Dupain intended on the right. A print in his archive shows space between the right-hand girl and the edge, which is better, while a print in a national collection omits her entirely. Losing her disembodied head and intense concentration on the diver weakens the photograph. (There is also a second picture of bathers from the same group (below))

At Newport can be straightforwardly construed as another celebration by Dupain the dedicated modernist of the vitalising power of sunlight and the exuberant Australianness of the beach, but there is an alternative way of reading it. An essay in Dupain’s Sydney (1999) notes that the photographer didn’t like people very much, valued solitude, and would rather be doing something than have to talk. (He was remarkably industrious, leaving an archive of more than a million pictures.) This group of bathers is together but disconnected. Two faces are hidden and unknowable, looking down at the water, and the others are half-concealed in shadow, lost in their own thoughts. Then there is the ungainly shape cast by the young man’s long legs, which serves as a foil to the dark tones of the rising land. The shadow introduces an element of discord and adds to the mood of subtle disquiet.

Rick Poynor. “Exposure: Newport Baths by Max Dupain,” on the Design Observer website 23/06/2015 [Online] Cited 24/10/2020

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Newport Baths I' 1952

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Newport Baths I
1952
Gelatin silver print
23.5 x 25.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Bondi Couple' 1950s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Bondi Couple
1950s
Gelatin silver print
20.5 x 20.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Manly' 1940s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Manly
1940s
Gelatin silver print
47 x 37.5cm

 

From 1938, and throughout the late 1940s after his return from the war, Dupain took many photographs of Manly beach from the high vantage point offered by its iconic shark tower. These landscapes often found striking diagonal obliques in the convergence of incoming surf, the activities of lifesavers, the lines of beachgoers, and the surrounding modernist architecture, including promenades. These photographs tell us as much about Dupain’s leisure time as they do his artistic interests: the beach was ‘how I used to spend my weekends’, Dupain later wrote. More than its convenience, Manly offered a very local experience of modernity. Dupain strongly believed in and advocated for a contemporary photography, that it was important to consciously be part of the age into which one was born.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Life Guards with Flag and Reel March)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Life Guards with Flag and Reel March)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
26 x 26.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Life Savers at Attention in a Row)' 1940s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Life Savers at Attention in a Row)
1940s
Gelatin silver print
25.5 x 30 cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Lifesavers' 1940s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Lifesavers
1940s
Gelatin silver print
36.5 x 47.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Passengers Disembarking from Ferry)' 1950s

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Passengers Disembarking from Ferry)
1950s
Gelatin silver print
30.5 x 30.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Male Commuters departing Ferry)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Male Commuters departing Ferry)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
27 x 26cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Newsstand)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Newsstand)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
36 x 30.5cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Meat Queue, Sydney' 1946

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Meat Queue, Sydney
1946
Gelatin silver print
40.5 x 50.5cm

 

Meat queue, Sydney was one in a series of pictures Sydney photographer Max Dupain undertook for the Department of Information. When interviewed by curator Helen Ennis in 1991 Dupain said:

“We were doing a story on queues after the war. They were all over the place – queues for buses, vegetables, fruit. I just happened to come across this butcher shop in Pitt Street, I think it was. Here they were all lined up, and I went around it, took a number of pictures, ultimately ending up with this sort of architectural approach with four of five females all dressed in black with black hats, not looking too happy about the world. Suddenly one of them breaks the queue when I’m focused up all ready to go, pure luck.”1

The solidity of the linear figures taken from mid distance beneath a meat coupon scale which will weigh a proportion of meat with the allowable coupons democratises the women. The picture is given a sudden focus as the central figure decides to move from the queue and unwanted contact is made with the woman ahead. Described as both a documentary photograph, but not necessarily a social comment, the economic food-rationing of postwar Australia is shown in this clear modernist image of black-and-white shapes in shallow space. Form rather than content defines this image. The central figure in a lighter coloured coat is balanced on either side by the darker coats as the black hats, which make a wave along the horizontal, parallel the line of meat hooks.

1/ Ennis, H. 1991, Max Dupain: photographs, Australian National Gallery, Canberra p. 18.

© Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Morning Commuters, The Kabu, Circular Quay' 1938

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Morning Commuters, The Kabu, Circular Quay
1938
Gelatin silver print
32.5 x 30cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Tram Abstraction' 1930

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Tram Abstraction
1930
Gelatin silver print
23.5 x 20cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) '(Buses, Eddy Avenue)' Nd

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
(Buses, Eddy Avenue)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
17.5 x 17cm

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Rush Hour, Kings Cross' 1938

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Rush Hour, Kings Cross
1938
Gelatin silver print

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Rush Hour, Kings Cross' 1938

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Rush Hour, Kings Cross
1938
Gelatin silver print

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Rush Hour, Kings Cross' 1938

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Rush Hour, Kings Cross
1938
Gelatin silver print
40.5 x 42cm

 

 

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European art research tour: Vasarely Museum, Budapest permanent exhibition

Visited September 2019 posted November 2020

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Zebras. Prekinetic study (Preliminary study for the kinetic theory. Graphic Period, 1929-1939)' 1939 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Zebras. Prekinetic study (Preliminary study for the kinetic theory. Graphic Period, 1929-1939) (installation view)
1939
Gouache, pencil, colour and white chalk on paper
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

While on my European art trip in 2019, I ventured by tram to the deepest suburbs of Budapest to visit the Vasarely Museum on a Sunday – one of only three days the museum is open. The journey was an experience in itself. The reward was that I got to see an artists work I have always admired (I have a Vasarely serigraph in my collection), set in one of the most beautiful art galleries I have ever seen in my life. What’s not too like.

Critically, I got to examine Vasarely’s work up close and personal, on a large scale. I noted how gestural his work is, even as it is geometric – emerging from his Gesture Drawings. Ground Plans of 1946. There is a mesmerising flow to his compositions, even as they are supposedly set, fixed, in their mathematical complexity.

Even as Josef Albers explored colour in the belief that colours have no inherent emotional associations, so Vasarely investigated the formula for a “plastic alphabet”, a universal visual language based on the structural interplay of form and colour, a programmed language with an infinite number of form and colour variations. Through serialisation and the processes of re-creation, multiplication and expansion, “in pictures based on the mutual association between forms and colours, he claimed to perceive a ‘grammar’ of visual language, with which a set of basic forms making up a composition could be arranged into a system similar to musical notation… He regarded colour-forms as the cells or molecules out of which the universe was made.”

Don’t believe all that is written on the can. While both artists want to euthanise the authenticity of the hand, the feeling of he eye, and the beauty of the object through an investigation of concept, form and replication, when in the presence of these paintings, once, twice, three times, one cannot deny the intimacy of their construction.

Unlike flat reproductions of these paintings in books, their serial reproduction, in these installation photographs you can see the ripples in the surface of these paintings. Their meticulous, hand-crafted production. For example, look at the surface of paintings such as Lom-Lan 2 (1953, below); Marsan (1950 / 1955 / 1958, below); and Sonora (1973, below). From a distance their patterns are stable but optically disturbing. Up close, their surface dis/integrates into swirls and ripples at a molecular level. The musical annotation – colour, form, pattern, repetition – of these optical illusions is subsumed into an aura, an earthly divination of a transient ‘planetary folklore’.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

.
All iPhone images © Dr Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

Downstairs galleries

 

View of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest

 

View of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

View of one of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at second left, Gesture Drawings. Ground Plans (1946); and at second right, Composition (1948)

 

View of one of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at second left, Gesture Drawings. Ground Plans (1946); and at second right, Composition (1948)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Gesture Drawings. Ground Plans' 1946 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Gesture Drawings. Ground Plans (installation view)
1946
Pencil on paper
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

The Galerie Denise René opened in 1944. Its first exhibition was Les dessins et composition de Vasarely (Vasarely’s drawings and graphic compositions). Surrealism influenced his works, and even caught the attention of André Breton. As Denise René recalled: ‘André Breton was even convinced we had found a Surrealist painter; it was mostly the trompe l’œils that made him think so, which abounded in Vasarely’s graphic innovations. Breton invited me and Vasarely to visit him in rue Fontaine. Éluard and Breton both came to see the exhibition, though on different days because Éluard had broken with Breton and Surrealism.’ Vasarely had a painterly turn. Shortly he made experimentations in gesture painting. (Victor Vasarely, Jazz, 1942, inv. V. 195) Later, despite his artistic discoveries, he described his earliest period as Les Fausses Routes (Wrong Roads).

Text from the Vasarely Museum website [Online] Cited 26/10/2020

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Man in motion. Study of Motion (The Man)' 1943

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Hombre en movimiento – Estudio del movimiento (El hombre)
Man in motion. Study of Motion (The Man)
1943
Tempera on plywood
117 x 132cm
Vasarely Museum Budapest

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Composition' 1948 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Composition (installation view)
1948
Oil on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Magyar Grafika (Hungarian Graphics). 'Az Ujság Hirdetés' (The Newspaper is Advertised) Edition 12 1931 (installation view)

 

Magyar Grafika (Hungarian Graphics)
Az Ujság Hirdetés (The Newspaper is Advertised) (installation view)
Edition 12
1931
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

A journal for the development of graphic industries and related professions. Budapest, 1. 1920 – 13. 1932

 

Installation view of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest

Installation view of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest

Installation view of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest

 

Installation views of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest with in the last photo at left, Versant (1952)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Versant' 1952 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Versant (installation view)
1952
Acrylic on plywood
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest

 

Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest with at right, Lom-Lan 2 (1953)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Lom-Lan 2' 1953 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Lom-Lan 2 (installation view)
1953
Oil on fibreboard
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation views on one of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing the painting 'Amir ("Rima")' 1953

Installation views on one of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing the painting 'Amir ("Rima")' 1953

 

Installation views on one of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing the painting Amir (“Rima”) 1953 (installation view)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Amir ("Rima")' 1953 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Amir (“Rima”) (installation view)
1953
Acrylic on plywood
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'MORA' Oeuvre profonde cinétique 1954/1960 (installation view)

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'MORA' Oeuvre profonde cinétique 1954/1960 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
MORA (Oeuvre profonde cinétique) (installation views)
1954/1960 (?)
Deep kinetic object, silk screen on plexiglas, glass and steel
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view one of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, 'Orion noir' (1970); and at right, 'Norma' (1962-1979)

 

Installation view one of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Orion noir (1970); and at right, Norma (1962-1979)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Orion noir' 1970

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Orion noir
1970
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Norma' 1962-1979 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Norma (installation view)
1962-1979
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest

 

Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Chess Set' 1980 (installation view)

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Chess Set' 1980 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Chess Set
1980
Multiple, plexiglass
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of one of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, 'Marsan-2' (1964/1974); at centre, 'Gizeh' (1955/1962); and at right, 'Marsan' (1950/1955/1958)

 

Installation view of one of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Marsan-2 (1964/1974); at centre, Gizeh (1955/1962); and at right, Marsan (1950/1955/1958)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Marsan-2' 1964/1974 (installation view)

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Marsan-2' 1964/1974 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Marsan-2 (installation views)
1964/1974
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Gizeh' 1955/1962 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Gizeh (installation view)
1955/1962
Oil on canvas
Donation of Victor Vasarely, 1970
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Marsan' 1950/1955/1958 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Marsan (installation view)
1950/1955/1958
Oil on canvas
Donation of Victor Vasarely, 1970
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Naissances' 1954/1960 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Naissances (installation view)
1954/1960
From the album Hommage à Johann Sebastian Bach (Éd. Pierre belford, Paris, 1973. Éxemplaire XIV/XX), Supplement no. 3.
Deep kinetic object, plexiglass, silk screen
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Zilia' 1981 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Zilia (installation view)
1981
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Stridio-Z' 1976-1977 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Stridio-Z (installation view)
1976-1977
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Tri-Axo' 1972/1976 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Tri-Axo (installation view)
1972/1976
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

William Seitz. 'The responsive eye' Museum of Modern Art, 1965

 

William Seitz
The responsive eye (book cover)
Museum of Modern Art, 1965
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest

 

Installation view of the downstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing 'Yllus' (1978)

 

Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing Yllus (1978)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Yllus' 1978 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Yllus
1978
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Upstairs galleries

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing 'V.P. 102' (1979)

 

Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing V.P. 102 (1979)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'V.P. 102' 1979 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
V.P. 102 (installation view)
1979
Acrylic on cardboard, mounted on plywood
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left in the display cabinet, 'KROA-MC' (1969); and at centre, 'Quivar (Ouivar)' (1974)

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left in the display cabinet, KROA-MC (1969); and at centre, Quivar (Ouivar) (1974)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, 'Eroed-Pre' (1978); and at right, 'Quivar (Ouivar)' (1974)

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Eroed-Pre (1978); and at right, Quivar (Ouivar) (1974)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Eroed-Pre' 1978 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Eroed-Pre (installation view)
1978
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Quivar (Ouivar)' 1974 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Quivar (Ouivar) (installation view)
1974
Collage, gouache on cardboard, mounted on plywood
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at right, 'Stri-oet' (1979)

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at right, Stri-oet (1979)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Stri-oet' 1979 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Stri-oet (installation view)
1979
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left centre, 'Stri-oet' (1979); and in the display cabinet, 'KROA-MC' (1969)

 

Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left centre, Stri-oet (1979); and in the display cabinet, KROA-MC (1969). Love the reflection of the colours on the wall behind!
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing 'KROA-MC' (1969)

 

Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing KROA-MC (1969)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, 'Bull' (1973/74); and at centre left, 'Orion noir' (1963)

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Bull (1973/74); and at centre left, Orion noir (1963)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Bull' 1973/1974 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Bull (installation view)
1973/1974
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Vega Mir' 1954/1960 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Vega Mir (Oeuvre profonde cinétique) (installation view)
1954/1960
From the album Hommage à Johann Sebastian Bach (Éd. Pierre belford, Paris, 1973. Éxemplaire XIV/XX), Supplement no. 1.
Multiple, silk screen on anodised aluminium
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Vega Mir' 1954/1960 (installation view detail)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Vega Mir (Oeuvre profonde cinétique) (installation view detail)
1954/1960
From the album Hommage à Johann Sebastian Bach (Éd. Pierre belford, Paris, 1973. Éxemplaire XIV/XX), Supplement no. 1.
Multiple, silk screen on anodised aluminium
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan. Self portrait with ‘Vega Mir’ 2019

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, 'Bi. Octans' (1979)

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Bi. Octans (1979)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Bi. Octans' 1979 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Bi. Octans (installation view)
1979
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, 'Kotzka' (1973-1976); and at right, 'Trybox' (1979)

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Kotzka (1973-1976); and at right, Trybox (1979)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Kotzka' 1973-1976 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Kotzka (installation view)
1973-1976
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Trybox' 1979 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Trybox (installation view)
1979
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at centre right, 'Vonal-Ket' (1972/1977)

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at centre right, Vonal-Ket (1972/1977)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Vonal-Ket' 1972/1977 (installation view)

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Vonal-Ket' 1972/1977 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Vonal-Ket (installation views)
1972/1977
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at centre left, 'Sonora' (1973)

 

Installation view of the upstairs galleries of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at centre left, Sonora (1973)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997) 'Sonora' 1973 (installation view)

 

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Sonora (installation view)
1973
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Vasarely Museum
1033, Budapest Szentlélek tér 6
Phone: + 36 1 388 7551

Opening hours:
Friday 11am – 4.00pm
Saturday – Sunday 11am – 4.00pm

Vasarely Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Thomas Ruff’ at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf

Exhibition dates: 12th September, 2020 – 7th February, 2021

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'press++01.38' 2015 from the exhibition 'Thomas Ruff' at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Sept 2020 - Feb 2021

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
press++01.38
2015
C-Print
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

 

Thomas Ruff is the true Renaissance man of contemporary photography. No greater compliment can be given.

His career in photography, as evidenced through the numerous bodies of work seen in this posting, has been an inquiry into the conceptualisation, status, presence, presentation, and representation of photographs in different contexts and media, through different technologies. A meditation on, and mediation into, the origins and purposes of photography and the interventions human beings enact to affect their outcomes.

His work “explores the most diverse genres and historical varieties of photography…”. For example, in the series press he combines front and back of an image, disrupting the reading of the image with contemporary hieroglyphs. In Zeitungsfotos he investigates the power of press photos and their deconstruction through the dot structure of the image. In Tableaux chinois he examines the use of photographs in political propaganda and looks at the artistic stylisation of the image. In one of my favourite series, jpeg, Ruff focuses on the pixellation and deconstruction of the image in compressed JPEG format photographs where, at a distance, the whole is more than the sum of the parts. This reminds me of the technique I witnessed when visiting Monet’s huge canvases of waterlilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris – how when you got up close to the canvases, there were huge daubs and mounds of paint accreted on the surface of the paintings which made no sense at close range. It was only when you stepped back that it all made sense.

In essence this is what grounds the work of Thomas Ruff: that he digs and unearths the hidden strands, the interweaving, that lies beneath the surface of photographies. He intervenes in the negative, the print, the newspaper photograph, the light, the camera and the physicality of the print. He turns these literally hidden connections into lateral images – side views of the familiar that touch the human and the machine from different points of view.

To think of all these ideas, concepts, and then to develop them and bring them together in holistic bodies of work that the viewer remembers – and there is the rub, for so much contemporary photography is unremarkable, mortal – lifts Ruff’s photographs beyond the realm of time and space. In their distortions, their sublime beauty, their critical thinking, they become i/mortal. They become the complexity that is us.

Dr Marcus Bunyan


Many thankx to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

“To understand how a pictorial genre actually works, I have to produce a series; I want to uncover the secret behind image generation.”


Thomas Ruff

 

 

Thomas Ruff (b. 1958) is one of the internationally most important artists of his generation. Already as a student in the class of the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art in the early 1980s, he chose a conceptual approach to photography, which continues to determine his handling of the most diverse pictorial genres and historical possibilities of photography to this day.

Thomas Ruff’s contribution to contemporary photography thus consists in a special way in the development of a form of photography created without a camera: He uses images that have already been taken and that have already been distributed and optimised for specific purposes in other, largely non-artistic contexts. Ruff’s image sources for these series range from photographic experiments of the nineteenth century to photographs taken by space probes. He examined the archive processes of large image agencies and the pictorial politics of the People’s Republic of China. But also pornographic and catastrophic images from the Internet form starting points for his own series of works created over the past twenty years that have increasingly been developed on the computer.

They originate from newspapers, magazines, books, archives, and collections or were simply accessible to everyone on the Internet. In each series, Ruff explores the technical conditions of photography in the confrontation with these different pictorial worlds. At the same time, he focuses on the afterlife of images in publications, archives, databases, and on the Internet.

Short Biography Thomas Ruff

Thomas Ruff was born in Zell am Harmersbach in 1958 and studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art from 1977 to 1985. From 2000 to 2005, he was himself Professor of Photography there. He first received international attention in 1987 with his series of larger-than-life portraits of friends and acquaintances who, as in passport photographs, gazed apathetically into the camera. In 1995, he represented Germany at the 46th Venice Biennale, together with Katharina Fritsch and Martin Honert. His works are collected internationally and are represented in numerous institutional collections.

Press release from the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen

 

Camera-less Photography

Thomas Ruff (b. 1958) is one of the internationally most important artists of his generation. Already as a student of the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art in the early 1980s, he chose a conceptual approach to photography. His work, which explores the most diverse genres and historical varieties of photography, represents one of the most versatile and surprising positions within contemporary art. The comprehensive exhibition at K20 focuses on series of pictures from two decades in which the artist hardly ever used a camera himself. Instead, he appropriated existing photographic material from a wide variety of sources for his often large-format pictures.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'Zeitungsfoto 014' 1990 from the exhibition 'Thomas Ruff' at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Sept 2020 - Feb 2021

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Zeitungsfoto 014
1990
C-Print
16.8 x 42.4cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

The Power of Press Photos

Where do we use photos? What happens when photos are printed? How do aesthetics and statements change?

The artist explores these questions in various series, in which he draws on image material from other photographers, processes this, and thematises contexts. For his series Zeitungsfotos, the artist collected and processed newspaper photos to test the familiarity with the motifs and their reliability as carriers of information. In the series press++, he reveals the work traces of newspaper staff in conflict with the photos that were taken especially for use in the newspaper. In his new series, Tableaux chinois, he examines the use of photographs in political propaganda and reveals the artistic stylisation of the photos with reference to the feasibility and time-related aesthetics of the printed products.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'Zeitungsfoto 060' 1990

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Zeitungsfoto 060
1990
C-Print
17.3 x 13.4cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Zeitungsfotos

The works in the series Zeitungsfotos (Newspaper Photos) were created between 1990 and 1991 as colour prints framed with passe-partouts. They are based on a collection of images which the artist cut out of German-language daily and weekly newspapers between 1981 and 1991. The selected motifs from politics, business, sports, culture, science, technology, history, or contemporary events reflect in their entirety the collective pictorial world of a particular generation. The artist had the selected images reproduced without the explanatory captions and printed in double column width. In this way, he questions the informational value of the photographs and directs our attention to the rasterisation of newspaper print.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'press++21.11' 2016

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
press++21.11
2016
C-Print, Edition 02/04
260 x 185cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

press++

Black-and-white press photographs from the 1930s to the 1980s, which were taken primarily from American newspaper and magazine archives, are the source material for the press++ series. Thomas Ruff has been working on this series since 2015, scanning the front and back sides of the archive images and combining the two sides so that the partially edited photograph of the front side is fused with all the texts, remarks, and traces of use on the back side. When printed in large format, the often disrespectful handling of this type of photography becomes visible.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 showing photographs from Ruff's series 'press++' (installation view)

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 showing photographs from Ruff’s series press++ (installation view)
WG Bildkunst 2020
Photo: WDR / Thomas Köster

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'press++ 60.10' 2017

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
press++ 60.10
2017
C-Print
225 x 185cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Going Digital

How are pictures made today? How do photos printed on paper differ from photos viewed on the Internet? Where are photos stored?

The investigation into the various pictorial genres leads to the archives and image stores of the past and present. The Internet offers seemingly inexhaustible sources of images by providing fast access to digitised, originally analog image material from older times and digitally created photographic material. As a researching artist, Thomas Ruff also finds here material for his studies, image production, and reflection.

His large-format photos of the series nudes draw on motifs and forms of presentation of thumb nail galleries (compilations of small images as previews) with pornographic images as they can be found on the Internet. By making the coarse pixel structure of the Internet images of the turn of the millennium into a pictorial principle, he thematises the technical conditions of the photographic images in his works. With the series jpeg, he continued these investigations and connected his selection of media images with the question of a collective memory for images and contemporary history. In his latest series of Tableaux chinois, pixel structures create visual tension and irritation alongside the offset screens of the digitised printed products of Chinese propaganda of the Mao era – and suggest the question of the technical conditions of images at the time they were created.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'nudes pea10' 1999

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
nudes pea10
1999
C-Print, Edition 1/2AP
102 x 129cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

nudes

An Internet research into the genre of nudes drew Thomas Ruff’s attention to the field of pornography and the images that were freely available on the World Wide Web at the turn of the millennium. The motifs and the special formal features that characterised the state of the art at that time became the starting points for new works. The found pictures had a rough pixel structure, which had already aroused the artist’s interest before. Thomas Ruff processed the found pictures in such a way that their pixel structure was just barely visible in print. By using motion blur and soft focus, by varying the colours and removing details, he gave the “obscene” pictures a painterly appearance and directed the eye to the pictorial structure and composition. The artist selected his source images according to compositional aspects. The choice of motifs shows a broad spectrum of sexual fantasies and practices.

The Internet 20 years ago

Thomas Ruff began working on the series nudes in 1999. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the transmission rates of the World Wide Web were still relatively low. Although dial-up modems had been around since the 1970s, devices with a speed of 56 kBit/s did not come onto the market until 1998. Even dial-up via ISDN, which was available at much higher prices from 1989 onwards, only allowed 64 kBit/s. It was not until July 1999 that Deutsche Telekom switched on the first ADSL connections, enabling transmission rates of up to 768 kBit/s. Although two million households were already connected by the end of 2001, slow Internet remained the general rule, above all outside the metropolitan regions. Until well into the 2000s, website operators thus relied on the offering of highly compressed images.

As a result, photographic images found wide and rapid distribution, but always initially in a highly compressed, reduced form. Thomas Ruff was one of the first to deal artistically with the question of the status of photography in the age of the Internet, with the series nudes from 1999 onwards and the series jpeg from 2004 onwards.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 showing work from Ruff's 'nudes' (installation view)

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 showing work from Ruff’s nudes (installation view)
WG Bildkunst 2020
Photo: WDR / Thomas Köster

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'jpeg ny01' 2004

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
jpeg ny01
2004
C-Print, Edition 1/1AP
256 x 188 cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Thomas Ruff. 'jpeg msh01' 2004

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
jpeg msh01
2004
C-Print
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

jpeg

Images distributed worldwide through the Internet, as well as scanned postcards and illustrations from photobooks, are the visual starting point of the jpeg series, on which Thomas Ruff has been working since 2004. In it, he focuses attention on a feature that determines all images compressed in JPEG format and becomes visible at high magnification. By intensifying the pixel structure and simultaneously enlarging the overall image, he creates a new image that resembles a geometric colour pattern when viewed closely but becomes a photographic image when viewed from a greater distance. Here, Ruff uses ideas from the painting of late Impressionism and combines these with the digital possibilities of the twenty-first century. By using the entire range of images published globally and simultaneously discussed in recent decades, he allows the series to become almost a visual lexicon of media imagery and a reflection of its characteristics determined by the medium.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing work from Ruff's 'jpeg' series

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing work from Ruff’s jpeg series
Photo: Achim Kukulies
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Propaganda Images

What are photos used for? Which reality do photos depict? How do photos affect reality?

In addition to the motifs and the formal as well as technical possibilities of photography, Thomas Ruff examines the possible uses of photos. With his adaptations of images from Chinese propaganda material, he makes the ideological appropriation and manipulative character of the images his theme.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing work from Ruff's 'tableaux chinois' series

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing work from Ruff’s tableaux chinois series
Photo: Achim Kukulies
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'tableau chinois_03' 2019

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
tableau chinois_03
2019
C-Print, Edition 01/04
240 x 185cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'tableau chinois_01' 2019

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
tableau chinois_01
2019
C-Print
240 x 185cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Tableaux chinois

For many years, Thomas Ruff has been preoccupied with the subject of propaganda imagery. For Tableaux chinois, the artist scanned images from books on Mao published in China, as well as from the magazine‚ La Chine, published and distributed worldwide by the Chinese Communist Party. He stored them in such a way that the offset raster screen was preserved. He then duplicated the images and converted the offset raster of the duplicates into a large pixel structure. As a result of a long editing process on the computer, a composition is created which brings together the characteristics of the various time-related media and exposes the propaganda image as manipulated.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing work from Ruff's 'tableaux chinois' series

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing work from Ruff’s tableaux chinois series
Photo: Achim Kukulies
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'r.phg.07_II' 2013

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
r.phg.07_II
2013
C-Print
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

On Par with the Pioneers

What is a negative? How have photographic techniques changed in the course of history? Does a digital image look different from an analog photo?

The transition from analog to digital photography took place in the 1990s, at a time when Thomas Ruff was already successful on an international level. In addition to the characteristics of digitally processed and circulated photos, he examined the special features of the production and processing of analog photography. The exhibited photo series reveal Ruff’s engagement with nearly 170 years of photographic history and technology.

The series Negative pays tribute to the function and particular aesthetics of the negative, which recorded the image information in the light-sensitive coating of a transparent plate and had to be exposed again on prepared paper. The works in the series Tripe focus on the specific possibilities of working with the variant of paper negatives. Ruff reconstructs and explores the effect of pseudo-solarisation – as the great image magicians and experimenters of the 1920s and 1930s explored and used this – with analog and digital means in the series flower.s.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'r.phg.08_II' 2015

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
r.phg.08_II
2015
C-Print
185 x 281cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Thomas Ruff. Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing work from Ruff's 'photograms' series

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing work from Ruff’s photograms series
Photo: Achim Kukulies
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Thomas Ruff. Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 (installation view) WG Bildkunst 2020

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing at right a work from Ruff’s photograms series
WG Bildkunst 2020
Photo: WDR / Thomas Köster

 

Fotogramme

Fascinated by photograms of the 1920s, Thomas Ruff decided to explore the genre and develop a contemporary version of these camera-less photographs. Beyond the limitations of analog photograms, the artist has been developing his versions of photograms since 2012, using a virtual darkroom to simulate a direct exposure of objects on photosensitive paper.

With this, he was able to place objects (lenses, rods, spirals, paper strips, spheres, and other objects) generated with the help of a 3D program on or over a digital paper, correct their position, and in some cases expose them to coloured light. He could thus control the projection of the objects on the background in virtual space and print the image calculated by the computer in the size he wanted. In this way, he succeeded in capturing the concepts and aesthetics of the pioneers of “kameralosen Fotografie” in the 1910s and 1920s, generating images with light and transporting them into the twenty-first century using a technique appropriate to his own time.

Digital photograms with many different coloured light sources and transparent objects could not be produced with the equipment available to Thomas Ruff in 2014. The computing process required such high capacities that Ruff’s computers would have needed over a year for each image. In 2014, he was given the opportunity to have photograms calculated by a mainframe computer at the Supercomputing Centre of the Forschungszentrum Jülich. This required roughly eighteen terabytes of data for each image.

 

Thomas Ruff. Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing at left a work from Ruff's 'photograms' series

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing at left a work from Ruff’s photograms series
WG Bildkunst 2020
Photo: WDR / Thomas Köster

 

Thomas Ruff. 'neg◊lapresmidi_01' 2016

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
neg◊lapresmidi_01
2016
C-Print
23.4 x 31.4cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Negative

In 2014, Thomas Ruff began to work more intensively on the visual appearance of the source material of analog photography, the “negative”. In order to make its photographic reality and pictorial quality visible, he transformed historical photographs into “digital negatives” In the process, not only the light-dark distribution in the image changed; the brownish hue of the photographs printed on albumin paper also became a cool, artificial blue tone.

The aim of the processing was to highlight the photographic “negative”, which, in analog photography, was never the object of observation, but always a means to an end. In this series, it is treated as an “original” worth viewing, from which a photographic print is made, and which is in danger of disappearing completely due to digital photography.

The series covers the entire spectrum of historical black-and-white photography and is divided into different subgroups. On display are the series neg◊lapresmidi and neg◊marey.

L’Après-midi d’un faune

For more than ten years, Stephane Mallarmé worked on his poem‚ L’Après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun), which was published in 1876. This complex Symbolist poem tells of the encounter of a faun with a group of nymphs. In the end, the nymphs disappear. What remains is their shadow in the form of writing: the poem itself.

The work inspired the composer Claude Debussy to write his radical symphonic poem‚ Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune in 1894. Debussy did not want to illustrate the poem, but rather to evoke an enraptured mood that corresponds to the drowsiness of Mallarmé’s faun. At the same time, he referred structurally to the 110-line poem: Debussy’s‚ Prélude also has 110 bars.

1912 saw the premiere of‚ L’Après-midi d’un faune, the first scandalous choreography by the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. The dancers moved to Debussy’s music almost continuously in profile and along particular planes. The movements were consciously intended to be reminiscent of the linear concept of Greek vase painting.

For the series neg◊lapresmidi, Thomas Ruff used photographs taken by Adolphe de Meyer during a performance of the ballet in 1912. In a sense, three turning points of the avant-garde culminate in Adolphe de Meyer’s photographs: the Symbolist poetry of Mallarmé, on which the ballet was based, the music of Debussy, and the choreography of Nijinski. Ruff’s inversions of Adolphe de Meyer’s photographs enrapture and alienate this moment and at the same time allow it to shine with particular intensity.

Capturing time

The series neg◊marey focuses on photographs taken by the physician Étienne-Jules Marey in the 1870s. At the time, he tried to take pictures of moving people and animals in order to better understand their movements. Almost simultaneously, the British-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge was working on similar experiments. While Muybridge devised elaborate constructions with which he captured individual moments of movement with several cameras connected in series, Marey developed a process in which movements from a single camera with interrupted exposure could be brought onto a single plate. By placing reflective dots on the test subject or animal, the movements could be captured precisely and in the same proportion as the interrupted exposure. This approach was reminiscent of the graphic method previously invented by Marey, which allowed the first continuous recordings of the pulse and the assignment of individual sections of the pulse curve to the respective heart activities.

 

Thomas Ruff. 'neg◊marey_02' 2016

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
neg◊marey_02
2016
C-Print
22.4 x 31.4cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Thomas Ruff. Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing 'flower.s_10' from Ruff's series 'flower.s'

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing flower.s_10 from Ruff’s flower.s series
Photo: Achim Kukulies
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

 

“Actually from time to time I try to take a photograph of a flower or several flowers but it just looks boring, it doesn’t work, so it seems that I cannot take photographs of flowers.”


Thomas Ruff

 

 

flower.s

Flower photograms by Lou Landauer (1897-1991), which Thomas Ruff had acquired, as well as the work on the photograms, gave him the idea of working with another photographic technique that has been used since the mid-nineteenth century: pseudo-solarisation (also called the Sabattier effect). This is a technique discovered by chance, in which the negative / positive is subjected to a diffuse second exposure during exposure in the darkroom, resulting in a partial reversal of light and shadow areas in the photographic image. For his series flower.s, which he has been working on since 2018, Ruff first photographs flowers or leaves with a digital camera, which he had arranged on a light table. During the subsequent processing on the computer, he applies the Sabattier effect.

 

Thomas Ruff. 'flower.s_10' 2019

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
flower.s_10
2019
C-Print
139 x 119cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Thomas Ruff. 'tripe_12 Seeringham. Munduppum inside gateway' 2018

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
tripe_12 Seeringham. Munduppum inside gateway
2018
C-Print, Edition 02/06
123.5 x 159.5cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Tripe

Paper negatives, which Captain Linnaeus Tripe (1822-1902) had produced on behalf of the British government in Burma and Madras between 1856 and 1862 and that are now in the archives of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, were the starting point for the series Tripe.

Thomas Ruff was able to view the existing negatives and selected several of these for his own work. All of them showed clear signs of ageing or damage. Ruff had the negatives digitally reproduced and then converted them into a positive, inverting the brownish hue of the negative into cyan blue.

He duplicated these positives and altered the coloration of the duplicate to the brown tone of the negative. He superimposed the two positive images as digital layers and removed parts of the layer of the brownish image, so that the coloration of the bluish image partially shines through. In a second step, he enlarged the images so that the texture of the paper, as well as all edits, damages, and changes become visible.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing the work 'tripe_15 Madura. The Blackburn Testimonial' (2018) from the 'tripe' series

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing the work tripe_15 Madura. The Blackburn Testimonial (2018) from the tripe series
Photo: Achim Kukulies
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'tripe_15 Madura. The Blackburn Testimonial' 2018

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
tripe_15 Madura. The Blackburn Testimonial
2018
C-Print
123.5 x 159.5 cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) '3D_m.a.r.s 16' 2013

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
3D_m.a.r.s 16
2013
C-Print
255 x 185cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

A Different Dimension

How do scientists use photographs? Does the tradition of travel photography still exist? Who invents new pictorial landscapes?

Photographs are used in many different areas. In space research, satellite photos are a basis for scientific knowledge about places that were previously inaccessible to humans. In the processing by the artist Thomas Ruff, these photographs become images of never-seen worlds and studies of the imagination, feasibility, and credibility of images.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing work from Ruff's 'ma.r.s' series

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing work from Ruff’s ma.r.s series
Photo: Achim Kukulies
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

ma.r.s.

During his research on photographs from outer space, Thomas Ruff came across photographs of Mars. These were taken by a camera within a probe sent into outer space by NASA in August 2005 and has been sending detailed images of the surface of the planet Mars to Earth since March 2006. The images are intended to enable scientists to obtain more precise knowledge of the surface, atmosphere, and water distribution of Mars.

For his series, created between 2010 and 2014, the artist processed these very naturalistic yet strange images in several steps; among other things, he transformed the black-and-white transmitted images, which were photographed vertically top-down, into an oblique view and then coloured them so that the surface of the distant planet appears accessible and almost familiar. The works of the subgroup “3D-ma.r.s.” illustrated here are photographs of the surface of Mars which were produced using the so-called anaglyph process. When viewed with red-green glasses, a spatial, three-dimensional image is created in the brain.

The raw material for Thomas Ruff’s series ma.r.s. is derived from HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment), a high-performance camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a probe that has been transmitting images from the surface of Mars to Earth since 2006.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing work from Ruff's 'ma.r.s' series

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Installation view K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen showing work from Ruff’s ma.r.s series
WG Bildkunst 2020
Photo: WDR / Thomas Köster

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'Retusche 01-09' 1995

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Retusche 01-09
1995
C-Print
14.7 x 10cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Retouching and Colour

How do photos become colourful? Why did photographers in the nineteenth century retouch their photos?

Since the early days of photography, monochrome and multicolour retouching has been used or images have been coloured. Thomas Ruff explores one possibility in his series Retusche (Retouching) as a form of embellishment and an approach to an ideal. His machines are heightened and isolated by colouring the motifs with typical colours of industrial production. For the work groups m.n.o.p. and w.g.l., the artist partially coloured photos of exhibition situations in order to highlight forms of presentation in museums and design intentions in exhibition practice.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'Retusche 03' 1995

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Retusche 03
1995
C-Print, handkoloriert mit pigmentfreier Retuschierfarbe, Edition 01/01
14.7 x 10cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Retusche (Retouching)

A colour photograph of Sophia Loren, which Thomas Ruff had seen at an exhibition in Venice in 1995, drew his attention to a practice of representation as old as photography itself: the colouring of photographs. Whereas in the photograph of Sophia Loren, a star was “embellished”, by the additional colour, Ruff decided in 1995 to apply this practice to ten portraits he had seen in the medical textbook‚ Das Gesicht des Herzkranken (The Face of the Cardiac Patient) by Jörgen Schmidt-Voigt from the 1950s. He applied “make up” to the faces with a brush and protein glaze paint, applying eye shadow, rouge, and lipstick.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) '0946' 2003

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
0946
2003
C-Print
150 x 195cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Maschinen (Machinery)

Around 2000, Thomas Ruff acquired roughly 2,000 photographs on glass negatives from the 1930s. These comprise the image archive of the former Rohde & Dörrenberg company from Düsseldorf-Oberkassel, which produced machines and machine parts. The photographs were originally taken for the production of the company catalog and reflect the company’s entire product range. To facilitate the manual cropping of the illustrated object at that time, the respective products were often photographed individually against a white background; the print was then retouched and further processed for final printing. Ruff emphasised this extremely elaborate preparation and image processing – the analog counterpart of digital processing by Photoshop – by colouring individual areas of the digitised images by means of deliberately set colours, similar to retouching, for the works in his series created between 2003 and 2005.

Catalog Illustrations

In the 1930s, the Rohde & Dörrenberg company from Düsseldorf Oberkassel published a catalog of its drills and milling machines. It also offered machines with which the customer could service the tools, such as sharpening apparatus, grinding machines, and the tip-tapering machine illustrated here. The images in the product catalog are hardly recognisable as photographs. The processing steps of cropping, retouching, and re-photographing resulted in an image that is more reminiscent of a technical drawing than a photograph of a machine in a workshop. Thomas Ruff’s series of pictures of machines thematise this elaborate path from photography to illustration in the product catalog and draws attention to the possibilities of staging and stylising objects in photography.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) Installation view at Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 showing work from Ruff's 'Maschinen' (Machinery) series including at right, '0946' (2003)

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Installation view at Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 showing work from Ruff’s Maschinen (Machinery) series including at right, 0946 (2003)
WG Bildkunst 2020
Photo: WDR / Thomas Köster

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'm.n.o.p.01' 2013

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
m.n.o.p.01
2013
C-Print, Edition 01/06
47.3 x 60cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

m.n.o.p.
w.g.l.

Two series by Thomas Ruff are based on black-and-white photographs from famous museum presentations of the 1940s and 1950s in New York and London. Thomas Ruff partially coloured the installation photographs digitally with a colour scheme reminiscent of the 1950s and enlarged them. While the artworks were left untouched – out of respect for the artists and their works – he coloured the carpets, the walls covered with fabric, and the ceilings. Through this treatment, he underscored the exhibition aesthetic of the 1940s to the 1960s and, with the resulting abstract coloured surface compositions, emphasised the design work of the exhibition organisers.

All of this emphasises the contrast to today’s widespread notion of the exhibition space as a “white cube”. m.n.o.p. (2013) presents processed installation views of the presentation of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) with works by Wassily Kandinsky, Rudolf Bauer, and other artists from the collection, which took place in the first museum building on 24 East 54th Street in 1948. The motifs from w.g.l. (2017) were taken from the exhibition‚ Jackson Pollock 1912-1956, one of the most important exhibitions in terms of the mediation of contemporary art, which was presented at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1958.

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 (installation view) WG Bildkunst 2020

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf 2020 (installation view)
WG Bildkunst 2020
Photo: WDR / Thomas Köster

 

 

With the exhibition Thomas Ruff, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen presents a comprehensive overview of one of the most important representatives of the Düsseldorf School of Photography. The exhibition ranges from series from the 1990s, which document Ruff’s unique conceptual approach to photography, to a new series that is now being shown for the first time at K20: For Tableaux chinois, Ruff drew on Chinese propaganda photographs. Parallel to Thomas Ruff’s exhibition, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is also presenting highlights from the collection at K20 under the title Technology Transformation. Photography and Video in the Kunstsammlung, which also deals with artistic photography and technical imaging processes in art.

“With his manipulations of photographs from many different sources, Thomas Ruff comments in an incredibly clever way on how we see images in a digitalised world. Through his virtuoso handling of digital image processing, he confronts us with a critical examination of the image material he uses and its historical, political, and epistemological significance. Some of his most important series are represented in our collection, and we are very proud to dedicate a large-scale exhibition at K20 to this prominent representative of the Düsseldorf School of Photography,” states Susanne Gaensheimer, Director of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

Thomas Ruff (b. 1958) is one of the internationally most important artists of his generation. Already as a student in the class of the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art in the early 1980s, he chose a conceptual approach to photography which is evident in all the workgroups within his multifaceted oeuvre and determines his approach to the most diverse pictorial genres and historical possibilities of photography. In order not to tie his investigations in the field of photography to the individual image found by chance, but rather to examine these in terms of image types and genres, Thomas Ruff works in series: “A photograph,” Ruff explains, “is not only a photograph, but an assertion. In order to verify the correctness of this assertion, one photo is not enough; I have to verify it on several photos.” The exhibition at K20 focuses on series of pictures from two decades in which the artist hardly ever used a camera himself. Instead, he appropriated existing photographic material from a wide variety of sources for his often large-format pictures.

Thomas Ruff’s contribution to contemporary photography thus consists in a special way in the development of a form of photography created without a camera. He uses images that have already been taken and that have already been disseminated in other, largely non-artistic contexts and optimised for specific purposes. The modus operandi and the origin of the material first became the subject of Ruff’s own work in the series of newspaper photographs, which were produced as early as 1990. The exhibition focuses precisely on this central aspect of his work. The pictorial sources that Ruff has tapped for these series range from photographic experiments of the nineteenth century to photo taken by space probes. He has questioned the archive processes of large picture agencies and the pictorial politics of the People’s Republic of China. Documentations of museum exhibitions, as well as pornographic and catastrophic images from the Internet, are starting points for his own series of works, as are the product photographs of a Düsseldorf-based machine factory from the 1930s. They originate from newspapers, magazines, books, archives, and collections or were simply available to everyone on the Internet. In each series, Ruff explores the technical conditions of photography in the confrontation with these different pictorial worlds: the negative, digital image compression, and even rasterisation in offset printing. At the same time, he also takes a look at the afterlife of images in publications, archives, databases, and on the Internet.

For Tableaux chinois, the latest series, which is being shown for the first time at K20, Ruff drew on Chinese propaganda photographs: products of the Mao era driven to perfection, which he digitally processed. In his artistic treatment of this historical material, the analog and digital spheres overlap; and in this visible overlap, Ruff combines the image of today’s highly digitalised China with the Chinese understanding of the state in the 1960s and its manipulative pictorial politics.

From the ma.r.s. series created between 2010 and 2014, there are eight works on view that have never been shown before, for which Ruff used images of a NASA Mars probe. Viewed through 3D glasses, the rugged surface of the red planet folds into the space in front of and behind the surface of the large-format images. Moving through the exhibition space and comprehending how the illusion is broken and tilted, one is introduced to Ruff’s concern to understand photography as a construction of reality that first and foremost represents a surface – a surface that is, however, set in a historical framework of technology, processing, optimisation, transmission, and distribution.

His hitherto oldest image sources are the paper negatives of Captain Linnaeus Tripe. When Tripe began taking photographs in South India and Burma, today’s Myanmar, for the British East India Company in 1854, he provided the first images of a world that was, for the British public, both far away and unknown. Since then, the world has become a world that has always been photographed. It is this already photographed world that interests the artist Thomas Ruff and for which he has also been called a ‘historian of the photographic’ (Herta Wolf). The exhibition therefore not only provides an overview of Ruff’s work over the past decades, but also highlights nearly 170 years of photographic history. In each series, Ruff formulates highly complex perspectives on the photographic medium and the world that has always been photographed.

Further series in the exhibition are the two groups of works referring to press photography, Zeitungsfotos (1990/91) and press++ (since 2015), the series nudes (since 1999) and jpeg (since 2004), which refer to the distribution of photographs on the Internet, as well as Fotogramme (since 2012), Negatives (since 2014), Flower.s (since 2019), Maschinen (2003/04), m.n.o.p. (2013), and w.g.l. (2017) – and, with Retouching (1995), a rarely shown series of unique pieces.

Text from the press kit from the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'm.n.o.p.08' 2013

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
m.n.o.p.08
2013
C-Print
47.3 x 60cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) 'w.g.l.01' 2017

 

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
w.g.l.01
2017
C-Print
42.6 x 60cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 

 

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
K20, Grabbeplatz 5
40213 Düsseldorf

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday 10am – 6pm
Saturday, Sunday, public holiday 11am – 6pm
The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is closed on December 24, 25 and 31

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen website

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Exhibition: ‘William Wegman: Being Human’ at Fotomuseum den Haag, the Netherlands

Exhibition dates: 5th September, 2020 – 3rd January, 2021

Curator: William A. Ewing

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'Untitled (Three Legged Dog)' 1974 from the exhibition 'William Wegman: Being Human' at Fotomuseum den Haag, the Netherlands, Sept 2020 - Jan 2021

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
Untitled (Three Legged Dog)
1974
Gelatin silver print
Collectie Kunstmuseum Den Haag
© William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist

 

 

Concept

Pathos

Portrait
Polaroid
Performance

History
Humour
Humanity

Master / artist

Human / being

 

Dr Marcus Bunyan


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

 

 

People like us / People we like

I didn’t always dress up the dogs. My first dog Man Ray was spared anthropomorphic adornment. That was left for Fay Ray. Fay and I came to a mutual realisation that she had a desire to be observed. Anyway, I found myself looking at her for long periods of time. Then one day, after some looking, I made her tall. Before long I was blurring the pedestal with fabric and creating the illusion of the anthropomorphic vertical. With the birth of Fay’s puppies, my cast of characters grew. Fay’s puppies – Chundo, Battina and Crooky – grew up watching their famous mother, and when it came their turn they were not taken by surprise. They knew what to do.

Colour fields

I began by ignoring colour, using the colour Polaroid film as though it were black and white. I distrusted colour. Sensuous, romantic, elusive colour. Colour was … well … colourful. In fact, the first few days with the Polaroid camera I made only black-on-black pictures. Man Ray under a black cloth against a black background. Polaroid film is very beautiful within a limited range. Man Ray was too dark for this film but Fay was perfect. With Fay I began to explore colour and light.

Weimaraners

No other breed that I am aware of is as conducive to the illusion of transformation as Weimaraners. Weimaraners are called ‘grey ghosts’. Their fur gives off an almost iridescent glow. They inhabit their forms in a strange way, never appearing to solidify into themselves as, say, a lab, a collie or a bulldog does. When you photograph a collie, you get a collie.

Tales

One day my assistant Andrea stood behind Fay to adjust her dress and she gestured out to me with her hand. Her long human arm appeared as Fay’s. The illusion startled me. A miracle. Kind of creepy. Fay was part human. I thought of cartoons and mythology, superheroes and Egyptian gods. Next thing you know, Batty’s son Chip was playing the flute.

Sit! / Stay!

The dogs have an obvious pride in what they do. They can sense the feeling in the room when they are working. If it’s a great picture or a difficult picture, they can feel what happens because everyone stops and goes ‘Wow!’ Fay was particularly agile and for her I concocted a series of anatomically challenging poses. I came to understand her balance and points of physical tension. Fay liked the challenge of a difficult pose. I think she liked to impress me.

Vogue / Style

I have a very awkward relationship with fashion. I’m a little bit timid about it. This isn’t the attitude of the typical fashion photographer. Fortunately, my Weimaraners are the perfect fashion models. Their slinky elegant forms are covered in grey, and grey, as everyone knows, goes with anything.

Nudes / Physique

Up close, unadorned, standing, sitting or lying before the eye of the big camera, the dogs become landscapes, a forest of trees, a topography of hills and valleys, earth and boulders, in a shoreline of endless interconnectivity.

Cubists

Since 1972 I have had a habit of keeping a white box in the studio. If I can’t think of anything to do, the box is a good place to start. The original work I made with this box alluded to Sol LeWitt’s minimal sculptures of the 1960s, but this is now a fading memory. I use a box the way a philosopher uses a chair, as a physical object representing hypothetical questions: ‘How many ways can a dog fit on a box?’, ‘How many dogs can fit in a box?’, ‘Around a box?’ And on and on. On these square wheels, round questions keep rolling.


William Wegman

 

 

Fotomuseum – William Wegman from Kunstmuseum Den Haag on Vimeo.

 

Many artists have a muse. Movie directors perfect their craft working repeatedly with their favourite actors, while choreographers create some of their best works for a specific dancer. In some cases, the muse is a silent partner, the object of an artist’s intense and obsessive gaze; in others the work emerges from a partnership so close that it is unclear which is the artist and which is the muse. For the American artist William Wegman (b. 1943), his muses have been generations of the Weimaraner breed. The inspiration came in 1970 when his first dog, Man Ray – named after Wegman’s favourite artist – sat himself in front of the camera. Instead of sending his faithful companion to his bed, Wegman seized the moment, and the rest is history. Wegman was already a well-known artist, but it is his numerous, human-like portraits of his ever-expanding cast of Weimaraners that have brought him worldwide fame. In partnership with renowned guest curator William A. Ewing and the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Fotomuseum Den Haag presents a major survey of no fewer than four decades of Wegman’s wide-ranging collaboration with Man Ray, Fay Wray, Candy and their descendants.

Press release from the Fotomuseum den Haag

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'Constructivism' 2014 from the exhibition 'William Wegman: Being Human' at Fotomuseum den Haag, the Netherlands, Sept 2020 - Jan 2021

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
Constructivism
2014
Pigment print
© William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'Dog Walker' 1990

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
Dog Walker
1990
Colour Polaroid
© William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'Farm Boy' 1996

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
Farm Boy
1996
Colour Polaroid
© William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'Tamino with magic flute' 1996

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
Tamino with magic flute
1996
Colour Polaroid photograph
61.0 x 50.8cm
Collection of the artist
© William Wegman

 

In Mozart’s The Magic Flute, the Queen of the Night persuades Prince Tamino to rescue her daughter Pamina from captivity under the high priest Sarastro; instead, he learns the high ideals of Sarastro’s community and seeks to join it. Separately, then together, Tamino and Pamina undergo severe trials of initiation, which end in triumph, with the Queen and her cohorts vanquished. The earthy Papageno, who accompanies Tamino on his quest, fails the trials completely but is rewarded anyway with the hand of his ideal female companion, Papagena.

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'George' 1997

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
George
1997
Colour Polaroid
© William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'Wall' 1997

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
Wall
1997
Colour Polaroid
© William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'Cut to Reveal' 1997

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
Cut to Reveal
1997
Colour Polaroid
© William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'Feathered Footwear' 1999

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
Feathered Footwear
1999
Colour Polaroid
© William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'Casual' 2002

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
Casual
2002
Colour Polaroid
© William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist

 

 

William Wegman: Being Human

Many great artists have a muse. Sometimes this muse is a silent partner, the object of an artist’s obsessive gaze. At other times the relationship is a deeply collaborative act.

The history of photography has its own celebrated cases: Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Renée Perle, for example, or Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe. For William Wegman, whose muses have been all these things and more, inspiration arrived almost half a century ago, when a Weimaraner who had joined the family showed both aptitude and passion for performing before the camera. In honour of one of Wegman’s most admired modern artists, he was named Man Ray, the first in a line of highly spirited performers.

William Wegman is a renowned and versatile American artist who resists an easy classification as he moves adroitly between painting, drawing, photography, film, video, books and performances. Although his famed Weimaraners are not featured in all these media, they reside at the core of his art. In the late 1970s Wegman found, in the large-format Polaroid print, his ideal means of expression – the perfect print size, exquisite colour and an ‘instantaneity’ which allowed for spontaneity and beneficial ‘accidents’. When his Polaroid chapter finally came to an end, the artist shifted to working digitally, rediscovering in this new medium what was essential to him about the Polaroid process: the print size, expressive colour and the studio set-ups.

Wegman’s world may revolve around his dogs, but his choice of sets, costumes and props betray a fascination with art history – Cubism, colour field painting, Abstract Expressionism, Constructivism, Conceptualism and the like. The diverse fields of photography also intrigue the artist, and we find in his work landscapes, nudes, portraits, reportage and fashion.

And yet, is it all really about dogs? Being Human suggests otherwise: these performers are us and we are them: housewife, astronaut, lawyer, priest, farm worker, even a dog walker! Some pose proudly and with confidence, others express doubts or vulnerabilities. It’s all about being human.

William A. Ewing. Exhibition curator

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'Upside Downward' 2006

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
Upside Downward
2006
Color Polaroid
© William Wegman. Courtesy of the artist

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'From the spirit world' 2006

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
From the spirit world
2006
Colour Polaroid photograph
61.0 x 50.8cm
Collection of the artist
© William Wegman

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'On base' 2007

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
On base
2007
Colour Polaroid photograph
61.0 x 50.8cm
Collection of the artist
© William Wegman

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'Cursive Display' 2013

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
Cursive Display
2013
Pigment Print
Courtesy of the artist
© William Wegman

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'Contact' 2014

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
Contact
2014
pigment print
111.7 x 86.4cm
Collection of the artist
© William Wegman

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943) 'V' 2017

 

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
V
2017
Colour polaroid photograph
Collection of the artist
© William Wegman

 

 

Fotomuseum Den Haag
Stadhouderslaan 43
2517 HV Den Haag

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11.00 – 17.00
The museum is closed on Mondays

Fotomuseum Den Haag website

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Photographs: ‘Gunner Andrew Rumann embarkation for Singapore, August 1941’ and other WW2 Australian photographs

October 2020

 

Andrew Rumann (Australian, 1905-1974) 'Untitled [Departure from Circular Quay, Sydney for Fremantle and Singapore]' 1941

 

Andrew Rumann (Australian, 1905-1974)
Untitled [Departure from Circular Quay, Sydney for Fremantle and Singapore]
1941
Silver gelatin photograph
5.5 x 5.3cm

 

 

These photographs were given to me in an envelope titled “Gunner Andrew Rumann embarkation for Singapore, August 1941”. I have carefully digitally scanned and cleaned them. The attribution seems correct for the first group of photographs in the posting, Departure from Circular Quay, Sydney for Fremantle and Singapore, but not for the rest. I have located Rumann’s POW record and found several pictures of the ship he would have taken to travel to Singapore.

The other photographs in the posting show Australian armed services personnel (none are American), but there are several anomalies that enable me to say that these are later photographs. Four Australian women personnel stand in front of an American Red Cross sign, and the ARC (or Amcross) did not arrive in Australia until 1942. And in the photograph Transportation Corps US Army BKC*23, the men an women are standing on a US Army transportation barge, unlikely to have been in Australian waters before 1942. Behind them Carley floats hang from their tethers.

As always, what interests me most about these photographs are the details contained within: the casualness of the men waiting at Post Exchange No. 2, with their sandals, singlets and slough hats; the man caught mid-clamber, climbing up into the truck in Taking out the rubbish; the women in dark glasses and hat sheltering her eyes from the sun in BKC*23; the men peering out of the portholes in the same photograph, one with a fag in his mouth.

We can feel the heat emanating from these photographs (it must be summer). All the men are in shorts and topless. In photographs such as Transportation Corps US Army BKC*23 and Embarkation we can admire their lithe bodies, and observe the ubiquitous 1940s mop of curly hair with short back and sides. They were already athletic before departure, but imagine fighting in the stinking hot forests of Burma on Army rations, or ending up in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, with so little meat on the bone to start with. You would be a skeleton before long. Finally, there is one personal sign that you can make out in the crowd seeing off the troops to Singapore from Circular Quay in 1941. “Jim Carr” it reads. Did he survive the war? Who knows.

More than 15,000 Australian soldiers were captured at the fall of Singapore. Of these, more than 7000 would die as prisoners of war, some in transport ships on their way to Japan, sadly torpedoed by Allied submarines. Andrew Rumann survived his trip to Japan as a POW and returned to Australia after the war. He died in 1974 aged 68 years old.

Dr Marcus Bunyan


All photographs have been digitally scanned and cleaned by Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

Gunner Andrew Rumann

Headquarters, Royal Australian Artillery, 8th Division, Australian Imperial Force (AIF)

Service Number – NX26452
Date of birth – 13 Sep 1905
Place of birth – Hungary
Place of enlistment – Paddington NSW
Next of Kin – Rumann, Rena

Malaya, captured at Singapore

Camp: Osaka, Japan

Andrew died in 1974 in Toor, Australia at 68 years old

 

In January 1941 a large component of the Australian Army’s recently raised 8th Division was posted to Malaya. An element of some 6000 men departed Sydney in the liner Queen Mary as part of Convoy US9 on 4 February 1941, arriving in Singapore two weeks later on 18 February. A further 5000 troops in Convoy US11B arrived at Keppel Harbour on 15 August 1941. Under the command of Major General Gordon Bennett, the force initially established its headquarters at Kuala Lumpur. Bennett had urged for specific territorial responsibility for his Division, and this resulted in an area which included Johore and Malacca, coming within his responsibility.

The Australian Army 8th Division in Malaya eventually reached about 15,000 men. An apt description of the commander, Major General Henry (Gordon) Bennett, found in a Veterans’ Affairs publication, (Moremon & Reid 2002) reads:

“A prominent citizen soldier, he had proven himself in World War I to be a fierce fighter and leader, but he was well known for his prickly temperament, argumentative nature and proneness to quarrel. His relations with senior British commanders and staff in Malaya were, at times, strained, as he grappled to maintain control of the Australian troops.”

Bennett’s independent spirit did not fit into the Allied command structure, however his Division generally acquitted themselves well against a seasoned enemy.

Walter Burroughs. “The Naval Evacuation of Singapore – February 1942,” on the Naval Historical Society of Australia website. June 2019 edition of the Naval Historical Review  [Online] Cited 04/09/2020.

Convoy US11B

Convoy US11B

Departed Sydney 29/7/1941 – Arrived Fremantle 6/8/1941
Departed Fremantle 8/8/1941 – Arrived Singapore 15/8/1941

Ships: Johan Van Oldenbarnevelt, Katoomba, HMAS Sydney, Marnix Van St. Aldegonde, HMAS Canberra, Sibajak.

In late July 1941 a convoy was organised to transport 8th Division troops to Singapore. The convoy included three Dutch passenger ships, and escort ships from the Royal Australian Navy.

Summary of Embarkation for Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (HMT FF)

The following troops embarked Johan Van Oldenbarnevelt at Woolloomooloo, Sydney on 29/7/1941 for the voyage to Singapore.

61524 – 8 Division Artillery

29 men arrived including 3 officers, 1 warrant officer, 3 sergeants, 22 corporals and privates.

(Source: Australian Army War Diary 1/15/14 – District Records Office Eastern Command May – July 1941)

Troopship 32 – Voyage 4

She [JVO] departed Sydney on July 17 and headed for Auckland New Zealand where she arrived on July 21 and departed again on the 22nd. She returned to Sydney arriving on July 25 and departed again on the 29th, sailing via Fremantle to Singapore arriving on August 15. End of Troop voyage 4.

 

Johan van Oldenbarnevelt on the way to Fremantle, 1/8/1941

 

Johan van Oldenbarnevelt on the way to Fremantle, 1/8/1941
Aerial Starboard side view of the Dutch liner Johan van Oldenbarnevelt transporting Australian troops to the Middle East as part of convoy US11B. Note the 4.7 pound gun and 12 pounder AA gun aft
1st August 1941
Australian War Memorial Naval Historical Collection
Public domain

 

Trooper Johan van Oldenbarnevelt is seen departing Wellington New Zealand during Troop Voyage 6 on September 15, 1941

 

Trooper Johan van Oldenbarnevelt is seen departing Wellington New Zealand during Troop Voyage 6 on September 15, 1941 – Note the guns up on the aft section!

 

Andrew Rumann (Australian, 1905-1974) 'Untitled [Departure from Circular Quay, Sydney for Fremantle and Singapore]' 1941

 

Andrew Rumann (Australian, 1905-1974)
Untitled [Departure from Circular Quay, Sydney for Fremantle and Singapore]
1941
Silver gelatin photograph
5.5 x 5.3cm

 

Circular Quay with the Sydney Harbour Trust building at left in the background. The spire is the CQ Fire Station No. 3.

 

Andrew Rumann (Australian, 1905-1974) 'Untitled [Departure from Circular Quay, Sydney for Fremantle and Singapore]' 1941

 

Andrew Rumann (Australian, 1905-1974)
Untitled [Departure from Circular Quay, Sydney for Fremantle and Singapore]
1941
Silver gelatin photograph
5.5 x 5.3cm

 

Andrew Rumann (Australian, 1905-1974) 'Untitled [Departure from Circular Quay, Sydney for Fremantle and Singapore]' 1941 (detail)

 

Andrew Rumann (Australian, 1905-1974)
Untitled [Departure from Circular Quay, Sydney for Fremantle and Singapore] (detail)
1941
Silver gelatin photograph
5.5 x 5.3cm

 

Gunner Andrew Rumann POW entry

 

NX26452 Gunner Andrew Rumann POW entry

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian) 'Untitled [Encampment]' 1942-45

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian)
Untitled [Encampment]
1942-1945
Silver gelatin photograph
5.5 x 5.3cm

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian) 'Untitled [Women standing in front of an American Red Cross sign]' 1942-45

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian)
Untitled [Women standing in front of an American Red Cross sign]
1942-1945
Silver gelatin photograph
5.5 x 5.3cm

 

The American Red Cross (ARC or Amcross) in Australia during WW2 became the largest hotel and restaurant chain in Australia at the time. Amcross was headed by Norman H. Davis with its headquarters in Sydney, NSW. …

Four American women led by Miss Helen Hall arrived in Australia in about late August 1942 to take charge of American Red Cross Service Personnel and to establish new American Red Cross centres and to extend existing centres. Miss Hall was the administrative assistant to the delegate in charge of American Red Cross Service Clubs and Leave Areas in Australia. The other three women were Miss Hannah More Frazer, who was appointed Director of the American Red Cross Service Club in Melbourne in about September 1942; Miss Florice Langley who opened an ARC Service Club in Cairns, in far north Queensland; and Mrs. Anita Woodworth who opened an ARC Service Club in Charters Towers in north Queensland.

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian) 'Untitled [Post Exchange No. 2]' 1942-45

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian)
Untitled [Post Exchange No. 2]
1942-1945
Silver gelatin photograph
5.5 x 5.3cm

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian) 'Untitled [Post Exchange No. 2]' 1942-45 (detail)

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian)
Untitled [Post Exchange No. 2] (detail)
1942-1945
Silver gelatin photograph
5.5 x 5.3cm

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian) 'Untitled [Taking out the rubbish]' 1942-45

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian)
Untitled [Taking out the rubbish]
1942-1945
Silver gelatin photograph
5.5 x 5.3cm

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian) 'Untitled [BKC*23]' 1942-45

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian)
Untitled [BKC*23]
1942-1945
Silver gelatin photograph
5.5 x 5.3cm

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian) 'Untitled [BKC*23]' 1942-45 (detail)

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian)
Untitled [BKC*23] (detail)
1942-1945
Silver gelatin photograph
5.5 x 5.3cm

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian) 'Untitled [Transportation Corps US Army BKC*23]' 1942-45

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian)
Untitled [Transportation Corps US Army BKC*23]
1942-1945
Silver gelatin photograph
5.5 x 5.3cm

 

Mike Peel. 'Carley float' 2018

 

Mike Peel
Carley float
2018
CC-BY-SA-4.0

 

Carley float

The Carley float (sometimes Carley raft) was a form of invertible liferaft designed by American inventor Horace Carley (1838-1918). Supplied mainly to warships, it saw widespread use in a number of navies during peacetime and both World Wars until superseded by more modern rigid or inflatable designs. Carley was awarded a patent in 1903 after establishing the Carley Life Float Company of Philadelphia. …

Simply by casting it over the side, the lightweight Carley float could be launched more rapidly than traditional rigid lifeboat designs, and without the need for specialised hoists. It could be mounted on any convenient surface and survive the battering against the ship’s sides during heavy seas. Unlike the rubber inflatable rafts of the period, it was relatively immune to compromise of its buoyant chambers. Seafarers in it were however completely exposed to the elements, and would suffer accordingly. An inquiry of 1946 reported that many sailors who had succeeded in getting to the safety of Carley floats had nevertheless succumbed to exposure before rescue could be made. The crew of the Canadian minesweeper HMCS Esquimalt, sunk offshore of Nova Scotia in April 1945, lost at least 16 to hypothermia during the six hours in which they awaited rescue. Few of the survivors could still walk.

Despite these shortcomings many seamen did owe their lives to the Carley float. Chinese sailor Poon Lim survived for a record 133 days adrift in the South Atlantic aboard a Carley float after his freighter SS Benlomond was sunk on 23 November 1942. He fashioned fishing gear from components of the raft. He was close to death when discovered off the coast of Brazil on 5 April 1943, but was able to walk ashore unaided.

Though its occupant did not survive, a shrapnel-ridden Carley float carried the body of an unknown man to land on Christmas Island in February 1942. The sun-bleached corpse had evidently spent a lengthy period at sea, though to this day it remains unknown from where the sailor had come. It has long been suspected that the body was that of a sailor from HMAS Sydney, which was lost with all hands under mysterious circumstances off the coast of Australia on 19 November 1941. A second Carley float, more confidently believed to be from Sydney, was recovered drifting 300 km off the Australian coast one week after the ship sank. It had been badly damaged by shellfire, but was empty. The float is now displayed at the HMAS Sydney exhibit of the Australian War Memorial, Canberra.

Text from the Wikipedia website

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian) 'Untitled [Transportation Corps US Army BKC*23]' 1942-45 (detail)

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian)
Untitled [Transportation Corps US Army BKC*23] (detail)
1942-1945
Silver gelatin photograph
5.5 x 5.3cm

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian) 'Untitled [Embarkation]' 1942-45

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian)
Untitled [Embarkation]
1942-1945
Silver gelatin photograph
5.5 x 5.3cm

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian) 'Untitled [Embarkation]' 1942-45 (detail)

 

Anonymous photographer (Australian)
Untitled [Embarkation] (detail)
1942-1945
Silver gelatin photograph
5.5 x 5.3cm

 

 

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