Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) What is Time? 1994 Gelatin silver print 16 × 19 7/8 inches (40.6 × 50.5cm) Gift of Duane Michals The Morgan Library & Museum
“Time is the duration of everything, and life is an event, a fluttering of wings.”
Duane Michals
There is no time
Vale the transcendent Duane Michals – storyteller.
Magician, poet, philosopher and dreamer.
An artist, like Joseph Cornell, who I have always felt a special affinity / infinity towards.
I wrote in earlier postings on his work:
“As he says, his work goes beyond description, beyond surfaces, to reveal the subject – not as it looks but as it feels. In his sequences he usually achieves this by posing a question that has no answer, a question that is like a Zen koan… what is the sound of one hand clapping? The grandfather ascends smilingly to heaven with little wings on his back as the child waves goodbye (if youth knew, if age could); the man as human condition turns into a galaxy; and the spirit leaves the body as it was left before. …
Michals staged, narrative scenes take us on a journey into his reality, one which “has entered a realm beyond observation.” He poses difficult questions that force us to examine ideas beyond the world of phenomena, beyond the world of surfaces. He challenges our repressed inner lives and our idealised image of ourselves, disturbing the boundaries of personality, ego, and identity.”1
And
“Duane Michals is one of the greatest photographic storytellers of the twentieth century. His parables – seemingly simple stories used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson – resonate, vibrate, with energy, and insight into, the human condition. They are as profound as the air we breathe but cannot see – expressing the invisible, presencing the spiritual. I feel, I know these stories, intimately. Those things-for-which-there-are-no-words. …
There are things here not seen in this photograph. The spirit leaves the body. William Blake and Duane Michals. Enchanted melancholy. The mysterious / music. In swift embrace. In love. In memory. In death. The fluidity of the line of the artist. Things are queer. The world implodes and ravages itself. Paradise is reborn. The letter, and love, from my father that I, also, never did receive. The nature of reality. Truth? … When I was young. What was time?”2
It was Michals great skill as an artist and a human being that enabled us the possibility of accessing some aspect of the mystery of our existence.
Stepping beyond … his spirit has left his body.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Marcus Bunyan. “Exposing your/self,” on the exhibition ‘Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals’ at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, November 2014 – February 2015 on the Art Blart website January 30, 2015 [Online] Cited 11/06/2026
2/ Marcus Bunyan. “The things-for-which-there-are-no-words,” on the exhibition ‘Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan’ at The Morgan Library & Museum, October 2019 – February 2020 on the Art Blart website January 24, 2020 [Online] Cited 11/06/2026
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I write with this photograph not to tell you what you can see, rather to express what is invisible.”
Duane Michals 1966 in Johnson, B. (ed.,) 2004, ‘Photography speaks: 150 photographers on their art’, Aperture, New York p. 150
“The nature of consciousness is always the central question,” he asserted. In The Human Condition, his panel of six photographs from 1969 begins with a man standing on the 14th Street subway platform; the train arrives and he is bathed in a halo of light; the light becomes a swirl and in the last frame he is swept into a white disc the size of a galaxy passing through the night sky. From the immediate to the universal in six frames.
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) Things Are Queer 1973 Nine gelatin silver prints Images: 5 × 7 inches (12.7 × 17.8cm) each Gift of Duane Michals The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) The Spirit Leaves the Body 1968 Gift of Richard and Ronay Menschel The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals is one of the greatest photographic storytellers of the twentieth century. His parables – seemingly simple stories used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson – resonate, vibrate, with energy, and insight into, the human condition. They are as profound as the air we breathe but cannot see – expressing the invisible, presencing the spiritual. I feel, I know these stories, intimately. Those things-for-which-there-are-no-words.
“Presencing. In 1885, Van Gogh, wrote a letter to his brother Theo: ‘Rembrandt goes so deep into the mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language. It is with justice that they call Rembrandt – [a] magician.’ (Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh [letter 534], on or about 10 October 1885, in Leo Jansen, Luijten and Nienke Bakker (eds.,). Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute, Amsterdam, 2009 [Online] Cited 11/10/2019)
The things-for-which-there-are-no-words remain hidden when approached with conceptual thought. They need to be experienced to be known. The currency of this experience, as we have seen, is deeply personal, but in allowing it we can touch on truth, perhaps even the truth.”1
There are things here not seen in this photograph. The spirit leaves the body. William Blake and Duane Michals. Enchanted melancholy. The mysterious / music. In swift embrace. In love. In memory. In death. The fluidity of the line of the artist. Things are queer. The world implodes and ravages itself. Paradise is reborn. The letter, and love, from my father that I, also, never did receive. The nature of reality. Truth?
“I’m completely overwhelmed by the nature of our reality,” he is quoted as saying in the exhibition catalog about human evolution. “We’ve been working on this version of man for a thousand years. He lives longer, he’s healthier, but he’s still an unproven product. Still the same greedy little bastard.”
“For Michals, photography is not documentary in nature but theatrical and fictive: the camera is one of many tools humanity uses to construct a comprehensible version of reality. In his imaginative, visually rich photographs, the artist exploits the medium’s storytelling capacity,” says the press release. Isobel Crombie suggests the ‘medium’ of photography has ‘The ability to speak to us across time and to connect to the mind and the heart.’2
When I was young. What was time?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Kim Devereux. “Me and My Muse,” in the NGV Magazine Issue 19 Nov – Dec 2019, p. 55
2/ Isobel Crombie. “One Suggestive Moment,” in the NGV Magazine Issue 19 Nov – Dec 2019, p. 33
Many thankx to The Morgan Library & Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I write with this photograph not to tell you what you can see, rather to express what is invisible.”
Duane Michals 1966 in Johnson, B. (ed.,) 2004, ‘Photography speaks: 150 photographers on their art’, Aperture, New York p. 150
“I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody’s face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.”
Duane Michals
Duane Michals uses visual narrative, symbolism and metaphysical imagery to interpret the human condition. His photographic sequences have a film-like appearance and represent intangible elements of dreams, imagination, death, time, myth and spirit. A freelance commercial photographer, Michals began experimenting with sequence works in the 1960s, later adding text to illuminate emotion and philosophical ideas and following in the tradition of painters such as René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico whom he greatly admired. His staged, fictive tableaux vivants are intimate scenes that explore the atmosphere of the invisible and metaphysical…
Robert Wiles Evelyn Francis McHale May 1, 1947 1947 Gelatin silver print Overall: 9 1/2 × 8 in. (24.1 × 20.3cm) Purchased on the Goldsmith Fund for Americana The Morgan Library & Museum
“At the bottom of Empire State Building the body of Evelyn McHale reposes calmly in grotesque bier her falling body punched into the top of a car.”
LIFE Magazine caption
“On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. “He is much better off without me. … I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody,” she wrote. Then she crossed it out. She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building. Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below. Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash. Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale’s death Wiles got this picture of death’s violence and its composure.”
LIFE Magazine description
On 30 April she visited her fiancée in Easton presumably to celebrate his 24th birthday and boarded a train back to NYC at 7 a.m., 1 May 1947. Barry [Rhodes] stated to reporters that “When I kissed her goodbye she was happy and as normal as any girl about to be married.”
Of course we’ll never know what went through Evelyn’s mind on 66 mi train ride home. But after she arrived in New York she went to the Governor Clinton Hotel where she wrote a suicide note and shortly before 10:30 a.m. bought a ticket to the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State Building.
Around 10:40 am Patrolman John Morrissey, directing traffic at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, noticed a white scarf floating down from the upper floors of the building. Moments later he heard a crash and saw a crowd converge on 34th street. Evelyn had jumped, cleared the setbacks, and landed on the roof of a United Nations Assembly Cadillac limousine parked on 34th street, some 200 ft west of Fifth Ave.
Across the street, Robert C. Wiles, a student photographer, also noticed the commotion and rushed to the scene where he took several photos, including this one, some four minutes after her death. Later, on the observation deck, Detective Frank Murray found her tan (or maybe gray, reports differ) cloth coat neatly folded over the observation deck wall, a brown make-up kit filled with family pictures and a black pocketbook with the note which read:
“I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me. Could you destroy my body by cremation? I beg of you and my family – don’t have any service for me or remembrance for me. My fiance asked me to marry him in June. I don’t think I would make a good wife for anybody. He is much better off without me. Tell my father, I have too many of my mother’s tendencies.”
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) The Spirit Leaves the Body 1968 Gift of Richard and Ronay Menschel The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) I Build a Pyramid 1978 6 (5 x 7 inch) silver gelatin prints with hand-applied text The Morgan Library & Museum
ILLUSION
Francesco Salviati (Italian, 1510-1563) Emblematic Design with Two-Headed Horse and Moth c. 1550-1563 Pen and brown ink, brown wash, on paper; framing lines at upper left and right edges in pen and brown ink Overall: 7 1/2 × 7 3/8 in. (19.1 × 18.7cm) Gift of János Scholz The Morgan Library & Museum
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) Satan Smiting Job with Boils c. 1805-1810 Pen and black and grey ink, grey wash, and watercolour, over faint indications in pencil, on paper Overall: 9 3/16 x 11 inches (233 x 280 mm) Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909 The Morgan Library & Museum
Jehan Georges Vibert (French, 1840-1902) A Cardinal in Profile 1880 Watercolour on paper Overall: 4 7/8 × 3 3/8 in. (12.4 × 8.6cm) Gift of John M. Thayer The Morgan Library & Museum
Henry Pearson (American, 1914-2006) 128th Psalm (Study for “Five Psalms”) 1968 Chinese ink on heavy paper Overall: 23 1/2 × 18 in. (59.7 × 45.7cm) Gift of Regina and Lawrence Dubin, M.D The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) The Illuminated Man 1968 Gelatin silver print, unique print Image: 15 5/8 x 22 7/8 inches The Morgan Library & Museum
When Michals arrived in New York from Pittsburgh in the early 1950s, the city provided not only freedom from the strict conventions of his Catholic upbringing, but an opening to worlds of ideas and experiences that extended in all directions. By the early 1960s, he was living with his life partner, the architect Frederick Gorree (who passed away in 2017) and experimenting with the photographic image beyond the single frame, often including handwritten texts.
“Duane cut photography’s umbilical cord,” Smith said about the photographer’s contributions to the medium. “He saw there’s no reason to limit the camera to what you find in the world; it should be part of the history of expressing ideas.” Michals’s 1970 one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art confirmed his significance in establishing a new genre.
In the 1960s, he became interested in Buddhism and meditation, further expanding his artistic concerns. At the Morgan, Michals walked over to a large, eye-popping ink drawing by Henry Pearson, an abstract artist loosely associated with the Op Art movement. Pearson’s “128th Psalm (Study for ‘Five Psalms’)” from 1968, is a light-bulb-shaped form with lines emanating from the center like electrified nerve endings and pulsating out beyond the frame.
“This drawing is pure energy,” he said. That same year, Michals – who had not known Pearson’s work – made “The Illuminated Man,” a photograph of a male figure facing the camera, his head emanating light, suggesting enlightenment. “The Illuminated Man” and “128th Psalm” share the theme of spiritual radiance.
Michals cited a 1937 painting by René Magritte not in the Morgan Collection called “The Pleasure Principle.” It is a portrait of the poet Edward James, a patron of Surrealist art, his head a glowing light bulb. “I only discovered the painting later,” he said, after he had made his own photographic homage, in 1965, in which Magritte appears ghostlike in double exposure, against a canvas on an easel, behind an empty chair. “I was very proud to have had a similar idea to one of my deities,” he said.
“The nature of consciousness is always the central question,” he asserted. In The Human Condition, his panel of six photographs from 1969 begins with a man standing on the 14th Street subway platform; the train arrives and he is bathed in a halo of light; the light becomes a swirl and in the last frame he is swept into a white disc the size of a galaxy passing through the night sky. From the immediate to the universal in six frames.
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) The Bewitched Bee 1986 Gelatin silver print Gift of Duane Michals The Morgan Library & Museum
IMAGE AND WORD
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) There Are Things Here Not Seen in This Photograph 1977 10 15/16 x 13 7/8 inches The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) I Remember Pittsburgh 8 1982 Gelatin silver print The Morgan Library & Museum
Ciro Ferri (Italian, 1634-1689) Fame Painting a Portrait Held by Religion 17th century Brush and brown and white gouache, pen and and brown ink, over black chalk, on brown toned paper Overall: 11 x 7 9/16 inches (279 x 192 mm) Purchased as the gift of the Fellows The Morgan Library & Museum
Design for a frontispiece engraved by Gérard Audran for a volume of portraits of cardinals published by Giovanni Giacomo de’ Rossi
Irving Penn (American, 1917-2009) Giorgio de Chirico, Rome Rome, 1944 (negative), 1946-1947 (print) Gelatin silver print on paper; mounted to cardstock Image And Sheet: 7 1/16 × 7 3/8 in. Gift of Irving Penn, 2006 The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) Andy Warhol 1958 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4cm) Collection of Richard and Ronay Menschel The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) René Magritte at His Easel 1965 77/8 × 97/8 inches (20 × 25.1cm) Collection of Richard and Ronay Menschel The Morgan Library & Museum
Florian, Marquis de (1755-1794) Red leather portfolio [realia] – Portefeuille de Monsieur de Voltaire and Donné à Monsieur de Florian “Voltaire’s briefcase” 18th century Leather, gold clasp Stamped on front: “Portefeuille de Monsieur / de Voltaire”; on back: “Donné a Monsieur / de Florian” Overall: 16 15/16 × 12 5/8 in. (43 × 32cm) Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1911 Pierpont Morgan Library Dept. of Literary and Historical Manuscripts The Morgan Library & Museum
Voltaire gave this briefcase to the marquis de Florian, the husband of his niece Elisabeth Mignot. Her sister, Marie-Louise Mignot, Mme Denis, was Voltaire’s companion for the last twenty-nine years of his life. With extensive decorative gold tooling. Exhibited numerous times at the Morgan Library as “Voltaire’s briefcase.”
“The things we chose from the collection were so close to what my instincts are,” he said to Joel Smith, the curator of photography at the Morgan, who organised the show with Michals.
The photographer was referring to the kinship between things he chose and the irreverent nature of his own work. “I’m completely overwhelmed by the nature of our reality,” he is quoted as saying in the exhibition catalog about human evolution. “We’ve been working on this version of man for a thousand years. He lives longer, he’s healthier, but he’s still an unproven product. Still the same greedy little bastard.”
To illustrate the point, he reached for Voltaire’s briefcase among the holdings in the Morgan’s collection. It dates from the 1700s and is decorated with gold-leaf filigree on its red leather casing.
Smith recalled that Michals was so “wowed at the thought of Voltaire’s ideas living inside it and amused by the showbiz of its provenance” that he went home and painted a portrait of Candide on an old tintype, adding Voltaire’s bitterly ironic refrain in white block letters: “This Is the Best of All Possible Worlds.” The briefcase and Candide, 2019 are both in the show.
Yet, Michals doesn’t share Voltaire’s bleak view of existence. His own work is often characterised by an iconoclastic wit, imbued with serious metaphysical inquiry – a “curiosity about the nature of reality, in a much more profound sense than just a bunch of atoms.”
Auguste Rodin (French, 1840-1917) Lucifer c. 1900 Pencil and watercolour, on paper Overall: 9 3/8 × 12 7/16 in. (23.8 × 31.6cm) Gift of Alexandre P. Rosenberg The Morgan Library & Museum
Egon Schiele (Austrian, 1890-1918) Embrace 1914 Graphite on wove paper Overall: 19 1/8 × 12 3/4 in. (48.6 × 32.4cm) Bequest of Fred Ebb The Morgan Library & Museum
[Looks at Egon Schiele’s drawing Embrace (p. 22)] There’s so much emotion in this; it’s so immediate. There’s a few things happening: physical entanglement, then you see the look on his face, registering some kind of emotional response. I love the idea: Schiele had no thought that in a hundred years we’d be standing here or how we’d be talking about it. Art is not really about the future.
Duane Michals in Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan exhibition catalogue 2019, p. 21
In this depiction of the artist in the arms of an unidentified companion, the jagged, seemingly erratic contours suggest a psychological agitation characteristic of Schiele’s self-portraits. A feeling of tension derives from the position of the artist’s head-turned away from the woman embracing him – as well as from the placement of the couple to the left of the sheet, with the figure of the woman cropped. The resulting asymmetry conveys the artist’s emotional unbalance and emphasises his egocentric character while demonstrating the amazing technical agility he brought to bear to express a wide range of emotions.
Text from The Morgan Library & Museum website
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) A Letter from My Father 1960 (image), 1975 (text) 15 3/4 × 19 7/8 inches (40 × 50.5cm) Gift of Duane Michals The Morgan Library & Museum
The Morgan Library & Museum proudly presents an exhibition combining a six-decade retrospective of Duane Michals with an artist’s-choice selection of works from all corners of the permanent collection. Michals is known for his picture sequences, inscribed photographs, and, more recently, films that pose emotional, conceptual, and cosmic questions beyond the scope of the lone camera image. Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan (October 25, 2019 to February 2, 2020) takes viewers on a tour of the artist’s mind, putting work from his expansive career in conversation with Old Master and modern drawings, books, manuscripts, and historical objects.
The first retrospective on Michals to be mounted by a New York City institution, the exhibition is organised around animating themes in the artist’s work: Theatre, Reflection, Love and Desire, Playtime, Image and Word, Nature, Immortality, Time, Death, and Illusion. It showcases his storytelling instincts, both in stand-alone staged photographs and in sequences. The exhibition also includes screenings of short films, Michals’s preferred medium in recent years.
For Michals, photography is not documentary in nature but theatrical and fictive: the camera is one of many tools humanity uses to construct a comprehensible version of reality. In his imaginative, visually rich photographs, the artist exploits the medium’s storytelling capacity. For example, the six images in I Build a Pyramid (1978) find the artist in Egypt, stacking stones in a modest pile that, from the camera’s perspective, appears to rival the scale of the ancient pharaohs’ monuments. Michals reveals that the scenario echoes his childhood habit of building cities from stones in his backyard in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. In the exhibition, Michals’s staged scenes are juxtaposed with those of his creative heroes, who include William Blake, Edward Lear, and Saul Steinberg. In his dual role as artist and curator he matches wits with writers, stage designers, toy makers, and his fellow portraitists of the past and the present.
Since 2015 Michals has focused his creative efforts on filmmaking, a natural outgrowth of his directorial habits as a photographer. On a screen in the exhibition, three short films are featured amid a cycle of over 200 photographs from the series Empty New York (1964-1965), the project through which the artist first recognised his theatrical vision of reality. Michals will host two special programs of film screenings in the Morgan’s Gilder Lehrman Hall, introducing films that have never been screened publicly before.
Illusions of the Photographer revives the format of the 2015 exhibition Hidden Likeness: Emmet Gowin at the Morgan, which The New York Times said “all but redefined the genre” of the collection dive curated by a contemporary artist. The present project is a personal one for Michals, who explains, “The Morgan literally is my favourite museum in New York. I always learn something at the Morgan. I’m so thrilled about this show, because it’s probably going to be the very last time to see me there, with all my resources and touchstones. I’m … archaic, in a way. I’m eighty-seven! I’m of my generation. My references are not at all to what people are talking about today. I’m comfortable there, that’s where I belong – and that’s what I contribute.”
Joel Smith, the Morgan’s Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head, says “Duane Michals’s art is contemplative, confessional, and comedic. It transcends the conventional bounds, and audience, of photography. Through narration and sequencing he reorients the camera towards timeless human dilemmas; he derives poetic effects from technical errors such as double exposure and motion blur. His originality and intimacy as an artist come through in the discoveries he brings to light from the Morgan’s collection.”
Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan is accompanied by an 88-page softcover catalogue featuring a wide-ranging interview with the artist and illustrations of seventy works, including his selections from the Morgan’s collection and the previously unpublished 1969 title sequence.
About Duane Michals
Duane Michals (b. February 18, 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania) is an American photographer who often combines images with text in a format that recalls cinematic storytelling. Michals received his BA from the University of Denver in 1953. He began photographing for magazines in 1960 and became a prolific portraitist of artists such as Andy Warhol, René Magritte, and Marcel Duchamp. His first solo exhibition was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1970. Michals lives and works in New York City.
Press release from The Morgan Library & Museum [Online] Cited 14/11/2019
NATURE
James Jacques Joseph Tissot (French, 1836-1902) God Creating the World c. 1900-1902 Gouache on board 7 3/4 x 5 1/4 inches (201 x 135 mm) Morgan Family Collection
James Jacques Joseph Tissot (French, 1836-1902) God Creates Eve while Adam is Asleep c. 1900-1902 Gouache on board 12 x 9 1/8 inches (305 x 233 mm) Morgan Family Collection
James Jacques Joseph Tissot (French, 1836-1902) Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden c. 1900-1902 Gouache on board 11 x 8 inches (279 x 203 mm) Morgan Family Collection
James Jacques Joseph Tissot (French, 1836-1902) Adam and Eve Perceive their Nakedness c. 1900-1902 Gouache on board 12 1/8 x 8 3/4 inches (308 x 221 mm) Morgan Family Collection
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) Paradise Regained 1968 6 silver gelatin prints with hand-applied text
… He picked up a panel of gouache drawings from around 1900 by French illustrator James Jacques Joseph Tissot titled “God Creating the World,” a biblical morality tale in a series of lighthearted scenes depicting the creation of Adam; then Eve; the two of them frolicking; Eve eating the apple; and their banishment from paradise. The Tissot sequence is among nearly 60 works in his final selection for the current exhibition Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan, through Feb. 2. His pick of drawings, paintings and artefacts resides in dialogue with 38 of Michals’s photographic works – his narrative sequences as well as stand-alone prints, projected images from a series titled “Empty New York,” and several of his recent short films.
He pointed out a link between the Tissot drawings and his own “Paradise Regained,” from 1968: a suite of six images that begins with a well-dressed young couple sitting and facing the camera in an empty apartment. With each frame they get progressively undressed, and more and more plants fill up the space behind them. In the final image, they are naked amid a lush, domestic Eden.
“I had been looking at a lot of Rousseau paintings when I made the sequence,” Michals said, referring to the jungle scenes of the French Post-Impressionist. While he loves the Tissot panel, he admitted, “I’m a raging atheist,” distancing himself from its religious message. “I was a pretend Catholic and then I stopped pretending.” The spiritual dimension of “Paradise Regained” is balanced by the artist’s tongue-in-cheek view of urban life, where men and women only return to a natural state indoors, where everything is unnatural.
Jacob Hoefnagel (Flemish, 1573 – c. 1632) Orpheus Charming the Animals 1613 Watercolour and gouache, heightened with white gouache, over traces of black chalk, on vellum mounted to panel; bordered in gold Overall: 6 9/16 × 8 5/16 in. (16.7 × 21.1cm) Purchased on the Sunny Crawford von Bülow Fund 1978 Morgan Family Collection
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) Warren Beatty 1967 Gelatin silver print 8 × 9 15/16 inches (20.3 × 25.2cm) Purchased on the Photography Acquisition Fund The Morgan Library & Museum
PLAYTIME
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) Things Are Queer 1973 Nine gelatin silver prints Images: 5 × 7 inches (12.7 × 17.8cm) each Gift of Duane Michals The Morgan Library & Museum
REFLECTION
Wallace Studio, Manchester, New Hampshire Untitled (Mirror) c. 1880s Cabinet card with rounded corners Mount: 6 7/16 × 4 3/16 in. (16.4 × 10.6cm) Print: 5 11/16 × 4 in. (14.4 × 10.2cm) Gift of Adam Fuss The Morgan Library & Museum
Carlo Galli Bibiena (1728 – c. 1778) Interior of a Gallery 1750s Pen and black ink and grey and brown wash Sheet is framed by an overmount of paper that leaves around 8 5/8 x 11 7/8 inches visible Overall: 9 1/4 × 12 13/16 in. (23.5 × 32.5cm) Thaw Collection The Morgan Library & Museum
John F. Collins (American, 1888-1990) Multiple Self-Portrait 1935 Gelatin silver print Image: 13 3/4 × 10 9/16 in. (34.9 × 26.8cm) Purchase on the Photography Collectors Committee Fund The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) A Story About a Story 1989 15 7/8 x 19 3/4 inches (40.3 × 50.2cm) Purchased on the Photography Collectors Committee Fund The Morgan Library & Museum
In Michals work, the immediate and the infinite spar. In the show is a single image by a little-known photographer named John F. Collins. The 1935 self-portrait shows Collins looking at us while holding a large photograph of himself; in that photograph he is looking down at the same photograph of himself. In each subsequent picture within a picture, he is looking out, and then into the photograph he is holding, into a spiralling infinity.
It is a striking parallel to Michals’ “A Story Within a Story” of 1989, in which a man leans against a mirror in the corner of the frame and faces a mirror in which his reflection echoes repeatedly as it recedes behind him. “This is a story about a man telling a story about a man. …” starts his text.
N. Institoris (d. 1845) Interior of a Prison c. 1825-1845 Pen and black ink, with grey wash, over pencil, on paper; verso contains slight sketch of a building, in graphite. 13 x 17 1/2 inches (330 x 445 mm) Gift of Mrs. Donald M. Oenslager, 1982 The Morgan Library & Museum
Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont (French, 1720-1791) Perspective View of the Mechanical Works and Construction of a Theater. Verso: Sketch of an elevation of a colonnade 18th century Pen and black ink, with grey wash, over graphite, on paper; verso: graphite 12 1/4 x 14 9/16 inches (310 x 369 mm) Purchased as the gift of Mrs. Donald M. Oenslager in memory of her husband The Morgan Library & Museum
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Cour de Rouen 1898 Albumen print Overall: 8 × 6 3/4 in. (20.3 × 17.1cm) Purchased on the Photography Collectors Committee Fund The Morgan Library & Museum
Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001) Penn Station Lovers 1946-1947, printed c. 1981 Gelatin silver print 14 x 11 in. (sheet) Purchased as the gift of Elaine Goldman The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) Empty New York, Subway Interior c. 1964 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4cm) Collection of Nancy and Burt Staniar The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) Empty New York, Dry cleaners upper East side c. 1964 Gelatin silver print 8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4cm) Collection of Nancy and Burt Staniar The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) From the series Empty New York c. 1964 Gelatin silver prints 8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4cm) Collection of Nancy and Burt Staniar The Morgan Library & Museum
TIME
Herbert Matter (American born Switzerland, 1907-1984) Alexander Calder hanging mobile in motion 1936 Gelatin silver print with additions by hand 5 9/16 × 6 3/16 in. (14.13 × 15.72cm) Purchased as the gift of Richard and Ronnie Grosbard The Morgan Library & Museum
Herbert Matter (April 25, 1907 – May 8, 1984) was a Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. The designer’s innovative and experimental work helped shape the vocabulary of 20th-century graphic design.
Biography
Born in Engelberg, Switzerland, Matter studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva [fr] and at the Académie Moderne in Paris under the tutalge of Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant. He worked with Adolphe Mouron Cassandre, Le Corbusier and Deberny & Peignot. In 1932, he returned to Zurich, where he designed posters for the Swiss National Tourist Office and Swiss resorts. The travel posters won instant international acclaim for his pioneering use of photomontage combined with typeface.
He went to the United States in 1936 and was hired by legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch. Work for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and other magazines followed. In the 1940s, photographers, including Irving Penn, at Vogue’s studios at 480 Lexington Avenue often used them for shooting the advertising work commissioned by outside clients. The practice was at first tolerated, but by 1950 it was banned on the grounds that it “has interfered with our own interests and has been a severe handicap to our editorial operations”. In response Matter and three other Condé Nast photographers Serge Balkin, Constantin Joffé and Geoffrey Baker left to establish Studio Enterprises Inc. in the former House & Garden studio on 37th Street (Penn stayed on but also left in 1952).
From 1946 to 1966 Matter was design consultant with Knoll Associates. He worked closely with Charles and Ray Eames. From 1952 to 1976 he was professor of photography at Yale University and from 1958 to 1968 he served as design consultant to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. He was elected to the New York Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame in 1977, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography in 1980 and the AIGA medal in 1983.
As a photographer, Matter won acclaim for his purely visual approach. A master technician, he used every method available to achieve his vision of light, form and texture. Manipulation of the negative, retouching, cropping, enlarging and light drawing are some of the techniques he used to achieve the fresh form he sought in his still lifes, landscapes, nudes and portraits. As a filmmaker, he directed two films on his friend Alexander Calder: “Sculptures and Constructions” in 1944 and “Works of Calder” (with music by John Cage) for the Museum of Modern Art in 1950.
Close friends of Matter and his wife Mercedes were the painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, fellow Swiss photographer Robert Frank and Alberto Giacometti. Matter’s wife Mercedes was the daughter of the American modernist painter Arthur Beecher Carles, and was herself the chief founder of the New York Studio School.
“The absence of pomposity was characteristic of this guy”, said another designer, Paul Rand, about Matter. His creative life was devoted to narrowing the gap between so-called fine and applied arts. Matter died on May 8, 1984, in Southampton, New York.
Saul Steinberg (American born Romania, 1914-1999) Untitled (Cat and wheel of time) 1965 Ink (black, blue, red, green, brown) and pencil on laid Strathmore 19 × 25 in. (48.26 × 63.5cm) Gift of the Saul Steinberg Foundation The Morgan Library & Museum
Saul Steinberg defined drawing as “a way of reasoning on paper,” and he remained committed to the act of drawing. Throughout his long career, he used drawing to think about the semantics of art, reconfiguring stylistic signs into a new language suited to the fabricated temper of modern life. Sometimes with affection, sometimes with irony, but always with virtuoso mastery, Saul Steinberg peeled back the carefully wrought masks of 20th-century civilisation.
Text from The Morgan Library & Museum website
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) When He Was Young 1979 8 x 9 15/16 inches (20.3 × 25.2cm) Purchased on the Photography Collectors Committee Fund The Morgan Library & Museum
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) What is Time? 1994 Gelatin silver print 16 × 19 7/8 inches (40.6 × 50.5cm) Gift of Duane Michals The Morgan Library & Museum
Included in his selection from the Morgan is an amusing drawing by Saul Steinberg, “Cat and the Wheel of Time,” 1965, in which the months of the year, the days of the week, and the hours of the day are written in circles inside a large wheel following a small cat down a hill. “Time has always been central to so much of my thinking,” Michals said. Smith handed him his text and image piece, What Is Time? from 1994, in which an eternally handsome young man holds an old-fashioned round clock to his ear. The text beneath it begins, “Time is the duration of everything, and life is an event, a fluttering of wings … the moment is the interval between now and then and, then, again.”
Curator: Linda Benedict-Jones, Curator of Photography at the Carnegie Museum of Art
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) A Letter from My Father 1960/1975 Gelatin silver print with hand-applied text Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery
Exposing your/self
Viva Michals! Viva Michals!
Magician, poet, storyteller, philosopher and dreamer.
Not for him the overblown statement (huge prints the size of billboards) but small, dark, rough prints assembled in photo-sequences, often incorporating text, that examine the human condition in every aspect. This is emotional work and Michals has a unique style and voice as an artist. You always know that you are looking at a sequence by Michals, for his signature is that distinctive.
As he says, his work goes beyond description, beyond surfaces, to reveal the subject – not as it looks but as it feels. In his sequences he usually achieves this by posing a question that has no answer, a question that is like a Zen koan… what is the sound of one hand clapping? The grandfather ascends smilingly to heaven with little wings on his back as the child waves goodbye (if youth knew, if age could); the man as human condition turns into a galaxy; and the spirit leaves the body as it was left before.
Various Michals sequences, such as The Spirit Leaves The Body (1968, below), have a circular construction. Another sequence, Things are Queer (1973, below) is also a circular spatio-temporal enigma where instead of moving forward, the camera and the viewer are pulled backwards in a space-time continuum… where Michals forces you to question what reality really is. These two sequences are my personal favourites, and I had to scour the internet to find images for them as you rarely see them online.
His most famous sequence, the one that you see most often, is Chance Meeting (1970, below) – again an open-ended, intimate but puzzling encounter with a reflection of the self. Michals sequences are full of ghosts, uncommon intimacies, nubile females and delicious males (Michals is gay and has just celebrated his 54th anniversary with his partner). Dealing “with topics such as death, desire, and the passage of time” his work peers inward to examine “his own thoughts and dreams, to blur the lines between photography and philosophy.”
All is not sunshine and light, and I feel that there is a nebulous, obsidian energy hovering not too far below the surface. The photographs have high contrast and the subjects are very closely framed, giving the sequences an almost claustrophobic quality, as though you are having the life, the energy gently yet forcibly manipulated around you. The photographs rarely breathe freely and you feel as though you are almost trapped within their spaces.
Then there is the text. Never used to excess in the sequences (the title does that job alone), the singular images are extended into a longer narrative by biting, poignant words – sentences that utter harsh truths and tell it how it really is. I can’t look at the image and read that text from A Letter from My Father (1960 / 1975, above) without thinking of my abusive father and wondering what happened to his love – whether he hadn’t hidden it, he just didn’t have any to start with. For any child inside an adult who has been abused, the image cuts to the bone.
Michals staged, narrative scenes take us on a journey into his reality, one which “has entered a realm beyond observation.” He poses difficult questions that force us to examine ideas beyond the world of phenomena, beyond the world of surfaces. He challenges our repressed inner lives and our idealised image of ourselves, disturbing the boundaries of personality, ego, and identity.1 He wrestles with Sartre’s noumenal world (the world of the subconscious, dreams), the “being-in-itself” or sometimes simply “the in-itself,” as Sartre calls it (what Kant called the noumenal world), where Sartre does not see man comfortably installed in the world.
“All of us, says Sartre, have a “pre-ontological comprehension” of being-in-itself, that is to say, an opaque, inarticulate, but very real sense of its presence and nature. The world is but a “varnish” on the surface of the being-in-itself; or, changing the metaphor, the world is but a “thin crust” of meaning which we impose upon being-in-itself. Ordinarily this thin crust of meaning conceals the in-itself and obscures our awareness of it, but the anguish of being is always there just below the surface of daily consciousness, and from time to time it breaks through to the surface, presenting being-in-itself without disguise.”2
This is what Michals attunes himself to, an examination of the in-itself, one that impacts on our internal poetic understandings of space and time. In his malleable daydreams Michals proffers a ‘releasement toward things’, the glimpsing of a coexistence between a conscious and unconscious way of perceiving which enables the seeing of the ‘Thing Itself’. As Heidegger observes,
“We stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery… Releasement towards things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way…”3
It is Michals great skill as an artist and a human being that enables us the possibility of accessing some aspect of the mystery of our existence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ As discussed in Magee, Bryan. Confessions of a Philosopher. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997, pp. 405-406
2/ Olsen, Robert. An Introduction to Existentialism. Dover Publications, New York, 1962, p. 39
3/ Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper & Row, 1966, pp. 55-56 quoted in Baracco, Mauro. “Completed Yet Unconcluded: The Poetic Resistance of Some Melbourne Architecture,” in van Schaik, Leon (ed.,). Architectural Design Vol. 72, No. 2 (‘Poetics in Architecture’). London: John Wiley and Sons, 2002, p. 74. Footnote 6.
Many thankx to the Carnegie Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Who gives a fuck about what he had for breakfast? These are stylistic ticks. The digital has changed the paradigms of photography. I had an opening in Boston and this woman had a little camera with her and kept exclaiming, ‘Everything is a photograph!’ That’s the problem. The bar has been lowered so much in photography now…”
“Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel?”
“I don’t trust reality. So all of the writing on and painting on the photographs is born out of the frustration to express what you do not see.”
Duane Michals
Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) Cavafy Cheats Playing Strip Poker 2004 12 Gelatin silver prints with hand applied text 5″ x 7″ each
This series of photographs was inspired by the poem The Windows by Constantine Cavafy:
In these dark rooms where I live out empty days, I wander round and round trying to find the windows. But the windows are not to be found – or at least I can’t find them. And perhaps it is better that way. Perhaps the light will prove another tyranny. Who knows what new things it will expose?
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) Chance Meeting 1970 Six gelatin silver prints Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) Things are Queer 1973 Nine gelatin silver prints Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) Grandpa Goes to Heaven 1989 Five gelatin silver prints with hand applied text Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Courtesy of the Artist and DC
“The best part of us is not what we see, it’s what we feel. We are what we feel. We are not what we look at… We’re not our eyeballs, we’re our mind. People believe their eyeballs and they’re totally wrong… That’s why I consider most photographs extremely boring – just like Muzak, inoffensive, charming, another waterfall, another sunset. This time, colours have been added to protect the innocent. It’s just boring. But that whole arena of one’s experience – grief, loneliness – how do you photograph lust? I mean, how do you deal with these things? This is what you are, not what you see. It’s all sitting up here. I could do all my work sitting in my room. I don’t have to go anywhere.”
Duane Michals
Opening November 1, 2014, at Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA), Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals is the definitive retrospective and the largest-ever presentation of this innovative artist’s work. Drawing from select loans and the museum’s holdings, which constitute the largest single collection of Michals’s output, and spanning six decades, the works in Storyteller include classic sequences from the early 1970s as well as rarely seen images from later in his career.
Born in 1932 and raised in a steelworker family in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Michals broke away from established traditions of documentary and fine art photography in the 1960s when he added handwritten messages and poems to prints, produced multi-image narrative sequences, and experimented with double- and triple-exposures. His work was poignant and unabashedly sentimental, flying in the face of the dominant photographic aesthetics of the time.
Storyteller unfolds in thematic groupings that range from portraiture to meditations on the mind’s interior world; from childhood and imagination to desire and death. Michals’s love of two very different cities, Pittsburgh and Paris, is evident in sections exploring the beauty, quirks, and particularities of these places. He has riffed on, critiqued, and crossed paths with countless artists, including René Magritte, Cindy Sherman, Joseph Cornell, Robert Frank, Andreas Gursky, Andy Warhol, and others, and a section of the exhibition brings to light the admiration and acerbic wit in Michals’s engagements with other creative minds.
“The exhibition is designed to acquaint the visitor with the many themes that Michals explored over more than half a century,” says curator of photography Linda Benedict-Jones. “Well known sequences such as Paradise Regained and Chance Meeting greet the viewer first, followed by engaging and sometimes surprising Children’s Stories. A section called The Mind’s Eye shows Michals’s absorption with photographing things that cannot actually be seen, such as A Man Going to Heaven or The Human Condition. We could not present Storyteller chronologically, because Michals revisits themes often. One theme, Painted Expression, shows how, in two distinct periods of his life – in the early 1980s and again in 2012 – Michals has picked up a brush to apply oil paint to both black-and-white photographic prints as well as most recently to 19th century tintypes, resulting in unique, one-of-a-kind photographic works. His creative energy is boundless and readily apparent when seen in a large retrospective display.”
“I’m a storyteller,” he often states as he begins a talk in public – equally interested in the moments before and after the “decisive moment” (a term coined by famed photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson). “When I began to do sequences, it wasn’t because I thought it was cool and the latest thing. I did it out of frustration with the still photograph.” He has observed that his practice aims to transcend mere appearances: “I’m not interested in what something looks like, I want to know what it feels like… My reality has entered a realm beyond observation.” This approach can be seen throughout his career, from early, carefully staged sequences, to hand-painted gelatin silver prints and tintypes, revealing the artist’s hand at work long after the image is captured.
According to curator of photography Linda Benedict-Jones, who organised Storyteller, “Duane Michals is a sensitive and provocative artist who has followed his own unique path. His way of staging narrative scenes, then recording them with a 35mm camera, represented a fresh approach to the medium. This, combined with an uncommon intimacy when dealing with topics such as death, desire, and the passage of time, set him apart as an image-maker.”
Storyteller also touches upon Michals’s extensive portfolio of commercial photography and portraiture, which spans several decades, and includes assignments for Neiman Marcus, Esquire, Vogue, and Gap, as well as commissioned portraits of such figures as Nancy Reagan, Sting, and Willem de Kooning.
CMOA, a fixture in Michals’s artistic upbringing, has acquired 139 of his works, ranging from his earliest images made in Russia in 1958 to hand-painted tintypes that he began creating in 2012. Michals, in turn, has always felt an attachment to Pittsburgh, a subject of many of his photographs, and of two books, the sequence The House I Once Called Home (2003) and poetry collection A Pittsburgh Poem (2013). Lending institutions to Storyteller include Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), Musée des Beaux Arts (Montreal), High Museum of Art (Atlanta), and Museum of Modern Art (New York). Even longtime admirers of the artist may be unfamiliar with several of his bodies of work, and an examination of this full range is long overdue: while Michals has been championed in several solo exhibitions throughout Europe in the past decade, this is his first major museum exhibition in North America since 1998.
Presented alongside Storyteller will be the exhibition Duane Michals: Collector, which highlights works from Michals’s private art collection that are promised gifts to the museum. The eclectic array of objects, ranging from 1799 to 1999, and from Francisco de Goya to André Kertész to Mark Tansey, will be united by Michals’s unique take on the artists, the artworks, and their influence on his own practice. Organised by associate curator of fine arts Amanda Zehnder, Duane Michals: Collector will further contextualise his work from an unusually personal perspective.
Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals represents a refreshing, much-needed reexamination of a historically significant photographer. Michals’s pioneering photography infused the medium with a personal, critical approach that translates universally. In an art world that feels at times jaded and detached, his images retain the same moving, affecting impact that they commanded decades ago.
Press release from the Carnegie Museum of Art
Photographer Duane Michals Talks About His Career
Internationally-renowned photographer Duane Michals discusses his eight-decade life and career as a self-described “expressionist.” His work is known for its innovative narrative sequencing and iconic use of text and image. During a period when photography looked out to the world around us, Michals redefined the medium by peering inward to his own thoughts and dreams to blur the lines between photography and philosophy.
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) The Spirit Leaves The Body 1968 Seven gelatin silver prints with hand applied text Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) The Young Girl’s Dream 1969 Five gelatin silver prints with hand applied text Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) Magritte with Hat 1965 Gelatin silver print with hand applied text Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) Magritte with Hat (detail) 1965 Gelatin silver print with hand applied text Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) This Photograph Is My Proof 1967 Gelatin silver print with hand-applied text The Henry L. Hillman Fund, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) Young Soldiers Dream in the Garden of the Dead with Flowers Growing from Their Heads 1995 From the series Salute, Walt Whitman Gelatin silver print The Henry L. Hillman Fund Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) The Human Condition 1969 Six gelatin silver prints with hand applied text Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery
Duane Michals (American, 1932-2026) Rigamarole 2012 Tintype with oil paint The William T. Hillman Fund for Photography Carnegie Museum of Art,Pittsburgh Courtesy of the Artist and DC Moore Gallery
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