Exhibition dates: 10th November, 2010 – 10th April, 2011

Curator: Douglas Eklund (also spelled Doug Ecklund), Associate Curator in the museum’s Department of Photographs

 

 

Aleksey Ivanovich Saveliev (Russian, 1883-1923)
At the Prepared Grave
1910
Gelatin silver print
8.9 x 13.3cm (3 1/2 x 5 1/4 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Pierre Apraxine, 2010

 

These six photo-postcards show various places and moments surrounding the death and burial of Leo Tolstoy. In November 1910 the eighty-two-year-old novelist walked away from his great wealth to devote himself to Christian charity and died in a stationmaster’s house after falling ill on a train. Tolstoy’s death was of tremendous national importance, and how he was to be mourned – whether to kneel or stand at the grave, for instance – signified a contrast between old and new that would be decided during the Russian Revolution seven years later.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

 

 

What an eclectic group of photographs in this posting as well as a great title for an exhibition!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

 

 

 

Aleksey Ivanovich Saveliev (Russian, 1883-1923)
Peasant Carts with Funeral Wreaths
1910
Gelatin silver print
8.9 x 13.3cm (3 1/2 x 5 1/4 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Pierre Apraxine, 2010

 

 

Aleksey Ivanovich Saveliev (Russian, 1883-1923)
Deputation of the Yasno-Polyanskyi Peasants
1910
Gelatin silver print
8.9 x 13.3cm (3 1/2 x 5 1/4 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Pierre Apraxine, 2010

 

 

Felix Thiollier (French, 1842-1914)
A Village Street in the Auvergne
c. 1910
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2008

 

An industrialist and serious amateur photographer in Saint-Étienne, Thiollier left to posterity a vast archive of photographs and negatives. Most are landscapes done in the Pictorialist style, but his more unusual images depict factories and daily life outside major cities in early twentieth century France.

 

 

Paul Haviland (American, 1880-1950)
Passing Steamer
1910
Platinum print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection
Purchase, Harriette and Noel Levine Gift, 2005

 

The son of a well-off china manufacturer in Limoges, Haviland encountered Alfred Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1908. He soon contributed articles to and published photographs in Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work (and acted as the gallery’s secretary at one point), even bankrolling the gallery’s three-year lease for Stieglitz when the rent was raised. In 1915 he started – with the Mexican-born caricaturist and gallerist Marius de Zayas and the journalist Agnes Ernest Meyer – a new magazine called 291, named for Stieglitz’s gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue.

This image appeared as a photogravure in a 1912 issue of Camera Work. While the soft focus and platinum printing are traces of the waning Pictorialist style, the unexpected vantage point and stark design made Passing Steamer a harbinger of things to come.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

Anton Giulio Bragaglia (Italian, 1890-1960)
Change of Position
1911
Gelatin silver print
12.8 x 17.9cm (5 1/16 x 7 1/16 in)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005

 

At age nineteen, Bragaglia became enamored of the Italian Futurist movement, which espoused the beauty of speed and war, the interdependence of time and space, and the total dissolution of time-consecrated institutions. Not following the stop-motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey from the previous century, Bragaglia left the camera’s shutter open to register the absolute fluidity of motion itself – in this case, the trajectory created by the sweeping, continuous arc of a simple change of body position. The result is a dissolution or dematerialisation of the man’s body in a seamless picture of active life. Although later banished from the Futurists’ ranks, the photographer created perhaps the first truly avant-garde images with the camera – the kind that would become prevalent across the continent only a decade later.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

Adolph de Meyer (American born France, 1868-1949)
[Dance Study]
c. 1912
Platinum print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949

 

De Meyer – who would become Vogue magazine’s first official fashion photographer, in 1913 – photographed the dancer Nijinsky and other members of Sergei Diaghilev’s troupe when L’Après midi d’un Faun was presented in Paris in 1912. It has been suggested that this photograph, the only nude by de Meyer, has some connection to the Russian ballet, but if so, it remains mysterious. In 1913 Mabel Dodge, a patroness of the avant-garde, wrote: “Nearly every thinking person nowadays is in revolt against something, because the craving of the individual is for further consciousness, and because consciousness is expanding and bursting through the moulds that have held it up to now.”

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939)
Tadeus Langier, Zakopane
1912-1913
Gelatin silver print
12.6 x 17.6cm (4 15/16 x 6 15/16 in)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection
Purchase, Denise and Andrew Saul Gift, 2005

 

 

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Le Grand Prix A.C.F.
1913
Gelatin silver print
11.5 x 17.1cm (4 1/2 x 6 3/4 in)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection
Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005
© Ministère de la Culture-France/AAJHL

 

A painter who considered photography a hobby, Lartigue was seven when his father, an accomplished amateur photographer, presented him with his first camera. reserving his images from childhood onward in album after album, Lartigue created a rich chronicle of the sporting life and entertainments of his upper-class milieu but one that, like his diaries, remained essentially private. Until 1963, when a show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, revealed Lartigue as a major photographer, his work was known only to a group of friends.

[This print has] been made by Lartigue prior to his public recognition, in his customary intimate scale. He made the Grand Prix picture by swinging the camera from left to right as the racing car sped by. It captures the same awestruck, slate-erasing feeling that inspired the Futurist Marinetti to rhapsodise four years earlier, “A roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

Unknown Artist, British School
The Great British Advance in the West: A Raiding Party Waiting for the Word to Go
1914-1918
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2010
Wikipedia Commons public domain

 

 

Unknown Artist, French School
The Great Nave: Wounded Soldiers Performing Arms Drill at the End of Their Medical Treatment, Grand Palais, Paris
1916
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection
Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005
Wikipedia Commons public domain

 

During World War I, wounded soldiers who had been sent to Paris to recover were drilled in the cavernous Grand Palais to prepare them for a return to the front.

 

 

Unknown artist (American School)
(Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks Selling Liberty Loans during the Third Loan Campaign at the Sub Treasury Building on Wall Street, New York City)
1918
Gelatin silver print
19.4 x 24.1cm (7 5/8 x 9 1/2 in)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase
The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1996

 

 

The twentieth century was truly born during the 1910s. This exhibition, which accompanies Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, surveys the range of uses to which photography was put as its most advanced practitioners and theorists were redefining the medium as an art. The title “Our Future Is in the Air“ is taken from a military aviation pamphlet that figures prominently (in French) in a 1912 Cubist tabletop still life by Picasso; it suggests the twinned senses of exhilarating optimism and lingering dread that accompanied the dissolution of the old order.

Photography was handmaiden and witness to the upheavals that revolutionised perception and consciousness during this tumultuous era. Space and time were overcome by motorcars and airplanes, radio and wireless, and man seemed liberated from the bounds of gravity and geography. This seemingly limitless expanse was mirrored by a new understanding of the unconscious as infinitely deep, complex, and varied – a continent ripe for discovery. The camera was seen as the conduit between these two states of self and world, and “straight photography” – stripped of the gauzy blur of Pictorialist reverie – was espoused by Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand among others.

This turn was not accidental: since handheld cameras became available in the late 1880s, anyone could be a photographer; similarly, photography had snaked its way into every corner of the culture. Elevated perception would distinguish the new artists from the amateur and the tradesman. The exhibition casts the widest possible net in order to show the foundations upon which the medium staked its claim as an independent art.

The 1910s – a period remembered for “The Great War,” Einstein’s theory of relativity, the Russian Revolution, and the birth of Hollywood – was a dynamic and tumultuous decade that ushered in the modern era. This new age – as it was captured by the quintessentially modern art of photography – will be the subject of the exhibition “Our Future Is In The Air”: Photographs from the 1910s, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from November 10, 2010, through April 10, 2011.

An eclectic centennial exhibition devoted to photography of the 1910s, “Our Future Is In The Air” provides a fascinating look at the birth of modern life through 58 photographs by some 30 artists, including Eugène Atget, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Eugène Druet, Lewis Hine, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Adolph de Meyer, Christian Schad, Morton Schamberg, Charles Sheeler, and Stanislaw Witkiewicz, among others. Drawn exclusively from the Museum’s collection, the exhibition also features anonymous snapshots, séance photographs, and a family album made by Russian nobility on the eve of revolution. “Our Future Is In The Air” complements the Museum’s concurrent presentation of groundbreaking photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand in the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand. The exhibition’s title is taken from a pamphlet for military aviation that figures prominently (in French) in a 1912 Cubist tabletop still-life by Picasso, but is used here because of its double meaning: the feelings of excitement and anxiety that accompanied such radical change.

“Our Future Is In The Air” opens in dramatic fashion with a series of photographs showing moments in the funeral procession and burial of Leo Tolstoy on November 9, 1910. The great Russian novelist passed away just after walking away from his great wealth and literary fame to lead a life of Christian charity. Certain details that can be seen in the photo-postcards – such as whether or not to kneel by the grave – represented a long simmering struggle between old and new, spiritual and secular, that would lead to revolution seven years later.

As cameras became smaller, faster, and easier to operate, amateur photographers such as the child prodigy Jacques-Henri Lartigue pushed the medium in directions that trained photographers shied away from. Since Lartigue was only recognised much later as a key figure in photography, prints such as the ones included here – showing speeding motorcars – are exceedingly rare. Lartigue made one of his most memorable photographs, Le Grand Prix A.C.F. (1913), by swinging his camera in the same direction as the car, as it sped by.

The camera also afforded access to the previously invisible, whether capturing a broken leg bone, revealed in an X-ray from 1916 or the trajectory created by a simple change in body position, in a 1911 motion study by the Futurist artist Anton Giulio Bragaglia.

At the same time, photography became an agent of democratic communication, and documentary photographers used its growing influence to expose degrading conditions of workers, the injustice of child labor, and the devastation of war. Beginning in 1908, Lewis Hine made 5,000 photographs of children working in mills, sweatshops, factories, and street trades; six of his photographs will be featured in this exhibition, including Newsboy asleep on stairs with papers, Jersey City, New Jersey, February 1912. Hine’s reports and slide lectures were meant to trigger a profound, empathetic response in the viewer.

During World War I, photography was utilised to document the mass casualties of mechanised warfare; in the exhibition, an affecting image from 1916, by an unknown artist, shows wounded French soldiers performing drills in the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris as part of their rehabilitation.

Also in the exhibition is an evocative 1918 photograph, again by an unknown artist, of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks entertaining a huge crowd at a war bonds rally on Wall Street.

“Our Future Is In The Air” accompanies the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, which focuses on contemporaneous works by three modernist masters of American photography: Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand. It includes photographs by several friends and compatriots of Alfred Stieglitz, from Adolph de Meyer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Paul Haviland, and Karl Struss to Morton Schamberg and Charles Sheeler, in whose works one can trace the transition from soft focus Pictorialism to a harder-edged, more detached “straight photography.”

Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

 

 

Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born America, 1882-1966)
The Octopus
1909
Platinum print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987

 

During the early 1910s, photographers such as Paul Strand, Karl Struss, and Coburn were using Pictorialist techniques from the previous century to depict startling perspectives on contemporary urban subjects, such as this dizzying, bird’s-eye view of New York’s Madison Square from a new skyscraper.

 

 

Unknown artist (American School)
(Man Holding Baseball in Catcher’s Mitt)
1910
Gelatin silver print
13.8 x 8.7cm (5 7/16 x 3 7/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Funds from various donors, 1998

 

 

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
11:00 A.M. Monday, May 9th, 1910. Newsies at Skeeter’s Branch, Jefferson near Franklin. They were all smoking. Location: St. Louis, Missouri
1910
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection
Gift of Phyllis D. Massar, 1970

 

Trained as a sociologist at Columbia University, Hine gave up his teaching job in 1908 to become a full-time photographer for the National Child Labor Committee. The success of the reform agency, created four years earlier, was largely dependent on its ability to sway public opinion.

Influenced by Jacob Riis’s pictures of slum conditions on New York’s Lower East Side, Hine obsessively documented the working conditions of children in mills, factories, and fields across the country, often going undercover to gain access to his subjects. The results – more than five thousand photographs – were used in field reports, exhibitions, pamphlets, and slide lectures. Hine’s decidedly unromantic, understated pictures served as a potent weapon of persuasion.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Addie Card, 12 years. Spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill. Girls in mill say she is ten years. She admitted to me she was twelve; that she started during school vacation and now would “stay”. Location: Vermont, August 1910
1910
Gelatin silver print
24.4 x 19.3cm (9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection
Purchase, Anonymous Gifts, by exchange, 2005

 

 

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Newsboy asleep on stairs with papers, Jersey City, New Jersey
February 1912
Gelatin silver print
Image: 11.5 x 16.8cm (4 1/2 x 6 5/8 in)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005

 

Exhibition Overview

The twentieth century was truly born during the 1910s. This exhibition, which accompanies Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, surveys the range of uses to which photography was put as its most advanced practitioners and theorists were redefining the medium as an art. The title “Our Future Is in the Air” is taken from a military aviation pamphlet that figures prominently (in French) in a 1912 Cubist tabletop still life by Picasso; it suggests the twinned senses of exhilarating optimism and lingering dread that accompanied the dissolution of the old order.

Photography was handmaiden and witness to the upheavals that revolutionised perception and consciousness during this tumultuous era. Space and time were overcome by motorcars and airplanes, radio and wireless, and man seemed liberated from the bounds of gravity and geography. This seemingly limitless expanse was mirrored by a new understanding of the unconscious as infinitely deep, complex, and varied – a continent ripe for discovery. The camera was seen as the conduit between these two states of self and world, and “straight photography” – stripped of the gauzy blur of Pictorialist reverie – was espoused by Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand among others.

This turn was not accidental: since handheld cameras became available in the late 1880s, anyone could be a photographer; similarly, photography had snaked its way into every corner of the culture. Elevated perception would distinguish the new artists from the amateur and the tradesman. The exhibition casts the widest possible net in order to show the foundations upon which the medium staked its claim as an independent art.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

 

 

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Boulevard de Strasbourg
1912
Albumen silver print from glass negative
22.4 x 17.5cm (8 13/16 x 6 7/8 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection
Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005

 

Atget found his vocation in photography in 1897, at the age of forty, after having been a merchant seaman, a minor actor, and a painter. He became obsessed with making what he termed “documents for artists” of Paris and its environs and compiling a visual compendium of the architecture, landscape, and artefacts that distinguish French culture and history. By the end of his life, Atget had amassed an archive of more than eight thousand negatives, which he organized into such categories as Parisian Interiors, Vehicles in Paris, and Petits Métiers (trades and professions). In Atget’s inventory of Paris, shop windows figure prominently and the most arresting feature mannequin displays. In the 1920s the Surrealists recognised in Atget a kindred spirit and reproduced a number of his photographs in their journals and reviews. Antiquated mannequins such as the ones depicted here struck them as haunting, dreamlike analogues to the human form.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939)
Jadwiga Janczewska, Zakopane
c. 1913
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection
Museum Purchase, 2005

 

Witkiewicz was prolific in many mediums, writing plays, novels, and philosophical treatises as well as painting and making darkly brooding photographic portraits and self-portraits. In all his work, he describes a proto-existential sense of the self struggling in vain against the undifferentiated mass of men and the indifference of death; he often turned to drugs to recover this missing plenitude of existence.

Between 1912 and 1913, when he thought he was going mad, Witkiewicz made a series of extraordinary self-portraits and portraits of friends, his dying father, and his fiancée, Jadwiga Janczewska. After this time, his engagement with photography was brief, as he devoted himself instead to literature and painting. He took his life on the day Russian troops entered Poland in 1939 – in part a gesture of national solidarity.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

Karl Struss (American, 1886–1981)
Claremont Inn, Riverside Drive
1915
Platinum print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Warner Communications Inc. Purchase Fund, 1977

 

A member of the Photo-Secession, Struss was a student of Clarence White and a friend of Alfred Stieglitz. He made dozens of photographs of New York City at dusk, delighting in the way things merged and were illuminated by strings of fine lights. This photograph, with its gleaming automobiles and electric lights, shows a popular summer restaurant housed in a colonial-era home on the Upper West Side. Four years later, Struss moved to Los Angeles to work as a still photographer in the burgeoning movie business. He wound up being hired as a cameraman by Cecil B. DeMille and in 1927 won the first Oscar for cinematography for his work on F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

Morton Schamberg (American, 1881–1918)
[View of Rooftops]
1917
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
Public domain

 

Had he not died of influenza in 1918, Schamberg likely would have remained one of the best avant-garde painters and photographers of his generation in America. He absorbed the lessons of Cubism through his contacts with the Stieglitz and Arensberg circles, and in photographs such as this one he demonstrated his deft application of the new artistic idioms.

After reaching a point of almost pure abstraction in his painting in the wake of the Armory show of 1913, Schamberg turned in 1915 toward more objective machine forms in his pastels and paintings, and toward urban images in his photographs.

Like Stieglitz’s photographs of the city made from the windows of his galleries, Schamberg’s New York is seen from an elevated perspective, but unlike the elder photographer’s images, Schamberg’s photograph is cool, altogether lacking in human or natural references, and celebrates an almost wholly geometric order underscored by his calculated framing and point of view. For many years this print, the only one Schamberg made from this negative, belonged to his closest friend, Charles Sheeler.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

 

 

Morton Schamberg (American, 1881-1918)
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (German, 1874-1927)
“God” by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Schamberg
1917
Gelatin silver print
24.1 x 19.2cm (9 1/2 x 7 9/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1973
Wikipedia Commons public domain

 

This photograph of a drain pipe attached to a miter box documents one of the most famous examples of American Dada. The sculpture God, a Readymade in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp’s upended urinal Fountain, has traditionally been attributed to Schamberg. Recent scholarship suggests, however, that it was primarily the creation of Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, a poet, shoplifter, junk collector, and Duchamp worshiper famous for strolling the streets of Greenwich Village with cancelled postage stuck to her face and a birdcage with a live canary dangling from her neck. The sculpture’s irreverent title recalls the sculptor Beatrice Wood’s unattributed comment, included in a published defence of Duchamp’s Fountain, “The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.”

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883–1965)
Dan Mask
c. 1918
Gelatin silver print
24.2 x 18.2cm (9 1/2 x 7 3/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Denise and Andrew Saul Gift, 2005

 

When Charles Sheeler took up the camera sometime in 1910-11, he was already a modestly accomplished painter. He began to photograph domestic architecture in the Philadelphia area, and within three years he had a successful sideline documenting fine private and public American collections of Chinese bronzes, Meso-American pots, and modern painting and sculpture by Cézanne, Picasso, and Duchamp. Through this work Sheeler met Walter Arensberg, Alfred Stieglitz, and other important collectors and dealers; to a few of them he sold his paintings.

The rigorous demands of detailed record photography soon influenced his painting as the direct, generally frontal assessment of both an object’s form and structure retrained and refined his eye. By 1916, Sheeler had begun to paint from photographs and also to pursue photography as an end in itself. With his first exhibition of photographs, a three-person show with Paul Strand and Morton Schamberg at Marius de Zayas’s Modern Gallery in 1917, Sheeler emerged as one of America’s few prominent artists equally skilled with brush and camera.

This photograph of a Dan mask from Ivory Coast may have been commissioned by John Quinn, a New York lawyer, collector of African art, and patron of the avant-garde. The ceremonial mask emerges from virtual obscurity, filled with mystery, its highly polished wood surface animated by a raking, angular light. The photograph functions as a fetish, speaking with its own voice, commanding our attention, and even, it would seem, judging our response.

This photograph was published in the March 1923 issue of “The Arts,” in an article by de Zayas entitled “Negro Art.”

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

 

 

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Doylestown House – Stairs from Below
1917
Gelatin silver print
21 x 15cm (8 1/4 x 5 15/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933

 

 

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