Exhibition dates: 23rd January – 4th September, 2015
*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF HUMAN EROTIC ACTIVITY AND NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*
Gallery wall of the exhibition Hold That Pose at the Kinsey Institute
A first for Art Blart – photographs from the world famous Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction!
After visiting the Kinsey Institute as part of my PhD in 2001 I was not allowed to publish any photographs from the collection for my research, which was a pity. Things have changed over the last decade and a half I am happy to say. As I observed in an email to Catherine Johnson-Roehr, Curator of Art, Artifacts, and Photographs recently, I understood that they had to be more sensitive than most institutions, especially with some of the material they hold in their collection. In reply, Catherine noted that while the Kinsey still had to be careful with the use of their materials especially when they are made public online, things had improved in the last 15 years. “Although we have collected artworks since the 1940s, we did not exhibit any of the materials until the 1990s and then on a very limited basis until 2002. When I arrived here in 2000, we had only a few tame images on our website, but now we have online galleries for some of our exhibitions (including all the juried art shows).”
Therefore, after some negotiation for online release, it is with great pleasure that I can feature 40 images in this two-part posting. Nobody should be offended by these glorious, historic photographs of the human body and a human action that everyone does, and it is fantastic to see the Kinsey opening up their collection to the world. We must oppose bigoted views such as that of Nazi Germany where they destroyed the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexology) headed by Magnus Hirschfeld, in 1933… by making these images visible in the world, not hiding them away behind closed doors. These are joyous photographs of the male and female body, a body in which every one of us lives, desires, and enjoys pleasure.
Many thankx for the Kinsey Institute for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The Kinsey Institute research collection contains thousands of examples of erotic imagery produced over centuries by artists around the world. When the new technology of photography was announced in France in 1839, it was not long before it became the most popular medium for depictions of the nude figure, as well as erotic imagery. The first photographic process to be widely used was the daguerreotype, which produced a unique image. With the invention of other processes that used negatives to make multiple prints, the mass production of erotic photographs became possible. Hold That Pose features daguerreotypes, tintypes, albumen and gelatin silver prints, stereocards, and other examples of photographic processes that were used by professional photographers in the 19th century to produce and distribute erotic material.
Photo process display case from the exhibition Hold That Pose at the Kinsey Institute
Stanhopes on display from the exhibition Hold That Pose at the Kinsey Institute
Unknown photographers Stanhope lenses and holders 19th or early 20th century
Unknown photographer Stanhope lens and holder (detail) 19th or early 20th century
Stanhope lenses and holders 19th or early 20th century
Stanhopes derive their name from Lord Stanhope, who created the tiny rod-shaped lens before the invention of photography. In 1859, an entrepreneurial French inventor named René Prudent Patrice Dagron patented a process for making “cylindres photomicroscopiques”, and then created a successful business selling them as inexpensive novelty items. A photograph smaller than the head of a pin was mounted on a Stanhope lens, and then both were placed in a holder such as a pen knife, ring, or other small object. Stanhopes were popular souvenir items – many featured photographs of places or famous monuments such as the Eiffel Tower, but images of nude women or explicit sexual activity were also produced.
Gallery wall from the exhibition Hold That Pose at the Kinsey Institute showing at second left, Bathing in a Baetingplace (Japan, 1880-1890, below) by an unknown photographer; and at second right bottom, Nude woman reclining on a fallen tree (c. 1880, below) by an unknown photographer
Stereoscope display case from the exhibition Hold That Pose at the Kinsey Institute
Stereoscope on display in the exhibition Hold That Pose at the Kinsey Institute
Stereo photography
The stereoscope, a device for viewing images in three dimensions, was invented in England in1838, just as the first photographic processes were being developed in France. The first stereo photographs were created using the daguerreotype process, which preserved an image on a highly polished silver plate. Initially a single camera was used to produce two nearly identical images that when viewed through a stereo device gave the illusion of seeing in 3-D, but soon a camera equipped with two lenses came into use for the production of stereo images. Stereoscopes became as popular as televisions are today, as a form of affordable home entertainment that could be enjoyed by children and adults.
Webster & Albee (Publishers, United States) Woman standing on the back of a kneeling man Late 19th century Hand-colored stereocard
See the installation photograph above and the card in the Stereoscope
Unknown photographer (France) Two nude women in a room with a mirror c. 1850-1855 Stereo daguerreotype under glass
Underwood & Underwood (United States) Oh ! you naughty man 1900 Stereocard
Unknown photographer The Entanglement Mid 19th century Hand-coloured stereocard
Unknown photographer (France) Nude woman in a room with a mirror c. 1850-1855 Copy photograph of stereo daguerreotype
Unknown photographer Photomontage of men and women engaged in sexual activity 1895-1900 Gelatin silver print
Unknown photographer Photomontage of men and women engaged in sexual activity (detail) 1895-1900 Gelatin silver print
Unknown photographer Woman penetrating a woman with a dildo 1880-1885 Gelatin silver copy print
Unknown photographer Bathing in a Baetingplace Japan, 1880-1890 Hand-coloured albumen print
___ and ___ – bathing, attended by their ____ (maid) who is putting charcoal into the fire under the tub
Unknown photographer (United States) Nude woman reclining on a fallen tree c. 1880 Modern platinum print from glass plate negative (printed in 2012 by Herbert Ascherman, Jr.)
Unknown photographer (Indiana, United States) Erect penis 19th century Modern gelatin silver print from glass plate negative
Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (German, 1856-1931) Man seated beside a tree Taormina, Sicily, 1899 Albumen print
Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (German, 1856-1931) Two nude men standing in a forest Taormina, Sicily, 1899 Albumen print
The Kinsey Institute Morrison Hall 313, Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana, USA
Another artist whom I knew very little about before researching for this posting. Another human being who survived the maelstrom of the Second World War by the skin of his teeth – obtaining a visa for Tangiers which, at the time, was the destination for thousands of Jews fleeing from Central Europe.
After seven years in Tangier – “Tangier, in December 1939, was an international city, almost a paradise in the middle of a world war-crazed … My stinging eyes, hands and my whole being to want to walk everywhere taking pictures” – he moved to Madrid, in order to go back to working as a photojournalist, to explore the regions of Spain, and to publish books of his work. This seems a strange country of choice to move to after the freedom of Tangiers, especially with the Fascist dictatorship of General Franco in full swing until 1975. I wonder what were his reasons behind this choice?
Muller obviously loved the Spanish landscape and its people and you can track his journeys across the Iberian Peninsula by looking up the places of his photographs on a map of the region. He travelled everywhere, from North to South, from West to East. Apparently, he was an active member of Spain’s underground intelligentsia, but why would you go to a country if you had to be covert about your intelligence? Was he in exile from Hungary or France, or from himself?
The strongest photographs in this posting are the images from Tangiers, although I would love to see more of his portrait work (the image Portrait of Susana, 1937, below is a cracker). Unfortunately there are very few of his portrait photographs online. The best of his work has an elegant simplicity with a wonderful control of people, space and light.
Addendum November 2017
I received a wonderful and unexpected email from Dania Muller, whose grandfather was Nicolás Muller. Dania explains the “enigma” of Nicolás settling in Spain:
“He was asked by the intellectuals who weren’t dismissed by Franco, Spain’s dictator at the time, to exhibit in Madrid. He was living in Tangier at the time. And so he went to Madrid to expose his work… only to encounter a beautiful lady who he felt a strong attraction too, and told his friend that he would marry her. She was my grandma, they fell in love and eventually he moved to Spain, had four kids and took in the Spanish way of life, where he lived peacefully and happily.”
Dania Muller email to Marcus Bunyan 25/11/2017.
What a joyous, happy ending! Dania is sending me a book on her grandfather’s work and I hope to do another posting in the near future.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Château de Tours for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“La fotografía en España en el año 47 ofrecía un aspecto bastante original: por un lado Ortiz Echagüe, el venerado maestro que hacía sus libros y sus fotografías como si fueran pinturas o grabados preciosos y por otra parte … Campúa, el fotógrafo del Caudillo, Jalón Ángel, Kaulak en la calle Alcalá y Geynes que junto Amer Ventosa copaban las fotografías de ata sociedad.
Por lo demás la fotografía no estaba valorada en nada o en casi nada, mostrando una perspectiva desoladora.”
“Photography in Spain in 1947 offered a rather original appearance: first Ortiz Echague, the revered teacher who had his books and his photographs as if they were paintings or beautiful prints and elsewhere … Campúa, photographer of the Caudillo, Jalon Ángel, Kaulak in Alcala Street and Geynes and Amer Ventosa together photographs were permeating society.
Otherwise the picture was not worth anything or almost nothing, showing a bleak outlook.”
“En mis retratos, si hubiera algo de interés, no será por el retratista, sino por parte del retratado. Me gustaba hacer retratos para conocer al personaje.”
“In my portraits, there was something of interest, it is not for the portrait, but for the sitter. I liked doing portraits to know the character.”
“In Porto I liked the harbour full of bustle, with its vivid colours … women with heavy downloading caryatids necks baskets of salt and coal. Other women, always with baskets on their heads, downloading large bales of dried cod, and among both men lying or sitting in the sun, watching the clouds, playing cards …”
Nicolás Muller (Spanish born Hungary, 1913-2000) Chinchón II Madrid, 1950 Chinchón II
Although little known in France, Nicolás Muller (Orosháza, Hungary, 1913 – Andrín, Spain, 2000) was one of the leading exponents of Hungarian social photography. Like many of his compatriots – Eva Besnyö, Brassaï, Robert Capa, André Kertész and Kati Horna – he spent much of his life in exile: born into a bourgeois Jewish family, he left Hungary shortly after the Anschluss in 1938, spending time in Paris, Portugal and Morocco before finally setting in Spain. This experience, and the situations and people he encountered along the way, did much to shape Muller’s work.
Like many of his fellow Hungarian photographers at the time, in the 1930s Muller worked in a humanist, documentary vein, evincing a strong sense of sympathy for the world of labour and the most modest members of society. His interest in the working man’s experience would remain a hallmark of his photographs. As the social and political contexts changed, he photographed agricultural labourers and dockers in the ports of Marseille and Porto, then children and street vendors in Tangiers, and life in the countryside. Later, he photographed cultural and social figures in Madrid.
The exhibition at the Château de Tours – the first show in France dedicated exclusively to this photographer – brings together a hundred images and documents from the archives kept by his daughter Ana Muller. This chronologically presented selection made by curator Chema Conesa follows the career and travels of this alert, curious photographer from 1935 to 1981.
Nicolás Muller was given his first camera at the age of thirteen, and immediately began to explore its capacity to express a certain idea of the world and of human beings. He maintained this passion for photography when studying law and politics at the Szeged University. His camera, and the feeling that he could use it to convey the adventure of living, were the formative constants of his life and art.
“I learned that photography can be a weapon, an authentic document of reality. […] I became an engaged person, an engaged photographer.”
During his four years at university he would also explore the Hungarian plains, whether on foot, by train or by bike, photographing men and women, the interiors of houses, scenes of rural life and the workers building the dykes on the River Tisza.
His early work is dominated by this rural aspect of Hungary – a country that had lost a significant fraction of its territory under the Treaty of Versailles (1920). It is also influenced by the avant-garde aesthetic of the day, with its diagonal perspectives and high- and low-angle shots.
When Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 (the Anschluss), Hungary aligned itself with the fascist regime and Muller decided to continue his photographic career elsewhere. He came to Paris, where he was in touch with other Hungarian photographers such as Brassaï, Robert Capa and André Kertész. He found work with periodicals such as Match, France Magazine and Regards, which published his photographs of working life in Hungary and Marseille. This theme continued to occupy him during his short stay in General Salazar’s Portugal, until he was imprisoned and then expelled.
Through his father, who had stayed in Hungary and had close links with Rotary Club International, Muller managed to obtain a visa for Tangiers – which, at the time, was the destination for thousands of Jews fleeing from Central Europe. The city roused him to a state of almost febrile creativity. “My eyes, my hands and my whole being are itching to go everywhere, to take photographs wherever I can.” His tireless portrayal of Tangiers also shows him learning to deal with a new challenge: intense light.
In Tangiers Muller contributed photographs to a number of books, such as Tanger por el Jalifa and Estampas marroquis, and did reportage work on the towns of the “Spanish Zone” commissioned by the Spanish High Commission in Morocco. After seven years in Tangiers – “the happiest years of my life” – Muller decided to move to Madrid in order to go back to working as a photojournalist, to explore the regions of Spain, and to publish books of his work.
As the reputation of his studio grew, so he frequented the writers, philosophers and poets who met at the legendary Café Gijón and around the Revista d’Occidente. An active member of Spain’s underground intelligentsia, he also made portraits of artist and writer friends, including Pío Baroja, Camilo José Cela, Eugeni d’Ors and Ramón Pérez de Ayala, and of figures such as the pianist Ataúlfo Argenta and the torero Manolete (Muller’s photo captures him not long before his death).
Nicolás Muller retired at the age of 68 and moved to Andrín (Asturias), where he died in 2000.”
And in Spain, Muller, he found the picture of the war, depressed by the legacy of the war and destroyed by repression and losses, a strange climate where lived traditions and religion country, big cities and the inland villages, children and widows of war. In our country, there were few references of the new documentary that took place in the rest of Europe, not to say that they are almost non-existent except in the case of Jose Ortiz Echague. You could say that with Catalá Roca, Muller is one of the most important photographers of the era in which he portrayed the society of Spain…
His social photography is part of this new documentary, from a very specific perspective, where the photographer has to be absent from the picture, it must be maintained as an external agent. Under this premise, Nicolas Muller, is a hunter of moments immortalised through his camera. He observed from the outside, does not seek to intervene in the context, it seeks to be faithful to the situation, the purity of the image and emotions. The artist is absent on the scene and that allows you to create a picture where the main protagonists are the people who participate in the moment. The exhibition held in 1947 for the West Magazine which expresses the new artistic concepts which would give photography in the context of modernity. For this exhibition portrayed famous people of Spanish society, mostly intellectuals and cultural figures as Azorín, Ortega y Gasset, Menendez Pidal, Marañón or John Doe … With this starting point, Nicolas Muller discovers the Spanish geography and unleashes the photographic socialism, traveling through villages and cities. In this series, the photographer welcomes environments, customs and influences of the inhabitants of the places where he spent days or months…
If a photographer wants to be the chronicler of the time in which he lives you have to convey reality and not an image that changes or imagines himself.”
Text translated from “Nicolás Muller, Social Photography in the War,” on the Madriz website, 15th January 2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use for the purposes of education and research
“Tangier, in December 1939, was an international city, almost a paradise in the middle of a world war-crazed … My stinging eyes, hands and my whole being to want to walk everywhere taking pictures.”
Photograph used under conditions of “fair use” for the purpose of academic research
This is a story that has never been told. It is the story of how the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia set up one of the very first photography departments in a museum in the world in 1967, and employed one of the first dedicated curators of photography, only then to fail to purchase classical black and white masterpieces by international artists that were being exhibited in Melbourne and sold at incredibly low prices during the 1970s and early 1980s, before prices started going through the roof.
The NGV had a golden chance to have one of the greatest collections of classical photography in the world if only they had grasped the significance and opportunity presented to them but as we shall see – due to personal, political and financial reasons – they dropped the ball. By the time they realised, prices were already beyond their reach.
Justifications for the failure include lack of financial support, the purchasing of non-vintage prints and especially the dilemma of distance, which is often quoted as the main hindrance to purchasing. But as I show in this research essay these masterpieces were already in Australia being shown and sold in commercial photography galleries in Melbourne at around $150, for example, for a Paul Strand photograph. As a partial public institution the NGV needs to take a hard look at this history to understand what went wrong and how they missed amassing one of the best collections of classical photography in the world.
This research paper investigates the formation of the international photographic collection at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.
Keywords
Photographs, photography, 19th century photography, early Australian photography, Australian photography, international photography collection, National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria photography department, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Australia, Melbourne, photographic collections, curator.
Beginnings: The International Photographic Collection at the National Gallery of Victoria
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Introduction
Invented by Louis Daguerre in 1839, the daguerreotype – a plate of copper coated in silver, sensitised to light by being exposed to halogen fumes – was the first publicly announced photographic process and the first to come into widespread use. The first photograph taken in Australia was a daguerreotype, a view of Bridge Street (now lost) taken by a visiting naval captain, Captain Augustin Lucas in 1841.1 The oldest surviving extant photograph in Australia is a daguerreotype portrait of Dr William Bland by George Barron Goodman taken in 1845 (see image below). This daguerreotype is now in the State Library of New South Wales collection.2
After these small beginnings, explored in Gael Newton’s excellent book Shades of Light,3 the Melbourne Public Library (later to become the State Library of Victoria) launched the Museum of Art in 1861 and the Picture Gallery in 1864, later to be unified into the National Gallery in 1870, a repository for all public art collections, the gallery being housed in the same building as the Library.4 The Pictures Collection (including paintings, drawings, prints, cartoons, photographs and sculpture) was started in 1859.5 The collection of photographs by the Library had both moral and educative functions. Photographs of European high culture reminded the colonists of links to the motherland, of aspirations to high ideals, especially in conservative Melbourne.6 Photographs of distant lands, such as Linnaeus Tripe’s Views of Burma, document other ‘Oriental’ cultures.7 Photographs of settlement and the development of Melbourne recorded what was familiar in an unknown landscape. “Documentation of both the familiar and the unknown intersected with the scientific desire for categorisation and classification.”8
It is not the purview of this essay to dwell on the development of photography in Australia during intervening years between the 1860s-1960s, but suffice it to say that the collecting of photographs at the State Library of Victoria continued the archiving of Australian identity and place through the ability “to define the self, claim the nation and occupy the world.”9Australian photographic practice followed the development of international movements in photography in these years: art and commerce from the 1860s-1890s, Pictorialism from the 1900s-1930s, Modernism in the 1930s-1940s and documentary photography from the 1940s-1960s. The development of Australian photography was heavily reliant on the forms of international photography. Analysis of these years can be found in Gael Newton’s book Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-198810 and Isobel Crombie’s book Second sight: Australian photography in the National Gallery of Victoria.11
In 1959 the epic The Family of Man exhibition, curated by the renowned photographer Edward Steichen from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, toured Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide to massive crowds. Featuring 503 photographs by 273 famous and unknown photographers from 68 countries this exhibition offered a portrait of the human condition: birth, love, war, famine and the universality of human experience all documented by the camera’s lens.12 In Melbourne the exhibition was shown in a car dealer’s showroom (yes, really!) and was visited by photographers such as Jack Cato, Robert McFarlane, Graham McCarter.13 The photographs in the exhibition, accompanied by text, were printed “onto large panels up to mural size[and] gave The Family of Man works an unprecedented impact, even given the role illustrated magazines had played through most of the century.”14This loss of the aura of the original, the authenticity of the vintage print, a print produced by the artist around the time of the exposure of the negative, would have important implications for the collection of international photographs in the fledgling National Gallery of Victoria photographic collection (even though Walter Benjamin saw all photography as destroying the authenticity of the original through its ability to reproduce an image ad nauseum).15 As Benjamin observes in his Illuminations,“The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject.”16 Other ways of looking at the world also arrived in Australia around the same time, namely Robert Frank’s seminal book The Americans,17a road movie photographic view of American culture full of disparate angles, juke boxes, American flags, car, bikes and diners.18
Beginnings
While legislatively the National Gallery had split from the State Library of Victoria in 1944,19 it wasn’t until August, 1968 that the National Gallery of Victoria moved into it’s own building designed by Roy Grounds at 180 St Kilda Road (now known as NGV International).20 In the years leading up to the move the Trustees and Staff went on a massive spending spree:
“But although the sources of income from bequests were limited during the year [1967], a somewhat increased Government purchasing grant continued, which, with the allowance made by the Felton Committee, seemed to stimulate Trustees and Staff almost to a prodigality of spending. Perhaps, too, an urge for as full a display as possible at the opening of the new Gallery contributed; for by the end of the year the entire grant for purchase until the end of June 1968 had been consumed, and as well some commitments made for the future. Only donations made from private sources, and through the generosity of the National Gallery society, enabled the rate of acquisition to be maintained.”21
Unfortunately, this profligacy did not include spending on photography. This was because the Department of Photography was only formed in April 1967 after the Director at the time, Dr Eric Westbrook, convinced the Trustees of the Gallery “that the time had come to allow photographs into the collection.”22 The impetus for establishing a photography collection “was the growing recognition and promotion of the aesthetics of photography.”23The Department of Photography at the NGV thus became the first officially recognised curatorial photography department devoted to the collection of photography as an art form in its own right in Australia and one of only a few dedicated specifically to collecting photography in the world.24 While the collecting criteria of the NGV has always emphasised “the primacy of the object as an example of creative expression,”25the fluid nature of photography was acknowledged in a 1967 report on the establishment of the Department of Photography.26
The new department, however, did not gain momentum until the establishment of a Photographic Subcommittee in October 1969 that consisted of the Director of the Gallery and three notable Melbourne photographers: Athol Shmith, Les Gray and Chairman, Dacre Stubbs, along with the Director of the National Gallery Art School, Lenton Parr. Advising the Committee were honorary representatives Albert Brown (in Adelaide) and Max Dupain (in Sydney).27 The Photographic Subcommittee defined the philosophies of the Department and began acquiring photographs for the collection.28 While the Department was located in the Gallery’s library and had no designated exhibition space at this time,29 Committee members stressed the need to make contacts with the international art world and fact-finding missions were essential in order to establish a curatorial department in Australia as no photography department had ever been established in Australia before. “Members were also concerned to position the new Department in an international context (achieved initially through linking the Gallery to an international exhibitions network and later by purchasing international photography.”30
Financial support and gallery space was slow in materialising and then (as now) “it was enlightened corporate and individual support that would significantly help the NGV to create its photography collection.”31 The first attributable international photograph to enter the collection was the 21.8 x 27.5 cm bromoil photograph Nude (1939) by the Czechoslovakian photographer Frantisek Drtikol in 1971 (Gift of C. Stuart Tompkins) (see above),32 an artist of which there remains only one work in the collection, and other early international acquisitions included twenty-seven documentary photographs taken during NASA missions to the moon in the years 1966-1969 (presented by Photimport in 1971)33 and work by French photographer M. Lucien Clergue in 1972, founder of the Arles Festival of Photography.34 Early international exhibitions included The Photographers Eye from the Museum of Modern Art in New York (facilitated through Albert Brown’s connections with photography curator John Szarkowski of MoMA).35
The purchasing of the Dritkol nude is understandable as he is an important photographer of people and nudes. “Drtikol made many portraits of very important people and nudes which show development from pictorialism and symbolism to modern composite pictures of the nude body with geometric decorations and thrown shadows, where it is possible to find a number of parallels with the avant-garde works of the period.”36 The acceptance of the set of twenty-seven NASA photographs is understandable but still problematic. Although some of the photographs are breathtakingly beautiful and they would have had some social significance at that time (the first lunar landing was in 1969), their relative ‘value’ as pinnacles of international documentary photography, both aesthetically and compositionally, must be questioned.37 One wonders on what grounds the Photographic Subcommittee recommended their acceptance at the very start of the collection of international photography for the Department of Photography when so many definitive photographs by outstanding masters of photography could have been requested as a donation instead. Similarly, the purchase by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1980 of over 108 space photographs by NASA, Washington, D.C. (manufacturer) for the international collection is equally mystifying when there was a wealth of European and American master photographers work being shown in exhibitions around Melbourne (and sold at very low prices, eg. $150 for a Paul Strand vintage print) that did not enter the collection.
In 1972 Jenny Boddington (with a twenty year background in documentary film)38 was appointed Assistant Curator of Photography. She was selected from fifty-three applicants,39 and was later to become the first full-time curator of photography at the NGV, the first in Australia and perhaps only the third ever full-time photography curator in the world. In 1973, the Melbourne photographer Athol Shmith, who sat on the Photographic Subcommittee, visited major galleries and dealers in London and Paris for five weeks and reserved small selections of non-vintage prints for purchase by Henri Lartigue, Bill Brandt, Paul Strand, Andre Kertesz, Edward Steichen and Margaret Bourke-White40 (non-contemporary ie. vintage work not being generally available at this time). Also in 1973 the corridor beside the Prints and Drawings Department opened as the first photography exhibition space, to be followed in 1975 by the opening of a larger photography gallery on the third floor.41
In 1975 Boddington made a six-week tour of Europe, London and America that included meeting photographers Andre Kertesz and Bill Brandt and the Director of the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski.42 Boddington also spent four weeks viewing photography at the MoMA, time that radically changed her ideas about running the department, including the decision that priority be given to the acquisition of important overseas material. She states:
“My ideas about the running of my department are radically changed … I believe that for some time in the future immediate priority and all possible energy should be given to the acquisition of important overseas material, remembering that ours is the only museum in Australia with a consistent policy of international collecting, and that effort in the initiation and mounting of exhibitions can be saved by showing some of the best work we have already purchased.”43
As Suzanne Tate notes in her Postgraduate Diploma Thesis, Boddington “was also determined to achieve autonomy from the Photographic Subcommittee, and to act on her own judgement, as other curators did.”44 Perhaps this understandable desire for autonomy and the resultant split and aversion (towards the Photographic Subcommittee) can be seen as the beginning of the problems that were to dog the nascent Photography department. In 1976 the Photographic Subcommittee was discontinued although Les Gray (who expressed a very ‘camera club’ aesthetic) continued to act as honorary advisor.45 The Photography department continued to collect both Australian and international photography in equal measure (but of equal value?) and held exhibitions of international photography from overseas institutions (including the early exhibition The Photographer’s Eye in 1968)46 and from the permanent collection (such as an exhibition of work by Andre Kertész, Bill Brandt and Paul Strand)47 in order to educate the public, not only in the history of the medium but how to ‘see’ photography and read ‘good’ photographic images from the mass of consumer images in the public domain.48
Paradigms and problems of international photography collecting at the National Gallery of Victoria
“It does not do to be impatient in the business of collecting for an art museum. A public collection is a very permanent thing. It is really necessary to think in terms of the future and how our photographs and our century will appear in that future. We would like those in the future to inherit material that is intelligible both for itself and in relation to the other arts; at the same time there is the need to satisfy the present. A collection cannot be richer than the responses of its artists but it is hoped that it will represent a rich trawl of each historical period.”
Jenny Boddington 49
The current photography collection at The National Gallery of Victoria consists of over 15,000 photographs of which around 3,000 are by international artists (a ratio of 20% whereas the ratio between Australian / international photographers at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra is 60/40%).50 Dr Isobel Crombie, now Assistant Director, Curatorial and Collection Management and former Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria, notes in her catalogue introduction “Creating a Collection: International Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria,” from the exhibition Re_View: 170 years of Photography that several factors have affected the collection of international photographs at The National Gallery of Victoria. I have identified what I believe to be the three key factors:
1/ Lack of financial support 2/ The purchasing of non-vintage prints 3/ The dilemma of distance
Financial support
When the Department of Photography was set up at The National Gallery of Victoria the lack of adequate funds tempered the Photography Subcommittees purchasing aspirations. This situation continued after the appointment of Jenny Boddington and continues to this day. Athol Shmith noted that there were two options for building a collection: one was to spend substantial funds to acquire the work of a few key photographers, the other option (the one that was adopted) was a policy of acquiring a small number of works by a wide range of practitioners, a paradigm that still continues.51 “A broadly based collecting policy was established to purchase work by Australian and International practitioners from all periods of photographic history.”52
The majority of early acquisitions of the Department were overwhelmingly Australian but this collection policy broadened dramatically after the overseas travel of Athol Shmith and Jenny Boddington.53 Cultural cringe was prevalent with regard to Australian photography and it was rarely, if ever, talked about as art. Australian photography was still in the hands of the camera clubs and magazines and influenced by those aesthetics… but the ability to purchase the desired international work was severely curtailed due, in part, to the low exchange rate of the Australian dollar. In 1976 one Australian dollar was worth approximately US 40 cents. Another reason was the lack of money to purchase international work. In the early 1970s the Department had approximately $3,000 a year to purchase any work (international or Australian) that gradually built up to about $30,000 per annum in the mid 1970s. In 1981-82, this was reduced to almost zero because of the financial crisis and credit squeeze that enveloped Australia. This lack of funds to purchase work was compounded by sky rocketing prices for international photographs by renowned photographers in the early 1980s.
While generous help over eight years from Kodak (Australasia) Pty. Ltd had helped buy Australian works for the collection (a stipulation of the funds),54 money for international acquisitions had been less forthcoming. In a catalogue text from 1983 Boddington notes,
“… classic, well-known photographs are now very expensive indeed. One can only look back with sincere appreciation to the days when the department’s purchasing budget was $1000 a year and the trustees agreed to buy 27 Bill Brandts, whilst the National Gallery Society donated a further 13 from ‘Perspective of Nudes’, thus concluding out first major international purchase, happily before Brandt’s prices quintupled in a single blow early in 1975. Photography was then beginning to be a factor in the market place of art and a budget of $1000 a year was no longer adequate – even for the purchase of Australian work! Where funds are limited (as they are) a fairly basic decision has to be made as to the direction a collection will follow. Here in Melbourne we have on the whole focused on the purest uses of straight photography as it reflects broad cultural concerns …”55
By 1976 the Felton Bequest purchased works by Julie Margaret-Cameron (one image! below) and the NGV purchased thirty-four André Kertész, evidence that the status of the Photography department was rising. Throughout the remainder of the 1970s and early 1980s, eighty works were acquired by artists such as Imogen Cunningham (five images), Eadweard Muybridge (two images – the only two in the collection), Lois Conner (three images) and Man Ray (eleven images).56 In 1995 Isobel Crombie revised the collecting policy of the Department and she notes in “Collecting Policy for the Department of Photography, National Gallery of Victoria (Revised October 1995),” Appendix 1 in Suzanne Tate’s Postgraduate Diploma Thesis under the heading ‘International Photography’57 that, “Given our financial resources extremely selective purchases are to be made in this area to fill those gaps in the collection of most concern to students and practicing photographers.”58 Crombie further notes that the contemporary collection is an area that needs much improvement whilst acknowledging the dramatic increases in prices asked and realised for prime photographs and the restricted gallery funds for purchases.59
While today the importance of philanthropy, fund raising and sponsorship is big business within the field of museum art collecting one cannot underestimate the difficulties faced by Boddington in collecting photographs by international artists during the formative years of the collection. As photography was liberated to become an art form in the early 1970s through the establishment of museum departments, through the emergence of photographic schools and commercial photographic galleries (such as the three commercial photography galleries showing Australian and international work in Melbourne: Brummels (Rennie Ellis), Church Street Photographic Centre (Joyce Evans) and The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop (Paul Cox, John Williams, William Heimerman and Ian Lobb), photography was given a place to exist, a place to breathe and become part of the establishment. But my feeling is that the status of photography as an art form, which was constantly having to be fought for, hindered the availability of funding both from within the National Gallery of Victoria itself and externally from corporate and philanthropic institutions and people.
To an extent I believe that this bunker mentally hindered the development of the photographic collection at the National Gallery of Victoria until much more recent times. Instead of photography being seen as just art and then going out and buying that art, the battle to define itself AS art and defend that position has had to be replayed again and again within the NGV, especially during the late 1970s-1980s and into the early 1990s.60 This is very strange position to be in, considering that the NGV had the prescience to set up one of the first ever photography departments in a museum in the world. Then to not support it fully or fund it, or to really understand what was needed to support an emergent art form within a museum setting so that the masterpieces vital for the collection could to be purchased, is perplexing to say the least. I also wonder whether more could not have been done to attract philanthropy and funds from personal and big business enterprises to support international acquisitions. I also wonder about the nature of some of the international purchases for the Department of Photography (the choice of photographer or photographs purchased) and the politics of how those works were acquired.
The purchasing of non-vintage prints
The paradigm for collecting international photographs early in the history of the Department of Photography was set by Athol Shmith in 1973 on his visit to Paris and London.
“Typically for the times, Shmith did not choose to acquire vintage prints, that is, photographs made shortly after the negative was taken. While vintage prints are most favoured by collectors today, in the 1970s vintage prints supervised by the artists were considered perfectly acceptable and are still regarded as a viable, if less impressive option now.”61
This assertion is debatable. While many museums including the NGV preferred to acquire portfolios of modern reprints as a speedy way of establishing a group of key images, Crombie notes in the catalogue essay to 2nd Sight: Australian Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria that the reason for preferring the vintage over the modern print “is evident when confronted with modern and original prints: differences in paper, scale and printing styles make the original preferable.”62 Crombie’s text postulates that this sensibility, the consciousness of these differences slowly evolved in the photographic world and, for most, the distinctions were not a matter of concern even though the quality of the original photograph was not always maintained.63 I believe that this statement is only a partial truth. While modern prints may have been acceptable there has always been a premium placed on the vintage print, a known value above and beyond that of modern prints, even at the very dawn of photography collecting in museums. I believe that price (which is never mentioned in this discussion) is the major reason for the purchase of non-vintage prints. In Crombie’s “Collecting Policy for the Department of Photography, National Gallery of Victoria (Revised October 1995),” she notes under the heading ‘Past Collecting Policy’ Point 1 that “Many non-vintage photographs have been collected … Purchase of non-vintage prints should not continue though we may we accept such photographs as gifts on occasion.”64
I vividly remember seeing a retrospective of the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh in 2005. One room consisted of small, jewel-like vintage prints that were amazing in their clarity of vision and intensity of the resolution of the print. In the other three rooms there were large blown-up photographs of the originals, authorised by the artist. Seen at mural size the images fell apart, the tension within the picture plane vanished and the meaning of the image was irrevocably changed. Even as the artist’s intentions change over time, even as the artist reprints the work at a later stage, the photograph is not an autonomous object – it becomes a post-structuralist textual site where the artist and curator (and writers, conservators, historians and viewers) become the editors of the document and where little appeal can be made to the original intentions of the author (if they are known).65 While change, alteration, editing, revision and restoration represent the true life of objects66 (and noting that the same re-inscription also happens with vintage photographs), the purchase of non-vintage prints eliminates the original intention of the artist. This is not to say that the modern printing, such as Bill Brandt’s high contrast version of People sheltering in the Tube; Elephant and Castle, underground station (1940 printed 1976, below) cannot become the famous version of the image, but that some acknowledgement of the history of the image must be made. Ignoring the negative/print split is problematic to say the least, especially if the original was printed with one intention and the modern print with an entirely different feeling. This is not a matter of refinement of the image but a total reinterpretation (as in the case of the Brandt). While all artists do this, a failure to acknowledge the original vision for a work of art and the context in which it was taken and printed – in Brandt’s case he was asked by the War Office to record the Blitz, in which Londoners sheltered from German air raids in Underground stations – can undermine the reconceptualisation of the modern print.
Photograph used under conditions of “fair use” for the purpose of academic research
Civilians sheltering in Elephant and Castle London Underground Station during an air raid in November 1940. Elephant and Castle London Underground Station Shelter: People sleeping on the crowded platform of Elephant and Castle tube station while taking shelter from German air raids during the London Blitz.
Photograph used under conditions of “fair use” for the purpose of academic research NB. Note the removal of the man sitting up at right in mid-foreground
The dilemma of distance
While the dilemma of distance is cited as an obstacle to the collection of international photographs by the Department of Photography in the early 1970s by Isobel Crombie,67 this observation becomes less applicable by the middle of the decade. Master prints from major international photographers were available for purchase in Australia by the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra (which had been collecting photography since the early 1970s),68 the Art Gallery of New South Wales (which established a Department of Photography in 1974),69 and the National Gallery of Victoria, through exhibitions at newly opened commercial galleries in both Melbourne and Sydney. Public touring exhibitions were held of the work of international photographers, most notably British Council exhibition of Bill Brandt in 1971, and the French Foreign Ministry’s major exhibition of Cartier-Bresson in 1974.70
In Melbourne commercial galleries specialising in photography and photographer run galleries had emerged, namely Brummels directed by Rennie Ellis in 1972, The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop founded by Paul Cox, Ingeborg Tyssen, John F. Williams and Rod McNicoll in 1973 (the Gallery was taken over in late 1974 by Ian Lobb, his first exhibition as director being at the beginning of 1975; Bill Heimerman joined as joint director at the beginning of 1976), and Church Street Photographic Centre established by Joyce Evans in 1977.71 At the commercial galleries the main influence was overwhelmingly American:
“The impact of exhibitions held by the NGV was reinforced by exhibitions of the work of Ralph Gibson, William Clift, Paul Caponigro, Duane Michals and Harry Callahan at The Photographers’ Gallery and by the series of lectures and workshops that the artists conducted during those exhibitions. Joyce Evans also organised important exhibitions during this period but again the focus was American with work by Minor White, Jerry Uelsmann, Les Krims and others.”72
Shows of American photography, many of which toured extensively, became relatively commonplace and it was the first time Australian photographers and the general public had access to such a concentration of international photography in a variety of styles.73 Ian Lobb, who took over the running of The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop in late 1974 (with Bill Heimerman), notes that the first exhibition of international photography at the gallery was that of Paul Caponigro in 1975.74
“We sold 22 prints which he told us was the second highest sale he had made to that point. With the success of the Caponigro show, we closed the gallery for a few months while the gallery was rebuilt. I took Bill as a business partner, and he made a trip to the USA to set-up some shows. From 1975, every second show was an international show.”75
Lobb observes that,
“The initial philosophy was simply to let people see the physical difference between the production of prints overseas and locally. After a while this moved from the Fine Print to other concerns both aesthetic and conceptual. The gallery at best, just paid for itself. During international shows the attendance at the gallery was high. During Australian shows the attendance was low.”76
From 1975-1981 The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop held exhibitions of August Sander (German – arranged by Bill Heimerman), Edouard Boubat (France), Emmet Gowin (USA – twice), Paul Caponigro (USA – twice), Ralph Gibson (UK – twice, once of his colour work), William Eggelston (USA), Eliot Porter (USA), Wynn Bullock (USA), William Clift (USA), Harry Callahan (USA), Aaron Siskind (USA – twice, once with a show hung at Ohnetitel) Jerry Uelsmann (USA), Brett Weston (USA). There was also an exhibition of Japanese artist Eikoh Hosoe (Japan) and his Ordeal by Roses series in 1986. These exhibitions comprise approximately 60% of all international exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop during this time, others being lost to the vagaries of memory and the mists of time. Prices ranged from $100 per print (yes, only $100 for these masterpieces!!) in the early years rising to $1500 for a print by Wyn Bullock towards the end of the decade.77 At Church Street Photographic Centre the focus was predominantly on Australian and American artists, with some British influence. Artists exhibited other than those noted above included Athol Shmith, Rennie Ellis, Wes Placek, Fiona Hall, Herbert Ponting, Julia Margaret Cameron, Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jack Cato, Norman Deck, Jan Saudek, Robert Frank, Edouard Boubat, Jerry Uelsmann and Albert Renger-Patzsch to name just a few.78
The purchasing of vintage prints by major international artists from these galleries by the National Gallery of Victoria was not helped by the allegedly strained relationships that Boddington had with the directors of these galleries. The feeling I get from undertaking the research is that one of the problems with Boddington’s desire to achieve autonomy and make her own decisions about what to purchase for the Photography Department (being strong willed) was that she ignored opportunities that we right here in Melbourne – because of the aforesaid relationships and lack of money (a lack of support from the hierarchy of the National Gallery of Victoria).
Conclusion
It would be a great pity if the oral history of the early exhibition of international photographers in Melbourne was lost, for it is a subject worthy of additional research. It would also be interesting to undertake further research in order to cross-reference the purchases of the Department of Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria in the years 1975-1981 with the independent international exhibitions that were taking place at commercial galleries in Melbourne during this time. What international photographs were purchased from local galleries, what choices were made to purchase or not purchase works, what works were actually purchased for the collection and what were the politics of these decisions?
For example, during 1976 nine photographs by the Italian photographer Mario Giacomelli (1925-2000) entered the collection as well as nineteen photographs by German photographer Hedda Morrison; in 1977 twelve photographs entered the collection by a photographer name Helmut Schmidt (a photographer whose name doesn’t even appear when doing a Google search). Under what circumstances did these photographs come into the collection? While these people might be good artists they are not in the same league as the stellar names listed above that exhibited at The Photographers’ Gallery and Church Street Photographic Centre. Questions need to be asked about the Department of Photography acquisitions policy and the independent choices of the curator Jennie Boddington, especially as the international prints were here in Melbourne, on our doorstep and not liable to the tyranny of distance.
Dr Isobel Crombie notes that the acquisitions policies were altered so that there was no major duplication between collections within Australia79 but it seems strange that, with so many holes in so many collections around the nation at this early stage, major opportunities that existed to purchase world class masterpieces during the period 1975-1981 were missed by the Department of Photography at the NGV.
While Crombie acknowledges the preponderance of American works in the collection over European and Asian works she also notes that major 20th century photographers that you would expect to be in the collection are not, and blames this lack “on the massive increases in prices for international photography that began in the 1980s and which largely excluded the NGV from the market at this critical time.”80 Crombie further observes that major contemporary photographers work can cost over a million dollars a print and the cost of vintage historical prints are also prohibitively high,81 so the ability to fill gaps in the collection is negligible, especially since the photography acquisitions budget is approximately 0.5-1 million dollars a year.82
Crombie’s time scale seems a little late for as we have seen in this essay, opportunities existed locally to purchase world class prints from master international photographers before prices rose to an exorbitant level. Put simply, the NGV passed up the opportunity to purchase these masterworks at reasonable prices for a variety of reasons (personal, political and financial) before the huge price rises of the early 1980s. They simply missed the boat.
I believe that this subject is worthy of further in-depth research undertaken without fear nor favour. While it is understandable that the NGV would want to protect it’s established reputation, the NGV is a partial public institution that should not be afraid to open up to public scrutiny the formative period in the history of the international collection of photography, in order to better understand the decisions, processes and photographic prints now held in it’s care.
Dr Marcus Bunyan May 2015
Word count: 5,594
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Shocken, 1969
Boddington, Jennie. International Photography: 100 images from the Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. Adelaide: The Art Gallery of South Australia, 1983
Boddington, Jennie. Overseas Travel by Assistant Curator of Photography. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1976
Boddington, Jennie. Modern Australian Photographs. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1976
Cox, Leonard B. The National Gallery of Victoria, 1861-1968: The Search for a Collection. Melbourne: The National Gallery of Victoria; Brown Prior Anderson Pty Ltd, 1971
Crombie, Isobel. Re_View: 170 years of Photography. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2009
Crombie, Isobel. Second sight: Australian photography in the National Gallery of Victoria. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2002
Downer, Christine. “Photographs,” in Galbally, Ann [et al]. The first collections: the Public Library and the National Gallery of Victoria in the 1850s and the 1860s. Parkville, Vic.,: The University of Melbourne Museum of Art, 1992, pp. 73-79
Frank, Robert. The Americans. Washington: Steidl/National Gallery of Art, Revised edition, May 30, 2008
Newton, Gael. Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988. Canberra: Australian National Gallery, Collins, 1988
Tate, Suzanne. Photographic Collections in Victoria: Waverley City Gallery, Horsham Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria: An Analysis of Past History and Future Directions. The University of Melbourne: Postgraduate Diploma Thesis, 1998
Photograph used under conditions of “fair use” for the purpose of academic research
This daguerreotype is the earliest known surviving photograph taken in Australia. It is probably that mentioned in the Sydney Morning Herald 14/1/1845, page 2, top column 5… It would appear to be a product of Goodman’s new studio at 49 Hunter Street, Sydney (see SMH 5/8/1844), before the introduction of hand colouring (see SMH 9/1/1845) and before the introduction of decorative backgrounds (see SMH 25/4/1846). It was probably produced between November 1844 and early January 1845 – Alan Davies, Curator of Photographs, State Library of NSW, 1993. (Image used for research under fair use conditions).
Front cover of John Szarkowski’s book The Photographers Eye, originally published by The Museum of Modern Art in 1966
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) A Bistro at Les Halles, Paris 1927 Gelatin silver photograph 17.7 x 24.7cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1976
Photograph used under conditions of “fair use” for the purpose of academic research
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Mrs Herbert Duckworth, her son George, Florence Fisher and H. A. L. Fisher c. 1871 Albumen silver photograph 31.0 x 22.7cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1979
Photograph used under conditions of “fair use” for the purpose of academic research
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) Leaf pattern c. 1929; printed 1979 Gelatin silver photograph 33.0 x 26.1cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased 1979
Photograph used under conditions of “fair use” for the purpose of academic research
NASA, Washington, D.C. (manufacturer) Instrument called Gnomon to determine size and distance of objects on moon 1969 Gelatin silver photograph on aluminium 49.0 x 39.0cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented by Photimport, 1971
Photograph used under conditions of “fair use” for the purpose of academic research
Neil Armstrong / NASA, Washington, D.C. (manufacturer) Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot, walks on the surface of the Moon near the leg of the Lunar Module (LM) 1969 Colour transparency 50.8 x 40.6cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased 1980
Photograph used under conditions of “fair use” for the purpose of academic research
8/ Crombie, Isobel. “Likenesses as if by magic: The early years 1840s-1850s,” in Second sight: Australian photography in the National Gallery of Victoria. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2002, p. 15.
9/ Fox, Paul Op. cit., p. 124.
10/ Newton, Gael. Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988. Canberra: Australian National Gallery, Collins, 1988 [Online] Cited 02/07/2014. Chapter 11 “Live in the Year 1929” and Chapter 12 “Commerce and Commitment.”
11/ Crombie, Isobel. Second sight: Australian photography in the National Gallery of Victoria. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2002. See chapters “In a new light: Pictorialist photography 1900s-1930s” (p.38), “New Photography: Modernism in Australia 1930s – 1940s” (p.50) and “Clear statements of actuality: Documentary photography 1940s-1960s” (p.64).
15/ “Benjamin’s work balances, often with paradoxical results, tensions between aspects of experience: the experiences simultaneously of being too late and too early (too soon) in the temporal dimension (c.f. Hamlet’s “the time is out of joint”) and being both distant and close (in the spatial dimension), and anyway of being both temporal and spatial. The concept of “aura,” which is one of Benjamin’s most influential contributions, is best understood in terms of these tensions or oscillations. He says that “aura” is a “strange web of space and time” or “a distance as close as it can be.” The main idea is of something inaccessible and elusive, something highly valued but which is deceptive and out of reach. Aura, in this sense, is associated with the nineteenth century notions of the artwork and is thus lost, Benjamin argues, with the onset of photography. At first photographs attempted to imitate painting but very quickly and because of the nature of the technology photography took its own direction contributing to the destruction of all traditional notions of the fine arts.” Phillips, John. On Walter Benjamin. [Online] Cited 02/06/2014. No longer available online
“One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.” Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936, Section 2. [Online] Cited 02/06/2014.
16/ Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Shocken, 1969, p. 236.
17/ Frank, Robert. The Americans. Washington: Steidl/National Gallery of Art, Revised edition, May 30, 2008.
18/ Newton, op.cit., Chapter 13.
19/ Anon. “A chronology of events in the history of the State Library of Victoria,” on the State Library of Victoria website. [Online] Cited 03/06/2010. No longer available.
20/ See Cox, Leonard B. The National Gallery of Victoria, 1861-1968: The Search for a Collection. Melbourne: The National Gallery of Victoria; Brown Prior Anderson Pty Ltd, 1971.
21/ Ibid., p. 378.
22/ Crombie, Isobel. op cit., Introduction p. 7.
23/ Crombie, Isobel. op cit., Introduction p. 7.
24/ Westbrook, Eric. “Minutes of the Photographic Subcommittee” 22/07/1970 quoted in Tate, Suzanne. Photographic Collections in Victoria: Waverley City Gallery, Horsham Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria: An Analysis of Past History and Future Directions. The University of Melbourne: Postgraduate Diploma Thesis, Chapter One, 1998, pp. 12-13. Other institutions included the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Art Institute of Chicago.
25/ Crombie, Isobel. op. cit., Introduction p. 6.
26/ Westbrook, Eric and Brown, Albert. “Establishment of Photography at the Victorian Arts Centre,” in Minutes of Trustees Reports, NGV, 4th April, 1967, p. 886 quoted in Crombie, Isobel. op cit., Introduction p. 6. Footnote 2.
27/ See Crombie, Isobel. op cit., Introduction p. 8 and Tate, Suzanne. op cit., Chapter 2: The Photography Department of the National Gallery of Victoria. pp. 14-15.
28/ NGV Trustees. National Gallery of Victoria Annual Report 1969-70. Melbourne, 1970, np quoted in Tate, Suzanne. op cit., Chapter 2: The Photography Department of the National Gallery of Victoria. pp. 14-15.
29/ NGV Photographic Subcommittee. Report. Melbourne, 1970, p. 2 quoted in Tate, Suzanne. op cit., Chapter 2: The Photography Department of the National Gallery of Victoria. p. 16.
30/ Crombie, Isobel. op cit., Introduction p. 8.
31/ Crombie, Isobel. “Creating a Collection: International Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria,” in Re_View: 170 years of Photography. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2009, p. 7.
32/ Ibid.,
33/ NGV Trustees.National Gallery of Victoria Annual Report 1971-72. Melbourne, 1970, np quoted in Tate, Suzanne. op cit., Chapter 2: The Photography Department of the National Gallery of Victoria. p. 16.
34/ NGV Trustees. National Gallery of Victoria Annual Report 1972-73. Melbourne, 1970, np quoted in Tate, Suzanne. op cit., Chapter 2: The Photography Department of the National Gallery of Victoria. p. 16.
35/ NGV Trustees. National Gallery of Victoria Annual Report 1969-70. Melbourne, 1970, np quoted in Tate, Suzanne. op cit., Chapter 2: The Photography Department of the National Gallery of Victoria. p. 16.
37/ Some of these images have been shown for the first time in over twenty years in the 2009 exhibition Light Years: Photography and Space in the third floor photography gallery at NGV International.
38/ “After Eureka Stockade Boddington went to work at Film Australia and in 1950 worked for the GPO Film Unit. With the introduction of television she went to work at the ABC as an editor. She and her second husband cameraman Adrian Boddington would then set up their own company Zanthus Films. After his death she became the curator of photography at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1971.” Allen, J. “Australian Visions. The films of Dahl and Geoffrey Collings,” in Eras Journal Edition 4, December 2002, Footnote 33 [Online] Cited 14/10/2014. No longer available online.
39/ Minutes of the NGV Photographic Subcommittee. Melbourne, 16/05/1972 quoted in Tate, Suzanne. op cit., Chapter 2: The Photography Department of the National Gallery of Victoria. pp. 17-18.
40/ Crombie, Isobel. “Creating a Collection: International Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria,” in Re_View: 170 years of Photography. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2009, p. 9.
41/ NGV Trustees. National Gallery of Victoria Annual Report 1974-75. Melbourne, 1975, p. 24 quoted in Tate, Suzanne. op cit., Chapter 2: The Photography Department of the National Gallery of Victoria. pp. 17-18.
42/ Boddington, J. Overseas Travel by Assistant Curator of Photography. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1976, pp. 1-3 quoted in Tate, Suzanne. op cit., Chapter 2: The Photography Department of the National Gallery of Victoria. pp. 18-19.
43/ Boddington, J. quoted in Crombie, Isobel. “Creating a Collection: International Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria,” in Re_View: 170 years of Photography. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2009, p. 9. See also Boddington, J. quoted in quoted in Tate, Suzanne. op cit., Chapter 2: The Photography Department of the National Gallery of Victoria. pp. 18-19.
44/ Boddington, J. Overseas Travel by Assistant Curator of Photography. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1976, pp. 1-3 quoted in Tate, Suzanne. op cit., Chapter 2: The Photography Department of the National Gallery of Victoria. pp. 18-19.
45/ NGV Trustees. National Gallery of Victoria Annual Report 1975-76. Melbourne, 1976, p. 26 quoted in Tate, Suzanne. op cit., Chapter 2: The Photography Department of the National Gallery of Victoria. pp. 18-19.
46/ See Crombie, Isobel. “Creating a Collection: International Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria,” in Re_View: 170 years of Photography. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2009, p. 9.
47/ NGV Trustees. National Gallery of Victoria Annual Report 1975-76. Melbourne, 1976, p. 27 quoted in Tate, Suzanne. op cit., Chapter 2: The Photography Department of the National Gallery of Victoria. pp. 18-19.
48/ See Crombie, Op. cit., p. 9.
49/ Boddington, Jenny. Modern Australian Photographs. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1976. Catalogue essay.
50/ See Crombie, Op. cit., p. 7. “The first formulation of policy in the Gallery’s annual report of 1976/77 stated the aim was to ‘develop a department of photography which will include both Australian and overseas works. The Australian collection will be historically comprehensive, while the collection of overseas photographers will aim to represent the work of the major artists in the history of photography’. Since that statement of intent thirty years ago, the collection has grown to include over 16,000 works. There are approximately sixty per cent Australian to forty per cent international photographs, a ratio that has remained constant over the years.” O’Hehir, Anne. “VIP: very important photographs from the European, American and Australian photography collection 1840s – 1940s” exhibition 26 May – 19 August 2007 on the National Gallery of Australia website [Online] Cited 12/10/2014. No longer available online
51/ See Crombie, Op. cit., p. 9.
52/ Crombie, Isobel. “Collecting Policy for the Department of Photography, National Gallery of Victoria (Revised October 1995),” in Tate, Suzanne. Photographic Collections in Victoria: Waverley City Gallery, Horsham Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria: An Analysis of Past History and Future Directions. The University of Melbourne: Postgraduate Diploma Thesis, 1998, p. 73. Appendix 1
53/ Crombie, Isobel. Second sight: Australian photography in the National Gallery of Victoria. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2002, p. 9
54/ Boddington, Jennie. Modern Australian Photographs. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1976. Catalogue essay.
55/ Boddington, Jennie. International Photography: 100 images from the Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. Adelaide: The Art Gallery of South Australia, 1983. Catalogue essay. Here we must acknowledge the contradiction between the quotations at footnotes 52 and 55, where the former proposes a broad based collecting policy from all eras both internationally and locally and, a few years later, the other proposes a focus on the purest uses of straight photography (in other words pure documentary photography) as it reflects broad cultural concerns.
56/ Tate, Suzanne. Photographic Collections in Victoria: Waverley City Gallery, Horsham Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria: An Analysis of Past History and Future Directions. The University of Melbourne: Postgraduate Diploma Thesis, 1998, pp. 19-20
57/ Crombie, Isobel. “Collecting Policy for the Department of Photography, National Gallery of Victoria (Revised October 1995),” cited in Tate, Suzanne. Ibid., Appendix 1 ‘International Photography’ Point 2, 1900-1980, p. 73
61/ Crombie, Isobel. “Creating a Collection: International Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria,” in Re_View: 170 years of Photography. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2009, p. 9
62/ Crombie, Isobel. Second sight: Australian photography in the National Gallery of Victoria. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2002, p. 10
63/ Ibid., p. 10
64/ Crombie, Isobel. “Collecting Policy for the Department of Photography, National Gallery of Victoria (Revised October 1995),” in Tate, Suzanne. Photographic Collections in Victoria: Waverley City Gallery, Horsham Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria: An Analysis of Past History and Future Directions. The University of Melbourne: Postgraduate Diploma Thesis, 1998, p. 73. Appendix 1
65/ McCaughy, Patrick. Review of ‘Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature’ by Paul Eggert on The Australian newspaper website [Online] December 2nd, 2009. Cited 01/01/2015. No longer available online.
66/ Ibid.,
67/ Crombie, Isobel. “Creating a Collection: International Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria,” in Re_View: 170 years of Photography. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2009, p. 9
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Turner first saw Norham, bordering Scotland on the river Tweed in Northumberland, in 1797. He was at the limits of his trip to northern England, when he also visited Buttermere, seen in the painting of nearly fifty years earlier shown nearby. After that first visit he made watercolours showing the ruin at sunrise, and visits in 1801 and 1831 resulted in further views. Here, finally, is one of a series of unfinished, unexhibited paintings reworking his monochrome Liber Studiorum landscape prints. Pure colours rather than contrasting tones express the blazing light as the historic building and landscape merge.
It is a hundred years since Turner’s painting, Norham Castle, Sunrise, went on display for the first time. The painting was among a group of twenty-one previously unknown, and essentially ‘unfinished’, canvases that were the focal point of a new Turner room inaugurated at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) in February 1906.
These pictures had entered to the national collection in 1856, but remained uncatalogued. This was chiefly due to a lack of adequate hanging space for the many oil paintings in the collection. But a bigger issue was the concern that the images would not be properly understood by the public. Gallery officials themselves had serious reservations, considering them only ‘rude beginnings’ or even ‘mere botches’.
Consequently, it was not until 1906, when a new generation began to look at Turner afresh, that space was made for the first batch of pictures disinterred from the National Gallery’s basement. These revelatory ‘new’ works were quite unlike the detailed pictures that the artist had exhibited. Their unresolved brushwork and luminous palette seemed to confirm the patriotic belief that Turner (and John Constable) had paved the way for the French Impressionists.
During the last hundred years, Norham Castle has gradually become the embodiment of many ideas about Turner’s later style, above all, its reduction of content to a minimum giving emphasis to the play of colour and light. This display explores the origins of Turner’s interest in Norham Castle as a subject and charts the impact the picture has had during its recent history.
Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775-1851) Approach to Venice Exhibited 1844 Oil on canvas Unframed: 62 x 94cm (24 7/16 x 37 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W. Mellon Collection Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
The large group of watercolours which resulted from Turner’s last visit to Venice in 1840 is characterised by a delicious liquidity which unifies air and water in layered, coloured mists. He stayed near the mouth of the Grand Canal at the Hotel Europe, from where he made sketches over the rooftops after dark. Alternatively, from a gongola off the great Piazzetta, he was able to see the sun set down the wide canal of the Giudecca.
First major West Coast international loan exhibition focuses on Turner’s late work; Famed 19th-century master created many of his most renowned pieces after age 60.
One of the most influential painters of nature who ever lived, Joseph Mallord William Turner (English, 1775-1851) was especially creative and inventive in the latter years of his life, producing many of his most famous and important paintings after the age of 60. On view at the J. Paul Getty Museum February 24, 2015, through May 24, 2015, J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free brings together more than 60 key oil paintings and watercolours from this culminating period of his career, and is the West Coast’s first major exhibition of Turner’s work.
“J.M.W. Turner is the towering figure of British 19th century art, a ground-breaking innovator in his own day whose relevance and status as a seeming harbinger of 20th century ‘modernism; has made him an inspiration to generations of later artists up to the present day. A successful and well-known public figure in his own day, Turner produced some of his most innovative and challenging work during the last 16 years of his life,” explains Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “He was frequently mocked and misunderstood for his choice of unusual subject matters, his experimentation with different canvas formats, and his pioneering free and spontaneous techniques in both oil and watercolour. While Turner could not knowingly have anticipated future artistic trends, he is seen today by many as a prophet of modernism because of his rough, gestural brushwork and quasi-abstract subject matter. His work captured the natural landscape’s atmosphere and colour like no other artist before him, and conveyed the awe-inspiring power of the elements as never before. This exhibition celebrates Turner as the most innovative and experimental artist of his time, and I have no doubt that it will be inspiring to a new generation of artists working in California today.”
“The exhibition shows an artist at the top of his game, totally at ease with his media, and still keen to push boundaries and challenge assumptions. We see how Turner was modern in his own time, but the results are astonishing even for us today,” said Julian Brooks, one of the exhibition curators.
The Sea
In his later years, Turner’s continuing fascination with the sea reached a zenith. Although he respected existing conventions of marine painting, particularly its 17th-century Dutch roots, he consistently moved beyond them, turning the water into a theatre for drama and effect. At the Royal Academy exhibitions, he confounded viewers with his bold portrayals of modern maritime action – whales and their hunters battling for survival – while striving to capture the mysterious depths and forces of the elements. Never having witnessed a whale hunt himself, he included a reference to “Beale’s Voyage” in the catalogues, acknowledging that his source of inspiration was Thomas Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839). (Herman Melville consulted the same book when writing Moby-Dick, published in 1851.)
The London press at the time greeted Turner’s whaling pictures, such as Hurrah! for the Whaler Erebus! Another Fish!, 1846, with scathing attacks, lambasting their yellow palette and lack of finish. The Almanack of the Month printed a cartoon of a Turner painting with a large mop and a bucket labeled “yellow,” and opined that his pictures resembled a lobster salad.
Travel
In addition to the sea, Turner’s insatiable appetite for history, different cultures, and sublime natural scenery drew him time and again to Continental Europe, where he observed not only spectacular sites such as ancient ruins, medieval castles, jagged mountain peaks, and meandering rivers, but also local customs and dress. On such travels he made numerous watercolour sketches, which effectively captured fleeting effects of nature on paper. These works display a complex layering of colour animated through the pulsing energy of turbulent handling. They demonstrate both Turner’s commitment to observed natural effects and his unwavering obsession with the vagaries and delights of watercolour, a medium he had indisputably made his own. Some of the finished watercolours he made for sale after his trips, such as The Blue Rigi, Sunrise, 1842, represent pinnacles in the use of watercolour technique.
Turner was especially captivated by the particular combination of light and colour he found in Venice, and revisited the city several times. He traveled lightly, usually alone, making few concessions to his age or failing strength, and drew constantly in his sketchbooks. Turner’s many images of Venice were among his most potent late works, influencing later artists such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903) and Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926).
For Turner, watercolour was the perfect medium to capture Venice’s aqueous and luminous effects. While based on on-the-spot sketches done there in 1840, Turner’s later paintings of Venice drew out the city’s essence and spirit rather than its exact topography. His Venice was often touched with a melancholy that echoed the romantic fatalism popularised by writers such as Lord Byron, offering a warning from history to Britain’s rise as a commercial empire.
Poetry
Turner was deeply interested in poetry and often paired his paintings with lines of text in order to elucidate their themes. In some cases he authored the poems himself but often he quoted celebrated 18th- and 19th-century British poets such as Thomas Gray and, most especially, Lord Bryon. Throughout the Getty exhibition, many of the lines of poetry or prose that he chose or wrote are reunited with his pictures on the gallery walls. For example, the lines “The moon is up, and yet it is not night/ The sun as yet disputes the day with her” from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818) were chosen, and slightly altered by Turner to accompany two paintings: Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino, exhibited 1839, and Approach to Venice, exhibited 1844, which both feature the setting sun and a rising moon but also evoke the rise and fall of empires.
Contemporary Events
Much of Tuner’s later work reflects on contemporary events including the modern state of Italy, the legacy of the Napoleonic Wars, and the spectacular fires that ravaged the Palace of Westminster and the Tower of London in 1834 and 1841, respectively. In addition, Turner was the first major European artist to engage with innovations such as steam power, as seen in Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, 1842, which shows this much-vaunted new technology at the mercy of the awesome power of the elements.
Technique
Perhaps nothing demonstrates Turner’s virtuosity as a painter better than the stories of his performances on “Varnishing Days.” The Royal Academy and the British Institution would set aside a short period of time for artists to put final touches on their work before an exhibition opened to the public. Turner revelled in the competitive jostling and repartee that occurred on these occasions. In his later years, he would frequently submit canvases with only the roughest indications of colour and form, speedily bringing them to completion on-site. Eyewitnesses record that Turner painted most of The Hero of a Hundred Fights, 1800-10, reworked and exhibited 1847, and Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834, 1834-1835, on their respective varnishing days.
Pairs and Shapes
In his later years, Turner was as creative in his approach to media, materials, and techniques as he was in his choice of subject matter. He created works that offer some of his most dazzling displays of colour, audacious handling, and complex iconographies. From 1840 to 1846, the artist employed a smaller canvas size for a series of paintings, which were often conceived as pairs expressing opposites, such as two that were exhibited in 1842: Peace – Burial at Sea and War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet. These were principally square but could also be round or octagonal. Exploring states of consciousness, optics, and the emotive power of colour, they shocked and mystified his audience, who thought them the products of senility or madness. Painted near the end of his life, these inventive works are a coda to Turner’s career, representing a synthesis of his innovations in technique, composition and theme.
Turner died in 1851 at age 76, leaving the majority of his work to the English nation along with an intended bequest to support impoverished artists. In the years since, while popular and scholarly ideas about his work have changed, he inarguably emerges as one of the most beloved figures and popular painters in the history of the United Kingdom.
This exhibition was organised by Tate Britain in association with the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. The Getty Museum curators of the exhibition are Julian Brooks, curator of drawings, and Peter Björn Kerber, assistant curator of paintings.
The exhibition is accompanied by the publication J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free. Edited by David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon, and Sam Smiles, this 250-page volume is richly illustrated.
~ Water, Wind, and Whales ~ Continental Travels ~ Contemporary Subjects ~ History, Myth, and Meaning ~ Pairs and Shapes
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Contemporary Subjects
Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775-1851) The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834 1834-1835 Oil on canvas Unframed: 92.1 x 123.2cm (36 1/4 x 48 1/2 in.) Philadelphia Museum of Art: The John Howard McFadden Collection, 1928
This watercolour study was originally one of nine consecutive leaves (D27846 – D27854; Turner Bequest CCLXXXIII 1-9) in a sketchbook. They have previously been documented with varying degrees of certainty as showing the 1834 fire at the Houses of Parliament beside the River Thames in central London, but are here identified as representing the similarly large and dramatic fire which broke out at the moated Tower of London on 30 October 1841, destroying the late seventeenth-century Grand Storehouse (see the Introduction to the sketchbook for detailed discussion).
Conflagration of the Tower of London, on the Night of the 30th of October 1841, a colour lithograph published on 3 November of a view ‘drawn upon the spot by William Oliver’ (1804-1853) shows the Tower complex from the north, with flames and smoke pouring from the windows and rafters of the Grand Storehouse, largely obscuring the White Tower. This can be compared with the present work, the most precisely detailed of Turner’s studies in terms of architectural features. (See the Introduction for other comparisons between Turner’s studies and contemporary prints.) The pale blue form towards the left is presumably intended as the White Tower; otherwise lacking in detail, the inner faces of its corner turrets are shown receding in steep perspective, although in fact the north-west turret is cylindrical. Turner has included details of rafters, a pediment and what seems to be the clock tower of the Grand Storehouse (which fell in at quite an early stage of the fire), but it is not clear whether he intended to show the scene directly from the north, aligned directly on the façade of the storehouse, or obliquely from the north-east, which would explain the relative positions of the clock tower and the White Tower.
In addition to the newspaper stories extensively quoted in the sketchbook’s Introduction, the following details from the Times relate to the raising of the alarm late on the evening of Saturday 30 October:
[Sergeant] Edwards [‘of the 1st Battalion of Fusilier Guards’] states, that while he was in the Nag’s Head public-house, in Postern-row [opposite the north side of the Tower], he perceived, to his great surprise, a light through one of the windows, just above the bomb proof part of the Bowyer Tower. He went out and crossed to the railings at the top of the moat by which the Tower is surrounded, and watched the light for a minute or two. At first it appeared but little larger than the glimmer of a candle, but it suddenly increased to such an extent, that no doubt was left upon his mind that the place was on fire.1
The present Tower study is notable in being the only one of the nine to incorporate gouache: a touch of white is combined with scratching out to render a bright light through a window of the towers silhouetted towards the left. This may be an effect Turner observed or imagined, or perhaps the report caught his attention.
Addressing the sequence of studies in the context of the traditional former 1834 identification, Katherine Solender felt that only this and D27850, D27853 and D27854 included ‘shapes that can be remotely identified with the Parliamentary complex’, in this case possibly indicating the roof and lantern of Westminster Hall on the right, with the Towers of Westminster Abbey beyond to the left.2 In his extended catalogue entry for Turner’s painting The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834, exhibited at the British Institution in 1835 (Philadelphia Museum of Art),3 Richard Dorment presented a sustained interpretation of the this and the other eight watercolour studies in terms of a sequence reflecting the topography and chronology of the 1834 Westminster fire.4
Matthew Imms, April 2014 from catalogue entry to David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, September 2014
1/ ‘The Tower of London. Destructive Conflagration. (Additional Particulars.)’, The Times, Tuesday 2 November 1841, p. 5. 2/ Solender 1984, pp. 50-1; see also Lyles 1992, p. 72. 3/ Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised ed., New Haven and London 1984, pp. 207-10 no. 359, pl. 364 (colour). 4/ Dorment 1986, pp. 400-1; see also Lyles 1992, p. 72.
This canvas was originally an exploration of industrial machinery, but it was reworked to show the moment when a bronze statue of the Duke of Wellington was removed from its mould. Using the intense light of the foundry to obscure the figure, Turner transforms Wellington into an ethereal presence. The image is in stark contrast to Turner’s carefully researched battle scenes. Here, tone and colour are employed to endow a national hero with elemental force.
Turner visited Portsmouth to record the arrival of the French king, who was on a State Visit. He made numerous sketches of the event and also painted two unfinished oils: one showing the king’s arrival, the other his disembarkation. Both are principally concerned with the atmosphere of the occasion, concentrating on the crowd of onlookers. Turner had met Louis-Philippe when the king was living in exile at Twickenham in the 1810s. Contact between them was renewed in the mid-1830s and he was invited to dine with him at his château at Eu in 1845.
Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775-1851) Mercury Sent to Admonish Aeneas Exhibited 1850 Oil on canvas Unframed: 90.2 x 120.6cm (35 1/2 x 47 1/2 in.) Framed: 129.6 x 160.7 x 18.5cm (51 x 63 1/4 x 7 5/16 in.) Tate: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
The nine finished paintings are being shown in a dedicated room of the exhibition which brings new perspectives on Turner’s work during the final period of his life. At the time of their creation Turner’s square canvases were his most controversial and they were famously subjected to a hail of abuse in the press. Even Ruskin, a devoted fan, described Turner’s work by 1846 as ‘indicative of mental disease’. The show will reposition Turner in his old age as a challenging and daring artist who continued his lifelong engagement with the changing world around him right up until his death in 1851.
When Turner began painting on square canvases in the later years of his life between 1840 and 1846 they were a new format for the artist to be working in. In works known as Shade and Darkness and Light and Colour, both exhibited 1843, it can be seen how Turner developed his dramatic use of the vortex, a technique characteristic in his later work.
The display of the square canvases, along with one unfinished square composition, has been made possible by the important loans of Glaucus and Scylla 1841 (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, USA), and Dawn of Christianity 1841 (Ulster Museum, Belfast, UK). The group of works includes some of Turner’s most iconic pairings such as Peace andWar, both exhibited 1842 (Tate). The exhibition as a whole will also include a number of pairings from throughout this period of his life, showing Turner’s fondness for working in sets or sequences in his old age.
“Turner’s controversial square canvases to be brought together for the first time,” from the Tate website 13 March 2014
Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775-1851) Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino 1839 Oil on canvas Unframed: 91.8 x 122.6cm (36 1/8 x 48 1/4 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The J. Paul Getty Museum 1200 Getty Center Drive Los Angeles, California 90049
Co-curators: Dr. Les Walkling and Stephen Zagala, Senior Curator at Monash Gallery of Art, as part of Melbourne’s Climarte Festival
Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024) Swanfires, Chris’s shed 2002-04 Chromogenic print 110 x 235.5cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2011 Reproduction courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
“The term “landscape” can be ambiguous and is often used to describe a creative interpretation of the land by an artist and the terrain itself. But there is a clear distinction: the land is shaped by natural forces while the artist’s act of framing a piece of external reality involves exerting creative control. The terms of this ‘control’ have be theorised since the Renaissance and, while representations of nature have changed over the centuries, a landscape is essentially a mediated view of nature.”
Dr Isobel Crombie. ‘Stormy Weather. Contemporary Landscape Photography’ (exhibition catalogue). Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2010, p. 15.
What’s the story!
I wish I could say that this is a marvellous, magical exhibition, that it has value in its being in the world… but I can’t. The exhibition is very disappointing, dispiriting even. If this is the current state of contemporary photographers working in the landscape in Australia, then the Earth is in deep trouble (as if we didn’t know it already).
A large part of the exhibition is given over to the work of the ND5 photographic collective. I am not going to name the photographers here since most of the exhibited work does not contain specific names (unlike this posting). The work has been culled (an appropriate word given the theme of the exhibition) from numerous bodies of work spanning the years 2010-2013.
Pairs of photographs have been renamed with poetic titles such as The lie of the land and The walls of the world with seemingly scant regard for the origins and stories of the photographs from their respective series, and then cobbled together in this present form under the banal title Investigations (2010-2013). This process pays no heed to the original conceptualisation of each series and the concerns of the collective at that time they were made and here this produces a display that has little rhyme or reason. Text quotations (see below) try to remedy the situation to little avail.
Further, if you think of those lush coffee table books – “Australia from the air” or “The wonders of the Great Barrier Reef” then you get the picture. Technically, the work is superb but aesthetically and emotionally these images are invariably dead (perhaps that is the irony – I looked for irony but it was sadly lacking). The collective say that they are fascinated – in the broadest sense – by places and opposites
“We are fascinated in the broadest sense by places like the Pilbara, including our ignorance and insensitivity to them. We are not ‘in the Pilbara’ in the way that scientists collect and identify it. Rather, we are collecting what can’t be seen; evidence of our uncertainty, interaction, wanderings and pondering…
We were drawn to its boundaries and edges; between solid and liquid, weight and weightlessness, hot and cool, dry and wet, between ourselves and the rest of the world, and that line of habitation that encrusts, indeed misrepresents our nation … The problem is how we index, moralise and politicise land use, rather than appropriating or projecting country as an aesthetic object.”1
Firstly, the opposites thing is such an easy way out; and secondly, as Isobel Crombie notes in the quotation at the top of the posting, any artist’s view of the landscape is always a mediated view of nature.
Through their lurid, hyperreal photographs of the land these photographs do exactly what this collective said they didn’t want to do… appropriate and project country as an aesthetic object. Here the pastiche is the real.
The group also seems to want to have AGENCY in both its meanings – as in photographic agency (a business or organisation providing a particular service on behalf of another business, person, or group); or an action or intervention producing a particular effect. What the collective is doing, in the broadest sense (for that is what they are working with), is creating an ideology of the landscape.
It’s not an ideology that I buy into.
You could propose that a couple of the photographs build an argument around the conceit / concept of the sublime – to question whether it can be undermined through irony (the impression of multiple light sources in Stirling Ranges, 2013, below), or to question whether it actually belongs on the surface of the earth (the dust-storm, In my Garden, 2012, below), where it can only be viewed as if the lens is detached from the surface of the earth. But this is drawing a long bow when these are viewed in the context of the rest of the work.
It is worth quoting Joan Fontcuberta extensively here for he, much more eloquently than I, names this work for what it is:
“Arthus-Bertrand is a highly experienced and highly regarded professional who has taken more than 100,000 aerial shots, covering almost the entire surface of the globe [author of Earth from Above – “as magnificent a coffee-table book as you could hope to find, whose successive reprints have sold in astronomical numbers”]. There is no doubt as to the quality of his work, on the contrary, we can only celebrate the fact that he and his team at the specialised agency Altitude continue to be so prolific and so creative. But his popular and commercial impact and the eagerness of the cultural institutions to clasp him to their bosoms prompt reflections that go to the very heart of documentary photography and its current crisis.
When paparazzi and the celebrity/human interest-genre reign supreme, serious photo reportage gives way to mere illustration, to the aestheticisation of the world and the masking of conflicts rendered insignificant by distance. Something is wrong when readers can say, ‘How picturesque the favelas are, with those bright colours! What wonderful colours these polluted rivers have!’ Bretch said photographic realism bounces off the façade of things: a photo of the Krupp factories shows us smokestacks and sheds, but tells us nothing about the relations of exploitation inside them. What was needed to refute him were photographers with the talent and the guts to demonstrate that it was a matter of critical sense and eloquence, that photography was a language which really could penetrate the camouflaging surfaces of the real.”2
That photography was a language which really could penetrate the camouflaging surfaces of the real. In this case the wonderful, hyperreal, saturated colours of the polluted rivers – that really hits the nail on the head.
If, as the collective says, “they want to examine its particular confluxes of culture, industry, environment and history in order to begin to craft a stronger vision for its future” (The Pilbara Project – 2010) then they need to be more concerned about what is present in the landscape, what is present in the community not from several emotional steps removed. You only have to look at the work of Edward Burtynsky and his Australian Minescape series to understand that in his series the photographs are all made in a way, and with a concern that goes beyond technical competence and cinematic craft – something that can rarely be said of the work presented by ND5.
Personally, I believe one of the main reasons for being an artist is to seek to redefine the sets of opposites that we find, to excavate… to pull away the mundane description of things. And in my opinion, if you really LOOK AT THIS WORK – and that’s seems to be a simple thing to ask an artist to do, to really look at their own work – then you have to ask yourself ‘Why would I want to look at this?’
There is no story, no pulling away of the veil, for these are prosaic images cloaked, as Fontcuberta says, in the colours of polluted rivers, in the camouflaging surfaces of the hyperreal. Perhaps these contemporary “picturesque” images are the modern form of the end of Pictorialism?
The lack of a story continues to haunt the rest of the exhibition as well. If we address the title Earth Matters in both its forms – that Earth really does matter to us; and that Earth matters (as in we are all made up of atoms and that matter commonly exists in four states (or phases): solid, liquid and gas, and plasma) then the work can relate to the body, place, landscape, etc… what an opportunity!
The usually reliable Rosemary Laing provides a dirge-like image that took me nowhere. Siri Hayes supplies a wonderful, ironic image (Wanderer in a sea of images 2013, below) with chopped down trees in a grand vista, a person taking a photograph of a person taking a photograph with belching power stations in the background – and then prints it at a massive scale which over stretches the boundaries of the technical possibilities of the negative. At a distance it just about holds up, but as can be seen from the closeup below (click on it for the large version) the image is blurred and distorted when printed at this huge scale. Photographs have a correct proportion to their significance as an image which is completely destroyed here.
David Tatnall exposes black and white pinhole images of the landscape which really didn’t do much for me, especially with an extraneous blurred human figure that really meant very little in the context of the images, while Harry Nankin’s work fails to convince. His creatures crawling over photo-senstised plates of glass and then displayed on a light box left me cold – and yet another artist where you had to look up the meaning of the title / word ekkyklêma to try and understand the story being told. Christian Bumbarra Thompson supplies an image that means nothing to the uninitiated (another story that can only be guessed at – there is no text to explain), while Anne Ferran’s beautiful, luminous ink-jet print’s on aluminium, Untitled (2008) are just that – beautiful and luminous – unless you know the backstory which is nowhere explained in the gallery. (The photographs are “more than a decade’s exploration of a piece of ground on the outskirts of the small village of Ross in central Tasmania. Today little remains of its past as a female convict prison, apart from some mounds of earth and scattered stones. Her photographs and video works about this site reflect the ongoing difficulty of grasping and making sense of a ruined and fragmented past.”)
And last but not least, to the star of the show: Silvi Glattauer’s series Sanctuary (2014, below). These are gorgeous!
Beautiful photogravure prints on cotton paper give a wonderful soft tonality to these alien environments. The worlds are like liquid mercury. I did a double take trying to work out what they were for quite a few seconds before I got it. Beautifully composed, quiet, sensitive and eloquent these are everything that so much of the rest of the show isn’t. The story is in the macrocosm and the microcosm, the world at our fingertips that we never see, that we are forever destroying. Not the broadest of brush strokes picturesque but getting in and getting your hands dirty, paradoxically revealing cosmic worlds that we usually only dream of. Finally a story worth photographing: some matter that really does matter.
Christian Bumbarra Thompson (Australian, b. 1978) Bidjara man of the Kunja Nation I’m not going anywhere without you 2009 from the series Lost together Chromogenic print 100 x 99.3cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2009 Reproduction courtesy of the artist
Siri Hayes (Australia, b. 1977) Wanderer in a sea of images 2013 Ink-jet print on polyester 220 x 280cm Collection of the artist Courtesy of the artist
Siri Hayes’s exquisitely detailed photographs depict picturesque landscapes but landscapes that are also disturbed, perhaps devastated by fire, littered with debris, or cleared of their native vegetation for plantation timber. By using the conventions of classical landscape painting to photograph the contemporary landscape, Hayes draws our attention to environmental themes in this unique, large-scale installation.
Siri Hayes (Australia, b. 1977) Wanderer in a sea of images (detail) 2013 Ink-jet print on polyester 220 x 280cm Collection of the artist Courtesy of the artist
Silvi Glattauer (born Argentina 1966; arrived Australia 1974) Sanctuary 2014 Six photogravure prints on cotton paper 27.6 x 27.7cm (each) Collection of the artist Courtesy of the artist
Silvi Glattauer (born Argentina 1966; arrived Australia 1974) Sanctuary I 2014 Six photogravure prints on cotton paper 27.6 x 27.7cm (each) Collection of the artist Courtesy of the artist
Silvi Glattauer (born Argentina 1966; arrived Australia 1974) Sanctuary VI 2014 Six photogravure prints on cotton paper 27.6 x 27.7cm (each) Collection of the artist Courtesy of the artist
Installation photographs of Earth Matters at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Harry Nankin (Australia, b. 1953) Minds in the cave / fragment 2 2014 Pigment ink-jet prints on cotton pape Collection of the artist
Harry Nankin (Australia, b. 1953) Ekkyklema #1 (installation view details) 2014 Gelatin silver chemogram films on starfire glass [on lightbox] 0.5 x 14 x 14cm (each) Courtesy of the artist Collection of the artist Note: 112 plein air silver gelatin shadowgram and chemogram films on starfire glass panes Photos: Marcus Bunyan
An ekkyklêma (“roll-out machine”) was a wheeled platform rolled out through a skênê in ancient Greek theatre. It was used to bring interior scenes out into the sight of the audience. Some ancient sources suggest that it may have been revolved or turned.
It is mainly used in tragedies for revealing dead bodies, such as Hippolytus’ dying body in the final scene of Euripides’ play of the same name, or the corpse of Eurydice draped over the household altar in Sophocles’ Antigone. Other uses include the revelation in Sophocles’ Ajax of Ajax surrounded by the sheep he killed whilst under the delusion that they were Greeks. The ekkyklêma is also used in comedy to parody the tragic effect. An example of this is in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae when Agathon, portrayed as an effeminate, is wheeled onstage on an ekkyklêma to enhance the comic absurdity of the scene.
Anne Ferran (Australian, b. 1949) Untitled 2008 From the series Lost to worlds 2 ink-jet print on aluminium 120 x 120cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired with assistance from the Robert Salzer Foundation 2009 Reproduction courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery (Melbourne)
Anne Ferran (Australian, b. 1949) Untitled 2008 From the series Lost to worlds 2 ink-jet print on aluminium 120.0 x 120.0cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired with assistance from the Robert Salzer Foundation 2009 Reproduction courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery (Melbourne)
Intellectually and emotionally engaging, sometimes austere, her [Ferran’s] photographs have explored histories of incarceration in prisons, asylums, hospitals and nurseries. They play with invisibility and anonymity, and are often haunted by things lost or unseen. Lost to Worlds 2008 was the culmination of more than a decade’s exploration of a piece of ground on the outskirts of the small village of Ross in central Tasmania. Today little remains of its past as a female convict prison, apart from some mounds of earth and scattered stones. Her photographs and video works about this site reflect the ongoing difficulty of grasping and making sense of a ruined and fragmented past.
Ninety Degrees Five Earth matters (installation stills) 2015 Multimedia, 10.13 minutes Filmed and edited: Michael Fletcher Score: Jo Quail-Sonver Collection of the artists Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Earth matters: contemporary photographers in the landscape is an exhibition developed by MGA for ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE; a Melbourne-wide arts festival exploring climate change and environmental ethics. MGA’s contribution to this festival highlights the ecological sensitivity of contemporary Australian photographers. Moving away from the detached ‘picturesque’ views of nature, so prevalent in the history of photography, these artists engage with the earth in immersive and connected ways.
Siri Hayes and Christian Thompson wander into epic vistas to enact comical self-portraits that capture the capricious nature of human presence on this planet. Silvi Glattauer peers into the interiors of bromeliad plants to find fecund microcosms that bubble with humble but hopeful vitality. Rosemary Laing pays tribute to ecological tragedy with a monumental photograph of bushfire devastation, while Anne Ferran ruminates over the tragic scars of colonial history in the landscape. David Tatnall’s eerie photographs have been produced with a rudimentary pinhole camera, embed in the environment to bear witness to the earth’s passing. Harry Nankin does away with the camera and its singular perspective altogether, using raw photographic film to record ecological forces in nocturnal landscapes.
Earth matters features a new installation by the Ninety Degrees Five collective alongside the work of other contemporary landscape photographers including Anne Ferran, Silvi Glattauer, Siri Hayes, Harry Nankin, David Tatnall and Christian Thompson. Ninety Degrees Five (ND5) is a collective of five Australian artists established in 2010, featuring Peter Eastway, Christian Fletcher, Michael Fletcher, Tony Hewitt & Les Walkling.
Text from the MGA website
Installation view of Ninety Degrees Five Investigations 2010-2013 at the exhibition Earth Matters, Monash Gallery of Art
Ninety Degrees Five The lie of the land (installation view) (Christian Fletcher, left; Les Walkling, right) 2012-2013 From the series Investigations 2010-2013 Pigment ink-jet prints Collection of the artists Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Christian Fletcher (Australian, b. 1965) From the series South West Light (detail) 2012 Pigment ink-jet print
Ninety Degrees Five The walls of the world (installation view) (Tony Hewitt, left; Peter Eastway, right) 2012-2013 From the series Investigations 2010-2013 Pigment ink-jet prints Collection of the artists Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Tony Hewitt (Australian) From the series Shark Bay – Inscription (detail) 2013 Pigment ink-jet print
About Ninety Degrees Five
“Our work … seeks to encourage and reinforce public concern for the fate of the earth, and our responsibility to act on that awareness.”
~ Les Walkling
Ninety Degrees Five (ND5) is a unique collaboration of four photographers, Christian Fletcher, Peter Eastway, Tony Hewitt, Les Walkling and film maker Michael Fletcher.
ND5 initially came together for The Pilbara Project in 2010. The Pilbara Project was developed and produced by FORM, an independent, non-profit cultural organisation in Western Australia. Curated by William L. Fox, the Director of the Center for Art and Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art, and Mollie Hewitt (FORM), the collaboration resulted in the book, The Pilbara Project: Field Notes and Photographs Collected over 2010, and the first Pilbara Project exhibition: 52 Weeks On, in February 2011.
Subsequent ND5 projects, South West Light 2011, Shark Bay – Inscription 2012, EAST 2013 and NORTH 2014 consolidated the collective’s independence and artistic agenda. The result has been ten exhibitions on three continents since 2011. Each exhibition is supported by public performances and events, including broadcast media, workshops, master classes, and artist talks.
Investigations 2010-2013 is ND5’s latest installation that remixes works from the first three ND5 projects (The Pilbara Project, South West Light, and Shark Bay – Inscription) to highlight their transcending artistic projections and cultural concerns. In this sense ND5’s projects are a primary research model for their ongoing Investigations, and thereby demonstrate an engaging, enquiring, and speculative process, not just its resolved and published outcome. This is important because ND5 has also become a case study in what can happen when a group forms from diverse but supportive individuals who are secure enough in their own practice to experiment with it.
This model privileges something of the urgency and necessity surrounding our worryingly fragile relationship to land and landscape, place and belonging, rights and duties, environmental crisis and environmental justice, sovereignty and reconciliation, trust and despair.
Investigations 2010-2013 also extends ND5’s collaborative endeavour through the acknowledgement, quotation and incorporation of other voices no less concerned with such matters, and thereby seeks to promote this conversation beyond individuals and collectives.
ND5
Text that accompanies the Ninety Degrees Five series Investigations 2010-2013 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Christian Fletcher (Australian, b. 1965) Stirling Ranges 2013 From the series South West Light 965mm x 2165mm
Tony Hewittt (Australian) Red Coast 2014 From the series Shark Bay – Inscription 965mm x 965mm
Peter Eastway (Australian) South of Faure Island 2014 From the series Shark Bay – Inscription 965mm x 965mm
Les Walkling (Australian, b. 1953) In my Garden 2012 From the series The Pilbara Project 965mm x 965mm
Monash Gallery of Art 860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150 Australia Phone: + 61 3 8544 0500
Artists:Clarice Beckett, Dorrit Black, Bessie Davidson, Ethel Carrick Fox, Joy Hester, Nora Heysen, Hilda Rix Nicholas, Margaret Preston, Jane Price, Thea Proctor, Kathleen Sauerbier, Grace Cossington Smith, Clara Southern and others.
Clarice Beckett (Australian, 1887-1935) Winter Morning, Beaumaris c. 1927-1931 Oil on canvas 39.3 x 55cm
A delightful exhibition on a subject I freely admit that I knew very little about. An intelligent opening speech from Associate Professor Alison Inglis from The University of Melbourne helped me to be more informed about this fascinating period in Australian art history.
The hero for me in this posting is the work of Clarice Beckett. The atmosphere of her paintings when seen in the flesh is incredible, perfectly capturing the suffused light of the bayside suburbs of Melbourne where she painted. Her impressions are so purposeful and vivid; no extraneous flourish is necessary. Look at the painting The Red Bus for example (below) … the brief almost cartoonish outline of the bus hugs the right hand side of the composition, the red picked up by one of the two people walking in the middle of a road that runs behind the tea-trees that shield the beach from view. Every Australian would understand the symbolic quality of this mythic road.
Shadows are delineated by a few patches of darkness, telegraph poles by four swiftly drawn lines balanced on the left-hand side of the painting by a faint sign post that is almost not there, reinforced spatially by a ghostly white figure further up the painting in the middle of the road. We can almost hear the cicadas song, feel the heat rising from the tarmac, a little breeze rolling in from the sea every now and then. These cultural memories, as annotated by Beckett, will last forever.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Lauraine Diggins Fine Art for allowing me to publish the text and art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the art.
Clarice Beckett (Australian, 1887-1935) Morning Ride Nd Oil on canvas on pulp board 29.5 x 35cm
Clarice Beckett (Australian, 1887-1935)
Clarice Majoribanks Beckett (21 March 1887-7 July 1935) was an Australian painter whose works are featured in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Beckett is recognised as one of Australia’s most important modernist artists. Despite a talent for portraiture and a keen public appreciation for her still lifes, Beckett preferred the solo, outdoor process of painting landscapes. She relentlessly painted sea and beachscapes, rural and suburban scenes, often enveloped in the atmospheric effects of early mornings or evening. Her subjects were often drawn from the Beaumaris area, where she lived for the latter part of her life. She was one of the first of her group to use a painting trolley, or mobile easel to make it easier to paint outdoors in different locations..
Australian Tonalism
Australian Tonalism is characterised by a particular “misty” or atmospheric quality created by the Meldrum painting method of building “tone on tone”. Tonalism developed from Meldrum’s “Scientific theory of Impressions”; claiming that social decadence had given artists an exaggerated interest in colour and, to their detriment, were paying less attention to tone and proportion. Art, he said, should be a pure science based on optical analysis; its sole purpose being to place on the canvas the first ordered tonal impressions that the eye received. All adornments and narrative and literary references should be rejected.
Tonalism opposed Post-Impressionism and Modernism, and is now regarded as a precursor to Minimalism and Conceptualism. The whole movement had been under fierce controversy and they were without doubt the most unpopular group of artists, in the eyes of most other artists, in the history of Australian art. Influential Melbourne artist and teacher George Bell described Australian Tonalism as a “cult which muffles everything in a pall of opaque density”.
While painting the wild sea off Beaumaris during a big storm in 1935, Beckett developed pneumonia and died four days later in a hospital at Sandringham. She was buried in the Cheltenham Memorial Park (Wangara Road) not far from another noted female artist, Mary Vale. She was only 48 when she died, the year after her mother’s death.
Clarice Beckett (Australian, 1887-1935) The Red Bus Nd Oil on canvas on composition board 36.5 x 44cm
Dorrit Black (Australian, 1891-1951) The Parish Hall 1937 Coloured linocut 23 x 36cm
“It is the artist’s business to reveal to mankind a new outlook on life and the world.”
Dorrit Black, 1946
It should come as no surprise that Dorothea Foster (Dorrit) Black, like other women artists, would be scorned by the sexist, conservative Australian art establishment during her lifetime. When her life was tragically cut short by a car accident in Adelaide in 1951, artist and critic Ivor Francis’s obituary declared Black was that city’s first and, perhaps least understood “modern” artist.
“She has so consistently been artistically cold-shouldered and ignored since her return here about 20 years ago that it is amazing how she maintained the courage to fight on against so much prejudice and misunderstanding,” he wrote. “… It will be many years before her exceptional talent can be properly appreciated in its right perspective, as it most certainly will be.” …
Black was part of a generation of women, alongside Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington-Smith and Grace Cowley, who took risks by travelling overseas, painting in modernist styles and pursuing artistic careers often against the wishes of their family.
“What decided me to throw in my hand altogether the other day was your declaration that I ought to consider my time as belonging to the family first, leaving my painting for my spare time …” Black wrote in a letter to her brother in 1938. “After more than 20 years of struggling to make an artist of myself, I cannot give it all up and settle down to being nothing but a good sister and daughter.”
“She was a very modern woman which meant she belonged to an age when educated women started to break out of Victorian traditions and become independent and self-determined,” Lock-Weir says.
Black travelled to Europe on three occasions, including a two-year stint beginning in from September 1927 when she studied with printmaker Claude Flight at London’s Grosvenor School of Art, and cubists Andre Lhote and Albert Gleizes in Paris. In the summer of 1928, she travelled to the south of France with Crowley and Anne Dangar, where each painted views of the medieval hillside town of Mirmande. Black returned to Adelaide in 1935 to care for her ailing mother, building a studio-house on the city’s edge at Magill where she mainly painted landscapes of the Adelaide Hills and south coast. She also continued to advocate modern art and taught at the South Australian School of Art, influencing a generation of artists led by Jeffrey Smart and Ruth Tuck.
“Plump, dignified, black-haired and well-groomed, she was regarded as a mother-figure by younger artists,” wrote Ian North in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
Black’s untimely death in 1951 at the age of 59 left a small legacy of around 130 oil paintings, 159 watercolours, 50 linocuts and a handful of drawings, according to art consultant John Cruthers. “Some painters paint a lot, some paint a little, and then there’s Dorrit.”
Miriam Moxham (Australian, 1885-1971) Country Morning c. 1940 Oil on composition board 94 x 182cm
Bessie Davidson (Australian, 1879-1965) Autumn Table at Villeneuve 1935 Oil on plywood 44 x 82cm
Bessie Davidson (Australian, 1879-1965)
Bessie Davidson (1879-1965) was an Australian painter known for her impressionist, light-filled landscapes and interiors.
Davidson traveled to Australia to visit family in 1914 and was there when World War I began. She returned to France immediately, where she joined the French Red Cross and served in various military hospitals. During the war, she met the woman who would be her companion for the next two decades, Marguerite Leroy (d. 1938), whose nickname was “Dauphine”.
The postwar period between 1918 and 1920 saw Davidson producing quiet, intimate, loosely impressionistic paintings – mostly interiors, still lives, and portraits – in muted tones. Her style evolved in a more vigorous direction in the 1920s and 1930s, with rich, vibrant, often dramatic colours laid on with a palette knife. In this period her work sold well and was well-received by critics. She traveled around Europe, Russia, and Morocco making outdoor sketches that she used as the basis for paintings later produced in her studio. Her landscapes are notable for their quality of light and sense of atmosphere.
In 1930 Davidson was a founding vice-president of La Société Femmes Artistes Modernes. She was a founding member of the Société Nationale Indépendentes and a member of the Salon d’Automne. In 1931 she was appointed to the French Legion of Honor, in part for her cofounding of the Salon des Tuileries, the only Australian woman to receive that honour up to that time. She exhibited widely with such artists as Mary Cassatt, Tamara de Lempicka, Camille Claudel, and Suzanne Valadon.
Although still a citizen of the British Commonwealth, Davidson decided to stay in France during World War II. She lived with friends in Grenoble, and some sources say that she was a member of the French Resistance. Her paintings from this period are strong, bright, and lively. In 1945, she returned to her old studio in Paris, occasionally spending time at a farm she bought near Rouen. In the postwar period, she painted mostly outdoors on small wood panels. She died at Montparnasse in France in 1965. She was buried in Saint-Saëns, Seine-Maritime.
Bessie Davidson (Australian, 1879-1965) Still Life with Flowers and Pears Nd Oil on cardboard 61 x 46cm
In the period between the wars, Australian women artists were leading the way by challenging traditions and exploring new ideas in art with a focus on colour, form and design, and subjects such as urban culture.
Role models like Jane Price, Jane Sutherland and Clara Southern had provided women with a basis to seriously pursue art as a profession. Circumstances and opportunity1 saw a flourishing of female artists establish a career through dedicated studies at a growing number of art schools, combined with travel overseas and, quite often, financial independence.
Painting en plein air was continued but rather than romanticised landscapes concerned with effects of light, the rise of the modern woman artist painted the landscape familiar to them with an adventurous attitude towards colour: from the buses and telegraph poles of Beckett’s Melbourne bayside suburbs; to the South Australian landscapes of Sauerbier; urban scenes such as Tempe Manning’s Princes Street and the intimate depictions of home or studio as seen in Gurdon’s Under the Window and as favoured by Cossington Smith.
Whilst there was no overall identifying modernist movement, a common experience of nearly all the women represented in this exhibition was travel and studies overseas, particularly to Paris and London,2 where the exposure to influences such as postimpressionism, modernism, futurism, cubism shaped each individual artist’s subsequent style.
Seemingly traditional and feminine subjects such as still life, flowers, intimate interior and leisure scenes and were invigorated through the work of artists such as Proctor (The Sewing Basket); Preston (Flowers) and Davidson, who maintained her career in France.3 Women artists were also exploring more modern and urban subjects, such as Craig’s HMAS Cerberus and the iconic renditions of the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Women artists tackled a wide variety of subjects, including those more accepted in the male domain, and which modern women now inhabited. Rix Nicholas ventured out to capture Australians in remote rural areas as seen in the well-known Fair Musterer (1935, QAG) and as in Boy on a Horse. Nora Heysen was the first woman awarded the Archibald Prize4 and appointed as an official war artist in 1943, as was Sybil Craig in 1945. Printmaking was also a key to the rise of modernism, most effectively by Dorrit Black as seen in TheParish Hall and also by Mabel Pye and Lisette Kohlhagen. Greater commercial and domestic design opportunities were a further important influence, including murals as undertaken by Haxton5 and the frieze-like Country Morning by Moxham.
There is an ever-growing understanding and appreciation of women artists and their influence in shaping Australian art, from ‘lost’ moderns6 to the household names such as Preston and Cossington Smith.
Text from the catalogue to the exhibition
Footnotes
1/ For example, the massive impact of the First World War allowed a shift away from the role of women simply as wife and mother and the economic affluence post-war, prior to the Depression, facilitated the ability to travel and contributed to opportunities for commercial art; the growth of art schools; the rise of domestic decoration.
2/ For example, Black studied in London with Claude Flight 1927 and with Andre Lhote and Albert Gleizes 1927-1929 in Paris; Proctor studied in London with George Lambert in 1903; Sauerbier studied at the Central School of Art in London 1925-1927; Cossington Smith attended the Winchester School of Art in 1912; Crowley studied in Paris 1926-1929; Davidson attended the Academie de la Chaumiere in Paris as did Syme and Rix Nicholas, among other studies in Paris and London; Heysen travelled to England, Paris and Italy; Carrick Fox travelled extensively throughout her life including London, Paris, Spain, Italy, Northern Africa, Australia, Tahiti; Preston travelled to Europe and her work was hung in the Old Salon in 1905.
3/ Davidson was appointed Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur for Art and Humanity by the French Government in 1931.
4/ Portrait of Madame Elink Schuurman, 1938.
5/ Elaine Haxton was awarded the Sulman Prize (AGNSW) in 1943 for her mural designs.
6/ See Dessmann, J. and Edwards, D., ‘The lost moderns: Tempe Manning, Niel A Gren and Norah Simpson’, Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, Art Gallery of NSW, 2013.
Sybil Craig (Australian, 1901-1989) HMVS Cerberus, Half Moon Bay, Melbourne c. 1927-1928 Oil on paper 44.8 x 49.3cm
HMVS Cerberus (Her Majesty’s Victorian Ship) is a breastwork monitor that served in the Victoria Naval Forces, the Commonwealth Naval Forces (CNF), and the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) between 1871 and 1924. Built for the colony of Victoria under the supervision of Charles Pasley, Cerberus was completed in 1870, and arrived in Port Phillip in 1871, where she spent the rest of her career. In 1924, the monitor was sold for scrap, and was sunk as a breakwater off Half Moon Bay. The wreck became a popular site for scuba diving and picnics over the years, but there was a structural collapse in 1993. Cerberus was sold to the Melbourne Salvage Company for £409 on 23 April 1924, with the buyer to break her up for scrap. The warship was towed from Corio Bay to Williamstown Naval Dockyard on 14 May for disassembly. After the salvage company removed what they could, she was then sold on to the Sandringham council for £150. The monitor was scuttled on 26 September 1926 at Half Moon Bay to serve as a breakwater for the Black Rock Yacht Club.
Sybil Craig studied privately with John Shirlow before attending art school at the National Gallery of Victoria (1924-1931) with Bernard Hall, William McInnes and Charles Wheeler. She also took private classes with George Bell and held her first solo exhibition in 1932 and as well as painting (in oils, watercolours and pastels) she also undertook more graphic work, including prints.
Craig was a founding member of the New Melbourne Art Club and was appointed an official war artist in 1945 (the third woman to be appointed after Nora Heysen and Stella Bowen) and depicted women workers at the munitions factory at Maribyrnong. Her paintings are particularly characterised by her use of colour and strong design. She is represented in key texts covering modern women artists.
Nora Gurdon (Australian, c. 1881-1974) Under the Window 1922 Oil on canvas 44.5 x 54.5cm
Nora Gurdon is well known for her late impressionist landscapes and is also associated with the Heidelberg School with Streeton a frequent guest at her country property. In 1914 Gurdon went to England and during the war nursed for two years at the Le Croisic, France. Streeton was also in Europe working as an official war artist often painting hospital scenes. In 1920 Gurdon returned to Australia and from that time added scenes from domestic life to her painting oeuvre (Peers p. 149). However she remained independent, did not marry, and made further trips to Europe in 1927 and 1937.
She was a member of the Australian Art Association and the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, (MESWAPS) joining as early as 1923. From her country property, Gurdon welcomed many fellow painters. For the members of the MESWAPS ‘successful outdoor painting days were held at the studio of Nora Gurdon in Mount Dandenong’.
Nora Heysen (Australian, 1911-2003) Self Portrait 1936 Charcoal on paper 35 x 25cm
Thea Proctor (Australian, 1879-1966) The Sewing Basket c. 1926 Watercolour 13.5 x 14cm
May Moore (New Zealand, Australia 1881-1931) Mina Moore (New Zealand, Australia 1882-1957) Thea Proctor 1912 Gelatin silver photograph, brown tone 18.5 x 10.0cm
“… the portrait of Thea Proctor is brown-toned, although the minimal studio background and the very direct gaze of the subject signals change. Jack Cato wrote of May and Mina that: ‘these enterprising young women were unable to afford the great studio premises filled with light from glass roofs and glass walls that were then the order of the day. By necessity they devised a method of portraiture by using the meagre light from an ordinary window in an ordinary room. It made their work so distinctive.’1 Despite the strong chiaroscuro, Proctor’s face is clear and her gaze direct. Her very upright pose, with her hand on her hip and no props to lean against, is that of a modern woman. Proctor’s dress was made by herself for the going-away party of her relative John Peter Russell in 1912. Other photographs from this shoot were published in The Lone Hand in July 1913 where it was noted that ‘she is singularly free from feminine tremors concerning her own work’.”2
1/ Cato J. (1955), The story of the camera in Australia, Georgian House, Melbourne p. 136 2/ Engledow, S. (2005), ‘The world of Thea Proctor’, The world of Thea Proctor, S. Engledow, A. Sayers and B. Humphries, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra p. 37
Mabel Pye (Australian, 1894-1982) Blue Vase c. 1936 Coloured linocut 22.7 x 18.7cm
Mabel Pye was a printmaker and painter from Melbourne who studied with Adelaide Perry and Napier Waller under Bernard Hall at the National Gallery School. Mabel introduced the use of linocuts into her work in the early 1930’s with bold colors and lines. Her work encompassed the use of the everyday including landscapes, portraits and still life. Mabel was a member of both the Victorian Art Society from 1918-1941 and also the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptures from 1920-1950.
Ethel Carrick Fox (Australian, 1872-1952)
Ethel Carrick Fox (Australian, 1872-1952) Arabs Walking Down a Street Nd Oil on canvas 45.7 x 37.9cm
Ethel Carrick Fox (Australian, 1872-1952)
Ethel Carrick Fox (1872-1951) was the wife of painter Emanuel Phillips Fox and a major artist in her own right. Carrick studied at the Slade School. She married E. Phillips Fox in 1905 and moved to Paris. She exhibited at the Salon D’Automne, Royal Academy London, Australian Art Association, Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, as well as at solo exhibitions and dual shows with her husband’s work.
She travelled extensively from 1920-1940, and lobbied Australian public gallery directors and curators to buy her husband’s works. During the 1920s she was recommended by the Atelier Grande Chaumiere as a private teacher of still life painting in Paris, and included a number of Australians and Americans in Paris amongst her students. Carrick died in Melbourne in 1951.
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Peter Beard’s, East Hampton, from the portfolio 82 Photographs 1974 to 1982 1982; printed 1983 Silver gelatin print
Hands / Class – Tree, Surface, Root
These are magnificent photographs. Fink’s mastery of the picture plane, ensemble, mise-en-scène, chiaroscuro is outstanding. But for me it is the attitude of the hands that make these photographs. Reaching, holding (usually the bodies of women), clasping, upturned, crotch grabbing, oversized, limp, clenched and gesticulating – in more of less every photograph it is the positioning of the hands that are the focus of my attention, and their relation to the social class of the proponent. The hedonism of Studio 54, the snobbishness of the benefits at MoMA and Corcoran Museum, and the Russian and Hungarian balls with their icy coolness and sidelong glances, all played off against the working class birthday parties of Pat Sabatine.
I spoke to my friend and mentor Ian Lobb about these photographs and we had a lively discussion:
MB: What do you think of the work of Larry Fink?
IL: The image of the child holding up his hand was on the cover of the second (?) Larry fink monograph. They are OK, but not great.
I have a rule: “The closer we get to the origin the more options we have.” But Larry is building on heaps of people – Winogrand, Mark Cohen etc, and earlier. And when that happens it really needs to be BUILT to be a success for the viewer. But he is just adding a bit. Its good, OK work. It’s mainly referencing stuff though. I can’t see anyone building on what he has done, a worker would have to go down the tree to a point before him to progress again.
Photography is pretty much fantastic before the fact, so things can look pretty good if it just happens. The process is so different from the reproduction of music that keeps trying to return to an original – photography has done that, but then runs tangential ideas where there can be flash and frozen time and no colour etc…
MB: I can understand what you are saying Ian … even though I don’t necessarily agree!
There is an essay I have just read as part of a Joan Fontcuberta book (“The Right Distance,” in Joan Fontcuberta. Pandora’s Camera: Photogr@phy after Photography. Mack, 2014, pp. 143-150). It’s interesting what he has to say about the “distance” of the photographer from the object… long distance landscape (in Victorian times… Muybridge, Carelton Watkins), long distance city (Marville) – the infinite sublime I call it – coming closer with Atget (parts of doors, stairs, closer engagement) and Blossfeldt – and then the avant-garde in the 1920s with the dissolution of far near into near far… followed by New Topographics and the griding of space, the regimentation and delineation of an even narrower point of view, both aesthetically and objectively.
I am paraphrasing but that is what he says anyway. It makes sense in one way. But in another we do not have to be either / or – near / far. Nor do we have to be “new” every time we take a photograph.
What I am arguing is that you do not always have to reinvent the wheel, in answer to your observation that you have to go back down the tree. Nothing is ever new and sometimes, as with the photography of Fink, it is the gesture that is enough for me – that human gesture that will never happen again exactly in that form. I am still in wonder of that moment, of the child’s raised hand (Pat Sabatine’s 8th Birthday Party). I don’t really care that people have done it before, they have never captured that moment, that precise gesture before… and it is still beautiful to me. The apple never falls far from the tree.
IL: A good term Marcus: the infinite sublime.
Fontcuberta understands it very well – mainly because it could be applied to the best of his pictures in terms of the continual involvement that some of them generate. As I said, the Larry Finks are OK. Have you seen the YouTube about Joel Sternfeld photographing in NY? He is literally right in peoples faces, and yet they don’t even seem to notice him. I’d like to see one of Larry Fink with his flash in these small rooms and intimate spaces.
What I can say is that some smart person will invent the term that distinguishes between the surface aesthetic of the digital and analogue print. There is such “value” in the display here [of Fink’s work], that would not mean the same in a digital print. Why? The analogue look could even be faked to fool everyone I suppose. Even with these, the surface would fall apart @ about 19″ sq and it would all be lost.
MB: It is the surface aesthetic Ian, but it goes deeper than that. I saw the Richard Avedon exhibition up at The Ian Potter Museum of Art were his negatives were blown up to enormous size and digitally printed… and they just didn’t work. There is a containment of energy within a classical analogue black and white photograph that the surface of a digital print cannot capture, yes, but in a good analogue photograph there is also an emotional depth that seems to transcend surface…. and as yet, digital photographs rarely approach this state of being. What would be a word that evinces surface and psychological depth at one and the same time?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Larry Fink is a prominent American photographer who is best known for capturing images of high-profile social events. Fink’s images from the 1970s and 1980s capture individual vignettes within social gatherings, and nod to the development of documentary photography within the image-driven culture of the second half of the twentieth century. Some of the photographs below are from Fink’s series 82 Photographs 1974 to 1982 and Making Out 1957 – 1980 and depict scenes from clubs and parties in and around New York City. Fink’s subjects are caught off-guard by his camera, and their expressions provide windows into their weariness or giddy party euphoria. Capturing groups and individuals at surprisingly intimate and vulnerable moments, his photographs subtly reveal the disconnect often found between a subject’s public image and his or her inner self. For example, in Peter Beard’s, East Hampton, Fink captures a dynamic group of people in various levels of engagement with one another. While some are intertwined, others glance outward to the party beyond, having seemingly lost interest in the gathering at hand.
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) John Sabatine and Molly 1980 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Jean Sabatine and Molly 1983 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) N.Y.C. Club Cornich, from the portfolio 82 Photographs 1974 to 1982 1977; printed 1983 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) N.Y.C. Club Cornich, from the portfolio 82 Photographs 1974 to 1982 1977; printed 1983 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Benefit, Corcoran Museum, Washington DC 1975 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Benefit, Corcoran Museum, Washington DC 1975 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Benefit, MoMA, New York 1977 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) ICP Peter Beard Opening 1977 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Oslin’s Graduation Party 1977 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Oslin’s Graduation Party June 1977 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Studio 54 1977 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Studio 54, New York City May 1977 Silver gelatin print
Shore writes that the four ways, “in which the world in front of the camera is transformed into the photograph” are flatness, frame, time, and focus. Fink was aware of these attributes of photography and used them to define the picture’s content and structure. (The depictive level)
Shore, Stephen. The Nature of Photographs. John Hopkins University Press, 1998 quoted by Tyler Brennan Reiss, October 16, 2013.
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Studio 54, New York City May 1977 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Studio 54, New York City May 1977 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Washington DC 1975 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Russian Ball, New York 1976 Silver gelatin print
“Sometimes you’re invited to a big ball and for months you think about how glamorous and exciting it’s going to be. Then you fly to Europe and you go to the ball and when you think back on it a couple of months later what you remember is maybe the car ride to the ball, you can’t remember the ball at all. Sometimes the little times you don’t think are anything while they’re happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life. I should have been dreaming for months about the car ride to the ball and getting dressed for the car ride, and buying my ticket to Europe so I could take the car ride. Then, who knows, maybe I could have remembered the ball.”
~ Andy Warhol
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Russian Ball, New York City 1976 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Pat Sabatine’s 8th Birthday Party 1977 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Pat Sabatine’s 11th Birthday Party 1980 Silver gelatin print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Skating Rink 1980 Silver gelatin print
My favourites: the weight of Weston’s Shipyard detail, Wilmington (1935, above); and the romanticism (Jean-François Millet-esque), sublime beauty of Boubat’s Lella, Bretagne, France (1947, below).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Cecil Stoughton (American, 1920-2008) Pres. John F. Kennedy’s Lincoln Continental 1963 Silver gelatin print
Cecil Stoughton (American, 1920-2008) Pres. John F. Kennedy’s Lincoln Continental 1963 Silver gelatin print
Cecil Stoughton (American, 1920-2008) Pres. John F. Kennedy’s Lincoln Continental 1963 Silver gelatin print
Cecil Stoughton (American, 1920-2008)
Cecil William Stoughton (January 18, 1920 – November 3, 2008) was an American photographer. Born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, Stoughton is best known for being President John F. Kennedy’s photographer during his White House years.
Stoughton took the only photograph ever published showing John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe together. Stoughton was present at the motorcade at which Kennedy was assassinated, and was subsequently the only photographer on board Air Force One when Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the next President. Stoughton’s famous photograph of this event depicts Johnson raising his hand in oath as he stood between his wife Lady Bird Johnson and a still blood-spattered Jacqueline Kennedy.
Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985) Garage Doors, San Francisco 1947 Silver gelatin print
Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985)
Max Yavno (1911-1985) was a photographer who specialised in street scenes, especially in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.
He did photography for the Works Progress Administration from 1936 to 1942. He was president of the Photo League in 1938 and 1939. Yavno was in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1942 to 1945, after which he moved to San Francisco and began specialising in urban-landscape photography. Photographer Edward Steichen selected twenty of Yavno’s prints for the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1950, and the next year Yavno won a Guggenheim fellowship.
History professor Constance B. Schulz said of him:
For financial reasons he worked as a commercial advertising photographer for the next twenty years (1954-75), creating finely crafted still lifes that appeared in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. He returned to artistic landscape photography in the 1970s, when his introspective approach found a more appreciative audience.
Ralph Steiner (American, 1899-1986) American Rural Baroque 1929 Silver gelatin print
Ralph Steiner (American, 1899-1986)
Ralph Steiner (February 8, 1899 – July 13, 1986) was an American photographer, pioneer documentarian and a key figure among avant-garde filmmakers in the 1930s.
Born in Cleveland, Steiner studied chemistry at Dartmouth, but in 1921 entered the Clarence H. White School of Modern Photography. White helped Steiner in finding a job at the Manhattan Photogravure Company, and Steiner worked on making photogravure plates of scenes from Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. Not long after, Steiner’s work as a freelance photographer in New York began, working mostly in advertising and for publications like Ladies’ Home Journal. Through the encouragement of fellow photographer Paul Strand, Steiner joined the left-of-centre Film and Photo League around 1927. He was also to influence the photography of Walker Evans, giving him guidance, technical assistance, and one of his view cameras.
In 1929, Steiner made his first film, H2O, a poetic evocation of water that captured the abstract patterns generated by waves. Although it was not the only film of its kind at the time – Joris Ivens made Regen (Rain) that same year, and Henwar Rodekiewicz worked on his similar film Portrait of a Young Man (1931) through this whole period – it made a significant impression in its day and since has become recognised as a classic: H2O was added to theNational Film Registry in December 2005. Among Steiner’s other early films, Surf and Seaweed (1931) expands on the concept of H2O as Steiner turns his camera to the shoreline; Mechanical Principles (1933) was an abstraction based on gears and machinery.
Wilson A. Bentley (American, 1865-1931) Snowflake c. 1920 Gold-chloride toned microphotographs from glass plate negatives
Andre de Dienes (Hungarian, 1913-1985) Erotic Nude 1950s Silver gelatin print
Andre de Dienes (Hungarian, 1913-1985)
Andre de Dienes (born Andor György Ikafalvi-Dienes) (December 18, 1913 – April 11, 1985) was a Hungarian-American photographer, noted for his work with Marilyn Monroe and his nude photography.
Dienes was born in Transylvania, Austria-Hungary, on December 18, 1913, and left home at 15 after the suicide of his mother. Dienes travelled across Europe mostly on foot, until his arrival in Tunisia. In Tunisia he purchased his first camera, a 35mm Retina. Returning to Europe he arrived in Paris in 1933 to study art, and bought a Rolleiflex shortly after.
Dienes began work as a professional photographer for the Communist newspaper L’Humanité, and was employed by the Associated Press until 1936, when the Parisian couturier Captain Molyneux noted his work and urged him to become a fashion photographer. In 1938 the editor of Esquire, Arnold Gingrich offered him work in New York City, and helped fund Dienes’ passage to the United States. Once in the United States Dienes worked for Vogue and Life magazines as well as Esquire.
When not working as a fashion photographer Dienes travelled the USA photographing Native American culture, including the Apache, Hopi, and Navajo reservations and their inhabitants. Dissatisfied with his life as a fashion photographer in New York, Dienes moved to California in 1944, where he began to specialise in nudes and landscapes.
George A. Tice (American, 1938-2025) Porch, Monhegan Island, Maine 1971 Selenium-toned silver print
George A. Tice (American, 1938-2025)
George Tice (b. 1938) is an American photographer best known for his large-format black-and-white photographs of New Jersey, New York, and the Amish. Tice was born in Newark, New Jersey, and self-trained as a photographer. His work is included in major museum collections around the world and he has published many books of photographs, including Fields of Peace: A Pennsylvania German Album (1970), Paterson, New Jersey (1972), Seacoast Maine: People and Places (1973), Urban Landscapes: A New Jersey Portrait (1975), “Lincoln” (1984), Hometowns: An American Pilgrimage (1988), Urban Landscapes (2002), Paterson II (2006), Urban Romantic (1982), and George Tice: Selected Photographs 1953-1999 (2001).
Auguste Salzmann (French, 1824-1872) Jerusalem, Sainte Sepulchre, Colonne du Parvis 1854 Blanquart-Evrard salted paper print from a paper negative
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) Billie Dauscha and Mabel Sidney, Bowery Entertainers December 4, 1944 Silver gelatin print
Winston O. Link (American, 1914-2001) Luray Crossing, Luray, Virginia 1956 Silver gelatin print
Paul J. Woolf (American, 1899-1985) Looking down on Grand Central Station 1935 Silver gelatin print
Paul J. Woolf began his photographic career in London, taking pictures as a child. He attended the University of California, Berkeley and the Clarence White School of Photography. By 1942 he was established as a professional photographer who specialised in design and night-time photography. Woolf also maintained a practice as a clinical social worker while continuing his work as a photographer.
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004) Alicante 1933 Silver gelatin print
Joel-Peter Witkin (American, b. 1939) Leda 1986 Silver gelatin print
Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990) Father taking his son to the first day of cheder 1937-1938 Silver gelatin print
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) James Rogers 1867 Albumen print
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) The Dream 1869 Albumen print
Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940) An Albanian Woman from Italy at Ellis Island 1905 Silver gelatin print
Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940) Italian laborer, Ellis Island 1905-1912 Silver gelatin print
Laure Albin-Guillot (French, 1879-1962) Opale c. 1930 Silver gelatin print
Cecil Beaton (British, 1904-1980) Virginia Cherrill 1930s Silver gelatin print
Édouard Boubat (French, 1923-1999) Lella, Bretagne, France 1947 Silver gelatin print
Édouard Boubat (French, 1923-1999)
Édouard Boubat (1923-1999) was a French photojournalist and art photographer.
Boubat was born in Montmartre, Paris. He studied typography and graphic arts at the École Estienne and worked for a printing company before becoming a photographer. In 1943 he was subjected to service du travail obligatoire, forced labour of French people in Nazi Germany, and witnessed the horrors of World War II. He took his first photograph after the war in 1946 and was awarded the Kodak Prize the following year. He travelled the world for the French magazine Réalités and later worked as a freelance photographer. French poet Jacques Prévert called him a “peace correspondent” as he was apolitical and photographed uplifting subjects.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2015 Digital photograph From the series Too Much of the Air
Too Much of the Air
After 16 months hard work, I have completed a new 52 image sequence.
These images will be printed large to reinforce the disintegration of the image, technology and human being. Tullio Crali‘s painting Before the Parachute Opens (Prima che si apra il paracadute) (1939) was one of a few starting points, inspirations, for the new sequence.
Below is a selection of images from the sequence. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
“Imagine being in these planes knowing that you only had moments to live, and knowing that you could do nothing about it. What brought you to that point, what decisions did you take as a human being (or were taken for you) that enacted this scenario.
The “greatness” as the event passes is what is being worked with here. It is the inverse aspect of the sublime. Usually the sublime is regarded as beyond time … but not here. Essentially I am sustaining the last moments of a doomed life, outside of time.
We are unusually privileged to experience the sublime in this way. It is usually a lost aspect through the death of the witness.”
Exhibition dates: 13th December, 2014 – 19th April, 2015
Exhibition coincides with the culmination of the Thomas Walther Collection Project, a four-year research collaboration between MoMA’s curatorial and conservation staff
Co-curators: Quentin Bajac, Chief Curator of Photography, MoMA, and Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator in the Department of Photography, MoMA
Unknown photographer British ‘Chute Jumpers 1937 Gelatin silver print 5 15/16 x 6 15/16″ (15.1 x 17.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
OMG, OMG, OMG if we had tele-transportation to travel around the world, I would be at this exhibition in an instant. Please MoMA, fly me to New York so that I can do a proper review of the exhibition!
Not only are there photographs from well known artists that I have never seen before – for example, the brooding mass of Boat, San Francisco (1925) by Edward Weston with the name of the boat… wait for it… ‘DAYLIGHT’ – there are also outstanding photographs from artists that I have never heard of before.
There is so much to like in this monster posting, from the glorious choreography of British ‘Chute Jumpers (1937) to the muscular symmetry and abstraction of Rodchenko’s Dive (1934); from the absolutely stunning light and movement of Riefenstahl’s Nocturnal Start of Decathlon 1,500m Race (August 1936) to the ecstatic, ghost-like swimming in mud apparitions of Kate Steinitz’s Backstroke (1930) – an artist who I knew nothing about (Kate Steinitz was a German-American artist and art historian affiliated with the European Bauhaus and Dadaist movements in the early 20th century. She is best known for her collaborative work with the artist Kurt Schwitters, and, in later life, her scholarship on Leonardo da Vinci). Another artist to flee Germany in the mid-1930s to evade the persecution of the Nazis.
In fact, when I looked through the checklist for this exhibition I observed the country of origin of the artist, and the date of their death. There are a lot of artists from Germany and France. Either they lived through the maelstrom of the Second World War and survived, escaped to America or England, or died during the war and their archive was lost (such as the artist Robert Petschow (German, 1888-1945). For some artists surviving the war was not enough either… trapped behind the Iron Curtain after repatriation, artists such as Edmund Kesting went unacknowledged in their lifetime. What a tough time it must have been. To have created this wonderful avant-garde art and then to have seen it dashed against the rocks of violence, prejudice and bigotry – firstly degenerate, then non-conforming to Communist ideals.
Out of the six sections of the exhibition (The Modern World, Purisms, Reinventing Photography, The Artist’s Life, Between Surrealism and Magic Realism, and Dynamics of the City) it would seem that the section ‘Reinventing Photography’ is the weakest – going from the checklist – with a lack of really memorable images for this section, hence only illustrated in this posting by one image. But this is a minor quibble. When you have images such as Anne W. Brigman’s A Study in Radiation (1924) or Edmund Kesting’s magnificent Glance to the Sun (Blick zur Sonne) (1928) who cares!
I just want to see them all and soak up their atmosphere.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. There is an excellent website titled Object: Photo to accompany the exhibition. It contains sections that map and compare photographs, connect and map artists’ lives along with many more images from the collection, conservation analysis and essays about the works. Well worth a look.
Note: Images below correspond to their sections in the exhibition.
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938) Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada Sporting Event 1928 Offset lithograph 5 3/4 x 4 1/8″ (14.1 x 10.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938) Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada Sporting Event 1928 Offset lithograph 5 3/4 x 4 1/8″ (14.1 x 10.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938) Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada Sporting Event 1928 Offset lithograph 5 3/4 x 4 1/8″ (14.1 x 10.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938)
Latvian painter, sculptor, graphic artist, designer and teacher, active in Russia. He was an important exponent of Russian Constructivism. He studied in Riga and Petrograd (now St Petersburg), but in the 1917 October Revolution joined the Latvian Rifle Regiment to defend the Bolshevik government; his sketches of Lenin and his fellow soldiers show Cubist influence. In 1918 he designed posters and decorations for the May Day celebrations and he entered the Free Art Studios (Svomas) in Moscow, where he studied with Malevich and Antoine Pevsner. Dynamic City (1919; Athens, George Costakis priv. col., see Rudenstine, no. 339) illustrates his adoption of the Suprematist style. In 1920 Klucis exhibited with Pevsner and Naum Gabo on Tver’skoy Boulevard in Moscow; in the same year Klucis joined the Communist Party. In 1920-21 he started experimenting with materials, making constructions from wood and paper that combined the geometry of Suprematism with a more Constructivist concern with actual volumes in space. In 1922 Klucis applied these experiments to utilitarian ends when he designed a series of agitprop stands based on various combinations of loudspeakers, speakers’ platforms, display units, film projectors and screens. He taught a course on colour in the Woodwork and Metalwork Faculty of the Vkhutemas (Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops) from 1924 to 1930, and in 1925 helped to organise the Soviet section at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. During the 1920s he became increasingly interested in photomontage, using it in such agitprop posters as ‘We will repay the coal debt to the country’ (1928; e.g. New York, MoMA). During the 1930s he worked on graphic and typographical design for periodicals and official publications. He was arrested and died during the purges in World War II.
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938) Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada Sporting Event 1928 Offset lithograph 5 3/4 x 4 1/8″ (14.1 x 10.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909-1949, on view from December 13, 2014, to April 19, 2015, explores photography between the First and Second World Wars, when creative possibilities were never richer or more varied, and when photographers approached figuration, abstraction, and architecture with unmatched imaginative fervour. This vital moment is dramatically captured in the photographs that constitute the Thomas Walther Collection, a remarkable group of works presented together for the first time through nearly 300 photographs. Made on the street and in the studio, intended for avant-garde exhibitions or the printed page, these objects provide unique insight into the radical intentions of their creators. Iconic works by such towering figures as Berenice Abbott, Karl Blossfeldt, Alvin Langdon Coburn, El Lissitzky, Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Paul Strand are featured alongside lesser-known treasures by more than 100 other practitioners. The exhibition is organised by Quentin Bajac, the Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography, and Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA.
The exhibition coincides with Object: Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909-1949, the result of a four-year collaborative project between the Museum’s departments of Photography and Conservation, with the participation of over two dozen leading international photography scholars and conservators, making it the most extensive effort to integrate conservation, curatorial, and scholarly research efforts on photography to date. That project is composed of multiple parts including a website that features a suite of digital-visualisation research tools that allow visitors to explore the collection, a hard-bound paper catalogue of the entire Thomas Walther collection, and an interdisciplinary symposium focusing on ways in which the digital age is changing our engagement with historic photographs.
Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909-1949, is organised thematically into six sections, suggesting networks between artists, regions, and objects, and highlighting the figures whose work Walther collected in depth, including André Kertész, Germaine Krull, Franz Roh, Willi Ruge, Maurice Tabard, Umbo, and Edward Weston. Enriched by key works in other mediums from MoMA’s collection, this exhibition presents the exhilarating story of a landmark chapter in photography’s history.”
Press release from the MoMA website
The Collection
In the 1920s and ’30s photography underwent a period of exploration, experimentation, technical innovation, and graphic discovery so dramatic that it generated repeated claims that the true age of discovery was not when photography was invented but when it came of age, in this era, as a dynamic, infinitely flexible, and easily transmissible medium. The Thomas Walther Collection concentrates on that second moment of growth. The Walther Collection’s 341 photographs by almost 150 artists, most of them European, together convey a period of collective innovation that is now celebrated as one of the major episodes of modern art.
The Project
Our research is based on the premise that photographs of this period were not born as disembodied images; they are physical things – discrete objects made by certain individuals at particular moments using specific techniques and materials. Shaped by its origin and creation, the photographic print harbours clues to its maker and making, to the causes it may have served, and to the treatment it has received, and these bits of information, gathered through close examination of the print, offer fresh perspectives on the history of the era. “Object: Photo” – the title of this study – reflects this approach.
In 2010, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave the Museum a grant to encourage deep scholarly study of the Walther Collection and to support publication of the results. Led by the Museum’s Departments of Photography and Conservation, the project elicited productive collaborations among scholars, curators, conservators, and scientists, who investigated all of the factors involved in the making, appearance, condition, and history of each of the 341 photographs in the collection. The broadening of narrow specialisations and the cross-fertilisation between fields heightened appreciation of the singularity of each object and of its position within the history of its moment. Creating new standards for the consideration of photographs as original objects and of photography as an art form of unusually rich historical dimensions, the project affords both experts and those less familiar with its history new avenues for the appreciation of the medium. The results of the project are presented in multiple parts: on the website, in a hard-bound paper catalogue of the entire Thomas Walther Collection (also titled Object: Photo), and through an interdisciplinary symposium focusing on the ways in which the digital age is changing our engagement with historic photographs.
Historical Context
The Walther Collection is particularly suited to such a study because its photographs are so various in technique, geography, genre, and materials as to make it a mine of diverse data. The revolutions in technology that made the photography of this period so flexible and responsive to the impulse of the operator threw open the field to all comers. The introduction of the handheld Leica in 1925 (a small camera using strips of 35mm motion-picture film), of enlargers to make positive prints from the Leica’s little negatives, and of easy-to-use photographic papers – each of these was respectively a watershed event. Immediately sensing the potential of these tools, artists began to explore the medium; without any specialised training, painters such as László Moholy-Nagy and Aleksandr Rodchenko could become photographers and teachers almost overnight. Excitedly and with an open sense of possibility, they freely experimented in the darkroom and in the studio, producing negative prints, collages and photomontages, photograms, solarisations, and combinations of these. Legions of serious amateurs also began to photograph, and manufacturers produced more types of cameras with different dimensions and capacities: besides the Leica, there was the Ermanox, which could function in low light, motion-picture cameras that could follow and stop action, and many varieties of medium- and larger-format cameras that could be adapted for easy transport. The industry responded to the expanding range of users and equipment with a bonanza of photographic papers in an assortment of textures, colours, and sizes. Multiple purposes also generated many kinds of prints: best for reproduction in books or newspapers were slick, ferrotyped glossies, unmounted and small enough to mail, while photographs for exhibition were generally larger and mounted to stiff boards. Made by practitioners ranging from amateurs to professional portraitists, journalists, illustrators, designers, critics, and artists of all stripes, the pictures in the Walther Collection are a true representation of the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of photography in this period of diversification.
Text from the MoMA website
Willi Ruge (German, 1882-1961) Photo of Myself at the Moment of My Jump (Selbstfoto im Moment des Abspringens) 1931 Gelatin silver print 5 9/16 × 8 1/16″ (14.2 × 20.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Willi Ruge (German, 1882-1961) With My Head Hanging Down before the Parachute Opened . . . (Mit dem Kopf nach unten hängend, bei ungeöffnetem Fallschirm . . .) 1931 Gelatin silver print 5 1/2 × 8″ (14 × 20.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Willi Ruge (German, 1882-1961) Seconds before Landing (Sekunden vor der Landung) From the series I Photograph Myself during a Parachute Jump (Ich fotografiere mich beim Absturz mit dem Fallschirm) 1931 Gelatin silver print 8 1/16 × 5 9/16″ (20.4 × 14.1cm) (irreg.) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Willi Ruge (German, 1882-1961) Seconds before Landing (Sekunden vor der Landung) (detail) From the series I Photograph Myself during a Parachute Jump (Ich fotografiere mich beim Absturz mit dem Fallschirm) 1931 Gelatin silver print 8 1/16 × 5 9/16″ (20.4 × 14.1cm) (irreg.) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Robert Petschow (German, 1888-1945) Lines of Modern Industry: Cooling Tower (Linien der modernen Industrie: Kühlturmanlage) 1920-29 Gelatin silver print 3 3/8 × 4 1/2″ (8.5 × 11.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Albert Renger-Patzsch, by exchange
Robert Petschow (German, 1888-1945) The Course of the Mulde with Sand Deposits in the Curves (Der Lauf der Mulde mit Versandungen in den Windungen) 1920-33 Gelatin silver print 3 3/8 × 4 1/2″ (8.5 × 11.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Albert Renger-Patzsch, by exchange
Robert Petschow (German, 1888-1945)
Robert Petschow was studying in Danzig as a free balloon pilot in the West Prussian air force. During the First World War Petschow was a balloon observer with the rank of lieutenant in Poland, France and Belgium. Maybe it was the work of a balloon observer which led him to photography, in which he was worked freelance from 1920. His images appeared in the prestigious photographic yearbook The German photograph in which he was presented with photographers such as Karl Blossfeldt, Albert Renger-Patzsch Chargesheimer and Erich Salomon. The book Land of the Germans, which was published in 1931 by Robert Diesel and includes many photographs of Petschow went on to be published in four editions. In 1931 he journeyed with the airship LZ 127, the “Graf Zeppelin” to Egypt. He participated as an unofficial member of the crew to document the trip photographically. In 1936, at the age of 48 years, Petschow joined the rank of captain in the Air Force and ended his work as a senior editor at the daily newspaper The West, a position he held from 1930. For the following years, there is no information to Petschow.
Robert Petschow died at the age of 57 years on 17 October 1945 in Haldensleben after he had to leave his apartment in Berlin-Steglitz due to the war. He left there a picture archive with about 30,000 aerial photographs, which fell victim of the war. His contemporaries describe Petschow as a humorous person and a great raconteur.
Translated from the German Wikipedia website by Google Translate
Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) Dive (Pryzhok v vodu) 1934 Gelatin silver print 11 11/16 x 9 3/8″ (29.7 x 23.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) Dive (Pryzhok v vodu) 1934 Gelatin silver print 11 3/4 × 9 5/16″ (29.9 × 23.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Leni Riefenstahl (German, 1902-2003) Nocturnal Start of Decathlon 1,500m Race (Nächtlicher Start zum 1500-m-Lauf des Zehnkampfes) August 1936 Gelatin silver print 9 5/16 x 11 3/4″ (23.7 x 29.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Leni Riefenstahl (German, 1902-2003) Untitled 1936 Gelatin silver print 9 3/16 x 11 5/8″ (23.4 x 29.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Kate Steinitz (American born Germany, 1889-1975) Backstroke (Rückenschwimmerinnen) 1930 Gelatin silver print 10 1/2 × 13 7/16″ (26.6 × 34.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
The Modern World
Even before the introduction of the handheld Leica camera in 1925, photographers were avidly exploring fresh perspectives, shaped by the unique experience of capturing the world through a lens and ideally suited to express the tenor of modern life in the wake of World War I. Looking up and down, these photographers found unfamiliar points of view that suggested a new, dynamic visual language freed from convention. Improvements in the light sensitivity of photographic films and papers meant that photographers could capture motion as never before. At the same time, technological advances in printing resulted in an explosion of opportunities for photographers to present their work to ever-widening audiences. From inexpensive weekly magazines to extravagantly produced journals, periodicals exploited the potential of photographs and imaginative layouts, not text, to tell stories. Among the photographers on view in this section are Martin Munkácsi (American, born Hungary, 1896-1963), Leni Riefenstahl (German, 1902-2003), Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956), and Willi Ruge (German, 1882-1961).
Anne W. Brigman (American born Hawaii, 1869-1950) A Study in Radiation 1924 Gelatin silver print 7 11/16 × 9 3/4″ (19.6 × 24.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Mrs. B. S. Sexton and Mina Turner, by exchange
Bernard Shea Horne (American, 1867-1933) Untitled 1916-17 Platinum print 8 1/16 × 6 1/8″ (20.5 × 15.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Bernard Shea Horne (American, 1867-1933) Design 1916-1917 Platinum print 7 15/16 x 6 1/8″ (20.2 x 15.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Bernard Shea Horne (American, 1867-1933)
Bernard Shea Horne was the son of Joseph Horne, who built a legendary department store in Pittsburgh. The younger Horne retired from the family business when he was in his thirties and moved to northern Virginia to pursue his interests in golf and photography. In 1916 he enrolled at the Clarence H. White School of Photography, in New York, and became friends with one of its teachers, the avant-garde painter Max Weber. Horne produced numerous Weber-inspired design exercises, which he compiled into albums of twenty Platinum prints each. The four prints in the Thomas Walther Collection belonged to an album that he gave to Weber.
In 1917 Horne was elected president of the White School’s alumni association, a post he retained until 1925. In 1918 instructor Paul L. Anderson left the school, and Horne took his place as teacher of the technique class, a job he held until 1926. That a middle-aged man of independent means commuted to the school several days a week from Princeton, New Jersey, where he then lived with his two sons, suggests Horne’s devotion to White and his Pictorialist aims. During these years, Horne played a major role in the White School’s activities. In 1920 he was given a one-person show in the exhibition room of the school’s new building, a show that the alumni bulletin described as “interesting and varied in subject and technique, rich in bromoils, strong in design.” Supportive of the practical applications of artistic photography, in 1920 White joined his school to other institutions, including the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the Art Directors Club, to form The Art Center in New York. In 1926 Horne was given a one-person show at The Art Center, which marked the end of his active association with the school.
Abbaspour, Mitra, Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria Morris Hambourg
Jarislav Rössler (Czech, 1902-1990) Untitled 1924 Pigment print 9 1/16 × 9 1/16″ (23 × 23 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel
Jarislav Rössler (Czech, 1902-1990)
Jaroslav Rössler (1902-1990) was one of the Czech avant-garde photographers of the first half of the twentieth century whose work has only recently become known outside Eastern Europe. Czech photography in the twenties and thirties produced radical modernist works that incorporated principles of abstract art and constructivism; Jaroslav Rossler was one of the most important and distinctive artists of the period. He became known for his fusing of different styles, bringing together elements of Symbolism, Pictorialism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, New Objectivity, and abstract art. His photographs often reduced images to elementary lines and shapes that seemed to form a new reality; he would photograph simple objects against a stark background of black and white, or use long exposures to picture hazy cones and spheres of light. From 1927 to 1935 he lived and worked in Paris, producing work influenced by constructivism and new objectivity. He used the photographic techniques and compositional approaches of the avant-garde, including photograms, large details, diagonal composition, photomontage, and double exposures, and experimented with colour advertising photographs and still lifes produced with the carbro print process. After his return to Prague, he was relatively inactive until the late 1950s, when he reconnected with Czech artistic and photographic trends of that period, including informalism. This book documents each stage of Rossler’s career with a generous selection of duotone images, some of which have never been published before. The photographs are accompanied by texts by Vladimir Birgus, Jan Mlcoch, Robert Silverio, Karel Srp, and Matthew Witkovsky.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) A Fish Called Sierra (Un pez que llaman sierra) 1944 Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 x 7 1/4″ (24.1 x 18.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection Edward Steichen Estate and gift of Mrs. Flora S. Straus, by exchange
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) Somewhat Gay and Graceful (Un poco alegre y graciosa) 1942 Gelatin silver print 6 5/8 × 9 1/2″ (16.9 × 24.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) Day of Glory (Día de gloria) 1940s Gelatin silver print 6 3/4 × 9 1/2″ (17.2 × 24.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Steel: Armco, Middletown, Ohio October 1922 Palladium print 9 1/16 × 6 7/8″ (23 × 17.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
In Edward Weston’s journals, which he began on his trip to Ohio and New York in fall 1922, the artist wrote of the exhilaration he felt while photographing the “great plant and giant stacks of the American Rolling Mill Company” in Middletown, Ohio. He then went to see the great photographer and tastemaker Alfred Stieglitz. Were he still publishing the magazine Camera Work, Stieglitz told him, he would have reproduced some of Weston’s recent images in it, including, in particular, one of his smokestacks. The photograph’s clarity and the photographer’s frank awe at the beauty of the brute industrial subject seemed clear signs of advanced modernist tendencies.
In moving away from the soft focus and geometric stylisation of his recent images, such as Attic of 1921 (MoMA 1902.2001), Weston was discovering a more straightforward approach, one of considered confrontation with the facts of the larger world much like that of his close friend Johan Hagemeyer, who was photographing such modern subjects as smokestacks, telephone wires, and advertisements. Shortly before his trip east, Weston had met R. M. Schindler, the Austrian architect, and had been excited by his unapologetically spare, modern house and its implications for art and design. Weston was also reading avant-garde European art magazines full of images and essays extolling machines and construction. Stimulated by these currents, Weston saw that by the time he got to Ohio he was “ripe to change, was changing, yes changed.”
The visit to Armco was the critical pivot, the hinge between Weston’s Pictorialist past and his modernist future. It marked a clear leave-taking from his bohemian circle in Los Angeles and the first step toward the cosmopolitan connections he made in New York and in Mexico City, where he moved a few months later to live with the Italian actress and artist Tina Modotti. The Armco photographs went with him and became talismans of the sea change, emblematic works that decorated his studio in Mexico, along with a Japanese print and a print by Picasso. When he sent a representation of his best work to the Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929, one of the smokestacks was included.
In the midst of such transformation, Weston maintained tried-and-true darkroom procedures. He had used an enlarger in earlier years but had abandoned the technique because he felt that too much information was lost in the projection. Instead he increasingly favoured contact printing. To make the smokestack print, Weston enlarged his 3 ¼ by 4 ¼ inch (8.3 by 10.8 centimetre) original negative onto an 8 by 10 inch (20.3 by 25.4 centimetre) interpositive transparency, which he contact printed to a second sheet of film in the usual way, creating the final 8 by 10 inch negative. Weston was frugal; he was known to economise by purchasing platinum and palladium paper by the roll from Willis and Clements in England and trimming it to size. He exposed a sheet of palladium paper to the sun through the negative and, after processing the print, finished it by applying aqueous retouching media to any flaws. The fragile balance of the photograph’s chemistry, however, is evinced in a bubble-shaped area of cooler tonality hovering over the central stacks. The print was in Modotti’s possession at the time of her death in Mexico City, in 1942.
Lee Ann Daffner, Maria Morris Hambourg
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Boat, San Francisco 1925 Gelatin silver print 9 5/16 x 7 9/16″ (23.7 x 19.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Tina January 30, 1924 Gelatin silver print 9 1/16 x 6 7/8″ (23 x 17.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund and The Fellows of Photography Fund, by exchange
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Acanthus mollis (Acanthus mollis [Akanthus, Bärenklau. Deckblätter, die Blüten sind entfernt, in 4facher Vergrößerung]) 1898-1928 Gelatin silver print 11 3/4 × 9 3/8″ (29.8 × 23.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Purisms
The question of whether photography ought to be considered a fine art was hotly contested from its invention in 1839 into the 20th century. Beginning in the 1890s, in an attempt to distinguish their efforts from hoards of Kodak-wielding amateurs and masses of professionals, “artistic” photographers referred to themselves as Pictorialists. They embraced soft focus and painstakingly wrought prints so as to emulate contemporary prints and drawings, and chose subjects that underscored the ethereal effects of their methods. Before long, however, most avant-garde photographers had come to celebrate precise and distinctly photographic qualities as virtues. On both sides of the Atlantic, photographers were making this transition from Pictorialism to modernism, while occasionally blurring the distinction. Exhibition prints could be made with precious platinum or palladium, or matte surfaces that mimicked those materials. Perhaps nowhere is this variety more clearly evidenced than in the work of Edward Weston, whose suite of prints in this section suggests the range of appearances achievable with unadulterated contact prints from his large-format negatives. Other photographers on view include Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932), Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002), Jaromír Funke (Czech, 1896-1945), Bernard Shea Horne (American, 1867-1933), and Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946).
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966) Vortograph 1916-17 Gelatin silver print 11 1/8 x 8 3/8″ (28.2 x 21.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund
Vortograph
The intricate patterns of light and line in this photograph, and the cascading tiers of crystalline shapes, were generated through the use of a kaleidoscopic contraption invented by the American / British photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, a member of London’s Vorticist group. To refute the idea that photography, in its helplessly accurate capture of scenes in the real world, was antithetical to abstraction, Coburn devised for his camera lens an attachment made up of three mirrors, clamped together in a triangle, through which he photographed a variety of surfaces to produce the results in these images. The poet and Vorticist Ezra Pound coined the term “vortographs” to describe Coburn’s experiments. Although Pound went on to criticise these images as lesser expressions than Vorticist paintings, Coburn’s work would remain influential.
Reinventing Photography – Here Comes New Photographer
In 1925, László Moholy-Nagy articulated an idea that became central to the New Vision movement: although photography had been invented 100 years earlier, it was only now being discovered by the avant-garde circles for all its aesthetic possibilities. As products of technological culture, with short histories and no connection to the old fine-art disciplines – which many contemporary artists considered discredited – photography and cinema were seen as truly modern instruments that offered the greatest potential for transforming visual habits. From the photogram to solarisation, from negative prints to double exposures, the New Vision photographers explored the medium in countless ways, rediscovering known techniques and inventing new ones. Echoing the cinematic experiments of the same period, this emerging photographic vocabulary was rapidly adopted by the advertising industry, which appreciated the visual efficiency of its bold simplicity. Florence Henri (Swiss, born America, 1893-1982), Edward Quigley (American, 1898-1977), Franz Roh (German, 1890-1965), Franciszka Themerson and Stefan Themerson (British, born Poland, 1907-1988 and 1910-1988), and František Vobecký (Czech, 1902-1991) are among the numerous photographers represented here.
André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985) Magda, Mme Beöthy, M. Beöthy, and Unknown Guest, Paris 1926-1929 Gelatin silver print 3 1/8 × 3 7/8″ (7.9 × 9.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985) Mondrian’s Glasses and Pipe 1926 Gelatin silver print 3 1/8 × 3 11/16″ (7.9 × 9.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund
Unknown Photographer White Party, Dessau (Weißes Fest, Dessau) March 20, 1926 Gelatin silver print 3 x 1 15/16″ (7.6 x 5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Acquired through the generosity of Howard Stein
Iwao Yamawaki (Japanese, 1898-1987) Lunch (12-2 p.m.) (Mittagessen [12-2 Uhr]) 1931 Gelatin silver print 6 7/16 × 4 5/8″ (16.3 × 11.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Gertrud Arndt (German, 1903-2000) At the Masters’ Houses (An den Meisterhäusern) 1929-1930 Gelatin silver print 8 7/8 x 6 1/4″ (22.6 x 15.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Gertrud Arndt (German, 1903-2000)
Gertrud Arndt (née Hantschk; 20 September 1903 – 10 July 2000) was a photographer associated with the Bauhaus movement.She is remembered for her pioneering series of self-portraits from around 1930.
Arndt’s photography, forgotten until the 1980s, has been compared to that of her contemporaries Marta Astfalck-Vietz and Claude Cahun.Over the five years when she took an active interest in photography, she captured herself and her friends in various styles, costumes and settings in the series known as Masked Portraits. Writing for Berlin Art Link, Angela Connor describes the images as “ranging from severe to absurd to playful.”Today Arndt is considered to be a pioneer of female self-portraiture, long predating Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Iwao Yamawaki (Japanese, 1898-1987) Untitled 1931 Gelatin silver print 8 11/16 x 6 1/2″ (22 x 16.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Hajo Rose (German, 1910-1989) Untitled (Self-Portrait) 1931 Gelatin silver print 9 7/16 × 7 1/16″ (23.9 × 17.9cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Hajo Rose (German, 1910-1989)
‘Finally – a house made of steel and glass!’ This was the enthusiastic reaction of Hajo Rose (1910-1989) to the Bauhaus building in Dessau when he began his studies there in 1930. Rose promoted the methods of the Bauhaus throughout his lifetime: as a lecturer at universities in Amsterdam, Dresden and Leipzig, and also as an artist and photographer.
Hajo Rose experimented with a wide variety of materials and techniques. The photomontage of his self-portrait combined with the Dessau Bauhaus building (c. 1930), the surrealism of his photograph Seemannsbraut (Sailor’s Bride, 1934), and the textile print designs that he created with a typewriter (1932) are examples of the extraordinary creativity of this artist. He also contributed to an advertising campaign for the Jena Glass Company: the first heat-resistant household glassware stood for modern product design and is still regarded as a kitchen classic today.
Shortly before the Bauhaus was closed, Hajo Rose was one of the last students to receive his diploma. Subsequent periods in various cities shaped his biography, which is a special example of the migratory experience shared by many Bauhaus members after 1933. After one year as an assistant in the Berlin office of László Moholy-Nagy, Hajo Rose immigrated to The Netherlands together with Paul Guermonprez, a Bauhaus colleague, in 1934. He worked there as a commercial artist and taught at the Nieuwe Kunstschool in Amsterdam. At the 1937 World Exposition in Paris, he won an award for his poster ‘Amsterdam’. After the Second World War, Rose worked as a graphic designer, photographer and teacher in Dresden and Leipzig. He continued to advocate Bauhaus ideas in the GDR, even though the Bauhaus was regarded in East Germany as bourgeois and formalistic well into the 1960s. Rose resigned from the Socialist Unity Party (SED) – in spite of the loss of his teaching position as a consequence. From that time, he worked as one of the few freelance graphic designers in the GDR. Hajo Rose died at the age of 79 – shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Gertrude Lawrence 1928 Gelatin silver print 9 7/16 × 7 9/16″ (24 × 19.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Edward Steichen Estate and gift of Mrs. Flora S. Straus, by exchange
The Artist’s Life
Photography is particularly well suited to capturing the distinctive nuances of the human face, and photographers delighted in and pushed the boundaries of portraiture throughout the 20th century. The Thomas Walther Collection features a great number of portraits of artists and self-portraits as varied as the individuals portrayed. Additionally, the collection conveys a free-spirited sense of community and daily life, highlighted here with photographs made by André Kertész and by students and faculty at the Bauhaus. When the Hungarian-born Kertész moved to Paris in 1925, he couldn’t afford to purchase photographic paper, so he would print on less expensive postcard stock. These prints, whose small scale requires that the viewer engage with them intimately, function as miniature windows into the lives of Kertész’s bohemian circle of friends. The group of photographs made at the Bauhaus in the mid-1920s, before the medium was formally integrated into the school’s curriculum, similarly expresses friendships and everyday life captured and printed in an informal manner. Portraits by Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954), Lotte Jacobi (American, born Germany, 1896-1990), Lucia Moholy (British, born Czechoslovakia, 1894-1989), Man Ray (American, 1890-1976), August Sander (German, 1876-1964) and Edward Steichen (American, born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) are among the highlights of this gallery.
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Summer Swimming (Sommerbad) 1925-1930 Gelatin silver print 7 x 7 7/8″ (17.8 x 20cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Bequest of Ilse Bing, by exchange
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Aenne Biermann (March 8, 1898 – January 14, 1933), born Anna Sibilla Sternfeld, was a German photographer of Ashkenazi origin. She was one of the major proponents of New Objectivity, a significant art movement that developed in Germany in the 1920s.
Biermann was a self-taught photographer. Her first subjects were her two children, Helga and Gershon.The majority of Biermann’s photographs were shot between 1925 and 1933. Gradually she became one of the major proponents of New Objectivity, an important art movement in the Weimar Republic. Her work became internationally known in the late 1920s, when it was part of every major exhibition of German photography.
Major exhibitions of her work include the Munich Kunstkabinett, the Deutscher Werkbund and the exhibition of Folkwang Museum in 1929. Other important exhibitions include the exhibition entitled Das Lichtbild held in Munich in 1930 and the 1931 exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts (French: Palais des Beaux Arts) in Brussels.Since 1992 the Museum of Gera has held an annual contest for the Aenne Biermann Prize for Contemporary German Photography, which is one of the most important events of its kind in Germany.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Helmar Lerski (Swiss born Germany, 1871-1956) Metamorphosis 601 (Metamorphose 601) 1936 Gelatin silver print 11 7/16 × 9 1/16″ (29 × 23cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. The Family of Man Fund
Helmar Lerski (Swiss, born Germany 1871-1956)
There can hardly be another name in the international history of photography whose work has been so frequently misunderstood and so controversially evaluated as that of Helmar Lerski (1871-1956). “In every human being there is everything; the question is only what the light falls on”. Guided by this conviction, Lerski took portraits that did not primarily strive for likeness but which left scope for the viewer’s imagination, thus laying himself open to the criticism of betraying the veracity of the photographic image.
… Lerski’s pictures were only partly in line with the maxims of the New Photography, and they questioned the validity of pure objectivity. The distinguishing characteristics of his portraits included a theatrical-expressionistic, sometimes dramatic use of lighting inspired by the silent film. Although his close-up photographs captured the essential features of a face – eyes, nose and mouth –, his primary concern was not individual appearance or superficial likeness but the deeper inner potential: he emphasised the changeability, the different faces of an individual. Lerski, who sympathised with the political left wing, thereby infiltrated the photography of types that was practised (and not infrequently misused for racist purposes) by many of Lerski’s contemporaries.
… Helmar Lerski’s attitude was at its most radical in his work entitled Metamorphosis. This was completed within a few months at the beginning of 1936 in Palestine, to where Lerski and his second wife Anneliese had immigrated in 1932. In Verwandlungen durch Licht (this is the second title for this work), Lerski carried his theatrical talent to extremes. With the help of up to 16 mirrors and filters, he directed the natural light of the sun in constant new variations and refractions onto his model, the Bernese-born, at the time out-of-work structural draughtsman and light athlete Leo Uschatz. Thus he achieved, in a series of over 140 close-ups “hundreds of different faces, including that of a hero, a prophet, a peasant, a dying soldier, an old woman and a monk from one single original face” (Siegfried Kracauer). According to Lerski, these pictures were intended to provide proof “that the lens does not have to be objective, that the photographer can, with the help of light, work freely, characterise freely, according to his inner face.” Contrary to the conventional idea of the portrait as an expression of human identity, Lerski used the human face as a projection surface for the figures of his imagination. We are only just becoming aware of the modernity of this provocative series of photographs.
Peter Pfrunder Fotostiftung Schweiz
Max Burchartz (German, 1887-1961) Lotte (Eye) (Lotte [Auge]) 1928 Gelatin silver print 11 7/8 x 15 3/4″ (30.2 x 40cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Acquired through the generosity of Peter Norton
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) Anna Oderfeld, Zakopane 1911-1912 Gelatin silver print 6 11/16 × 4 3/4″ (17 × 12.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Mrs. Willard Helburn, by exchange
Edmund Kesting (German, 1892-1970) Glance to the Sun (Blick zur Sonne) 1928 Gelatin silver print 13 1/16 x 14 1/2″ (33.2 x 36.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Edmund Kesting (German, 1892-1970)
Edmund Kesting (27 July 1892, Dresden – 21 October 1970, Birkenwerder) was a German photographer, painter and art professor. He studied until 1916 at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts before participating as a soldier in the First World War, upon returning his painting teachers were Richard Müller and Otto Gussmann and in 1919 he began to teach as a professor at the private school Der Weg. In 1923 he had his first exposition in the gallery Der Sturm in which he showed photograms. When Der Weg opened a new academy in Berlin in 1927, he moved to the capital.
He formed relations with other vanguardists in Berlin and practiced various experimental techniques such as solarisation, multiple images and photograms, for which reason twelve of his works were considered degenerate art by the Nazi regime and were prohibited. Among the artists with whom he interacted are Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky and Alexander Archipenko. At the end of World War II he formed part of a Dresden artistic group known as Künstlergruppe der ruf – befreite Kunst (Call to an art in freedom) along with Karl von Appen, Helmut Schmidt-Kirstein and Christoph Hans, among others. In this city he made an experimental report named Dresdner Totentanz (Dance of death in Dresden) as a condemnation of the bombing of the city. In 1946 he was named a member of the Academy of Art in the city.
He participated in the controversy between socialist realism and formalism that took place in the German Democratic Republic, therefore his work was not realist and could not be shown in the country between 1949 and 1959. In 1955 he began to experiment with chemical painting, making photographs without the use of a camera and only with the use of chemical products such as the developer and the fixer and photographic paper, for which he made exposures to light using masks and templates. Between 1956 and 1967 he was a professor at the Academy of Cinema and Television of Potsdam.
His artistic work was not recognised by the authorities of the German Democratic Republic until 1980, ten years after his death.
Maurice Tabard (French, 1897-1984) Am I Beautiful? (Suis-je belle?) 1929 Gelatin silver print 9 5/16 × 6 15/16″ (23.6 × 17.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Between Surrealism and Magic Realism
In the mid-1920s, European artistic movements ranging from Surrealism to New Objectivity moved away from a realist approach by highlighting the strange in the familiar or trying to reconcile dreams and reality. Echoes of these concerns, centred on the human figure, can be found in this gallery. Some photographers used anti-naturalistic methods – capturing hyperreal, close-up details; playing with scale; and rendering the body as landscape – to challenge the viewer’s perception. Others, in line with Sigmund Freud’s definition of “the uncanny” as an effect that results from the blurring of distinctions between the real and the fantastic, offered visual plays on life and the lifeless, the animate and the inanimate, confronting the human body with surrogates in the form of dolls, mannequins, and masks. Photographers influenced by Surrealism, such as Maurice Tabard, subjected the human figure to distortions and transformations by experimenting with photographic techniques either while capturing the image or while developing it in the darkroom. Additional photographers on view include Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933), Jacques-André Boiffard (French, 1902-1961), Max Burchartz (German, 1887-1961), Helmar Lerski (Swiss, 1871-1956), and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939)
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Daily News Building, 220 East 42nd Street, Manhattan November 21, 1935 Gelatin silver print 9 5/8 × 7 1/2″ (24.4 × 19.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Marjorie Content (American, 1895-1984) Steamship Pipes, Paris Winter 1931 Gelatin silver print 3 13/16 × 2 11/16″ (9.7 × 6.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Andreas Feininger, by exchange
Marjorie Content (American, 1895-1984)
Marjorie Content (1895-1984) was an American photographer active in modernist social and artistic circles. Her photographs were rarely published and never exhibited in her lifetime, but have become of interest to collectors and art historians. Her work has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chrysler Museum of Art; it has been the subject of several solo exhibitions. (Wikipedia)
Marjorie Content (1895-1984) was a modest and unpretentious photographer who kept her work largely to herself, never published or exhibited. Overshadowed by such close friends as Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz, she was more comfortable as a muse and source of encouragement for others, including her fourth husband, poet Jean Toomer. This text presents her beautiful, varied photographs and provides a glimpse into her life. Her pictures portray a variety of images including: New York’s frenetic cityscape distilled to essential patterns and rhythms; the Southwestern light and heat along with the strength and dignity of the Taos pueblo culture; and cigarettes and other everyday items arranged in jewel-like compositions. The discovery of the quality and extent of her work is proof that an artist’s determination can surmount a lack of recognition in her lifetime.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Votive Candles, New York City 1929-1930 Gelatin silver print 8 1/2 x 6 15/16″ (21.6 x 17.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Willard Van Dyke and Mr. and Mrs. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., by exchange
Georgii Zimin (Russian, 1900-1985) Untitled 1926 Gelatin silver print 3 11/16 x 3 1/4″ (9.4 x 8.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Georgii Zimin (Russian, 1900-1985)
Georgii Zimin was born in Moscow in 1900, where he lived and worked for his entire life. Before the Russian Revolution he enrolled as a student at the Artistic-Industrial Stroganov Institute, known after 1918 as SVOMAS (Free state art studios). Zimin continued his studies at VKhUTEMAS (Higher state artistic and technical studios), which replaced SVOMAS in 1920. It was during his time at the school that he published the portfolio Skrjabin in Lukins Tanz (Scriabin in Lukin’s dance), in an edition of one hundred. This set of Cubo-Futurist lithographs from 1922 features costumed dancers in erotic poses, complementing a ballet choreographed by Lev Lukin. This work garnered Zimin acknowledgment by the Academy of Arts and Sciences and marked his affiliation with the Russian Art of Movement group. Throughout the 1920s he showed regularly at Art of Movement exhibitions at GAKhN (State academy for artistic sciences), in Moscow. Zimin also experimented with photography in the late 1920s and early 1930s, producing photograms akin to those made by László Moholy-Nagy and others at the time. Later in life, he served as Art Director of Exhibitions at the Department of Trade and held a post at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition.
~ Ksenia Nouril
Umbo (Otto Umbehr) (German, 1902-1980) Mystery of the Street (Mysterium der Strasse) 1928 Gelatin silver print 11 7/16 x 9 1/4″ (29 x 23.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Umbo (Otto Umbehr) (German, 1902-1980)
Trained at the Bauhaus under Johannes Itten, a master of expressivity, Berlin-based photographer Umbo (born Otto Umbehr) believed that intuition was the source of creativity. To this belief, he added Constructivist structural strategies absorbed from Theo Van Doesburg, El Lissitzky, and others in Berlin in the early twenties. Their influence is evident in this picture’s diagonal, abstract construction and its spatial disorientation. It is also classic Umbo, encapsulating his intuitive vision of the world as a resource of poetic, often funny, ironic, or dark bulletins from the social unconscious.
After he left the Bauhaus, Umbo worked as assistant to Walther Ruttmann on his film Berlin, Symphony of a Great City 1926. In 1928, photographing from his window either very early or very late in the day and either waiting for his “actors” to achieve a balanced composition or, perhaps, positioning them as a movie director would, Umbo exposed three negatives. He had an old 5 by 7 inch (12.7 by 17.8 centimetre) stand camera and a 9 by 12 centimetre (3 9/16 by 4 3/4 inch) Deckrullo Contessa-Nettle camera, but which he used for these overhead views is not known, as he lost all his prints and most negatives in the 1943 bombing of Berlin. The resulting images present a world in which the shadows take the active role. Umbo made the insubstantial rule the corporeal and the dark dominate the light through a simple but inspired inversion: he mounted the pictures upside down (note the signature in ink in the lower right) .
In 1928-29, Umbo was a founding photographer at Dephot (Deutscher Photodienst), a seminal photography agency in Berlin dedicated to creating socially relevant and visually fascinating photoessays, an idea originated by Erich Solomon. Simon Guttmann, who directed the business, hired creative nonconformists, foremost among them the bohemian Umbo, who slept in the darkroom; Umbo in turn drew the brothers Lore Feininger and Lyonel Feininger to the agency, which soon also boasted Robert Capa and Felix H. Man. Dephot hired Dott, the best printer in Berlin, and it was he who made the large exhibition prints, such as this one, ordered by New York gallerist Julien Levy when he visited the agency in 1931. Umbo showed thirty-nine works, perhaps also printed by Dott, in the 1929 exhibition Film und Foto, and he put Guttmann in touch with the Berlin organizer of the show; accordingly, Dephot was the source for some images in the accompanying book, Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Here comes the new photographer!). Levy introduced Umbo’s photographs to New York in Surréalisme (January 1932) and showcased them again at the Julien Levy Gallery, together with images by Herbert Bayer, Jacques-André Boiffard, Roger Parry, and Maurice Tabard, in his 1932 exhibition Modern European Photography.
Maria Morris Hambourg, Hanako Murata
Umbo (Otto Umbehr) (German, 1902-1980) Six at the Beach (Sechs am Strand) 1930 Gelatin silver print 9 3/8 × 7 1/8″ (23.8 × 18.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966) The Octopus 1909 Gelatin silver print 22 1/8 × 16 3/4″ (56.2 × 42.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Dynamics of the City – Symphony of a Great City
In his 1928 manifesto “The Paths of Contemporary Photography,” Aleksandr Rodchenko advocated for a new photographic vocabulary that would be more in step with the pace of modern urban life and the changes in perception it implied. Rodchenko was not alone in this quest: most of the avant-garde photographers of the 1920s and 1930s were city dwellers, striving to translate the novel and shocking experience of everyday life into photographic images. Equipped with newly invented handheld cameras, they used unusual vantage points and took photos as they moved, struggling to re-create the constant flux of images that confronted the pedestrian. Reflections in windows and vitrines, blurry images of quick motions, double exposures, and fragmentary views portray the visual cacophony of the metropolis. The work of Berenice Abbott (American, 1898- 1991), Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966), Germanie Krull (Dutch, born Germany, 1897-1985), Alexander Hackenschmied (Czech, 1907-2004), Umbo (German, 1902-1980), and Imre Kinszki (Hungarian, 1901-1945) is featured in this final gallery.
The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019 Phone: (212) 708-9400
Opening hours: 10.30 am – 5.30 pm Open seven days a week
![George Baron Goodman, d. 1851. [Dr William Bland, ca. 1845 - portrait] c. 1845](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/goodman-dr-george-bland-1845-web.jpg "George Baron Goodman, d. 1851. [Dr William Bland, ca. 1845 - portrait] c. 1845")
![Sybil Craig (Australian, 1901-1989) '[HMVS Cerberus, Half Moon Bay, Melbourne]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/craig_cerberus-web.jpg "Sybil Craig (Australian, 1901-1989) '[HMVS Cerberus, Half Moon Bay, Melbourne]' Nd")
![Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Acanthus mollis' (Acanthus mollis [Akanthus, Bärenklau. Deckblätter, die Blüten sind entfernt, in 4facher Vergrößerung]) 1898-1928](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/karl-blossfeldt-german-1865e280931932-acanthus-mollis-web.jpg "Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Acanthus mollis' (Acanthus mollis [Akanthus, Bärenklau. Deckblätter, die Blüten sind entfernt, in 4facher Vergrößerung]) 1898-1928")
![Iwao Yamawaki (Japanese, 1898-1987) 'Lunch (12-2 p.m.)' (Mittagessen [12-2 Uhr]) 1931](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/iwao-yamawaki-japanese-1898e280931987-lunch-12e280932-p-m-web.jpg "Iwao Yamawaki (Japanese, 1898-1987) 'Lunch (12-2 p.m.)' (Mittagessen [12-2 Uhr]) 1931")
![Max Burchartz (German, 1887-1961) 'Lotte (Eye)' (Lotte [Auge]) 1928](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/max-burchartz-lotte-eye-1928-web.jpg "Max Burchartz (German, 1887-1961) 'Lotte (Eye)' (Lotte [Auge]) 1928")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.