Visited September 2019 posted November 2020
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Zebras. Prekinetic study (Preliminary study for the kinetic theory. Graphic Period, 1929-1939) (installation view)
1939
Gouache, pencil, colour and white chalk on paper
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
While on my European art trip in 2019, I ventured by tram to the deepest suburbs of Budapest to visit the Vasarely Museum on a Sunday – one of only three days the museum is open. The journey was an experience in itself. The reward was that I got to see an artists work I have always admired (I have a Vasarely serigraph in my collection), set in one of the most beautiful art galleries I have ever seen in my life. What’s not too like.
Critically, I got to examine Vasarely’s work up close and personal, on a large scale. I noted how gestural his work is, even as it is geometric – emerging from his Gesture Drawings. Ground Plans of 1946. There is a mesmerising flow to his compositions, even as they are supposedly set, fixed, in their mathematical complexity.
Even as Josef Albers explored colour in the belief that colours have no inherent emotional associations, so Vasarely investigated the formula for a “plastic alphabet”, a universal visual language based on the structural interplay of form and colour, a programmed language with an infinite number of form and colour variations. Through serialisation and the processes of re-creation, multiplication and expansion, “in pictures based on the mutual association between forms and colours, he claimed to perceive a ‘grammar’ of visual language, with which a set of basic forms making up a composition could be arranged into a system similar to musical notation… He regarded colour-forms as the cells or molecules out of which the universe was made.”
Don’t believe all that is written on the can. While both artists want to euthanise the authenticity of the hand, the feeling of he eye, and the beauty of the object through an investigation of concept, form and replication, when in the presence of these paintings, once, twice, three times, one cannot deny the intimacy of their construction.
Unlike flat reproductions of these paintings in books, their serial reproduction, in these installation photographs you can see the ripples in the surface of these paintings. Their meticulous, hand-crafted production. For example, look at the surface of paintings such as Lom-Lan 2 (1953, below); Marsan (1950 / 1955 / 1958, below); and Sonora (1973, below). From a distance their patterns are stable but optically disturbing. Up close, their surface dis/integrates into swirls and ripples at a molecular level. The musical annotation – colour, form, pattern, repetition – of these optical illusions is subsumed into an aura, an earthly divination of a transient ‘planetary folklore’.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
.
All iPhone images © Dr Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Downstairs galleries
View of the Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
View of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at second left, Gesture Drawings. Ground Plans (1946); and at second right, Composition (1948)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Gesture Drawings. Ground Plans (installation view)
1946
Pencil on paper
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The Galerie Denise René opened in 1944. Its first exhibition was Les dessins et composition de Vasarely (Vasarely’s drawings and graphic compositions). Surrealism influenced his works, and even caught the attention of André Breton. As Denise René recalled: ‘André Breton was even convinced we had found a Surrealist painter; it was mostly the trompe l’œils that made him think so, which abounded in Vasarely’s graphic innovations. Breton invited me and Vasarely to visit him in rue Fontaine. Éluard and Breton both came to see the exhibition, though on different days because Éluard had broken with Breton and Surrealism.’ Vasarely had a painterly turn. Shortly he made experimentations in gesture painting. (Victor Vasarely, Jazz, 1942, inv. V. 195) Later, despite his artistic discoveries, he described his earliest period as Les Fausses Routes (Wrong Roads).
Text from the Vasarely Museum website [Online] Cited 26/10/2020
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Hombre en movimiento – Estudio del movimiento (El hombre)
Man in motion. Study of Motion (The Man)
1943
Tempera on plywood
117 x 132cm
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Composition (installation view)
1948
Oil on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Magyar Grafika (Hungarian Graphics)
Az Ujság Hirdetés (The Newspaper is Advertised) (installation view)
Edition 12
1931
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
A journal for the development of graphic industries and related professions. Budapest, 1. 1920 – 13. 1932
Installation views of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest with in the last photo at left, Versant (1952)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Versant (installation view)
1952
Acrylic on plywood
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest with at right, Lom-Lan 2 (1953)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Lom-Lan 2 (installation view)
1953
Oil on fibreboard
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing the painting
Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Amir (“Rima”) (installation view)
1953
Acrylic on plywood
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
MORA (Oeuvre profonde cinétique) (installation views)
1954/1960 (?)
Deep kinetic object, silk screen on plexiglas, glass and steel
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Orion noir (1970); and at right, Norma (1962-1979)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Orion noir
1970
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Norma (installation view)
1962-1979
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Chess Set
1980
Multiple, plexiglass
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Marsan-2 (1964/1974); at centre, Gizeh (1955/1962); and at right, Marsan (1950/1955/1958)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Marsan-2 (installation views)
1964/1974
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Gizeh (installation view)
1955/1962
Oil on canvas
Donation of Victor Vasarely, 1970
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Marsan (installation view)
1950/1955/1958
Oil on canvas
Donation of Victor Vasarely, 1970
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Naissances (installation view)
1954/1960
From the album Hommage à Johann Sebastian Bach (Éd. Pierre belford, Paris, 1973. Éxemplaire XIV/XX), Supplement no. 3.
Deep kinetic object, plexiglass, silk screen
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Zilia (installation view)
1981
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Stridio-Z (installation view)
1976-1977
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Tri-Axo (installation view)
1972/1976
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Seitz
The responsive eye (book cover)
Museum of Modern Art, 1965
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing Yllus (1978)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Yllus
1978
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Upstairs galleries
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing V.P. 102 (1979)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
V.P. 102 (installation view)
1979
Acrylic on cardboard, mounted on plywood
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left in the display cabinet, KROA-MC (1969); and at centre, Quivar (Ouivar) (1974)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Eroed-Pre (1978); and at right, Quivar (Ouivar) (1974)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Eroed-Pre (installation view)
1978
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Quivar (Ouivar) (installation view)
1974
Collage, gouache on cardboard, mounted on plywood
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at right, Stri-oet (1979)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Stri-oet (installation view)
1979
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left centre, Stri-oet (1979); and in the display cabinet, KROA-MC (1969). Love the reflection of the colours on the wall behind!
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing KROA-MC (1969)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Bull (1973/74); and at centre left, Orion noir (1963)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Bull (installation view)
1973/1974
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Vega Mir (Oeuvre profonde cinétique) (installation view)
1954/1960
From the album Hommage à Johann Sebastian Bach (Éd. Pierre belford, Paris, 1973. Éxemplaire XIV/XX), Supplement no. 1.
Multiple, silk screen on anodised aluminium
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Vega Mir (Oeuvre profonde cinétique) (installation view detail)
1954/1960
From the album Hommage à Johann Sebastian Bach (Éd. Pierre belford, Paris, 1973. Éxemplaire XIV/XX), Supplement no. 1.
Multiple, silk screen on anodised aluminium
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan. Self portrait with ‘Vega Mir’ 2019
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Bi. Octans (1979)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Bi. Octans (installation view)
1979
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at left, Kotzka (1973-1976); and at right, Trybox (1979)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Kotzka (installation view)
1973-1976
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Trybox (installation view)
1979
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at centre right, Vonal-Ket (1972/1977)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Vonal-Ket (installation views)
1972/1977
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Vasarely Museum, Budapest showing at centre left, Sonora (1973)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian-French, 1906-1997)
Sonora (installation view)
1973
Acrylic on canvas
Vasarely Museum Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Vasarely Museum
1033, Budapest Szentlélek tér 6
Phone: + 36 1 388 7551
Opening hours:
Friday 11am – 4.00pm
Saturday – Sunday 11am – 4.00pm
Exhibition: ‘Walker Evans’ at the Centre Pompidou, Paris
Tags: 20th-century American culture, Alabama Tenant Farmer, Alabama Tenant Farmer Floyd Bourroughs, Allie Mae Burroughs, ambulant portrait photographer, American art, american artist, American culture, American landscape, american photographer, American photographers, American photography, American Vernacular, American vernacular photography, Americanness, Anna Maria Florida, architectural photographer, automobile carcases, building debris, catalogue photographer, Centre Pompidou, cinema posters, codes of applied photography, composition, composition of window displays, Coney Island, Coney Island Beach, consumption, documentary style, documentary style of imagery, enamel signs, Faces, Floyd Bourroughs, frontality, graphic ephemera, Hale Country, history of photography, Industrial waste, John Atlee Kouwenhoven, Louisiana mansions, mechanisms of overproduction and consumption, Negroes' Church South Carolina, New York City street corner, objectivity, overproduction, Paris, photobooth, photobooth photography, photobooth portraits, placards, post cards, post-card photographer, print images, Resort Photographer at Work, roadside buildings, Self-Portrait in Automated Photobooth, Shoeshine Stand Detail in Southern Town, shots in series, signs, Stamped Tin Relic, Subway Portrait, the American landscape, the Depression, Tin Snips by J. Wiss and Sons, Truck and Sign, twentieth-century American photographers, typography, typography of signs, vernacular, vernacular photography, Walker Evans, Walker Evans Alabama Tenant Farmer, Walker Evans Allie Mae Burroughs, Walker Evans Anna Maria Florida, Walker Evans Centre Pompidou, Walker Evans Coney Island Beach, Walker Evans documentary style, Walker Evans Floyd Bourroughs, Walker Evans Negroes' Church South Carolina, Walker Evans New York City Street Corner, Walker Evans Resort Photographer at Work, Walker Evans Self-Portrait, Walker Evans Self-Portrait in Automated Photobooth, Walker Evans Shoeshine Stand Detail in Southern Town, Walker Evans Stamped Tin Relic, Walker Evans Subway Portrait, Walker Evans Tin Snips by J. Wiss and Sons, Walker Evans Truck and Sign, Walker Evans Untitled Detroit, Wife of a Cotton Sharecropper, window displays, wooden houses
Exhibition dates: 26th April 2017 – 14th August 2017
Curator: Mnam/Cci, Clément Cheroux
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Stamped Tin Relic
1929
Gelatin silver print
23.3 x 28cm
Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris Achat en 1996
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © Centre Pompidou / Dist.RMN-GP
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Coney Island Beach
c. 1929
Gelatin silver print
22.5 x 31cm
The J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Los Angeles
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The un/ordinariness of ordinariness
What a pleasure.
I’ve never liked the term ‘”vernacular” photography’ because, for me, every time someone presses the shutter of the camera they have a purpose: to capture a scene, however accidental or incidental. That context may lie outside recognised networks of production and legitimation but it does not lie outside performance and ritual. As Catherine Lumby observes, what the promiscuous flow of the contemporary image culture opens up, “is an expanded and abstracted terrain of becoming… whereby images exceed, incorporate or reverse the values that are presumed to reside within them in a patriarchal social order.”1 Pace Evans.
His art of an alternate order, his vision of a terrain of becoming is so particular, so different it has entered the lexicon of America culture.
Marcus
Walker Evans: “The passionate quest to identify the fundamental features of American vernacular culture… the term “vernacular” designates those popular or informal forms of expression used by ordinary people for everyday purposes – essentially meaning all that falls outside art, outside the recognised networks of production and legitimation, and which in the US thus serves to define a specifically American culture. It is all the little details of the everyday environment that make for “Americanness”: wooden roadside shacks, the way a shopkeeper lays out his wares in the window, the silhouette of the Ford Model T, the pseudo-cursive typography of Coca-Cola signs. It is a crucial notion for the understanding of American culture.”
Text from press release
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Many thankx to the Centre Pompidou for allowing me to publish the artwork in the posting. Please click on the art work for a larger version of the image.
1. Lumby, Catharine. “Nothing Personal: Sex, Gender and Identity in The Media Age,” in Matthews, Jill (ed.,). Sex in Public: Australian Sexual Cultures. St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1997, pp. 14-15.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Truck and Sign
1928-1930
Gelatin silver print
16.5 x 22.2cm
Collection particulière, San Francisco
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © Fernando Maquieira, Cromotex
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
New York City Street Corner
1929
Gelatin silver print
18.4 x 12.7cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Self-Portrait in Automated Photobooth
1930
Gelatin silver print
18.3 x 3.8cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dist-RMN-GP/Image of the MMA
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Self-Portrait in Automated Photobooth (details)
1930
Gelatin silver print
18.3 x 3.8cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dist-RMN-GP/Image of the MMA
Walker Evans (1903-1975) was one of the most important of twentieth-century American photographers. His photographs of the Depression years of the 1930s, his assignments for Fortune magazine in the 1940s and 1950s, and his “documentary style” influenced generations of photographers and artists. His attention to everyday details and the commonplace urban scene did much to define the visual image of 20th-century American culture. Some of his photographs have become iconic.
Conceived as a retrospective of Evans’s work as a whole, the Centre Pompidou exhibition presents three hundred vintage prints in a novel and revelatory thematic organisation. It highlights the photographer’s recurrent concern with roadside buildings, window displays, signs, typography and faces, offering an opportunity to grasp what no doubt lies at the heart of Walker Evans’ work: the passionate quest to identify the fundamental features of American vernacular culture. In an interview of 1971, he explained the attraction as follows: “You don’t want your work to spring from art; you want it to commence from life, and that’s in the street now. I’m no longer comfortable in a museum. I don’t want to go to them, don’t want to be ‘taught’ anything, don’t want to see ‘accomplished’ art. I’m interested in what’s called vernacular. For example, finished, I mean educated, architecture doesn’t interest me, but I love to find American vernacular”.
In the English-speaking countries, and in America more notably, the term “vernacular” designates those popular or informal forms of expression used by ordinary people for everyday purposes – essentially meaning all that falls outside art, outside the recognised networks of production and legitimation, and which in the US thus serves to define a specifically American culture. It is all the little details of the everyday environment that make for “Americanness”: wooden roadside shacks, the way a shopkeeper lays out his wares in the window, the silhouette of the Ford Model T, the pseudo-cursive typography of Coca-Cola signs. It is a crucial notion for the understanding of American culture. It is to be found in the literature as early as the 19th century, but it is only in the late 1920s that it is first deployed in a systematic study of architecture. Its importance in American art would be theorised in the 1940s, by John Atlee Kouwenhoven, a professor of English with a particular interest in American studies who was close to Walker Evans himself.
After an introductory section that looks at Evans’s modernist beginnings, the exhibition introduces the subjects that would fascinate him throughout his career: the typography of signs, the composition of window displays, the frontages of little roadside businesses, and so on. It then goes on to show how Evans himself adopted the methods or visual forms of vernacular photography in becoming, for the time of an assignment, an architectural photographer, a catalogue photographer, an ambulant portrait photographer, while all the time explicitly maintaining the standpoint of an artist.
This exhibition is the first major museum retrospective of Evans’s work in France. Unprecedented in its ambition, it retraces the whole of his career, from his earliest photographs in the 1920s to the Polaroids of the 1970s, through more than 300 vintage prints drawn from the most important American institutions (among them the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.) and also more than a dozen private collections. It also features a hundred or so other exhibits drawn from the post cards, enamel signs, print images and other graphic ephemera that Evans collected his whole life long.
Press release from the Centre Pompidou
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Westchester, New York, farmhouse
1931
Gelatin silver print pasted on cardboard
18 x 22.1cm
Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris
© W. Evans Arch., The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © Centre Pompidou / Dist. RMN-GP
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York
1931
Gelatin silver print
18.73 x 16.19cm
Collection particulière, San Francisco
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © Fernando Maquieira, Cromotex
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
License Photo Studio, New York
1934
Gelatin silver print
27.9 x 21.6cm (image: 18.3 x 14.4cm)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Penny Picture Display, Savannah
1936
Gelatin silver print
21.9 x 17.6cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Willard Van Dyke
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © 2016. Digital Image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Joe’s Auto Graveyard
1936
Gelatin silver print
11.43 x 18.73cm
Collection particulière, San Francisco
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © Ian Reeves
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Houses and Billboards in Atlanta
1936
Gelatin silver print
16.5 x 23.2cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © 2016. Digital Image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence
Curator’s point of view
“You don’t want your work to spring from art; you want it to commence from life, and that’s in the street now. I’m no longer comfortable in a museum. I don’t want to go to them, don’t want to be ‘taught’ anything, don’t want to see ‘accomplished’ art. I’m interested in what’s called vernacular.”
.
Walker Evans, interviewed by Leslie Katz (1971)
Through more than 400 photographs and documents, this retrospective of the work of Walker Evans (1903-1975) explores the American photographer’s fascination with his country’s vernacular culture. Evans was one of the most important of twentieth-century American photographers. His photographs of the Depression years of the 1930s, his “documentary style” and his interest in American popular culture influenced generations of photographers and artists. Bringing together the best examples of his work, drawn from the most important private and public collections, the exhibition also accords a large place to the artefacts that Evans himself collected throughout his life, to offer a fresh approach to the work of one of the most significant figures in the history of photography.
Study of his images – from the very first photographs of the 1920s to the Polaroids of his last years – reveals a fascination with the utilitarian, the domestic and the local. This interest in popular forms and practices emerged very early, when he started to collect postcards as a teenager. More than ten thousand items he had gathered by the time of his death are now held by the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Other everyday objects from his personal collection – enamel signs, handbills and adverts – are exhibited here.
Walker Evans’s attraction to the vernacular finds expression, above all, in his choice of subjects: Victorian architecture, roadside buildings, shopfronts, cinema posters, placards, signs, etc. His pictures also feature the faces and bodies of ordinary people, whether victims of the Depression or anonymous passers-by. Something else “typically American” was the underside of progress. During the 1930s in particular, the American landscape was strewn with ruin and waste. Evans kept an eye on them ever after. Industrial waste, building debris, automobile carcases, wooden houses in ruins, Louisiana mansions fallen in the world, antiques, garbage, faded interiors, bare patches in exterior render: these were the other face of America. Just as much as the towering skyscraper or the gleaming motor car, all this was an element of the modern. This concern with decline and obsolescence gave the photographer a critical edge and reveals a profound fascination with the mechanisms of overproduction and consumption characteristic of the age.
Evans didn’t just collect the forms of the vernacular, he also borrowed its methods. In many of his images, he adopts the codes of applied photography: the shots in series, the frontality, the apparent objectivity. Waiting, camera in hand on the corner of the street or in the subway, he accumulated portraits of city-dwellers by the dozen, releasing his shutter with the mechanical regularity of a photo booth. Working like a post-card photographer or architectural photographer, Evans built up, in surprisingly systematic fashion, a catalogue of churches, doors, monuments and small-town main streets. Sculptures, wrought-iron chairs, household tools: all seem to have been selected for their unique qualities as objects. The repetitivity, the apparent objectivity and the absence of emphasis in these images are typical of commercial photographs produced to order. In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, asked Evans to photograph the six hundred sculptures of the exhibition of “African Negro Art”. The method he adopted was that of the catalogue photographer, rigorously avoiding dramatic effects by eliminating shadow; tightly framed and set against a neutral background, the pieces find a new elegance. The photographer would often have recourse to this regime in the years that followed, notably for a portfolio entitled “Beauties of the Common Tool”, published in Fortune magazine in July 1955. This adoption of the forms and procedures of non-artistic photography even as Evans laid claim to art prefigures – some decades in advance! – the practices of the conceptual artists of the 1960s.
Clément Chéroux
Julie Jones
in Code Couleur, No. 28, May – August 2017, pp. 14-17
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Shoeshine Stand Detail in Southern Town
1936
Gelatin silver print
14.5 x 17cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Anonymous Gift
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dist-RMN-GP/Image of the MMA
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Negroes’ Church, South Carolina
March 1936, circulation April 1969
Gelatin silver print
25.2 x 20.2cm
Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa Acheté en 1969
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © Musée des Beaux-Arts du Canada, Ottawa
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Alabama Tenant Farmer Floyd Bourroughs
1936
Gelatin silver print
22.9 x 18.4cm
Collection particulière, San Francisco
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © Fernando Maquieira, Cromotex
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Allie Mae Burroughs, Wife of a Cotton Sharecropper, Hale Country, Alabama
1936
Gelatin silver print
22.3 x 17.3cm
Collection particulière
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © Collection particulière
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Subway Portrait
January 1941
Gelatin silver print
20.9 x 19.1cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Kent and Marcia Minichiello, in Honour of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © National Gallery of Art, Washington
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Resort Photographer at Work
1941
Gelatin silver print, later print
15.9 x 22.4cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Anna Maria, Florida
October 1958
Oil on fibreboard
40 × 50.2cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Walker Evans Archive, 1994
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image of the MMA
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Untitled, Detroit
1946
Gelatin silver print
16 x 11.4cm
Fondation A.Stichting, Bruxelles
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © Fondation A.Stichting, Bruxelles
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Tin Snips by J. Wiss and Sons Co., $1.85
1955
Gelatin silver print
25.2 x 20.3cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Centre Pompidou
75191 Paris cedex 04
Phone: 00 33 (0)1 44 78 12 33
Opening hours:
Exhibition open every day from 11am – 9pm except on Tuesday
Closed on May 1st
Centre Pompidou website
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