Aubrey Beardsley and “The Yellow Book,” Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession, Josef Albers, Dada, Surrealism, William Blake (a favourite of mine), photography, typography and graphic design. You couldn’t ask for more… except for those psychedelic colours!
As a friend of mine observed of the Grateful Dead, Oxford Circle (1966) poster – look where the tickets were sold: psychedelic shops, book stores, record shops and coffee houses. He actually saw the Grateful Dead play live while he was in America, and he said it was quite a trip. As Mark Feeney keenly observes, this art was “liberation in two dimensions.”
He is correct, for these posters and record covers reflect the cultural era from which they emerge – the official beginnings of Gay Liberation, Feminism, student revolt, protests against war and racism, civil rights, drugs, free love and peace. They are powerful and eloquent works of art that summon the noisy spirit of the age, a riotous poltergeist hell bent on change.
And all these years later, they still look as fresh and as relevant (perhaps even more so in this conservative world), as they day they were created. Just fab!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. It always amazes me the cultural contexts in which photography can be put to use.
Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“What’s fascinating is how the graphic designs manage to have a kind of coherence despite being such a jumble. Certain principles recur: curves, yes, angles, no; a pugilistic employment of colour (psychedelia really did look … psychedelic); legibility as afterthought. So do certain influences: Aubrey Beardsley and “The Yellow Book,” Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession, Dada, Surrealism (among the album covers on display is, yes, the Jefferson Airplane’s “Surrealistic Pillow”). The presiding spirit is William Blake: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” The last thing the Haight cared about was history, but history’s hand lay all over it.
The look of these designs is assaultive, overly busy, restrained only by the confines of poster size or album cover. That look still feels exhilarating: liberation in two dimensions. It must have felt close to Martian back then. NASA wanted to put a man on the moon. Why stop there? Gravity was just another law to flout. One of the 32 Herb Greene photographs in “The Summer of Love” shows Airplane lead singer Grace Slick looking at the camera and flipping the bird. Maybe that image, even more than Blakean excess, is the presiding spirit.”
Mark Feeney. “The MFA celebrates San Francisco’s Summer of Love,” on the Boston Globe website July 6th 2017 [Online] Cited 02/01/2022. No longer available online
Victor Moscoso (born Galicia in 1936) is a Spanish-American artist best known for producing psychedelic rock posters, advertisements, and underground comix in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s.
Moscoso was the first of the rock poster artists of the 1960s era with formal academic training and experience. After studying art at Cooper Union in New York City and at Yale University, he moved to San Francisco in 1959. There, he attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where he eventually became an instructor. Moscoso’s use of vibrating colours was influenced by painter Josef Albers, one of his teachers at Yale. He was the first of the rock poster artists to use photographic collage in many of his posters.
Professional success came in the form of the psychedelic rock and roll poster art created for San Francisco’s dance halls and clubs. Moscoso’s posters for the Family Dog dance-concerts at the Avalon Ballroom and his Neon Rose posters for the Matrix resulted in international attention during the 1967 Summer of Love.
Stanley Miller (Mouse) (American, b. 1940) and Alton Kelley (American, 1940-2008) Moby Grape, Sparrow, The Charlatans (Avalon Ballroom, 13-14 January 1967) 1967 Poster, offset lithograph Collection of Patrick Murphy Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Bonnie MacLean, also known as Bonnie MacLean Grahamis an American artist known for her classic rock posters. In the 1960s and 1970s she created posters and other art for the promotion of rock and roll concerts managed by Bill Graham, using the iconic psychedelic art style of the day. MacLean went on to continue her art as a painter focusing mostly of nudes, still lifes and landscapes.
Fillmore posters
Artist Wes Wilson was the main poster artist for the Fillmore Auditorium when he and Bill Graham had a “falling out” and Wilson quit. MacLean had been painting noticeboards at the auditorium in the psychedelic style, and took up the creation of the posters after Wilson left, creating about thirty posters, most in 1967. MacLean’s posters are included in many museum collections including at the Brooklyn Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco collection and at the DeYoung museum. A few examples of her posters are in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art collection.
Stanley George Miller (born October 10, 1940), better known as Mouse and Stanley Mouse, is an American artist, notable for his 1960s psychedelic rock concert poster designs for the Grateful Dead and Journey albums cover art as well as many others.
Psychedelic posters
In 1965, Mouse travelled to San Francisco, California with a group of art school friends. Settling initially in Oakland, Mouse met Alton Kelley. Kelley, a self-taught artist, had recently arrived from Virginia City, Nevada, where he had joined a group of hippies who called themselves the Red Dog Saloon gang. Upon arrival in San Francisco Kelley and other veterans of the gang renamed themselves The Family Dog, and began producing rock music dances. In 1966, when Chet Helms assumed leadership of the group and began promoting the dances at the Avalon Ballroom, Mouse and Kelley began working together to produce posters for the events. Later the pair also produced posters for promoter Bill Graham and for other events in the psychedelic community.
In 1967, Mouse collaborated with artists Kelley, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson to create the Berkeley Bonaparte Distribution Agency. Mouse and Kelley also worked together as lead artists at Mouse Studios and The Monster Company – producing album cover art for the bands Journey and Grateful Dead. The Monster Company also developed a profitable line of T-shirts, utilising the four colour process for silk screening.
The psychedelic posters Mouse and Kelley produced were heavily influenced by Art Nouveau graphics, particularly the works of Alphonse Mucha and Edmund Joseph Sullivan. Material associated with psychedelics, such as Zig-Zag rolling papers, were also referenced. Producing posters advertising for such musical groups as Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Grateful Dead led to meeting the musicians and making contacts that were later to prove fruitful.
Alton Kelley (June 17, 1940 in Houlton, Maine – June 1, 2008 in Petaluma, California) was an American artist best known for his psychedelic art, in particular his designs for 1960s rock concerts and albums. Along with artists Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson, Kelley founded the Berkeley Bonaparte distribution agency in order to produce and sell psychedelic poster art.
Along with fellow artist Stanley Mouse, Kelley is credited with creating the wings and beetles on all Journey album covers as well as the skull and roses image for the Grateful Dead. Kelley’s artwork on the 1971 self-titled live album, Grateful Dead, incorporated a black and white illustration of a skeleton by Edmund Sullivan, which originally appeared in a 19th-century edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
In celebration of the Summer of Love’s 50th anniversary, this exhibition explodes with a profusion of more than 120 posters, album covers and photographs from the transformative years around 1967. That summer, fuelled by sensational stories in the national media, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood became a mecca for thousands seeking an alternative to the constrictions of postwar American society. A new graphic vocabulary emerged in posters commissioned to advertise weekly rock concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom, with bands such as Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and the Janis Joplin-led Big Brother & The Holding Company.
A group of more than 50 concert posters highlights experiments with psychedelic graphic design and meandering typography – often verging on the illegible. These include works by Wes Wilson, who took inspiration from earlier art movements such as the Vienna Secession, and Victor Moscoso, whose studies of colour theory with Josef Albers at Yale University translated into striking use of bright, saturated colours in his own designs. A grid of 25 album covers traces the influence of the famously amorphous lettering in the Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul on countless covers and posters from later in the decade.
At the heart of the exhibition is a group of 32 photographs by Herb Greene, a pioneering member of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture and now a resident of Massachusetts. Many of his iconic images document the city’s burgeoning music scene, while a selection from a newly published portfolio offers a glimpse at everyday life in the Haight during the fabled summer of 1967.
Text from the Museum of Fine Arts website
Herb Greene (American, 1942-2025) Ohio to San Fransico: Haight Street 1967 (Plate 17) 1967, printed 2013 Photograph, gelatin silver print Private collection Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Herb Greene (American, 1942-2025) Ohio to San Fransico: Haight Street 1967 (Plate 20) 1967, printed 2013 Photograph, gelatin silver print Private collection Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Herb Greene (American, 1942-2025) Ohio to San Fransico: Haight Street 1967 (Plate 30) 1967, printed 2013 Photograph, gelatin silver print Private collection Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Herb “Herbie” Greene (born April 3, 1942 – March 3, 2025) was an American photographer best known for his portraits of The Grateful Dead, the iconic psychedelic rock band led by Jerry Garcia. Over 50 years, Greene’s photographs traced the band’s evolution from its roots in San Francisco’s psychedelic underground to global stardom.
His portraits of other rock and roll luminaries – including Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Led Zeppelin, Rod Stewart, Jeff Beck, The Pointer Sisters, Carlos Santana, Sly Stone, and more – have been regularly featured in Rolling Stone magazine and several books documenting the music of the 1960s counterculture.
Known as “Herbie” by his friends, Greene won high praise for his ability to capture intimate portraits of the most revered figures in rock. That access was largely due to his relationships with the bands he photographed. Although he refers to himself as “just the guy with the long hair and the camera,” Greene lived in San Francisco during the 1960s rock revolution and was friends with renowned musicians, promoters, and artists.
1960s San Francisco
In 1961, Greene took photography classes at City College of San Francisco and later enrolled at San Francisco State University, where he majored in anthropology and communications. After moving into an apartment near the famed Haight-Ashbury district, he met Jerry Garcia at a bluegrass café called the Fox and Hound. The two became friends and Greene booked his first gig, a portrait session with Garcia’s band, The Warlocks. (The band would eventually change its name to The Grateful Dead).
As Greene’s reputation grew, some of the decade’s most iconic performers came to him for portraits and album covers. He photographed Big Brother and the Holding Company and its lead singer, Janis Joplin. He shot the cover for the Jefferson Airplane’s second album, Surrealistic Pillow, and captured rare portrait sessions with Rod Stewart, Jeff Beck, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Procol Harem and others. His portfolio landed him a job as a fashion photographer with Joseph Magnin and Co, a prominent San Francisco department store. Greene began to split his time between San Francisco and a new studio in Los Angeles. As the 1960s came to a close, his work with The Grateful Dead and other iconic rockers continued.
Greene and The Grateful Dead
Greene first met Jerry Garcia in 1963 at The Fox and Hound, a bluegrass café on North Beach in San Francisco. Both were just 21 years old, and Garcia had not yet formed The Warlocks, the band that would eventually become The Grateful Dead. He was playing as part of the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers, a folk trio. After one of the Garcia’s sets, Greene introduced himself. It was the start of a lifelong friendship. The pair remained friends until Garcia’s death in August 1995.
While many photographers have captured The Grateful Dead on film, Greene is widely regarded as the group’s unofficial photographer. Over 50 years, he shot just 10 sit-down sessions with the band, but his images’ intimacy offer a rare glimpse into the band’s evolution from a fledgling group to international stars.
Photography style and equipment
Despite ample opportunities, Greene did not photograph musicians on stage. Instead, he shot portraits of his subjects in his studios, backstage, and in his home. His pieces include both one-on-one and group shots, and he is renowned for his ability to capture intimate expressions from revered musical figures.
Green’s portraits were shot in both colour and black-and-white, and the bulk of his work was captured on Kodak Tri-X 120-roll film, using D76 developer. His go-to cameras were a Hasselblad and Mamiya RB67.
Alfred Roller (2 October 1864 – 21 June 1935) was an Austrian painter, graphic designer, and set designer.
Roller was born in Brünn (Brno), Moravia. He at first studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Christian Griepenkerl and Eduard Peithner von Lichtenfels, but eventually became disenchanted with the Academy’s traditionalism. In 1897 he co-founded the Viennese Secession with Koloman Moser, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann, Gustav Klimt, and other artists who rejected the prevalent academic style of art. He became a professor of drawing at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Kunstgewerbeschule) in 1899, and president of the Secession in 1902.
In his early career Roller was very active as a graphic designer and draughtsman. He designed numerous covers and vignettes for the pages the Secessionist periodical Ver Sacrum, as well as the posters for the fourth, fourteenth, and sixteenth Secession exhibitions. He also designed the layout of the exhibitions themselves.
In 1902 Roller was introduced to the composer Gustav Mahler by Carl Moll. Roller expressed an interest in stage design and showed Mahler several sketches he had made for Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Mahler was impressed and decided to employ Roller to design the sets for a new production of the piece. The production, which premiered in February 1903, was a great critical success. Roller continued to design sets for Mahler’s productions. Eventually Roller left the Secession and his teaching post at the Kunstgewerbeschule to be appointed chief stage designer to the Vienna State Opera, a position he held until 1909. He died in Vienna in 1935.
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Eugene Hyland
Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGV Australia, Melbourne is a small but stylishly designed exhibition that presents well in the gallery spaces. The look and feel of the exhibition is superb, and it was a joy to see so many works in so many disparate medium brought together to represent a decade in the history of Australia: photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, ceramic art, magazine art, travel posters, Art Deco radios, film, couture, culture, Aboriginal art, and furniture making, to name but a few.
The strong exhibition addresses most of the concerns of the 1930s – The Great Depression, beach and body culture, style, fashion, identity, culture, prelude to WW2, dystopian and utopian cities etc., – but it all felt a little cramped and truncated. Such a challenging time period needed a more expansive investigation. What there is was excellent but one display case on slums or magazine art was not substantive enough. The same can be said for most of the exhibition.
There needed to a lot more about the impact of the Great Depression and people living in poverty, for you get the feeling from this exhibition that everyone was living the Modernist high-life, wearing fashionable frocks and smoking cigarettes sitting around beautifully designed furniture surrounded by geometric textiles. The reality is that this paradigm was the exception rather than the rule. Many people struggled to even feed themselves due to The Great Depression, and it was a time of extreme hardship for people in Australia. Life for many, many people in Australia during the 1930s was a life of disenfranchisement, assimilation, oppression, social struggle, poverty, hunger and a hand to mouth existence.
“After the crash unemployment in Australia more than doubled to twenty-one per cent in mid-1930, and reached its peak in mid-1932 when almost thirty-two per cent of Australians were out of work… The Great Depression’s impact on Australian society was devastating. Without work and a steady income many people lost their homes and were forced to live in makeshift dwellings with poor heating and sanitation.” (Text from “The Great Depression,” on the Australian Government website [Online] Cited 06/10/2017. No longer available online)
New artists and designers may have been emerging, new skyscrapers being built and the new ‘Modern Woman’ may have made her appearance but the changes only affected white, middle and upper social classes. Migrants, particularly those from Italy and southern Europe, were resented because they worked for less wages than others; and only brief mention is made of the White Australia policy in the exhibition but not by name (see text under Indigenous art and culture below). This section was more interested in how white artists appropriated Aboriginal design during this period for their own ends.
With this in mind, it is instructive to read sections of the illustrated handbook (see cover below, handbook not in the exhibition) produced by the National Museum of Victoria (in part, the forerunner of the NGV) to accompany a special exhibition of objects illustrating Australian Aboriginal Art in 1929:
“The subject of aboriginal Art – in this case the Art of the Australian Aboriginal – has to be approached with the utmost caution, for, though it comes directly within the domain of anthropology, it is in an indirect way a very important question in psychology and pedagogies. We possess some knowledge of our own mentality through the kind of offices of psychology; but though we have some – many in certain classes – material relics of our primitive and prehistoric ancestor, the only evidence of evolution of thought and the development of his powers of abstract conception must be derived from his art…
Still it appears possible that the study of primitive man, as represented by our Australian black, will throw some new light on the subject, and even if not more important than the old world pictographs themselves, his art work will enable the efforts of the Aurignacian and Magdalenian artists [cultures of the Upper Paleolithic in western Europe] to be better comprehended, and their import understood. But, for that study to achieve even a modicum of success, it is essential that the inquiring psychologist divest his mind of all civilized conceptions and mentality and assume those of the prehistoric man – or of the infant of the present day.”1
This is the attitude towards Aboriginal art that pervaded major art institutions right across Australia well into the 1950s. That the white has to “divest his mind of all civilised conceptions and mentality and assume those of the prehistoric man” – in other words, he has to become a savage – in order to understand Aboriginal art. It says a lot that the Trustees of the National Museum of Victoria then decided to reprint the illustrated handbook in 1952 without amendment, reprinting the publication originally used for the Exhibition in 1929. Nothing had changed in 22 years!
Other small things in the exhibition rankle. The preponderance of the work of photographer Max Dupain is so overwhelming that from this exhibition, it would seem that he was the only photographer of note working in Australia throughout the decade. While Dupain was the first Modernist photographer in Australia, and a superb artist, Modernist photography was very much on the outer during most of the 1930s… the main art form of photography being that of Pictorialism. None of this under appreciated style of photography makes an appearance in this exhibition because it does not fit the theme of “Brave New World”. This dismisses the work of such people as Cecil Bostock, Harold Cazneaux, Henri Mallard, John Eaton et al as not producing “brave”, or valuable, portraits of a country during this time frame. This is a perspective that needs to be corrected.
Highlights in this exhibition included an earthenware vase by Ethel Blundell; a painting by that most incredible of atmospheric painters, Clarice Beckett (how I long to own one of her paintings!); a wonderful portrait by the underrated Cybil Craig; two stunning Keast Burke photographs; two beautiful stained glass windows of a male and female lifesaver; the slum photographs of F. Oswald Barnett (more please!); and the graphic covers of mostly short-lived radical magazines.
These highlights are worth the price of admission alone. A must see before the exhibition closes.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ A. S. Kenyon. “The Art of the Australian Aboriginal.” in Australian Aboriginal Art. Melbourne: Trustees of the National Museum of Victoria, (1929) reprinted 1952, p. 15.
National Museum of Victoria Australian Aboriginal Art (cover) 1952 (reprint of 1929 illustrated handbook) Brown, Prior, Anderson Pty. Ltd., Melbourne (publishers) Trustees of the National Museum of Victoria 39 pages
The 1930s was a turbulent time in Australia’s history. During this decade major world events, including the Depression and the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe, shaped our nation’s evolving sense of identity. In the arts, progressive ideas jostled with reactionary positions, and artists brought substantial creative efforts to bear in articulating the pressing concerns of the period. Brave New World: Australia 1930s encompasses the multitude of artistic styles, both advanced and conservative, which were practised during the 1930s. Included are commercial art, architecture, fashion, industrial design, film and dance to present a complete picture of this dynamic time.
The exhibition charts the themes of celebrating technological progress and its antithesis in the nostalgia for pastoralism; the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ and consumerism; nationalism and the body culture movement; the increasing interest in Indigenous art against a backdrop of the government policy of assimilation and mounting calls for Indigenous rights; the devastating effects of the Depression and the rise of radical politics; and the arrival of European refugees and the increasing anxiety at the impending threat of the Second World War. Brave New World: Australia 1930s presents a fresh perspective on the extraordinary 1930s, revealing some of the social and political concerns that were pertinent then and remain so today.
Text from the NGV website
Harold Cazneaux (New Zealand 1878 – Australia 1953, Australia from 1886) No title (Powerlines and chute) c. 1935 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the H. J. Heinz II Charitable and Family Trust, Governor, 1993
In 1934 BHP (Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited) commissioned leading pictorialist photographer Harold Cazneaux to record their mining and steel operations for a special publication to mark their fiftieth anniversary in 1935. Cazneaux’s dramatic industrial images blended a soft, atmospheric focus with a modernist sense of space, form and geometry. In 1935-36 Australia exported close to 300,000 tonnes of iron ore to Japan; however, after Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 fear of its expansionist aims in the Pacific increased and soon afterwards the federal government announced a ban on the export of all iron ore to Japan.
Fred Ward (designer) (Australian, 1900-1990) E. M. Vary, Fitzroy, Melbourne (attributed to) (manufacturer) active 1920s-1940s
Sideboard c. 1932 Mountain ash (Eucalyptus sp.), painted wood, painted plywood, steel (a-e) 84.0 x 119.7 x 48.7cm (overall) Proposed acquisition
Side table c. 1932 Mountain ash (Eucalyptus sp.), jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata), steel 55.7 x 66.0 x 49.2cm Proposed acquisition
Tray table c. 1932 Mountain ash (Eucalyptus sp.), blackwood (Acacia melanoxylon), steel (a-b) 52.0 x 60.9 x 42.5cm (overall) Proposed acquisition
A new generation of artists and designers
While modern art was a source of debate and controversy throughout the 1930s, modernism in architecture, interior design, industrial design and advertising became highly fashionable. In Melbourne a small group of designers pioneered modern design in Australia. Furniture designer Fred Ward first designed and made furniture for his home in Eaglemont, where he had established a studio workshop. It was admired by friends and he was encouraged to produce furniture for sale. In 1932 Ward opened a shop in Collins Street, Melbourne. There he offered his furniture, as well as linens and Scandinavian glass. The fabrics for curtains and upholstery were printed by Australian designer Michael O’Connell with bold designs that shocked some but were favoured by a new generation looking to create modern interiors.
More than in most periods, in the 1930s art, design and architecture were closely integrated with the changing realities of contemporary life. It was a time when the last vestiges of the conservative art establishment were swept away by a new generation of artists and designers who were to drive Australian art in the second half of the twentieth century.
Installation views of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with Max Dupain’s Illustration for Kelvinator advertisement at left and Ethel Blundell’s Vase centre on sideboard Photos: Courtesy NGV Photographic Services
Fred Ward was one of the first and most important designers of modern furniture in Australia. He began making furniture around 1930, and in 1932 opened a shop in Collins Street selling his furniture, as well as textiles by Michael O’Connell and other modern design pieces. In 1934 Ward went into partnership with Myer Emporium and established the Myer Design Unit, for which he designed a line of modular ‘unit’ furniture for commercial production. Ward’s simple, functional aesthetic and use of local timbers with a natural waxed finish was in contrast to the luxurious materials and decorative motifs of the contemporary Art Deco style.
The armchair, sideboard and occasional tables were designed by Fred Ward and purchased by Maie Casey in the early 1930s. The wife of R. G. Casey, federal treasurer in the Lyons Government, Maie was a prominent supporter of modern art and design. Moving to Canberra in 1932, she furnished her house at Duntroon in a modern style with furniture by Ward and textiles by Michael O’Connell. The design of Ward’s armchair closely resembles a 1920s armchair by German Bauhaus furniture designer Erich Dieckmann, who was known for his standardised wooden furniture based on geometric designs.
Michael O’Connell designer (England 1898-1976, Australia 1920-1937) Textile c. 1933 Block printed linen National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1988
Michael O’Connell pioneered modernist textiles in Melbourne and was an influential advocate of modern design. Working with his wife Ella from his studio in Beaumaris, O’Connell used woodblocks and linocuts to hand print onto raw linens and silks, which were used for fashion garments and home furnishing. O’Connell’s boldly patterned and highly stylised designs were considered startlingly modern. Some of his early fabrics featured ‘jazz age’ scenes of nightclubs and dancing, while later motifs were based on Australian flora and fauna, or derived from Oceanic and Aboriginal art.
Sam Atyeo (Australian, 1910-1990) Album of designs: tables c. 1933 – c. 1936 Album: watercolour, brush and coloured inks, coloured pencils, 14 designs tipped into an album of 16 grey pages, card covers, tape and stapled binding 30.0 x 19.2 cm (page) 30.0 x 20.8 x 0.8cm (closed) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of the artist, 1988
Sam Atyeo was a leading figure in Melbourne’s emerging modernist circles in the early 1930s, the partner of artist Moya Dyring and lover of Sunday Reed. He had studied at the National Gallery School, where he was a brilliant and rebellious student. Around 1932 Atyeo became friendly with Cynthia Reed, who managed Fred Ward’s furniture shop and interior design consultancy on Collins Street. After she opened Cynthia Reed Modern Furnishings in Little Collins Street, Atyeo designed furniture for Reed, that was strongly influenced by Ward’s designs.
Max Dupain (Australia 1911-1992) Illustration for Kelvinator advertisement 1936 Gelatin silver photograph 32.8 x 25.3cm Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Purchased with funds provided by the Photography Collection Benefactors’ Program 2000
Modernity reflected what was new and progressive in Australian urban life. The image of the city became an allegory for this in art, and efficiency and speed became watchwords for modernity. Many artists celebrated the city and technological advancements in works utilising a modern style of hard-edged forms, flat colours and dynamic compositions. The engineering marvel of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which opened in 1932, was an ongoing source of fascination for artists, as were images of building the city, industry and modern modes of transport.
The skyscraper was also a powerful symbol of modern prosperity, especially when the Great Depression cast doubt on the inevitability of progress; hence the advent of tall buildings in Australian cities was hailed with relief and optimism. In 1932, at the peak of the Depression, the tallest building in Melbourne was opened: the Manchester Unity Building at the corner of Swanston and Collins streets. With its ornamental tower and spire taking its overall height to 64 metres, the building was welcomed by The Age newspaper as ‘a new symbol of enterprise and confidence, undaunted by the “temporary eclipse” of the country’s economic fortune’.
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with Seventh city of the Empire – Melbourne, Victoria at left; and Evening dress at right Photo: Eugene Hyland
Percy Trompf (Australian, 1902-1964) Seventh city of the Empire – Melbourne, Victoria 1930s Colour lithograph printed by J. E. Hackett, Melbourne State Library Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mr Grant Lee, 2007
Percy Trompf’s poster celebrates Melbourne’s first skyscraper, the iconic Manchester Unity Building on the corner of Swanston and Collins streets. Designed by architect Marcus Barlow in the Art Deco ‘Gothic’ style, it was built at high speed between 1930 and 1932, and provided much needed employment during the Depression. At twelve storeys high and topped with a decorative tower it was Melbourne’s tallest building and contained the city’s first escalators. A powerful symbol of the city’s modernity, it was often featured in images of Melbourne.
Unknown, Australia Evening dress c. 1935 Silk 144cm (centre back), 36cm (waist, flat) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Miss Irene Mitchell, 1975
Ethel Spowers (Australia 1890-1947, England and France 1921-1924) The works, Yallourn 1933 Colour linocut, ed. 3/50 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne The Joseph Brown Collection Presented through the NGV Foundation by Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE, Honorary Life Benefactor, 2004
Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme were leading figures in modern art in Melbourne. In the 1920s they studied with modernist Claude Flight at the Grosvenor School in London, where they learnt to make colour linocuts that followed Flight’s principles of rhythmic design combined with flat colour. In April 1933 Spowers and Syme visited the Yallourn Power Station in Gippsland, which had been opened in 1928 and was the largest supplier of electricity to the state.
Clarice Beckett (Australian, 1887-1935) Taxi rank c. 1931 Oil on canvas on board Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth
Installation view of Herbert Badham’s George Street, Sydney (1934) from the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
After serving in the Royal Australian Navy during the First World War, Herbert Badham studied at the Sydney Art School and began exhibiting in 1927. In his paintings he was a keen observer of everyday urban life: streets with shoppers, city workers on their lunch break and drinkers in the pub were painted in a contemporary, hard-edged realist style.
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Rush hour in King’s Cross 1938, printed c. 1986 Gelatin silver photograph 41.2 x 40.3cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of Mr A.C. Goode, Fellow, 1987
During the 1930s the city provided a rich source of imagery for artists working in modern styles, who celebrated the speed and efficiency of modern transport technology and expanding road and rail networks. Yet as car ownership increased during the 1930s, larger cities began to suffer congestion and the rush hour became part of urban life. Throughout the decade the pace and stress of modern life became a topic of public debate, with conservative commentators decrying this transformation of the Australian lifestyle.
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with Max Dupain’s Rush hour in King’s Cross at right Photo: Courtesy NGV Photographic Services
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with Grace Cossington Smith’s The Bridge in-curve at right Photo: Courtesy NGV Photographic Services
The slow rise of the Sydney Harbour Bridge above the city was recorded by numerous painters, printmakers and photographers, including Sydney modernist Grace Cossington Smith. Her iconic The Bridge-in-curve depicts the bridge just before its two arches were joined in August 1930, and conveys the sense of wonder, achievement and hope that was inspired by this engineering marvel. By painting the emerging, rather than the complete bridge, Cossington Smith also focuses our attention on the energy and ambition required to create it.
Installation view of Frank Hinder’s Trains passing (1940) from the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Frank Hinder (Australian, 1906-1992, United States 1927-1934) Trains passing 1940 Oil on composition board National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1974
Frank Hinder was one of the first abstract artists in Australia. After living and studying in the United States, Hinder and his wife, the American sculptor Margel, returned to Sydney in 1934. There they became part of a small avant-garde group that included Grace Crowley, Rah Fizelle, Ralph Balson and the German sculptor and art historian Eleanore Lange, all of whom were interested in Cubist, Constructivist and Futurist art. Hinder later said that this work was inspired by seeing Lange, sitting next to him on a train, reflected in the windows of a passing train.
Frank Hinder (Australia 1906-1992, United States 1927-1934) Commuters 1938 Tempera on paper on board Private collection
Victorian Railways, Melbourne (publisher) (Australia, 1856-1976) The Victorian Railways present The Spirit of Progress 1937 Booklet: colour photolithographs and letterpress, 12 pages, cardboard cover printed by Queen City Printers, Melbourne 20.8 x 26.8cm (closed) State Library Victoria, Melbourne
Launched in November 1937, The Spirit of Progress express passenger train was a source of immense pride to Victorians. Built in Newport, Victoria, the train featured many innovations, including all-steel carriages and full air-conditioning. Designed in the Art Deco, streamlined style by architectural firm Stephenson & Turner, the passenger carriages were fitted out to a level of comfort not previously seen in Australia, and included a full dining carriage. The train ran between Melbourne and the New South Wales state border at Albury, the longest non-stop train journey in Australia at that time, at an average speed of 84 kilometres per hour.
Installation view of Ivor Francis’ Speed! from the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Ivor Francis (England 1906 – Australia 1993, Australia from 1924) Speed! 1931 Colour process block print Art Gallery of South Australia Adelaide South Australian Government Grant 1986
Randille, Melbourne (maker) active 1930s Night gown c. 1938 Silk (a) 166cm (centre back) 38.9cm (waist, flat) (dress) (b) 121cm (centre back) 38cm (waist, flat) (slip) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented by Mrs A. G. Pringle, 1982
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with Max Dupain’s Rush hour in King’s Cross left and Frank Hinder’s Jackhammer third from right and Margel Hinder’s Man with jackhammer second right Photo: Courtesy NGV Photographic Services
Margel Hinder (United States 1906 – Australia 1995, Australia from 1934) Man with jackhammer 1939 Cedar National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through the NGV Foundation with the assistance of J. B. Were & Son, Governor, 2001
American-born Margel Hinder was one of Australia’s leading modernist sculptors. She had studied art in Boston, where she met and married Sydney artist Frank Hinder. In 1934 they moved to Australia and became an important part of Sydney’s small modern art scene. In Man with jackhammer Hinder has simplified and contained the figure within a square frame, the strong diagonal form of the jackhammer creating a sense of compressed energy and force. Man and machine have fused in this celebration of industry and progress.
In the 1930s the new ‘Modern Woman’ made her appearance as a more serious and emancipated version of the giddy 1920s ‘flapper’. A woman who worked, she often lived alone in one of the new city apartment buildings, visited nightclubs and showed less interest in traditional marriage and child rearing. A lean body type became fashionable and was enhanced by the lengthened hemlines and defined waists introduced by French couturier Jean Patou in 1929. This slender silhouette was supported by form-fitting foundation garments by manufacturers such as Berlei.
The Modern Woman became one of the most potent images of contemporary life, being celebrated in women’s magazines such as the ultra-stylish Home and the Australian Women’s Weekly, launched in 1933. While such magazines were congratulating her and promoting new consumer goods to the Modern Woman, at the same time she was criticised by conservative commentators. In 1937 photographer Max Dupain wrote: ‘There must be a great shattering of modern values if woman is to continue to perpetuate the race… In her shred of a dress and little helmet of a hat, her cropped hair, and stark bearing, the modern woman is a sort of a soldier… It is not her fault it is her doom’.
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with Peter Purves Smith’s Maisie left, Cybil Craig’s Peggy second left and Peter Purves Smith’s Lucile at top right Photo: Eugene Hyland
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with Cybil Craig’s Peggy second left and Lina Bryans The babe is wise at right Photo: Courtesy NGV Photographic Services
Peter Purves Smith (Australia 1912-1949, England 1935-1936, England and France 1938-1940) Maisie 1938-1939 Gouache National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Bequest of Lady Maisie Drysdale 2001
In 1937 the striking, auburn-haired Maisie Newbold was a student at the George Bell School in Melbourne, where she met fellow student Peter Purves Smith and his best friend Russell Drysdale. Maisie and Purves Smith were married in 1946, only three years before latter’s premature death from tuberculosis. Purves Smith painted this portrait at the start of their relationship. It depicts Maisie as a stylish woman wearing the latest fashion, the angularity of her features contrasted by the soft fur of her collar and feathers of her hat. Many years later Maisie married Drysdale.
Installation view of Sybil Craig’s work Peggy c. 1932 Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Lina Bryans (Germany (of Australian parents) 1909 – Australia 2000, Australia from 1910) The babe is wise 1940 Oil on cardboard National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Miss Jean Campbell, 1962
Lina Bryans’s portrait of author Jean Campbell is titled after Campbell’s 1939 novel The Babe is Wise, a contemporary story set in Melbourne and in which the main protagonists are European migrants. A well-known figure in Melbourne’s literary circles, Campbell was noted for her ‘quick and slightly audacious wit’. Bryans had begun painting in 1937 with the support of William Frater. In the late 1930s she lived at Darebin Bridge House, which became an informal artists’ colony and meeting place for writers associated with the journal Meanjin.
Peter Purves Smith (Australian, 1912-1949, England 1935-1936, England and France 1938-1940) Lucile 1937 Oil on board Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Purchased 2011 with funds raised through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Appeal
Nora Heysen (Australian, 1911-2003, England and Italy 1934-1937) Self-portrait 1932 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Acquired with the assistance of the Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2011
During the first decade of her life as a professional artist, Nora Heysen completed numerous self-portraits. In many of these she depicts herself in the act of drawing or painting, holding a palette and brush or with other accoutrements of the artist, and thereby asserting her professional identity. Yet these are also highly charged works in which Heysen scrutinises herself (and the viewer) with an unflinching and unsmiling gaze.
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with Arthur Challen’s Miss Moira Madden above chair Photo: Eugene Hyland
The terrible physical losses and psychological traumas of the First World War changed Australian society and prompted anxious concerns about the direction of the nation. For some this meant an inward-looking isolationism, a desire that Australian culture should develop independently and untouched by the ‘degenerate’ influences of Europe.
The search for rejuvenation frequently involved explorations of the capabilities and vulnerabilities of the human body. In the hands of artists, corporeal forms came to symbolise nationhood, most often expressed through references to the art of Classical Greece and mythological subjects. The evolution of a new Australian ‘type’ was also proposed in the 1930s – a white Australian drawn from British stock, but with an athletic and streamlined shape honed by time spent swimming and surfing on local beaches.
This art often has a distinctive quality to it, which in the light of history can sometimes make for disquieting viewing. With the terrible knowledge of how the Nazi Party in Germany subsequently used eugenics in its systematic slaughter of those with so-called ‘bad blood’, the Australian enthusiasm for ‘body culture’ can now seem problematic. Images of muscular nationalism soon lost their cache in Australia following the Second World War, tainted by undesirable fascistic overtones.
Keast Burke (New Zealand 1896 – Australia 1974, Australia from 1904) Harvest c. 1940 Gelatin silver photograph (25.6 x 30.5cm) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gerstl Bequest, 2000
Keast Burke (New Zealand 1896 – Australia 1974, Australia from 1904) Husbandry 1 c. 1940 Gelatin silver photograph Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Gift of Iris Burke 1989
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Discus thrower 1937, printed (c. 1939) Gelatin silver photograph 38.5 x 37.5cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 2003
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Souvenir of Cronulla 1937 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of National Australia Bank Limited, Honorary Life Benefactor, 1992
In the 1930s Max Dupain responded to Henri Bergson’s book Creative Evolution (1907) in which he considered creativity and intuition as central to the renewed development of society, and the artist as prime possessor of these powers. Vitalism, as this philosophy was termed, was believed to be expressed through polarised sexual energies. In this work Dupain focuses on the sexually differentiated ‘energies’ of men and women, associating women with the forces of nature.
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with Daphne Mayo’s A young Australian in foreground Photo: Eugene Hyland
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with Dorothy Thornhill’s Neo-classical nudes and Resting Diana at left; Tom Purvis’ Australia’s 150th Anniversary Celebrations (wall print) at centre rear; and Jean Broome-Norton’s Abundance on plinth at right Photo: Courtesy NGV Photographic Services
Tom Purvis (England, 1888-1959) Australia’s 150th Anniversary Celebrations c. 1938 Colour lithograph Courtesy of Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney
Installation view of Dorothy Thornhill’s Neo-classical nudes from the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Dorothy Thornhill (England 1910 – Australia 1987, New Zealand 1920-1929, Australia from 1929) Resting Diana 1931 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1977
The invocation of the Classical body as a modern prototype was a powerful idea in the 1930s. The Graeco- Roman goddess Diana, the virgin patron goddess of the hunt, was popularly invoked as an ideal of female perfection, and represented with a slender and athletic physique. Dorothy Thornhill’s Diana is a remarkable visualisation of such a ‘modern Diana’, her angular body and defined musculature reflecting the masculinisation of female bodies at this time. She is a formidable presence, the quiver of arrows slung nonchalantly across her shoulders a trophy of her victory over the male gender.
Jean Broome-Norton (Australian, 1911-2002) Abundance 1934 Plaster, bronze patination National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of ICI Australia Limited, Fellow, 1994
“High-rise buildings, fast trains and engineering feats such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge jostled against the Great Depression, conservatism and a looming Second World War during the 1930s, one of the most turbulent decades in Australian history. The major exhibition at the NGV, Brave New World: Australia 1930s, will explore the way artists and designers engaged with these major issues providing a fresh look at a period characterised by both optimism and despair. The exhibition will present a broad-ranging collection of more than 200 works spanning photography, painting, printmaking, sculpture and decorative arts as well as design, architecture, fashion, graphics, film and dance.
Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV, commented, “Brave New World explores an important period of Australian art history during which Abstraction, Surrealism and Expressionism first emerged, and women artists arose as trailblazers of the modern art movement. It will offer an immersive look at the full spectrum of visual and creative culture of the period, from Max Dupain’s iconic depictions of the Australian body and beach culture to a vast display of nearly 40 Art Deco radios, which were an indispensable item for the Australian home during the 1930s.”
Presented thematically, Brave New World will show how artists and designers responded to major social and political concerns of the 1930s. The Great Depression, which saw Australia’s unemployment rate rise to 32% by 1932, is seen through the eyes of photographer F. Oswald Barnett in his powerful images of poverty-stricken inner Melbourne suburbs such as Fitzroy, Collingwood and Carlton, and in the works of Danila Vassilieff, Yosl Bergner, Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker who were among the first artists to depict Australia’s working class and destitute.
In contrast, many other artists at the time chose to focus upon the vibrant city streets, cafes and buildings of contemporary Australian cities, such as renowned modernist Grace Cossington Smith with her energetic canvasses of flat colours and abstracted forms. Other artists featured in Brave New World including Hilda Rix Nicholas and Elioth Gruner concentrated on more traditional scenes of the Australian bush, which was seen as a place of respite from the frenetic pace of modern city life.
The exhibition will explore artists’ responses to the growing calls for Indigenous rights during the 1930s, which was accompanied by a rising interest in Aboriginal art and particularly the work of Albert Namatjira, the first Indigenous artist of renown in Australia; and the rise of the ‘modern woman’, a female who favoured urban living, freedom and equality over marriage and child rearing.
The 1930s also saw the idea of the ‘Australian body’, a tanned, muscular archetype shaped by sand and surf, come to the fore of the Australian identity. Artists who engaged with this idea, including Max Dupain, Charles Meere and Olive Cotton, will be presented in Brave New World. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated, 212-page hardback publication, featuring essays by leading writers on each of the exhibition themes. A series of public programs will also be offered including a major symposium, an Art Deco walking tour of Melbourne and a dance performance, recreating Demon machine (1924) by the Bodenweiser company that toured Australia in the late 1930s as well as an original solo by the choreographer, Carol Brown (NZ).
Press release from the NGV
Nanette Kuehn (Germany 1911 – Australia 1980, Australia from 1937) Borislav Runanine and Tamara Grigorieva in Jeux D’Enfants, original Ballets Russes, Australian tour 1939-1940 Gelatin silver photograph Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre, Melbourne The Australian Ballet Collection. Gift of The Australian Ballet, 1998
The expressive body: dance in Australia
If modern art encapsulated the ideals and conflicting forces of the early twentieth century, then modern dance embodied its restless vitality and the quest for a different kind of subjectivity and expression. To many, modern dance is the pivotal art form for a mid twentieth century concerned with plasticity, the expressive body and tensions between the individual and its collective formation.
The decade of the 1930s is framed by the 1928-1929 tour of Anna Pavlova’s dance company and the three tours of the remnant Ballets Russes companies (1936-1937, 1938-1939,1939-1940) that excited many aspiring modernist artists. These tours sowed the seeds for subsequent ballet narratives in Australia, because the eruption of war in 1939 meant that Ballets Russes dancers, including Helene Kirsova and Edouard Borovansky, stayed in the country and established ballet companies. While trained in Russian dance technique, these artists were also influenced by the aesthetics of change in European art and dance that included new bodily techniques, dynamic movement patterns and modern technologies. It was the individual dancers of modern dance, however, including Louise Lightfoot and Sonia Revid, who produced the expressive intensity of a more autonomous art of movement.
Installation views of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA featuring a wall print of Sonia Revid dancing on Brighton beach c. 1935 by an unknown Australian photographer Photos: Courtesy NGV Photographic Services
Australia, Unknown photographer Sonia Revid dancing on Brighton beach c. 1935 Courtesy of State Library Victoria, Melbourne
Sonia Revid was one of the leading proponents of modern interpretative dance in Melbourne. Born in Latvia, she studied with the great dancer Mary Wigman in Germany before coming to Australia in 1932. Revid is credited with introducing the ‘German Dance’ to Australian audiences, and in the mid 1930s established the Sonia Revid School of Art and Body Culture in Collins Street. She composed her own dances, one of the best known being Bushfire drama (1940), based on the 1939 Victoria Bushfires.
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Ballet (Emmy Towsey and Evelyn Ippen, Bodenwieser Dancers performing Waterlilies) 1937, printed (c. 1939) Gelatin silver photograph 44.5 x 33.5cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 2003
Jack Cato (Australia 1889-1971, England 1909-1914, South Africa 1914-1920) Helene Kirsova and Igor Youskevitch in Les Presages, Monte Carlo Russian Ballet 1936-1937 Gelatin silver photograph 24.8 x 19.4cm Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre, Melbourne The Australian Ballet Collection Gift of The Australian Ballet, 1998
Choreographed by Léonide Massine in 1933, Les Presages (Destiny) was a popular and avant-garde work during the Ballets Russes tours to Australia in 1936-1937. It was one of the first contemporary ballets to be choreographed to an existing musical score, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. Portrayed in this picture are two principal dancers from the Monte Carlo Ballets Russes: Hélène Kirsova, who remained in Australia and formed her own ballet company in Sydney in the early 1940s, and Igor Youskevitch, who became a leading American ballet dancer, appearing here in the role of the Hero.
Evelyn Ippen designer and maker active in Australia 1930s Dress for Slavonic Dances 1939 Cotton, silk (velvet) (appliqué), elastic, metal (zip) for a production of the Bodenwieser Ballet, choreographed by Gertrud Bodenwieser Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre, Melbourne Bodenwieser Collection. Gift of Barbara Cuckson, 2000
The Slavonic Dances were choreographed by Gertrud Bodenwieser to represent what she described as the ‘vigour and passionate feelings of the Slavonic people’, and toured with her first company in Australia in 1939. Loosely using folk-dance motifs, this ensemble work would have been a stylish crowd-pleaser in contrast to more serious dances. The appliqué and colourful flower motifs on this dress are similar to designs by Natalia Goncharova for the Ballets Russes, although the simplified appeal of its ‘red bodice, long, swirling skirt, and gathered white sleeves’ were probably designed by one of the company dancers, Evelyn Ippen.
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Tamara Tchinarova in Presages Published in Art in Australia, February 15, 1937 National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne Shaw Research Library
Australia Tunes Into The World
These radios comprise a selection of Australian designed and manufactured tabletop models from the 1930s at a time when this new method of communication became an integral part of every home. They reflect the rapid spread of the streamlined style to Australia from the United States, England and Europe, where industrial designers applied machine-age styling to everyday household appliances. The use of new synthetic plastics (Bakelite) and mass production helped to make radios affordable for ordinary people, even in the depths of the Depression, and radio transmission brought the world into every Australian home. As cheap alternatives to the expensive wooden console in the lounge room, these small, portable radios allowed individual family members to listen to serials, quizzes and popular music in other rooms such as the kitchen, bedroom and verandah, as well as in the workplace.
Radios of the 1930s are now appreciated as quintessential examples of Art Deco styling, and one of the first expressions of art meeting industry. These colourful and elegant radio sets were one of the first pieces of modern styling in the Australian home. They were also a symbol of modern technology and a new future.
Installation view of Australian Art Deco radios from the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Eugene Hyland
Airzone (1931) Ltd, Sydney (manufacturer) Mullard (white) 1938 Collection of Peter Sheridan and Jan Hatch
Airzone (1931) Ltd, Sydney (manufacturer) Mullard (speckled green) 1938 Collection of Peter Sheridan and Jan Hatch
Installation views of Australian Art Deco radios from the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photos: Courtesy NGV Photographic Services
Sun and surf
The beach was a complex location in the Australian creative imagination. It was a democratic site in which the trappings of wealth and position were abandoned as people stripped down to their bathers. It was a place of hedonistic pleasures that offered sensuous engagement with sun and surf, and a primitive landscape where natural forces restored the bodies of those depleted by modern life. It was a playground for the tourist that was considered distinctively Australian. As war loomed again in the late 1930s, it was also a pseudo-militaristic zone in which the lifesaver was honed for ‘battle’ in the surf.
The lifesavers that helped protect the beach-going public were regularly praised as physical exemplars who could build the eugenic stock of the nation. As the Second World War approached, the connection of these trained lifesavers to military servicemen also became painfully apparent.
Male lifesavers were used by artists in promoting Australia to tourists: a poster commemorating the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932 positioned the lifesaver as the quintessential representative of Australian manhood. Douglas Annand and Arthur Whitmore’s virile lifesaver proudly gestures towards the new bridge, his muscles as strong and protective as the steel girders that span the harbour.
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) On the beach. Man, woman, boy 1938 Gelatin silver photograph 39.2 x 47.2cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1982
Showing a naked family on the beach, Max Dupain’s work is a perfect illustration of social concerns of the times. As Australia moved closer to engagement in another world war, fears about the poor physical fitness of the population were debated, with a ‘national fitness’ campaign instituted by the government in 1938. Dupain’s father, George, was one of the country’s first physical educationalists, opening the Dupain Institute of Physical Education and Medical Gymnastics in 1900 and writing extensively on the subject of health and fitness. Max Dupain attended the gym and was well versed in contemporary concerns about fitness.
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Eugene Hyland
Installation view of Male lifesaver, window and Female lifesaver, window (both c. 1935) from the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Unknown, Melbourne Male lifesaver, window c. 1935 Stained glass, lead 47.5 x 40.8cm Williamstown Swimming and Life Saving Club, Williamstown Donated by C. J Dennis
‘On golden and milky sands, bodily excellence is displayed the year round, clearly defined by the sun in an atmosphere as viewless and benign as the air of Hellas as described by Euripides.’
J. S. Macdonald, 1931
Unknown, Melbourne Female lifesaver, window c. 1935 Stained glass, lead 47.0 x 40.9cm Williamstown Swimming and Life Saving Club, Williamstown Donated by Councillor R. T. Bell
Although much was made of the ‘gods of the golden sand’, as one poet glowingly described lifesavers, lifesaving clubs were not entirely male in membership. Women lifesavers also made their mark, albeit in more limited numbers and with much less recognition. At the Williamstown Lifesaving Club in Melbourne a woman lifesaver was included in this fine and very rare stained glass window that, along with its counterpart featuring a male lifesaver, graced the newly established clubhouse around 1935.
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with the male and female lifesavers (centre); Max Dupain’s The carnival at Bondi (fourth from right); Sydney Bridge celebrations (second right); and Douglas Annand and Max Dupain’s Australia (right) Photo: Courtesy NGV Photographic Services
Max Dupain (Australian 1911-1992) Sunbaker (1938), dated 1937, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 38.0 x 43.1cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board, 1976
Taken on a camping trip near Culburra, on the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales, in January 1938, Max Dupain’s original version of the Sunbaker was a much darker image that existed at the time only in an album gifted to his friend Chris Van Dyke. Dupain lost the original negative and printed this variant version in 1975 for an exhibition. It is an image that is now considered an icon in Australian photography, and has come to represent key values of the interest in ‘body culture’, celebrating health and fitness in the context of the beach.
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) The carnival at Bondi 1938 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1982
‘The lifesaving teams … are splendid examples of the physique, resourcefulness and vitality of our youth and manhood. They are typical of the outdoor life which Australians lead and they are living testimonies to the value of surfing and the vigour and stamina of our race.’
DAILY EXAMINER, July 1935
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Manly 1938, printed c. 1986 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased from funds donated by Hallmark Cards Australia Pty Ltd, 1987
Gert Sellheim (Russia (of German parents) 1901 – Australia 1970, Australia from 1926) The seaside calls – go by train – take a Kodak 1930s Colour lithograph Printed by F. W. Niven, Melbourne State Library Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mr Grant Lee
Gert Sellheim was born to German parents in Estonia, at that time part of the Russian Empire. After studying architecture in Europe he travelled to Western Australia in 1926, before settling in Melbourne in 1931, where he began working as an industrial and commercial designer. Working for the Australian National Travel Association, Sellheim created a series of posters promoting beach holidays, which incorporated Art Deco motifs and typography. His most famous design is the flying kangaroo logo for Qantas, which he created in 1947.
Douglas Annand (attributed to) (Australian, 1903-1976) Follow the sun – Australia’s 150th Anniversary celebrations 1938 Colour lithograph and photolithograph Courtesy of Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney
The 1930s were the heyday of the travel poster. Posters were commissioned by railway and tourism groups or shipping companies and airlines to promote Australian holiday destinations, both at home and overseas. The Australian National Travel Association was formed in 1929 to promote Australia to overseas markets. As part of its strategy it commissioned posters from leading graphic artists, such as Percy Trompf, James Northfield and Douglas Annand. From the late 1920s Australia began to actively promote itself to the world by using the beach, sun and surf as motifs.
Installation views of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with the work of John Rowell, Hilda Rix Nicholas, Gert Sellheim and Percy Trompf on the far wall, and Robert E. Coates Photographs of Australian Pavilion at New York World’s Fair (1939) on the projector screen at left Photos: Courtesy NGV Photographic Services
The Australian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair projected an image of Australia as a young and healthy nation, a place of industry, sport and tourism. Designed by John Oldham of Sydney architectural firm Stephenson & Turner, the modern design of the building was complemented by Douglas Annand’s interior displays featuring the latest graphic design, and audio-visual and photomontage techniques. These photographs of the Australian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair were taken by commercial photographer Robert E. Coates.
Installation views of Robert E. Coates’ Photographs of Australian Pavilion at New York World’s Fair (1939) (digital images, looped) Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Pastoral landscapes
Along with the beach, another national myth evolved around the Australian bush. Although most Australians lived in cities, in the years following the First World War the nation became increasingly informed by a mythology centred on the bush and the landscape. For those who considered the modern city a profoundly depleting force, the bush was a touchstone of traditional ‘values’. It was nostalgically conceived of as an idyllic natural realm whose soil, literally and metaphorically, sustained its people. Both the classical Pastoral ideal of a land in which only sheep and cattle roam, and the Georgic tradition, which celebrated the achievements of agriculture, became dominant themes in landscape art.
Pastoral landscapes were admired above all as representing the antithesis of ‘decadent’ modern life. As art critic and gallery director J. S. Macdonald wrote, such art would ‘point the way in which life should be lived in Australia, with the maximum of flocks and the minimum of factories’. With their emphasis on farming and pastoral industries, such works affirmed white landownership, with Indigenous people largely absent.
John Rowell (Australian, 1894-1973) Blue hills c. 1936 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1936
Gert Sellheim (Russia (of German parents) 1901 – Australia 1970, Australia from 1926) Spring in the Grampians 1930s Colour photolithograph State Library Victoria, Melbourne Purchased 2000
Hilda Rix Nicholas (Australian, 1884-1961, Europe 1911-1918) The fair musterer c. 1935 Oil on canvas Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Purchased 1971
As a young artist Hilda Rix Nicholas had a successful career in France before returning to Australia after the First World War. In 1934, several years after the birth of her son, Rix Nicholas returned to painting and depicted her new life living on the family property Knockalong, on the Monaro Plains in New South Wales. Depicting the governess of her young son holding the reins of her horse, dog at her feet, and sheep in the distance, in The fair musterer Rix Nicholas claims for women an active role in the masculine world of pastoral Australia.
Hilda Rix Nicholas (Australian, 1884-1961, Europe 1911-1918) The shepherd of Knockalong 1933 Oil on canvas Collection of Peter Rix, Sydney Courtesy of Deutscher & Hackett
Depicting the artist’s husband and young son, The shepherd of Knockalong is a reminder of the traditional importance of the wool industry to the nation’s economy. With his legs firmly connected to the ground and pictured as a large figure dominating the landscape setting, the farmer is the benign owner and ‘shepherd’ of the land spreading out behind him, the presence of his young son ensuring dynastic succession. At a time when Aboriginal people were confined to reservations and denied citizenship, Hilda Rix Nicholas’s painting can also be considered as an assertion of the British colonisers’ right to ownership of Australia.
Percy Trompf (Australian, 1902-1964) Western Australia c. 1936 Colour lithograph Courtesy of Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney
Indigenous art and culture
During the 1930s Aboriginal people were often pejoratively referred to as a ‘dying race’. The Australian Government continued to enforce a ‘divide and rule’ assimilationist policy. Determined by eugenics, this entailed removing Aboriginal people of mixed descent from their families and reserves, and absorbing them into the dominant society, with consequent loss of their own language and customary ritual practices. Increasingly during this period, Aboriginal people formed their own organisations and agitated for full citizenship rights.
This was also a decade that saw increasing awareness of, and interest in, Indigenous art. Albert Namatjira astonished Melbourne audiences at his first solo exhibition at the Athenaeum Gallery in 1938. Comprising forty-one watercolour paintings, all of his works sold within three days of the opening. The following year the Art Gallery of South Australia purchased one of Namatjira’s works. Indigenous art also inspired non-Indigenous artists, including Margaret Preston and Frances Derham who appropriated design elements in their works. The idea of ‘Aboriginalism’, in which settlers sought an Australian identity in the context of Britishness and the Empire, saw artists travelling to the outback to paint and sketch subjects they believed connected them to Indigenous history.
Best known as a progressive educator and advocate of children’s art, Frances Derham was also an active member of the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria, and with potter Allan Lowe shared Margaret Preston’s interest in the appropriation of Indigenous art. From the mid 1920s Derham began to incorporate Aboriginal motifs into her linocuts and in 1929, synchronous with the exhibition Australian Aboriginal Art at the Museum of Victoria, Derham presented a lecture to the Arts and Crafts Society, entitled ‘The Interest of Aboriginal Art to the Modern Designer’.
Frances Derham (Australian, 1894-1987, New Zealand and Ireland 1902-1908) Kangaroo (at the zoo) c. 1931 Linocut printed in brown ink on Chinese paper National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mr Richard Hodgson Derham, 1988
Frances Derham (Australia 1894-1987, New Zealand and Ireland 1902-1908) The Aboriginal artist 1931 Colour linocut on Japanese paper National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mr Richard Hodgson Derham, 1988
During the 1920s Margaret Preston considered Aboriginal art a source of good design in the decoration of household items. In the 1930s her study of Aboriginal culture intensified, as she developed a greater interest in its anthropological and cosmological elements. In 1940 Preston travelled to the Northern Territory to study Aboriginal art. On her return she developed a more explicit Aboriginal style in paintings featuring earthy tones, strong black outlines and patterns of dots and lines.
Unknown Walamangu active (1930s) Dhukurra dhaawu (Sacred clan story) c. 1935 Earth pigments on Stringybark (Eucalyptus sp.), resin 128.3 x 63.9cm The Donald Thomson Collection Donated by Mrs Dorita Thomson to the University of Melbourne and on loan to Museums Victoria, Melbourne
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, segregation was the main government policy regarding Aboriginal people. It was re-enforced by the 1909 Aborigines Protection Act, which gave the Aborigines Protection Board the power to control where Aboriginal people lived in New South Wales. In 1937 the Commonwealth Government adopted a policy of assimilation, whereby Aboriginal people of mixed descent were henceforth to be assimilated into white society, while others were confined to reserves. In 1931 Arnhem Land was declared an Aboriginal Reserve by the government and non-Indigenous entry into the region was restricted.
Tjam Yilkari Katani Liyagalawumirr active 1930s Wagilag dhaawu (Wagilag Sisters story) (installation view) 1937 Earth pigments on Stringybark (Eucalyptus sp.) The Donald Thomson Collection Donated by Mrs Dorita Thomson to the University of Melbourne and on loan to Museums Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
For Yolgnu people, painting on bark or objects is intimately connected with painting on the body, and the Yolgnu term barrawan means both ‘skin’ and ‘bark’. These paintings are transcriptions of the sacred designs that were painted onto men’s bodies and convey the power of the Yolgnu ancestors whose actions created their world. The Wagilag Sisters Dreaming story chronicles the creative acts of the sisters as they travelled across Arnhem Land. Such stories pass on important knowledge, cultural values and belief systems to later generations.
Arthur Murch (Australian, 1902-1989, Europe 1936-1940) Walila, Pintupi tribe 1934 Pencil National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1934
In 1933, on the invitation of Professor H. Whitridge Davies, Sydney artist Arthur Murch accompanied a research team from Sydney University to Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission, south-west of Alice Springs. Murch remained there for six weeks painting the landscapes and making portraits of Indigenous people. These were exhibited in Sydney soon after his return.
Percy Leason (Australia 1888 – United States 1959, United States from 1938) Thomas Foster (installation view) 1934 Oil on canvas State Library Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Isabelle Leason, 1969 Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Thomas Foster was born at Coranderrk Station in 1882, the son of Edward Foster and Betsy Benfield. Foster’s was one of the last portraits painted by Leason as part of the unfortunately titled exhibition The Last of the Victorian Aborigines. These portraits were debuted on 11 September at the Athenaeum Gallery in Collins Street, Melbourne, to great public acclaim. Foster, like most of Leason’s subjects, appears shirtless, his arms folded behind his back, pushing forward his chest and clearly showing his scarification marks.
Gert Sellheim (Russia (of German parents) 1901 – Australia 1970, Australia from 1926) Corroboree Australia 1934 Colour lithograph printed by F. W. Niven, Melbourne State Library Victoria, Melbourne Gift of the Australian National Travel Association, 1934
Dystopian cities
Australia was hit hard by the Great Depression. The worst year was 1932, when unemployment reached nearly thirty-two per cent, and by the following year almost a third of all unemployed men had been without work for three years. With wages cut and unemployment rising, many families were left struggling to survive and this poverty was most evident in run-down, inner-city areas. Two émigrés, Danila Vassilieff and Yosl Bergner, were the first Australian artists to turn their attention to the plight of the urban poor and the disposed. Their powerful, expressive style was influential upon young artists, including Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker.
Economic hardship fostered bitterness and political unrest, and membership of radical groups on both the left and right increased. Boundaries between political agendas and art production became porous in this decade, and many artists believed, like Bergner, ‘that by painting we would change the world’. The complex enmeshment of the creative and political became a defining feature of the decade, and art in Australia became increasingly political, with the political realm involving itself with art.
By the end of the decade the worsening political situation overseas and a sense that another world war was inevitable contributed to a growing sense of unease. Many artists expressed this anxiety and foreboding in their works.
Laurence Le Guay (Australian, 1917-1990) No title (War montage with globe) c. 1939 Gelatin silver photograph 30.4 x 24.9cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through the NGV Foundation with the assistance of Mrs Mem Kirby, Fellow, 2001
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Hot rhythm! 1936 Silver gelatin photograph 24.7 x 17.8cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne William Kimpton Bequest, 2016
In this work, Max Dupain has the shadow of a slide trombone seemingly bisect the naked body of a woman in a photograph that, in the context of his known views, is less an erotic celebration of modern jazz culture and nightlife than a comment on the disruptive nature of modernity.
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Doom of youth 1937 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1982
In Doom of youth – a title taken from Wyndham Lewis’s 1932 polemical book of the same name – Max Dupain creates an allegorical photograph in which a naked male body represents his vision of modern Australia. Using symbols that suggest disempowerment, Dupain implies that the flywheel of mechanisation has doomed youth (the representatives of a nation’s future) to a bleak fate.
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Night with her train of stars and her gift of sleep 1936-1937 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne William Kimpton Bequest, 2016
Referring to Edward Hughes’s 1912 Symbolist work of the same name, Max Dupain has replaced the painter’s dark-winged goddess of the night, who tries to calm the putti (or ‘stars’) that cling to her, with an updated modern version in which city lights replace starlight. The symbolism of the giant breast that towers over the electric lights of the urban landscape suggests an inversion of the natural for the man-made. The personification of night refers to the Greek goddess Nyx, a powerful force born of Chaos, and the mother of children including Sleep, Death and Pain. Given his often gloomy assessment of modernity, Dupain’s invocation of Nyx seems appropriate in the context.
Installation views of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with Herbert Badham’s Paint and morning tea second left and Albert Tucker’s Self-portrait third from right Photos: Courtesy NGV Photographic Services
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with Albert Tucker’s Self-portrait (1937) at left Photo: Eugene Hyland
Installation view of Albert Tucker’s Self-portrait (1937)from the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
In the late 1930s Albert Tucker’s contact with émigré artists Yosl Bergner and Danila Vassilieff was to provide important encouragement for him to pursue his artistic vocation and to make art that was responsive to the issues of his time. In 1938 Tucker was a founding member of the Contemporary Art Society, and he became one of the most articulate voices in the often bitter debates between modernists and conservatives. In the 1940s, together with his partner Joy Hester, Tucker was a key member of the group of artists and writers that formed around John and Sunday Reed at Heide.
From 1936 until the early 1940s Albert Tucker chronicled himself with numerous painted and drawn self-portraits. In these works we witness a harrowing disintegration of his physical self, which mirrored the artist’s overwrought emotional state. He recalled: ‘It was a period when the whole world, and all the people I knew, seemed to be seething with ideas and energies and experiences; and my own mind was a seething mess … The highly emotional, overwrought expressionist paintings suited my state at the time’.
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with work by Danila Vassilieff on the centre black wall including Street scene with graffiti (left), Truth, Woolloomooloo (second left) and Young girl (Shirley) the large painting at right; and F. Oswald Barnett’s photographs of Melbourne slums in the display cabinet Photos: Courtesy NGV Photographic Services
Installation view of Danila Vassilieff ‘s Street scene with graffiti (1938) from the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Danila Vassilieff (Russia 1897 – Australia 1958, Australia from 1923, Central and South America, Europe, England 1929-1934) Truth, Woolloomooloo 1936 Oil on canvas Private collection
It is notable that the first artists to depict the poverty of inner-city slums were two recently arrived émigrés, Danila Vassilieff and Yosl Bergner. Russian-born Vassilieff, who had fought with the white Russian army, first arrived in Australia in 1923 before leaving again in 1929. On his return in 1935 he painted a series of dark streetscapes, depicting the inner suburban areas of Woolloomooloo and Surry Hills in Sydney. Moving to Melbourne, Vassilieff’s expressionist style influenced many young artists, including Lina Bryans, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan.
Danila Vassilieff (Russia 1897 – Australia 1958, Australia from 1923, Central and South America, Europe, England 1929-1934) Young girl (Shirley) 1937 Oil on canvas on composition board National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne National Gallery Society of Victoria Century Fund, 1984
F. Oswald Barnett (Australian, 1883-1972)
Fitzroy. View from the Brotherhood of St Lawrence Fitzroy. Rear view of house North Melbourne. Group of children in Erskine Place West Melbourne. A Dudley Mansion Carlton. Wash-house and bath-room, 48 Palmerston Street North Melbourne. No. 19 Byron Street West Melbourne rubbish tip
c. 1930 – c. 1935 Gelatin silver photograph and typewriting on card State Library Victoria, Melbourne F. Oswald Barnett Collection Gift of Department of Human Services, Victoria 2001
One of the most visible and lasting effects of the Great Depression was the housing crisis in the poor working class areas of Melbourne and Sydney. Many of the nineteenth-century houses had fallen into disrepair, overcrowding was endemic and a great number of families lived in squalid and unhealthy conditions. Throughout the decade ‘slum’ abolition movements in Melbourne and Sydney ran public campaigns to place public housing on the political agenda, leading to the creation of the first state Housing Commissions.
In Melbourne, Methodist layman F. Oswald Barnett led a campaign calling for slum demolition and the rehousing of residents in government-financed housing. He took hundreds of photographs that were used in public lectures and to illustrate the 1937 report of the Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board. This led to the creation of the Housing Commission of Victoria in 1938, with its first major project being the Garden City estate at Fishermans Bend. In Sydney a similar campaign led to the Housing Improvement Act of 1936 and the construction of the first fifty-six home units at Erskineville. (NGV)
The photographs in the F. Oswald Barnett Collection were taken by Barnett and other unidentified photographers in the 1930s. Many of them were used to illustrate a government report on slum housing and/or made into lantern slides for lectures in a public campaign. F. Oswald Barnett was born in Brunswick, Victoria. A committed Methodist and housing reformer, he led a crusade against Melbourne’s inner city slums. In 1936 he was appointed to the Slum Abolition Board and from 1938-1948 he was the vice-chair of the Housing Commission. In this position he attempted to shape compassionate public housing policy. He later protested vigorously against proposed high-rise housing (Monash Biographical Dictionary of 20th century Australia).
Scenes from Melbourne during the depression (extract) c. 1935 Black and white film transferred to media player 1 min. 51 sec. silent (looped) Courtesy of National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Canberra Video: Dr Marcus Bunyan
While there is an abundance of newspaper and documentary photographs which document the 1930s shanty towns, slums, relief and charity works, there is very little moving image recordings available. Instead, the moving image medium at the time was primarily focused on providing entertainment that would allow the audience temporary relief from the Depression. This rare footage depicts slum areas of inner Melbourne, and provides great insight into the horrible living conditions that many Australian families experienced.
Ola Cohn (Australian, 1892-1964, England 1926-1930) The sundowner 1932 Painted plaster National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Jack and Zena Cohn, 2016
Ola Cohn studied sculpture with Henry Moore at the Royal College of Art in London in the 1920s. She returned to Melbourne in 1930, where the following year her solo exhibition established her as a leading proponent of modern sculpture. During the Depression the sight of ‘swagmen’ or ‘sundowners’ became commonplace as unemployed men travelled across the country in order to find work. In 1932 Cohn submitted this maquette of a sundowner to a competition for a full-scale sculpture to be erected in Fitzroy Gardens in Melbourne: unsurprisingly it was not chosen as the winning entry.
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with Bernard Smith’s The advance of Lot and his Brethren at centre and Albert Tucker’s The futile city at right Photo: Eugene Hyland
Installation view of Bernard Smith’s The advance of Lot and his Brethren from the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Bernard Smith (Australian, 1916-2011, England and Europe 1948-1951) The advance of Lot and his Brethren 1940 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gift of the artist, 2008
In the early 1930s, artists depicted the city as a modern utopia, a place of triumphant progress and aspiration later in the decades, a new radical iconography of the city as a place of moral decay and corruption appeared. Painted at the start of the Second World War, Lot and his brethren expresses Bernard Smith’s despair at the conflagration that the world had been plunged into. Based on the biblical story of Lot, who fled from God’s destruction of Sodom, Smith depicts Karl Marx as the saviour who leads his people from the burning city.
Albert Tucker (Australian, 1914-1999, Europe and United States 1947-1960) The futile city 1940 Oil on cardboard Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Melbourne Purchased from John and Sunday Reed, 1980
At the start of the Second World War Surrealism was an important influence upon Albert Tucker, as were the writings of T. S. Eliot. The futile city was inspired by Eliot’s epic poem The Waste Land (1922): ‘I came on T. S. Eliot, and instantly I recognised a twin soul because here was horror, outrage, despair, futility, and all the images that went with them. He confirmed my own feelings and also became a source … because of the images that would involuntarily form while I was reading the poetry’.
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with Yosl Bergner’s Citizen (c. 1940) at left Photo: Eugene Hyland
Installation view of Yosl Bergner’s Citizen (c. 1940) from the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Yosl Bergner was one of approximately 7000-8000 Jewish people, mainly from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, who arrived in Australia between 1933 and 1939 fleeing Nazi persecution. This number included many artists, musicians, architects, writers and intellectuals who were to contribute greatly to Australia’s cultural life. However, government policy remained opposed to large-scale intake of Jewish refugees, and some were met with anti-Semitic sentiments upon their arrival.
Installation view of Yvonne Atkinson The tram stop (1937) from the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Brave New World 1938 Gelatin silver photograph 29 x 20cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne William Kimpton Bequest, 2017
In 1935 Max Dupain referred to Aldous Huxley’s book Brave New World (1932) in his photograph of a woman trapped by technology. Dupain was attracted to this biting satire on the ethical dilemmas of social engineering because it appeared to endorse his own fervently held ideas of how modernity was affecting the individual and national body. At the time his choice to directly reference this book was surprisingly provocative: Brave New World had been banned by the Australian customs department, with existing copies rounded up and burned. Dupain returned again to the theme in 1938, producing this variant version.
Installation view of the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA with Max Dupain’s Brave New World (wall print) at centre rear with Sideboard and Chest of drawers at right Photo: Eugene Hyland
Installation view of Sideboard and Chest of drawers from the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Eugene Hyland
Unknown, Australia Sideboard 1920s-1940s Painted wood, wood, tin National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased NGV Foundation, 2013
Unknown, Australia Chest of drawers 1920s-1940s Painted wood, wood, tin National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased NGV Foundation, 2013
Unknown, Australia Sideboard 1920s-1940s Painted wood, wood, tin National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased NGV Foundation, 2013
Unknown, Australia Chest of drawers 1920s-1940s Painted wood, wood, tin National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased NGV Foundation, 2013
Working-class people were the most affected by the high levels of unemployment during the Depression. By 1932 more than 60,000 men, women and children were dependent on the susso, a state-based sustenance payment that enabled families to buy only the bare minimum of food. Many families unable to pay their rent were evicted from their homes. For those suffering economic hardship, ‘making do’ became a way of life, and furniture would be constructed from found items such as kerosene tins and packing crates.
J. M. Harcourt (writer) (Australian, 1902-1971) John Long (publisher) Upsurge 1934 London, March 1934 State Library Victoria, Melbourne
Censorship of books was vigorously pursued by federal and state governments during the 1930s. Australia was one of only two countries in the world to ban Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World when it was first published in 1932. Australian author J. M. Harcourt’s novel Upsurge (1934) was the first book to be banned following a recommendation by the newly established Book Censorship Board in 1934. Portraying the lives of Western Australia’s working class during the Depression, it was described by one customs official as ‘thinly disguised propaganda on behalf of Communism and social revolution’.
Activism
During the 1930s a small number of artists became active in the militant working-class struggle through their involvement in social and cultural organisations affiliated with the Communist Party, such as the Friends of the Soviet Union, the Workers’ Art Club and the Workers’ Theatre Group, which were formed in Sydney, Melbourne and other metropolitan centres. A number of these artists were also involved with a variety of mostly short-lived radical magazines, helping with their production, as well as providing covers and illustrations. Linocuts were a preferred medium for these artists, as the materials were inexpensive and the images reproduced well.
Jack Maughan (illustrator) (Australia 1897-1980) Masses Cover illustration for Masses, vol. 1, no. 1, printed by Bright Printing Services, published by the Workers’ Art Club, Melbourne, November 1932 1932 Linocut printed in red and black ink State Library Victoria, Melbourne
Installation view of Herbert McClintock’s cover illustration for Strife, vol. 1, no. 1 (1930) from the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Edited by eighteen-year-old communist Judah Waten, with Herbert McClintock as art editor, Strife declared itself ‘an organ of the new culture, destructive and constructive’. The first issue was due for release in October 1930; however, a blasphemous poem by Brian Fitzpatrick published in the magazine prompted a police raid on the Strife office and the editor’s hasty destruction of (most) copies of the issue.
Installation view of cover illustration for Proletariat, vol. 2, no. 1 (1933) by an unknown illustrator from the exhibition Brave New World: Australia 1930s at NGVA Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia Federation Square Corner of Russell and Flinders Streets, Melbourne
I have written critically and glowingly of Crewdson’s work in the past (see my review of his exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne 2012). With the exhibition Gregory Crewdson: Cathedral of the Pines the same elements are extant: life in the back woods of America, the tableaux beautifully staged and presented in large photographic prints throughout the three floors of the expansive spaces of the Photographers’ Gallery, London. And yet there is something particularly “icky”, if I can use that word, about this new body of work. What made me feel this way?
Firstly, I was uncomfortable with the number of naked or half-naked females (compared to men) in the photographs, all looking vulnerable, melancholic and isolated in small, rural town America. If this is how Crewdson sees women in the microcosms he creates – vulnerable women “pictured” in forest and cabin settings – this incessant observation is objectionable to me. These are not powerful, strong, independent women, far from it. These are stateless women who peer endlessly out of windows, or sit on the end of beds looking downcast. It is almost degrading to females that these woman are so passive and objectified. Reinforcing the theme of isolation and desperation is the word “HELP!” painted on the bridge above a naked woman standing on a roadway; reinforcing the feeling of voyeurism is a woman’s bra hanging in a toilet being observed by a man on a pair of skis.
Secondly, compared to the earlier series, the spaces in these new photographs seem to be completely dead. The photographs look handsome enough but they have a very different feel from the previous work. While externally referencing a sense of space and uncertainty present in B grade movies, European and American 19th century landscape paintings (where the human figure is dwarfed by the supposed sublime), and the paintings of Edward Hopper – the spaces in these new works feel closed, locked down and a bit scary. Nothing is real (and never has been) in Crewdson’s work but this time everything seems to be over directed. As my friend Elizabeth Gertsakis observed, “The environmental context is chilling. The palette is extremely cold, there is no warmth at all. The viewer is not welcome, because there is nothing to be welcome to… even for curiosity’s sake. No one is real here – everything is silent.” Or dead. Or lifeless.
The whole series seems apathetic. That is, apathy with extreme effort. While Crewdson observes that the darkness lifted, leading to a reconnection with his artistic process and a period of renewal and intense creativity, this work is clearly at the end of something. As Elizabeth comments, “An invisible wall has come down here… and there is absolutely no entry. This body of work is so much more pervy because it is so obvious and wooden. The camera here is well and truly in the mortuary and the photographer is the undertaker as well as the man who makes dead faces look ‘human’.” But he doesn’t make them human, and there’s the rub. Which all begs the question: where is this work going?
While Crewdson continues to move down a referential and associative path, the work fails to progress conceptually even as the work ultimately stagnates, both visually and emotionally. These wooden mise en scène are based on a very tired conceptual methodology, that of the narrative of the B grade movie which, if you have the money, time and willingness to invest in, can seem sufficiently sophisticated. Of course, buyers want to keep buying a signatory technique or idea that is easily recognisable and this adds to the cachet of the art… but as a critic you have to ask where the work is going, if an artist keeps repeating the same thing over and over and over again in slightly different contexts.
Imagine if Degas had kept painting ballet dancers using the same lighting, the same perspective, the same colour palette, the same psychological investigation painting after painting… what we would be saying about the resulting work? Sure, there is great technical proficiency contained in Crewdson’s work, but is he pushing the work anywhere more interesting?
And the simple answer to that question is, no he isn’t.
No wonder he has been having a tough time reconnecting with his artistic process.
“It was deep in the forests of Becket, Massachusetts that I finally felt darkness lift, experienced a reconnection with my artistic process, and moved into a period of renewal and intense creativity.”
This is the first UK exhibition of Cathedral of the Pines, a new body of work by acclaimed American artist Gregory Crewdson, and it is also the first time The Photographers’ Gallery has devoted all three of its gallery spaces to one artist.
With this series, produced between 2013 and 2014, Crewdson departs from his interest in uncanny suburban subjects and explores human relations within more natural environments. In images that recall nineteenth-century American and European paintings, Crewdson photographs figures posing within the small rural town of Becket, Massachusetts, and its vast surrounding forests, including the actual trail from which the series takes its title. Interior scenes charged with ambiguous narratives probe tensions between human connection and separation, intimacy and isolation.
Crewdson describes this project as ‘his most personal’, venturing to retrieve in the remote setting of the forest, a reminiscence of his childhood. The images in Cathedral of the Pines, located in the dystopian landscape of the anxious American imagination, create atmospheric scenes, many featuring local residents, and for the first time in Crewdson’s work, friends and family. In Woman at Sink, a woman pauses from her domestic chores, lost in thought. In Pickup Truck, Crewdson shows a nude couple in the flatbed of a truck in a dense forest – the woman seated, the man turned away in repose. Crewdson situates his disconsolate subjects in familiar settings, yet their cryptic actions – standing still in the snow, or nude on a riverbank – hint at invisible challenges. Precisely what these challenges are, and what fate awaits these anonymous figures, are left to the viewer’s imagination.
Crewdson’s careful crafting of visual suspense conjures forebears such as Diane Arbus, Alfred Hitchcock, and Edward Hopper, as well as the influence of Hollywood cinema and directors such as David Lynch. In Cathedral of the Pines, Crewdson’s persistent psychological leitmotifs evolve into intimate figurative dramas. Visually alluring and often deeply disquieting, these tableaux are the result of an intricate production process: For more than twenty years, Crewdson has used the streets and interiors of small-town America as settings for photographic incarnations of the uncanny.
Maintaining his trademark elaborate production processes, Crewdson works with a large crew to produce meticulously staged images with an obsessive attention to detail. Situated between Hollywood cinema and nineteenth-century American and European Romantic landscape painting, these scenes are charged with ambiguous narratives, which prove tensions between human connection and separation, intimacy and isolation.
Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website and wall text
Room 2
Gregory Crewdson. The VW Bus 2013
Gregory Crewdson. Pregnant Woman on Porch 2013
Gregory Crewdson. Father and Son 2013
Gregory Crewdson. The Ice Hut 2014
Gregory Crewdson. Sisters 2014
Gregory Crewdson. Sisters 2014 (detail)
Gregory Crewdson. The Disturbance 2014 (detail below)
I missed the closing date for this exhibition due to the ongoing problems with my hand. However, I believe it is valuable to post these images because Louise Lawler is an always provocative, thoughtful and interesting artist. She shines a light or, more possibly, pokes a big stick at patriarchal systems of value in art – turning perceived points of view, ways of seeing, and “the cultural circumstances that support art’s production, circulation, and presentation” on their head.
“… behind Ms. Lawler’s shape-shifting works lies a poetic intelligence, a political sharpness and an understanding of the artwork as a form of value, but also as a source and an object of love.”
Well said.
Lawler possesses a unique understanding of the forms of culture embodied within images and also an intimate knowledge of the archetypal forms buried deep within their bones. Is the pattern immanent in the paper (the cosmos), or is the paper a blank slate to be written on by the creator?
Distorted, restaged, reframed and re-presented for the times…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to MoMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
(Note on reproducing Lawler’s Adjusted to Fit works: Each time these images are reproduced, they should be stretched to the space given to the reproduction. The original file (un-stretched) is the origin point for anything that is then adjusted by the photo editor.)
Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW is the first major survey in New York of the artist Louise Lawler (American, b. 1947), spanning the 40-year creative output of one of the most influential artists working in the fields of image production and institutional critique. The exhibition takes its title from one of Lawler’s most iconic works, Why Pictures Now (1982), a black-and-white photograph showing a matchbook propped up in an ashtray. Reminiscent of an advertising photograph or a film noir still, it asks the viewer to consider why the work takes the form of a picture, and why the artist is making pictures now. Lawler came of age as part of the Pictures Generation, a loosely knit, highly independent group of artists named for an influential exhibition, Pictures, organised in 1977 by art historian Douglas Crimp at Artists Space in New York. These artists used photography and appropriation-driven strategies to examine the functions and codes of representation. Lawler’s signature style was established in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when she began taking pictures of other artists’ works displayed in collectors’ homes, museums, storage spaces, and auction houses to question the value, meaning, and use of art.
WHY PICTURES NOW is organised by Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, with Kelly Sidley, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography.
“Ms. Lawler and Roxana Marcoci, the exhibition’s curator, have devised something quite different: an open, airy survey with lots of room for roaming, some chairs for sitting and two conjoined, markedly different halves focusing on Ms. Lawler’s activities with pictures and then words. The first half is dominated by photographs in various shapes and guises, including mural-size images. The second, which seems almost empty at first, contains two large vitrines of ephemera that show off Ms. Lawler’s gifts for graphic design and for language, with displays of everything from matchbook covers and napkins to exhibition announcements and art books that she photo-edited. …
Ms. Lawler’s images have multiple lives, exposing the ceaseless flexibility of photographs. Constantly recycled, they go from framed and portable to paperweights to the wall-covering murals of her “adjusted to fit” series. In the show’s first half, four “adjusted” photos cover immense, staggered walls, looming like ocean liners sliding out of their docks. Their monumentality thrills but also chides the art world for its embrace of spectacle and the overblown. …
It is hard to know if these words [“Why Pictures Now”] proclaim the power, or the worthlessness, of pictures. Probably both. Either way, behind Ms. Lawler’s shape-shifting works lies a poetic intelligence, a political sharpness and an understanding of the artwork as a form of value, but also as a source and an object of love.”
Join us for a conversation with MoMA director Glenn Lowry and curator Roxana Marcoci on the opening of the exhibition, Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW. The first New York museum survey of the work of American artist Louise Lawler, this exhibition is an exploration of her creative output, which has inspired fellow artists and cultural thinkers alike for the past four decades.
Among the most intriguing aspects of Lawler’s working process is her continuous re-presentation, reframing, or restaging in the present, a strategy through which she revisits her own images by transferring them to different formats – from photographs to paperweights, tracings, and works she calls “adjusted to fit” (images stretched or expanded to fit the location of their display). Lawler’s critical strategies of reformatting existing content not only suggest the idea that pictures can have more than one life, but underpin the intentional, relational character of her farsighted art.
Louise Lawler | HOW TO SEE the artist with MoMA curator Roxana Marcoci
Can the exact same image have a completely different meaning if its title or medium is changed? Explore the work of one of today’s most influential female artists, Louise Lawler, in the new exhibition Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW.
MoMA curator Roxana Marcoci gives us a tour of the exhibition that charts Lawler’s continuous re-presentation, reframing, or restaging of the present, a strategy through which Lawler revisits her own images by transferring them to different formats – from photographs to paperweights, tracings, and works she calls “adjusted to fit” (images stretched or expanded to fit the location of their display).
Louise Lawler’s Birdcalls at MoMA
You’re not hearing things. For the duration of the Louise Lawler exhibition, a stroll through our Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden places you squarely in the middle of Birdcalls, the artist’s defiant, humorous critique of the art world’s captivation with male artists. Find out what exhibition inspired Lawler’s sole sound piece with MoMA curator Roxana Marcoci.
Lawler’s study of art in its commercial context will be complemented by the display of a work by a younger artist that highlights a different kind of economy. The sculpture New York State Unified Court System (top photo), by artist Cameron Rowland, included in the artist’s knockout exhibition at Artists Space this winter, takes the form of four oak benches used in courtrooms and built using prison labour.
“Swimming among the show’s images are words and wordplay that can have a few layers. One of Ms. Lawler’s better-known photographs shows Jasper Johns’s creamy “White Flag” (1955) hanging above a bed with an equally creamy monogrammed satin spread. The image is sensibly titled “Monogram,” all the more fittingly since “Monogram” is also the title of one of Robert Rauschenberg’s combines from the 1950s, when he and Mr. Johns were lovers.
“Lawler’s suspicion of the image is nothing new. In WHY PICTURES NOW, her career survey currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, the Pictures Generation artist is again and again engaged in taking the familiar – a famous work of art, different forms of banal ephemera – and making it abnormal through clever subversion. There is a timid jostling of her male peers, a slight nudge off the pedestal of reverence, which is evident in much of her work and makes it eminently appealing – even if some of its institutional critique is diminished under the museum’s glow of prestige. But what is often obscured in Lawler’s work is the way that it’s not only questioning the apparatus of making and displaying art, but also its reception – the formalised way that we, the spectators, are looking.”
The Museum of Modern Art announces Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW, the first major survey in New York of the artist Louise Lawler (American, b. 1947). Spanning the 40-year creative output of one of the most influential artists working in the fields of image production and institutional critique, the exhibition will be on view from April 30 to July 30, 2017, in The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor, along with one sound work, Birdcalls (1972-1981), which will be installed in The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. The exhibition takes its title from one of Lawler’s most iconic works, Why Pictures Now (1982), a black-and-white photograph showing a matchbook propped up in an ashtray. Reminiscent of an advertising photograph or a film noir still, it asks the viewer to consider why the work takes the form of a picture, and why the artist is making pictures at this moment. Lawler came of age as part of the Pictures Generation, a loosely knit, highly independent group of artists named for an influential exhibition, Pictures, organised in 1977 by art historian Douglas Crimp at Artists Space in New York. These artists used photography and appropriation-driven strategies to examine the functions and codes of representation. Lawler’s signature style was established in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when she began taking pictures of other artists’ works displayed in collectors’ homes, museums, storage spaces, and auction houses to question the value, meaning, and use of art. WHY PICTURES NOW is organised by Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, with Kelly Sidley, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography.
Lawler’s work offers a defiant, witty, and sustained feminist analysis of the strategies that inform art’s production and reception. In 1971, she was invited to assist several artists for independent curator Willoughby Sharp’s Pier 18, an exhibition that featured 27 male artists on an abandoned pier on the Hudson River. While walking home after leaving the pier one evening, Lawler began to mimic birdlike sounds in order to ward off any unwanted interactions, chanting “Willoughby! Willoughby!” This parody evolved into Birdcalls, a seven-minute audio piece in which Lawler squawks, chirps, and twitters the names of famous male artists, from Vito Acconci to Lawrence Weiner – an astute critique of the name recognition enjoyed by her male contemporaries. Birdcalls thematises Lawler’s strategy of resistance to the authoritative and the patronymic proper name. This work will be played throughout the course of the exhibition, in MoMA’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.
An intriguing aspect of Lawler’s practice is her process of continuous re-presentation, reframing, or restaging in the present: she revisits her own work by transferring her images to different formats, from a photograph to a tracing, and to works that she calls “adjusted to fit.” The “tracings” are large-format black-and-white line versions of her photographs that eliminate colour and detail, functioning instead as “ghosts” of the originals. “Adjusted to fit” images are stretched or expanded to fit the location of their display, not only suggesting the idea that pictures can have more than one life, but also underpinning the intentional, relational character of Lawler’s farsighted art.
The exhibition consists of a sequence of mural-scale, “adjusted to fit” images set in dynamic relation to non-linear groupings of photographs – of collectors’ homes, auction houses, and museum installations – distinctive of Lawler’s conceptual exercises. Additionally, a deceptively empty gallery presents black-and-white tracings of Lawler’s photographs that have been printed on vinyl and mounted directly on the wall. A display of the artist’s ephemera from the 1970s to today highlights the feminist and performative undercurrents of her art. Lawler’s long history of artistic collaborations, with Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, Andrea Fraser, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Christopher d’Arcangelo, Peter Nadin, and Lawrence Weiner, among others, come full circle in the ephemera on display. Furthermore, on the platform outside the gallery space, two “adjusted to fit” images are shown together with Cameron Rowland’s work New York State Unified Court System. Comprised of four oak courtroom benches, it was included in Rowland’s exhibition 91020000, presented at Artists Space in 2016. Lawler and Rowland share an interest in examining the imbalances of exploitative economies, the use value and exchange value of art, the politics of space, and the interplay of power between human relations and larger institutional structures, including markets, museums, prisons, and governments. Additionally, Andrea Fraser will perform her work May I Help You? in the exhibition space. In foregrounding her work’s relationship to the economies of collaboration and exchange, Lawler shifts focus from the individual picture to the broader history of art. Her careful attention to artistic contexts, modes of presentation, and viewers’ receptions generates witty, affective situations that contribute to institutional transformation.
One of her most famous images, “Pollock and Tureen” (1984), shows a fragment of a painting by Jackson Pollock above an antique soup tureen. In the photograph, the colour relationships are clear, offering insight into the choices of the collectors who “arranged” (a favourite word of Lawler’s) the scene. The work is about class, capitalism, and domesticity, not to mention reality and fiction. But when all the site-specific context is removed [in the tracing] … all we’re left with is contemplating the original Lawler artwork’s role in art history and the market.
In Benjamin Buchloh’s essay for Lawler’s retrospective last year at the Museum Ludwig, one of his most cogent points is about the nature of melancholy in her original photographs. “[H]er images,” he writes, “leave equally little doubt that there is hardly a more melancholic space than that of a fulfilled and seemingly satisfied utopian aspiration, one that has, however, not quite lived up to the originary promises … “
Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897) Örnen efter landningen. Ur serien Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd, 14/7 1897 14/7 1897. The Eagle Balloon after landing From the series The Flight of the Eagle 1897/1930 Gelatin silver print
While there are some outstanding photographs in this posting, the selection seems rather ad hoc. It is always good to see the work of Julia Margaret Cameron and other illuminati of late 19 century photography, but the highlight in this posting are the ethereal and tragic photographs from the Eagle polar expedition.
We can only be grateful that so many negatives have survived, a testament to both the photographer, the developer and the coldness of the ice, leaving us with such transcendent images of human endurance.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Moderna Museet for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897) 14/7 1897. After the crash From the series The Flight of the Eagle 1897/1930 Gelatin silver print Some rights reserved by Tekniska museet
Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897) Setting up-camp, raising the Swedish flag From the series The Flight of the Eagle 1897/1930 Gelatin silver print Some rights reserved by Tekniska museet
Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897) Moving a boat through the icy waters From the series The Flight of the Eagle 1897/1930 Gelatin silver print Some rights reserved by Tekniska museet
Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897)
In July 1897, Salomon August Andrée (1854-1897) embarked on his voyage to the North Pole in the balloon Örnen [The Eagle], accompanied by the engineer Knut Frænkel (1870-1897) and the photographer Nils Strindberg. A few days later, the balloon crashed on the ice, and they were forced to continue their journey on foot. The conditions were severe, and the expedition ended in disaster. After a few months, in October, they made up camp on Kvitøya on Svalbard. This is where their bodies were found thirty years later, along with Strindberg’s camera.
The expedition and the events surrounding it, were widely publicised both at the time of the expedition, and later when they were found. Per Olof Sundman’s book The Flight of the Eagle (1967) was turned into a film by Jan Troell in 1982. Although these photographs were taken as scientific observations, and to document the work of the members of the expedition, they now appear as some of the most remarkable and beautiful photographs in polar history.
John Hertzberg (1871-1935) was a photographer and docent at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He was commissioned to develop the exposed films, and managed successfully to process ninety-three of Strindberg’s photographs. He made copies of the negatives, which were used to produce the prints on paper that are now at institutions including Moderna Museet, the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm and Grenna Museum – Polarcenter in Gränna.
The original negatives ended up at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Hertzberg re-touched some of the pictures, and these are primarily the ones that have been published and embody the public perception of the expedition. Moderna Museet has both sets, and the re-touched photographs are shown above the un-retouched versions in this exhibition.
Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897) At camp From the series The Flight of the Eagle 1897/1930 Gelatin silver print Some rights reserved by Tekniska museet
Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897) Camp on White Island From the series The Flight of the Eagle 1897/1930 Gelatin silver print Some rights reserved by Tekniska museet
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Four Shelves of Books 1844 Salted Paper Print
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
The Scientist William Henry Fox Talbot in Britain experimented with various silver salt solutions on paper. In the mid-1830s, he succeeded in producing a negative image on photosensitive paper in a camera and had thus ingeniously invented the negative.
In 1844-1846, he published what could be regarded as the first photographically illustrated magazine, The Pencil of Nature, in which he described the technique and how photography could be used in practice. He himself claimed that its most important use was to produce evidence, but he also had artistic ambitions for his photographic images. It was Talbot who eventually launched the term “photography” (writing with light) for his invention. Many different words and metaphors were used to describe this new medium, but photography was soon established as its proper name.
Oscar Gustave Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Lesson 1860 Albumen silver print
Carl Jacob Malmberg (Swedish, 1824-1895) The copper quay and the polishing works at Fiskars bruk, Finland 1872 Albumen silver print
Fiskars (Swedish, Finnish: Fiskari) is a village in the town of Raseborg (Raasepori) in western Uusimaa, Finland. The village is the site of the former Fiskars Bruk, which was founded in 1646 and gave rise to the company Fiskars.
The exhibition Written in Light – The First Photographers explores Moderna Museet’s collection of photography from the second half of the 19th century. It includes the Museum’s unique collection of daguerreotypes and works by a few of the world’s most famous photographers: Julia Margaret Cameron, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, and Carleton E. Watkins.
Since its invention, photography has developed, changed, and been used for many different aims and purposes. With the breakthrough of digital images, and their omnipresence in social media, photography is once again in a period of change. This gives all the more reason to look back and consider the impact of its legacy on contemporary photography. This exhibition highlights the Museum’s collection of daguerreotypes, but also gives examples of other early photographic techniques.
Thanks to two significant acquisitions in the mid-1960s, the Helmut Gernsheim Duplicate Collection, and the Helmer Bäckström Photographic Collection, some of the most internationally famous photographers in history are represented at Moderna Museet.
Before and Behind the Lens
Written in Light and Film Inside an Image are part of the photographic project Before and Behind the Lens, which consists of a series of exhibitions, discussions and guided tours. Before and Behind the Lens examines the role of photographic images in art and the transformation of the medium since the early experiments with new technology in the 19th century, to today’s explorations of the potential of the optical lens. Moderna Museet has one of Europe’s finest collections of photography, ranging from pioneers such as Julia Margaret Cameron to many of the most influential contemporary artists who visualise the world for us with the camera lens.
Press release from Moderna Museet
Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill Misses Grierson c. 1845 Salted paper print, calotype
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) and David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
The first prominent calotype practitioners were active in Scotland, which was exempt from Talbot’s patent restrictions. David Octavius Hill was a portrait painter, and Robert Adamson an engineer. In 1843, they began collaborating as photographers, after Hill had been assigned to portray a group of clergymen and laymen who had left the Church of Scotland and founded the Free Church of Scotland. Hill wanted to use photographs to create individual portraits of the several hundred participants in this assembly.
It took them more than a year to produce a calotype of each member, and the painting took another 20 years for Hill to complete. They continued working together for four years, until Adamson’s premature death, producing nearly 3,000 photographs of architecture, landscapes, but especially portraits, which they always signed together. They also documented working women and men in the fishing village of Newhaven near Edinburgh in a natural and personal style that was unusual for that period.
Salted Paper Print, Calotype
Silver in common salt on/in paper 1839 – c. 1870
A paper is first soaked in a saline solution and then brushed on one side with silver nitrate, forming light-sensitive silver chloride. After allowing the paper to dry in the dark, it is exposed in sunlight for hours, in contact with a negative, until the image appears (printing-out). Excess silver chloride is then subjected to fixation in a strong saline solution or in sodium thiosulphate and is rinsed away in water. Subsequent gold toning (after 1849) lent the picture a richer tonal range and greater permanence. After 1850 they were often waxed and/or sometimes coated with a layer of albumen. Salted paper prints have a matte finish, and the paper fibres of the support are clearly visible in magnification. When fixed in salt, the image tone is reddish brown; in sodium sulphate it is a yellowish orange. Permanence is relatively low, and when faded or discoloured the prints turn to a yellowish brown. This technique was the first used to reproduce an image on paper from a negative. Although the term calotype is sometimes used, a calotype is actually a salted paper negative.
Johan Wilhelm Bergström (Swedish, 1812-1881) Self-Portrait c 1850 Daguerreotype
In 1844 Bergström became a photographer, an occupation he would hold for about ten years. As a daguerreotypist he became diligently engaged, and took pictures of the great people of the day. He also took a series of topographic images, which today are of great value. During a visit to Uppsala in 1845, he captured what is today the oldest known photographic image of the city, as well as a stereoscope image.
Daguerreotype
Amalgam on silver-coated copper 1839 – c. 1865
A copper plate is coated with a thin layer of silver, buffed and treated with iodine vapour in a closed container, transforming the silver to light-sensitive silver iodide. After being exposed in the camera for 10-30 minutes, the image is developed in heated mercury vapour. Silver and mercury form a white amalgam and the image is a reverse, low contrast positive. The picture was initially fixed in a saline bath, later in a bath of sodium sulphite. A subsequent toning in gold solution strengthened the sharpness and stability of the image. To protect the image against chemical and physical damage, the plate was tightly sealed with mats and glass and often enclosed in a case. Daguerreotypes are detailed, neutral in tone, sometimes hand-tinted, and are easily distinguishable by their alternately negative and positive impressions, depending on the angle of the light in which they are viewed.
Marcus Selmer (Danish worked Norway, 1819-1900) Bride from Birkeland 1855 Daguerreotype, hand coloured
Marcus Selmer (Danish worked Norway, 1819-1900) Bride from Birkeland (detail) 1855 Daguerreotype, hand coloured
It is not immediately clear what drew Marcus Selmer (1819-1900), a Danish portrait photographer, to spend most of his life working in Norway. He trained as a pharmacist in his native Denmark, and was working in a chemist owned by his uncle when he discovered daguerreotype photography. He experimented with this new technology in his spare time and began sending his pictures in to local exhibitions. In 1852, Selmer travelled to Norway, to visit some of his uncle’s family in the city of Bergen. He never returned.
He soon found work as a photographer in Bergen and, within a year, was able to establish his own studio. This became the first permanent photographic studio in Bergen, as few photographers who visited would stay all year round. Photographers often visited Bergen in the summer, hoping to capture the fjords and mountains that surround the area, but, as they needed good light for their work, the dark and cold weather had driven most of them away by the time winter rolled around. Selmer ingeniously built his studio almost entirely out of glass, allowing enough light into the space, which enabled him to continue working throughout the year.
Selmer’s work quickly became well-known throughout Norway. He sold many books of his photographs, and sold individual images to the press and the burgeoning tourist industry, before eventually being appointed the royal photographer in 1880. Although his career was varied, Selmer is primarily remembered today for his portraits of local people in national folk costume… These photographs depict the customs, traditions and culture of the Norwegian people, and reflect Selmer’s interest in his adopted home.
Carl Jacob Malmberg (Swedish, 1824-1895) Maria Catharina Malmberg with Children c. 1860 Ambrotype
Ambrotype
Silver in collodion on glass 1854 – c. 1880
A glass plate, coated with silver halogens in collodion, is sensitised with silver nitrate and then exposed wet in the camera. After being developed in iron sulphate – occasionally with the addition of silver nitrate – and fixed in potassium cyanide and washed, the plate is allowed to dry. The picture is then lacquered or protected with a sheet of glass, and the back is coated with black lacquer, textile, or cardboard so that the picture – actually a thin negative – is seen as a positive. It is a direct positive which is often tastefully displayed with mats and under glass in cases. Ambrotypes have a neutral tone, but are sometimes hand-tinted. The surface is characterised by a typical “doubleness”, as high-keys can be seen in the negative on the glass surface and low-keys against the dark background lining.
Oscar Gustave Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) No title (Shoeless boy playing whistle) c. 1860 Albumen silver print
Oscar Gustave Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875)
One of few internationally famous Swedish photographers is Oscar Gustave Rejlander, but little is known of his early life in Sweden. He settled in Britain around 1840, where he worked as a photographer until he died. He had probably studied art and was interested in art history. His works show distinct influences from Italian renaissance, Spanish baroque, Dutch 17th-century painting and the British Pre-Raphaelites.
In his studio, he would build and photograph a kind of “tableaux vivants”, or staged scenes. Perhaps the most famous of Rejlander’s works is The Two Ways of Life from 1857, a negative montage consisting of some 30 exposures combined into a composition. Rejlander’s oeuvre also includes a series of pictures of poor children and families. Towards the end of his life, Rejlander met Charles Darwin and was commissioned to illustrate his acclaimed book The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).
Oscar Gustave Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) The Two Ways of Life 1857 Albumen silver print
In 1857 Rejlander made his best-known allegorical work, The Two Ways of Life. This was a seamlessly montaged combination print made of thirty-two images in about six weeks. First exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, the work shows two youths being offered guidance by a patriarch. Each youth looks toward a section of a stage-like tableaux vivant – one youth is shown the virtuous pleasures and the other the sinful pleasures. (Wikipedia)
Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) Down the Valley, Yosemite 1861 Albumen silver print
Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) Tutueamela, El Capitan, 3000ft, Yosemite 1861 Albumen silver print
Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
Voyages of discovery, nature and landscapes were popular motifs for the early photographers. The growing tourism increased demand for pictures from exotic places, making this a source of income for publishers of photographic literature. The American West was one such region, and some of the photographers who began working there also documented the American Civil War. One of the most prominent of these was Carleton E. Watkins, who had travelled and photographed the Yosemite Valley on several occasions in the first half of the 1860s.
In his large-format photographs, so-called mammoth prints, he captured the massive mountain formations, dramatic waterfalls and gigantic trees. His heavy equipment was carried by some ten mules, and it is almost a miracle, considering the difficult conditions, that so many of his photographs survived.
A definite advancement in the process of creating negatives was made by the Brit Frederick Scott Archers (1813-1857), who discovered how to use glass sheets for the negative instead of paper. Collodion was used to bind the necessary silver salt to the glass, but it could only be exposed while wet, hence the term wet plate process. The glass negatives gave sharp details, and a large number of paper prints could be made from one negative.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) The Mother of Salome 1870 Albumen silver print
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) The Angel at the Tomb 1870 Albumen silver print
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
In Victorian Britain, a small group of photographers were the very first to attempt to create and formulate art photography. Julia Margaret Cameron, who belonged to this group, left behind a fantastic collection of intimate portraits of her family and large circle of friends. She was an amateur photographer who was active mainly in the 1860s and 1870s.
Her staged pictures, inspired by myths, biblical stories and English literature, have a characteristically expressive soft focus. Cameron’s photographs are reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites and renaissance painting. The Moderna Museet collection of Julia Margaret Cameron includes portraits of Charles Darwin, Henry Taylor and Alfred Tennyson, along with staged tableaux of The Angel at the Grave and the melodramatic Maud from one of Tennyson’s most famous poems. Cameron’s last major photographic project in the UK, before she and her family moved to Ceylon, present Sri Lanka, was to illustrate Tennyson’s work Idylls of the King (1874-75).
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Maud “There has Fallen a splendid Tear From the Passion Flower at the Gate” 1875 Illustration to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Other Poems. Sitter is Mary Ann Hillier Albumen silver print
Albumen Silver Print
Silver in albumen on paper 1850 – c. 1900
A paper is brushed with a solution of albumen (egg white) and table salt and is allowed to dry. It is then bathed in silver nitrate and again allowed to dry, this time in darkness. Albumen, salt and silver form an emulsion containing light-sensitive silver salts which are exposed in daylight in direct contact with a negative until the desired image appears (printing-out). Residual light-sensitive silver salts are then removed through fixation, and the picture is washed in water. After 1855, most albumen silver photographs were gold-toned, followed by additional fixation and rinsing. Commercially produced albumen silver paper became available in 1863. Albumen silver prints have a thin paper support and are therefore normally mounted. The surface is usually glossy, and the tone may vary from yellow / red / brown to a violet blue, depending on exposure time and toning. Prints commonly change in tone to yellow / yellow-green in high-keys due to deterioration of the albumen. In magnification characteristic cracks can be seen.
Rosalie Sjöman (Swedish, 1833-1919) Alma Sjöman c. 1875 Albumen silver print, hand coloured
Rosalie Sjöman (Swedish, 1833-1919)
Rosalie Sjöman was one of many prominent women photographers. She opened a studio in 1864 on Drott-ninggatan 42 in Stockholm, after being widowed with three small children. The photographer Carl Jacob Malmberg had had his studio at this address previously, and there are some indications that Sjöman may have been working for him. Her business prospered, and towards the end of the 1870s Rosalie Sjöman had five female employees, and she seems to have chosen to hire women only. R. Sjöman & Comp. later opened studios on Regeringsgatan 6, and in Kalmar, Halmstad and Vaxholm.
Her oeuvre includes numerous carte-de-visite portraits and larger so-called cabinet cards, with a mixture of classic portraits, various staged scenes, people wear-ing local folk costumes, and mosaics. The expertly hand-tinted photographs are especially eye-catching; several of them portray her daughter Alma Sjöman.
In the 1860s, photography progressed from being an exclusive novelty into a more widespread and popular medium. The popular carte-de-visite were introduced in France in the mid-1850s, but became extremely fashionable when Emperor Napoleon III had his portrait made in the new format (6 x 9 cm). This trend spread rapidly, and portrait studios opened in large cities and smaller towns. This cartomania lasted for a decade, and the market stabilised around the mid-1870s, when the photographic medium entered a calmer phase.
Carl Jacob Malmberg (Swedish, 1824-1895) No title From the series Gymnastics c. 1875 Albumen silver print
Carl Jacob Malmberg (Swedish, 1824-1895)
The collection Carl Jacob Malmberg left behind includes most photographic techniques and image types. He is also an example of a photographer’s career development after the first innovative period in the 1840s and up to the 1890s. Malmberg was born in Finland and first studied to be a goldsmith in St Petersburg, where he also learned photography.
He moved to Stockholm, where he opened a studio in 1859 on Drottninggatan 42, and later on Norrtullsgatan 2, and finally on Regeringsgatan 6. Around this period, when cartes-de-visite portraits came into fashion, Malmberg’s practice really took off. On a visit to Finland in 1872, he took a series of photographs at Fiskars iron mill, documenting all the workshops and buildings. A slightly odd portfolio in Malmberg’s collection consists of more than 100 pictures of gymnasts. He had been commissioned by Hjalmar Ling at the Gymnastiska Centralinstitutet in Stockholm to take these pictures to illustrate the book Förkortad Öfversikt af allmän Rörelselära (Short Summary of General Exercise Physiology, 1880).
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson William Etty 1844/c. 1880 Carbon Print Reproduction photo: Prallan Allsten/Moderna Museet
Carbon Print
Charcoal (and colour) pigments and potassium bichromate in gelatin on paper 1864 – c. 1930
An emulsion with pigment and potassium dichromate in gelatin on thin paper is exposed in contact with a negative in daylight. The gelatin is hardened in relation to the amount of light during the exposure. The soaked paper is then turned over and pressed against a new support, coated with insoluble gelatin. The original support comes off in a bath of warm water or may be pulled off, and leaves an image with hardened pigmented gelatin. Any unexposed gelatin can then be washed off. The picture is finally subjected to an alum bath to remove the residual light-sensitive dichromate and to further harden the remaining gelatin. The result is a reversed image. It can be corrected by first reversing the negative or by transferring the image to a new support (Autotype).
Bühler and Höchheimer: A direct process on fabricated papers which were sensitised in alcohol, exposed in contact with a negative and developed in water. Carbon prints have a clear relief character with raised and glossy low-key areas. The tone is usually deep brown or black, but may vary with the choice of pigment. In magnification the emulsion gives a “ragged” impression, especially in high-keys.
Carl Curman (Swedish, 1833-1913) Waldemarsudde 1888 1888 Cyanotype
Carl Curman (Swedish, 1833-1913)
The physician Carl Curman had many interests, and studied both medicine and art as a young man. Eventually, he became a famous balneologist, and initiated the plan for public baths in Stockholm and eventually also the Sturebadet swimming baths.
He built a photographic studio at the Karolinska Institute in the early 1860s, and was a pioneer of medical photography, before being appointed a professor of plastic anatomy at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1869. His lectures have been documented, in pictures showing students gathered around Curman for dissections. These photographic studies of the human anatomy were also used in the emerging field of eugenics – a troubling part of Western history.
Curman was never a professional photographer, but is one of the many practitioners who have made their mark on the history of photography. His more private projects include pictures from Lysekil, where he worked as a balneologist, from Stockholm where he lived, and from various travels abroad, together with his wife Calla Curman, co-founder of the women’s society Nya Idun.
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Moderna Museet is ten minutes away from Kungsträdgården, and twenty minutes from T-Centralen or Gamla Stan. Walk past Grand Hotel and Nationalmuseum on Blasieholmen, opposite the Royal Palace. After crossing the bridge to Skeppsholmen, continue up the hill. The entrance to Moderna Museet and Arkitekturmuseet is on the left-hand side.
Elizabeth Gertsakis (Australian, b. 1954) Children Playing (detail) 2017 Digital prints on metallic silver acrylic 39 x 163cm
Conquering Orientalism
A beautiful, sensitive, sensual even, exhibition by the wonderful Elizabeth Gertsakis at William Mora Galleries. The artist forms a living relationship with early images of women and children from the Prefecture of Florina – mostly taken from that most vernacular form of photograph, the postcard – something that was sold as souvenir to the tourist trade, or posted to loved ones overseas.
Gertsakis identifies with their ethnicities and beliefs and physical appearances, transmuting their identities and narratives by printing these ephemeral objects on steel, that most durable of substances, which makes them shine under the gallery lights. The photographs both transcend time and transcend the physicality of the actual photograph… making their hidden histories a precious, and contemporary, thing. Like their protagonists, the steel makes the images and the people in them hardy enough to survive the vicissitudes thrust upon these communal people.
Gertsakis observes, “My voice is in placing myself between the present and the past as it has been generated by the cameras of others.” Beautifully enunciated. With her deep familial roots in the area – one that endured nearly five hundred years of Islamic rule and culture, as well as multiple ethnic communities and religions; Christian Greeks, Slavs, Bulgarians, Jews, Turkic and Albanian Moslems, Vlachs and Gypsies – Gertsakis creates witness and testament to her own communal familial past.
The rare and unique costumes come from the artists personal collection and when I was in the gallery space there seemed to be this electricity flowing between the images and the cloth. It was almost as though the people in the photographs were dancing again, were speaking to us today of their trials and tribulations, of their energy to survive the turmoil of the first decades of the 20th century.
Elizabeth is first generation… her father and grandfather and grandmothers… were those people…. exactly as they appear. They survived the yoke of the oppressor and conquered Orientalism. These are their valuable, inspiring stories, beautifully told.
Installation view of the exhibition Girls In Our Town: Women in the Shadow of ‘The Magnificent Empire’ Florina Prefecture & Region, Macedonia Greece 1900-1917, 2017 by Elizabeth Gertsakis at William Mora Galleries, Richmond Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Elizabeth Gertsakis (Australian, b. 1954) Florina 2017 Digital prints on metallic silver acrylic 39 x 174cm
Elizabeth Gertsakis (Australian, b. 1954) Dancing Macedonian Girls 2017 Digital prints on metallic silver acrylic 39 x 136cm
Installation view of the exhibition Girls In Our Town: Women in the Shadow of ‘The Magnificent Empire’ Florina Prefecture & Region, Macedonia Greece 1900-1917, 2017 by Elizabeth Gertsakis at William Mora Galleries, Richmond Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Girls In Our Town: Women in the Shadow of ‘The Magnificent Empire’ Florina Prefecture & Region, Macedonia Greece 1900-1917, 2017 by Elizabeth Gertsakis at William Mora Galleries, Richmond Photo: Marcus Bunyan
I was born in the town of Florina, Macedonia, Greece. This town is in the top north western part of Greece adjacent to Albania, FYROM and Bulgaria. My family migrated to Australia in 1954 and I was educated in Australia
Florina was an oriental (ανατολικό) town belonging to the Ottoman Empire which controlled Greece from 1453 to 1922; the people of Florina were a mesh of multiple ethnic communities and religions; Christian Greeks, Slavs, Bulgarians, Jews, Turkic and Albanian Moslems, Vlachs and Gypsies. These religious groups lived and worked together in close proximity. Florina was a typical Balkan town in the later stages of the decline of Ottoman rule in the Balkans.
From 1903-1918, and including World War One (1914) and the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922 the entire northern territories of the Graeco-Balkan Peninsula (including Serbia) suffered great population losses through wars, cataclysmic population displacements (ethnic cleansing) and population exchanges. Refugee diaspora was moving in all directions, across from east to west in both directions. This vast political re-construction of Europe and the Balkans may have initially started from wars of revolutionary independence from the Ottomans, and subsequent internal Balkan expansionist claims to new territory, but it was the conflagration of the First World War that irreversibly rocked its cultural foundations for the future, beyond any political value in the creation of new national states in the Balkans and Asia Minor.
This history of diaspora and displacement laid down a new pattern for the twentieth century and into the twenty first century; a set of historical problems that had and continue to have irreversible impact on the function of community memory in relation to identity experienced by each succeeding wave of refugees and migrants who abandon everything in the simple need to escape and to survive.
I have chosen to highlight the consequences of cultural uprooting on memory and identity through the images of women from Florina, taken by various known and unknown photographers in the period from 1900-1918. These photographs were taken by people who may have had commercial or political intentions in the first instance but the resulting image does not always remain in the control of its original maker. Gender is important in this exhibition because it has been traditionally the female that carries the symbolic function of ritual and memory in relation to culture and identity, and ultimately, the idea and meaning of where belonging and home is. In other words the responsibility falls on the refugee and migrant woman if there is any question or ambivalence or sense of lack. This responsibility remains a constant memorial and cognitive challenge to the psyche of the female survivor, refugee and migrant.
I have used archival photographic images and reconfigured them to create a narrative representing difference. They have been extracted from their solitary sources from commercial photography, press photography and the archives of the Photographic Section of the French Army (Campaign d’Orient 1916-1918).
The installations invite entry into unknown individual histories and emphasis shared past communal lives even though there were multiple political differences and historical consequences. The original images were the result of various kinds of personal and spatial exploitation, both desired and undesired. Photography as a commercial technology played a profound role in the identification and changing of the global meaning of identity that resulted from death during war, disruption and the re-allocation of populations.
Today this usage of images of diaspora continues in the same way via 24/7 news and the internet. I feel it is important to examine female representation during times of crisis and trauma. My desire is that this exhibition encourages multiple narratives and a focus on recognition and justice for minorities internationally and in Australia, as well as the recognition and diversity of individual authenticity. Within the stereotype I look for authenticity, not for any kind of ethnic purity; and I know this is the case both within multicultural as well as the liberal concerns for justice and human rights issues in regard to minorities in contemporary art. As a woman it is the moment when, through my life in art, history and photography, that I accepted the bequest of my own historically difficult position as being the reality of my own identity.
Elizabeth Gertsakis, July 2017
Elizabeth Gertsakis (Australian, b. 1954) Lerinki 2017 Digital prints on metallic silver acrylic 39 x 72cm
Elizabeth Gertsakis (Australian, b. 1954) Beautiful Macedonians 2017 Digital prints on metallic silver acrylic 39 x 68cm
Elizabeth Gertsakis (Australian, b. 1954) Noli Me Tangere (Don’t Touch Me) 2017 Digital prints on metallic silver acrylic 60 x 91cm
William Mora Galleries 60 Tanner St, Richmond VIC 3121, Australia Phone: +61 3 9429 1199
Opening hours: Wednesday – Friday 10am – 4pm or by appointment
My hand is progressing slowly. A return to part-time work in the next couple of weeks, for which I will be grateful. It has been tough road dealing with this injury.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Antoine-Louis Barye (French, 1796-1875) Walking tiger Tigre qui marche c. 1841, cast 1900 Bronze National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest, 1927
John Armstrong (English, 1893-1973) Invocation 1938 Tempera on plywood National Gallery of Victoria Purchased with funds donated by Ian Hicks AM and Dorothy Hicks, 2006
Invocation is one of a series of paintings, which John Armstrong begun in the 1930’s as a direct statement against the rise of Fascism in Europe. John Armstrong observed Fascism in Italy at first hand and became an active left wing campaigner against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. He was commissioned as an official war artist, designing a cover for a leaflet in the 1945 election campaign and contributed occasional articles and poetry to left wing journals. In his painting Victory, he imagined the result of a nuclear holocaust, which attracted the attention at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1958.
Text from the Leicester Galleries website [Online] Cited 17/07/2017. No longer available online
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Eclipse 1911, printed 1956- early 1970s Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased, 1978
Surrogates and the Surreal
Atget’s photograph Pendant l’éclipse (During the eclipse) was featured on the cover of the seventh issue of the Parisian Surrealists’ publication La Révolution surréaliste, with the caption Les Dernières Conversions (The last converts), in June 1926. The picture was uncredited, as were the two additional photographs reproduced inside. Although Atget firmly resisted the association, his work – in particular his photographs of shop windows, mannequins, and the street fairs around Paris – had captured the attention of artists with decidedly avant-garde inclinations, such as Man Ray and Tristan Tzara. Man Ray lived on the same street as Atget, and the young American photographer Berenice Abbott (working as Man Ray’s studio assistant) learned of the French photographer and made his acquaintance in the mid-1920s – a relationship that ultimately brought the contents of Atget’s studio at the time of his death (in 1927) to The Museum of Modern Art almost forty years later.
Pierre Bonnard (France, 1867-1947) Siesta La Sieste 1900 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest, 1949
Eugène Boudin (French, 1824-1998) Low tide at Trouville Trouville, Mareé basse 1894 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest, 1939
John Brack (Australian, 1920-1999) Self-portrait 1955 Melbourne, Victoria Oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria Purchased with the assistance of the National Gallery Women’s Association, 2000
Striking in its candour, with its subject stripped of vanity and dressed in early-morning attire, Self portrait is a piercing study of a man engaged in the intimacy of shaving. Although images of women at their toilette have been frequently depicted by both male and female Australian artists, it is unusual for men to be shown or to show themselves in this context. Modest in scale, Brack’s image is conceived in a complex yet subtle colour scheme, applied with clarity and precision.
Geoffrey Smith. “John Brack’s Self Portrait,” on the National Gallery of Victoria website 4th June 2014 [Online] Cited 21/12/2021
Britains Ltd, London manufacturer (English, 1860-1997) Milk float and horse no. 45F from the Model home farm series 1921-1961 c. 1950 Painted lead alloy National Gallery of Victoria Presented by Miss Lucy Kerley and her nephew John Kerley, 1982
Jacques Callot (French, 1592-1635) The firing squad L’Arquebusade Plate 12 from Les Misères et les malheurs de la guerre The miseries and misfortunes of war series 1633 Etching, 2nd of 3 states National Gallery of Victoria Purchased, 1950
Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024) Nahant, Massachusetts 1965 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased with the assistance of the National Gallery Society of Victoria, 1977
Jean Charles Cazin (French, 1841-1901, lived in England 1871-1875) The rainbow L’Arc-en-ciel late 1880s Oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest, 1913
Marshall Claxton (English, 1813-1881, lived in Australia 1850-1854) An emigrant’s thoughts of home 1859 Oil on cardboard National Gallery of Victoria Presented by the National Gallery Women’s Association, 1974
Marshall Claxton’s painting An emigrant’s thoughts of home (1859) belongs to a clutch of works, both fine and popular, both pictorial and literary, that for an Australasian audience are perhaps the most resonant of the many products of Victorian culture. Emigration, a social and political phenomenon for mid-nineteenth-century Britain, and the essential lubricant of British imperialism, inspired a profusion of paintings, prints, novels, plays, poems, essays and letters that speak eloquently about the realities and myths of Victorian Britain and its role in the world, engaging concepts of the family, womanhood, the artist’s role and function and, indeed, the meaning of life.
Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003) Teacup ballet 1935, printed 1992 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992
Among Cotton’s most famous photographs, Teacup ballet has very humble origins. It was taken after hours in the Dupain studio and used a set of cheap cups and saucers Cotton had earlier bought from a Woolworths store for use around the studio. As she later recounted: ‘Their angular handles suggested to me the position of “arms akimbo” and that led to the idea of a dance pattern’. The picture uses a range of formal devices that became common to Cotton’s work, especially the strong backlighting used to create dramatic tonal contrasts and shadows. The picture achieved instant success, and was selected for exhibition in the London Salon of Photography for 1935.
Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003) The sleeper 1939, printed 1992 Gelatin silver photograph, ed. 4/25 National Gallery of Victoria Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992
The sleeper 1939, Olive Cotton’s graceful study of her friend Olga Sharp resting while on a bush picnic, made around the same time as Max Dupain’s Sunbaker, presents a different take upon the enjoyment of life in Australia. The woman is relaxed, nestled within the environment. The mood is one of secluded reverie.
Edward Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Kalóqutsuis – Qágyuhl 1914, printed 1915 Photogravure National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Ms Christine Godden, 1991
Not only was he one of the greatest ethnographic photographers of all time (as well as being an ethnographer recording more than 10,000 songs on a primitive wax cylinder, and writing down vocabularies and pronunciation guides for 75 languages) … he was also an aesthetic photographer. Looking at his photographs you can feel that he adhered to the principles of the nature and appreciation of beauty situated within the environment of the Native American cultures and peoples. He had a connection to the people and to the places he was photographing…
Curtis created a body of work unparrallleled in the annals of photography – an ethnographic study of an extant civilisation before it vanished (or so they thought at the time). Such a project stretched over thirty years, producing 45-50 thousand negatives “many of them on glass and some as large as fourteen by seventeen inches” of which 2,200 original photographs appeared in his magnum opus, The North American Indian…
While all great photographers have both technical skill and creative ability it is the dedication of this artist to his task over so many years that sets him apart. That dedication is critically coupled with his innate ability to capture the “spirit” of the Native American cultures and peoples, their humanity.
Frances Derham (Australian, 1894-1987) Building the bridge 1929 Colour linocut on Japanese paper National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Mr Richard Hodgson Derham, 1988
Kerry Dundas (Australian, b. 1931, lived in Europe 1958-1967) A girl is carried away under arrest From the Youth against the Bomb series 1961-1963 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1971
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Bondi 1939 Gelatin silver photograph 30.3 × 29.5cm National Gallery of Victoria Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board, 1976
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Hitchhikers, near Vicksburg, Mississippi 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1975
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Auto dump, near Easton, Pennsylvania 1935, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1975
William Frater (born Scotland 1890, arrived Australia 1913, died 1974) The blue nude c. 1934 Oil on canvas on cardboard National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Mrs Lina Bryans 1969
His contribution to art in Australia was, however, as a painter who introduced Post-Impressionist principles and challenged the notion that art was an imitation of nature.
Frater’s oeuvre developed between 1915 and 1920 towards a simplification of design, an interplay of massed lights and shadows, and sonorous low-keyed colour that reflected his interest in the classical seventeenth century painters in interaction with the analytical tonal theory of Max Meldrum. Notable examples of his predominantly figure and portrait paintings are ‘The artist’s wife reading’ (1915) and ‘Portrait of artist’s wife’ (1919). An experimental Colourist phase followed in the next decade. His first solo exhibition was held in May 1923 at the Athenaeum, Melbourne, and he exhibited with the Twenty Melbourne Painters from the late 1920s, and the Contemporary Group of Melbourne in the 1930s.
His approach in the 1930s was markedly indebted to Cézanne, especially in the portraits which predominated until his retirement… Frater gave aggressive leadership to the small group of modernists in the 1920s. His example, teaching, lecturing and crusty style of polemic did much to disrupt the academic style as the arbiter of pictorial values and to pioneer a change of taste in the community.
L. J. Course. “Frater, William (1890-1974),” on the Australian Dictionary of Biography website, published first in hardcopy 1981 [Online] Cited 23 December 2021
Emmanuel Frémiet (French, 1824-1910) Gorilla carrying off a woman Gorille enlevant une femme 1887 Bronze National Gallery of Victoria Gift of the artist 1907
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) Hillcrest, New York 1970, printed c. 1977 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1977
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) Mount Rushmore 1969, printed c. 1977 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1977
The ‘tourist gaze’
As Grundberg notes, Friedlander’s terse depiction shows both the sight and the tourists themselves, being brought into existence through the effects of looking, reflecting, framing and imaging. These, he adds, are all linked to the general project of culturally appropriating the natural world. ‘Natural site has become acculturated sight’ (Grundberg 1990: 15).
As the image makes clear, the ‘sight’ or the ‘site’ is a ‘seeing’ without a subject, for it pre-exists the arrival and activity of any individual tourist-photographer, who, once located there, is framed as much as framing. The sight is not so much an object to be viewers an already structured condition of seeing, a situation which places the sightseer even as he or she freely choose to look or shoot.
The effects of photography’s presence in the tourist system merely completed a process under way before photography’s birth. As tourists, even at the moment of photographing, even if touring cameraless, we are not so much looking as looking at images, or looking for images. Tourism provides us less with experience than with events to be seen, Or rather, events to look at. The privileging of the visual grants us separation from our own experience… We look on or look in through the distancing arrangements of the camera or through eyes educated to see with the same ontological remoteness. The world of the tourist is ‘over there’, in the past-present, in the exotic-ordinary. It is framed off, the object of imaging or description, in some spectacular distance, or set back as performance (Greenwood in Smith 1989).
Peter Osborne. Traveling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture. Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 81-82.
Barbara Hepworth (English, 1903-1975) Eidos 1947 Stone, synthetic polymer paint National Gallery of Victoria Purchased with the assistance of the Samuel E. Wills Bequest to commemorate the retirement of Dr E. Westbrook, Director of Arts for Victoria, 1981
Eidos a Greek term meaning “form” “essence”, “type” or “species”. The early Greek concept of form precedes attested philosophical usage and is represented by a number of words mainly having to do with vision, sight, and appearance. The words, εἶδος (eidos) and ἰδέα (idea) come from the Indo-European root *weid-, “see”.Eidos (though not idea) is already attested in texts of the Homeric era, the earliest Greek literature. This transliteration and the translation tradition of German and Latin lead to the expression “theory of Ideas.” The word is however not the English “idea,” which is a mental concept only.
The meaning of the term εἶδος (eidos), “visible form”, and related terms μορφή (morphē), “shape”, and φαινόμενα (phainomena), “appearances”, from φαίνω (phainō), “shine”, Indo-European *bhā-, remained stable over the centuries until the beginning of philosophy, when they became equivocal, acquiring additional specialised philosophic meanings.
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) Sam Pine, 8 year old truant newsboy who lives at 717 West California Street 1917 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1980
David Hockney (born England 1937, worked in United States 1964-1968, 1975- ) Reclining figure 1975 Etching and liftground etching, ed. 38/75 National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Margaret Toll 2006
Edmond-François Aman-Jean (French, 1860-1936) Woman resting La Femme couchée c. 1904 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest 1905
Max Klinger (German, 1857-1920) Cast of artist’s hands 1920 plaster National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Mrs Marcelle Osins, 1994
Fred Kruger (Australian born Germany, 1831-1888) Coast scene, Mordialloc Creek, near Cheltenham c. 1871 Albumen silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Mrs Beryl M. Curl, 1979
The best of the landscape photographs have nothing to do with Arcadian, pastoral life at all. For me, Kruger’s photographs only start to come alive when he is photographing gum trees against the sky. Anyone who has tried to photograph the Australian bush knows how difficult it is to evince a “feeling” for the bush and Kruger achieves this magnificently in a series of photographs of gum trees in semi-cleared land, such as Bush scene near Highton (c. 1879). These open ‘park-like’ landscapes are not sublime nor do they picture the spread of colonisation but isolate the gum trees against the sky. They rely on the thing itself to speak to the viewer, not a constructed posturing or placement of figures to achieve a sterile mise-en-scène.
Kusakabe Kimbei (Japanese, 1841-1934) No title (Couple with a cabinet photograph and ghost in background) 1880s Albumen silver photograph, colour dyes National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 2004
Kimbei Kusakabe arrived in Yokohama in 1856 and became Felice Beato’s pupil, hand-colouring his photographs until 1863. In 1881, he opened his own studio and promptly became one of the most prosperous and influential photographers of his generation, rivalling the Western artists that had until then dominated the market. With his coloured portraits, everyday scenes and landscapes, he is the purveyor of souvenir images for Westerners visiting Japan. Kimbei Kusakabe depicted men in serene social and economic contexts while women – his favourite subjects – were represented in romantic portraits as well as domestic and cultural scenes. The young mysterious and submissive geisha was particularly appealing to Western audiences and the Japanese photographer helped establish their visual identity as icons of feminine beauty and social etiquette. Kimbei Kusakabe’s rare images are a rich resource for the comprehension of a Japan that has now disappeared.
Text from The Red List website [Online] Cited 17/07/2017. No longer available online
Kusakabe Kimbei worked with Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried as a photographic colourist and assistant before opening his own workshop in Yokohama in 1881, in the Benten-dōri quarter, and from 1889 operating in the Honmachi quarter. He also opened a branch in the Ginza quarter of Tokyo. Around 1885, he acquired the negatives of Felice Beato and of Stillfried, as well as those of Uchida Kuichi. Kusakabe also acquired some of Ueno Hikoma’s negatives of Nagasaki. He stopped working as a photographer in 1912-1913.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Towards Los Angeles, California 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1975
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Ditched, stalled and stranded, San Joaquin Valley, California 1935, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1975
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Interlude, after watching the Fourth of July Parade, Vale, Oregon 1941, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1975
José López (born Cuba 1941, lived in United States c. 1961-1992, died United States 1992) Luis Medina (born Cuba 1942, lived in United States 1961-1985, died United States 1985) Boy asleep by the beach 1976 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1978
Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945) No title (Woman collecting a Christmas present from the car) from the Christmas Holidays with Bob’s Family, Mermaid Beach, Queensland series 1977-1978, printed 1979 Gelatin silver photograph, coloured pencils and fibre tipped pen, ed. 1/5 National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1980
This was a very hands on process, an observation confirmed by artist Ruth Maddison. “The process was like hand watering your garden, an intense exchange and engagement with the object. When I started I was completely untrained, but I loved the process. I just experimented in order to understand what medium does what on what paper surface. There was the beauty of its object and its physicality. I just loved the object.” Her series Christmas holiday with Bob’s family, Mermaid Beach, Queensland (1977-1978), photographed over Christmas Day and several days afterwards, evidences this magical transformation. Vernacular photographs of a typical Australia Christmas holiday become something else, transformed into beautiful, atypical representations of family, friendship, celebration and life.
Henri Matisse (France, 1869-1954) Reclining nude on a pink couch Nu couché sur canapé rose 1919 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest 1952
Amedeo Modigliani (born Italy 1884, lived in France 1906-1920, died France 1920) Nude resting c. 1916-1919 Pencil on buff paper; laid down National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest 1948
László Moholy-Nagy (born Hungary 1895, lived in Germany 1920-1934, lived in United States 1935-1937, United States 1937-1946, died United States 1946) Helsinki 1927, printed 1973 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1975
David Moore (Australian, 1927-2003) Migrants arriving in Sydney 1966 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1991
In this evocative image Moore condenses the anticipation and apprehension of immigrants into a tight frame as they arrive in Australia to begin a new life. The generational mix suggests family reconnections or individual courage as each face displays a different emotion.
Moore’s first colour image Faces mirroring their expectations of life in the land down under, passengers crowd the rail of the liner Galileo Galilei in Sydney Harbour was published in National Geographic in 1967.1 In that photograph the figures are positioned less formally and look cheerful. But it is this second image, probably taken seconds later, which Moore printed in black-and-white, that has become symbolic of national identity as it represents a time when Australia’s rapidly developing industrialised economy addressed its labour shortage through immigration. The strength of the horizontal composition of cropped figures underpinned by the ship’s rail is dramatised by the central figure raising her hand – an ambiguous gesture either reaching for a future or reconnecting with family. The complexity of the subject and the narrative the image implies ensured its public success, which resulted in a deconstruction of the original title, ‘European migrants’, by the passengers, four of whom it later emerged were Sydneysiders returning from holiday, alongside two migrants from Egypt and Lebanon.2 Unintentionally Moore’s iconic image has become an ‘historical fiction’, yet the passengers continue to represent an evolving Australian identity in relation to immigration.
1/ Max Dupain and associates: Accessed 17/06/2006. No longer available online 2/ Thomas D & Sayers A 2000, From face to face: portraits by David Moore, Chapter & Verse, Sydney
Henry Moore (English, 1898-1986) Reclining figure distorted – Sectional line 1979 Chalk, charcoal, wax crayon, ballpoint pen and watercolour over pencil National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Ginny Green, Sandra Bardas OAM family, Vicki Vidor OAM and Bindy Koadlow in memory of their parents Loti Smorgon AO and Victor Smorgon AC through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2014
William De Morgan & Co., London (manufacturer, England 1872-1911) William De Morgan (designer, England 1839-1917) Startled tigers, dish c. 1880 Earthenware National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest 1980
Helen Ogilvie (Australian, 1902-1993) (Four figures seated at a table listening to a phonograph through earpieces) Illustration to Flinders Lane: recollections of Alfred Felton by Russell Grimwade. Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1947 c. 1947 Wood-engraving on Japanese paper, proof National Gallery of Victoria
“What interested me I think were the English wood engravers. I would have seen them in reproductions in books … I think it appealed to me as an artistic expression because it was done so directly with the hand. I know that when a painter is painting the hand is connected with the brain. But with wood engraving it seemed to me it was almost more so. And I got very worked up about it, but I had no way of learning … I know how I got started. Eric Thake was the man who said to me, “I’ll show you how to use your tool.”‘
from Anne Ryan, ‘Australian etchings and engravings 1880s-1930s from the Gallery’s collection’, AGNSW, Sydney 2007
John Perceval (Australian, 1923-2000) Lover’s walk in the corn, summer, England 1964 Oil and toy mouse on canvas National Gallery of Victoria Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Fingal Pastoral Property Limited, Fellow, 1997
Peter Peryer (New Zealand, 1941-2018) Seeing 1989 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1996
G. B. Poletto (Italian, 1915-1988) No title (Ava Gardner in wardrobe still for On the beach: Street) 1957 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 2003
David Potts (Australian, 1926-2012, lived in England 1950-1955) Cat show, London 1953 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased through the KODAK (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund 1975
August Sander (German, 1876-1964) Itinerant basket makers from the People of the Twentieth Century project 1929, printed 1973 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased 1974
Nomadism
In the literature on nomadism, there is considerable disagreement over the range of societies that should be designated as “nomadic,” but there is some consensus that at least three categories of mobile peoples should be recognised. The first category, to which many wish to restrict the term “nomadic,” is that of pastoral nomads… The second broad category of nomads is that of hunter-gatherers, whose mode of subsistence sets them apart from both pastoralists and sedentary farmers…
The third basic category is that of Gypsies, itinerant basket-makers, tinkers, weavers, mimes, magicians, musicians, horse dealers, nostrum traders, carnival people, circus performers, and so on. Characterised the variously as “service nomads,” “economic nomads,” “commercial nomads,” “craftsman nomads,” “non-food producing nomads,” “floating industrial populations,” “peripatetic tribes,” “peripatetic peoples” or plain “peripatetics,” these are spatially mobile peoples who primarily exploit resources in the social environment. They exploit what Berland and Salo call a distinct peripatetic niche: “the regular demand for specialised goods and/or services that more sedentary or pastoral communities cannot, or will not, support on a permanent basis.”
Ronald Bogue. Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics. London and New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 114-115.
Ben Shahn (born Lithuania 1898, lived in United States c. 1925-1969, died United States 1969) A deputy with a gun on his hip during the September 1935 strike in Morgantown, West Virginia 1935, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Purchased, 1975
Athol Shmith (Australian, 1914-1990) Misses Mary and Rae Plotkin, bridesmaids at the wedding of Mrs Edith Sheezel 1940 Hand-coloured gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Victoria Gift of Mary Lipshut through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gift’s Program, 2012
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911, lived throughout Europe and Asia 1871-1910) No title (Tattooed bettōs, porters) c. 1875, printed c. 1877-1880 Albumen silver photograph, colour dyes National Gallery of Victoria Purchased through the NGV Foundation with the assistance of The Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 2001
“There are two employments which I have mentioned among those of domestic servants because they would be so classed by us, but which in Japan rank among the trades. The jinrikisha man and the groom belong, as a rule, to a certain class at the bottom of the social ladder, and no samurai would think of entering either of these occupations, except under stress of severest poverty. The bettōs, or grooms, are a hereditary class and a regular guild, and have a reputation, among both Japanese and foreigners, as a betting, gambling, cheating, good-for-nothing lot. An honest bettō is a rare phenomenon.”
Alice Mabel Bacon. Japanese Girls and Women. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company The Riverside Press, 1891, p. 319.
Hiroshi Sugimoto (born Japan 1948, lived in United States and Japan 1976- ) Winnetka Drive-In, Pb aramount 1993 Gelatin silver photograph, ed. 8/25 National Gallery of Victoria Bowness Family Fund for Contemporary Photography, 2009
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s famous series Theaters is represented in the exhibition by the work Winnetka Drive-In, Paramount (1993) where Sugimoto “photographs auditoriums of American movie theaters, and drive-in movies, during showings. The exposure time used for the photograph corresponds with the projection time of the film. This allows him to save the duration of the entire film in a single shot. What remains visible of the film’s time-compressed, individual images is the bright screen of the movie theater, which illuminates the architecture of the space. That its content retreats into the background makes the actual film a piece of information, manifesting itself in the (movie theater) space. As a result, instead of a content-related event, film presents itself here as the relationship between time and spatial perception.”3
If we think of the camera lens as being fully open, like an eye without blinking, for the duration of the length of the film then the shutter of the lens has to be set on “B” for Bulb which allows for long exposure times under the direct control of the photographer. “The term bulb is a reference to old-style pneumatically actuated shutters; squeezing an air bulb would open the shutter and releasing the bulb would close it… It appears that when instantaneous shutters were introduced, they included a B setting so that the familiar bulb behaviour could be duplicated with a cable release.”4 In other words light waves, reflecting from the surface of objects, are controlled by the photographer over an indefinite period (not the short “snap” of the freeze frame / the decisive moment), accumulating light from thousands of years in the past through the lens of the camera onto the focal plane, coalescing into a single image, controlled and constructed by the photographer.
Dr Marcus Bunyan from a review of the NGV exhibition Light Works 2012
3/ Kellein, Thomas and Sugimoto, Hiroshi. Time Exposed. Thames & Hudson, First edition, 1995, p. 91, quoted in Heike Helfert. “Hiroshi Sugimoto “Theaters”,” on the Media Art Net website Nd [Online] Cited 08/09/2012. 4/ Anonymous. “Bulb (photography),” on the Wikipedia website Nd [Online] Cited 08/09/2012.
James Thomas (English, 1854-1921, lived in Italy 1889-1906) Thyrsis 1914 Bronze, patina National Gallery of Victoria Felton Bequest, 1915
Joseph Turner (active in Australia 1856-1880s) No title (Laying the foundation stone of the Geelong clock tower) 1856 Daguerreotype leather, wood, silk, gilt metal and glass (case) National Gallery of Victoria Purchased, 1974
Market Square was a town square located in the centre of Geelong, Victoria, Australia. Consisting of eight acres (2.9 hectares) of land, the area was reserved by Governor Sir George Gipps as a town square during the initial surveying of Geelong. The area later became a produce market, before being progressively built upon. Today the Market Square Shopping Centre occupies the site, having been opened in 1985 by the City of Geelong…
A clock tower was built in the centre of the square in 1856. It was the idea of the second mayor of Geelong James Austin, who offered to pay for a clock tower in Geelong to mark his term as mayor. The clock was featured in The Illustrated London News in March 1855. Components for the clock arrived in Geelong on November 13, 1855 from England, but the location for the clock had yet to be decided. Suggestions of high ground at top of Moorabool, Yarra or Gheringhap Streets were put forward at the time, the indecision lasting into early 1856. In July 1857 a decision was made, and the foundation stone was finally laid in the Market Square…
The clock tower remained until October 1923 when it was demolished to make way for the CML Building. There was a public outcry, and no one was willing to demolish it. However, it was deemed too impractical to move intact, and was brought down by steel cables attached to traction engine. The site of the clock tower is marked by a plaque in the Market Square Shopping Centre.
I really, really don’t know what tales I can tell from this disparate group of media images illustrating (and that’s the key word) the exhibition.
Except to say that their stage managed, dead pan style, really, really doesn’t do it for me.
The sensation of loneliness, limited colour palette and total nihilism leaves me as cold as a corpse in a freezer.
The tale that nothing in the world has a real existence, or really matters.
If Norman Rockwell used photographs to compose his painted illustrations, then that is what these are … photographic illustrations.
A perfect example of this composite, stilted painterly overkill is Julie Blackmon’s New Chair (2014, below).
Everything is perfectly posed, poised and positioned in relation to each other: the boy behind the chair; the price on the chair; the pair of legs and two hands lifting the roller door; the children in the background; the blue dress of the child in the forground and her relationship to the horse, baseball, melting icy pole, football and young lad with head wrapped in bubble wrap while another piece lies on the ground. The ramp fills the space delightfully behind these artefacts with the hero splash of colour, the new chair, perched upon its upper reaches.
This, dear friends, is the state of contemporary narrative photography, where “telling tales” – to gossip about or reveal another person’s secrets or wrongdoings – is just this. Gossip about nothing.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the McNay Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Telling Tales: Contemporary Narrative Photography, an introduction with Rene Barilleaux
René Paul Barilleaux, Chief Curator, gives an introduction to Telling Tales: Contemporary Narrative Photography exhibition. Featuring 17 artists, Telling Tales is the McNay’s first large scale photography exhibition. Works such as Nan Goldin’s landmark The Ballad of Sexual Dependency demonstrate some artists’ explorations of the politics of the day – in this case, the onset of the AIDS crisis – while other examples, including photographs by Tina Barney, Justine Kurland, and Paul Graham, investigate class differences, marginalised communities, and social justice. Primarily in colour and often large-scale, the photographs reference everything from classical painting and avant-garde cinema, to science fiction illustration and Alfred Hitchcock.
Telling Tales: Contemporary Narrative Photography is a survey of work by artists who record stories through pictures, whether real or imagined. Organised by the McNay’s Chief Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art, René Paul Barilleaux, the exhibition includes approximately fifty photographs from the late 1970s to the present by 17 ground-breaking photographers. Telling Tales is the McNay Art Museum’s first large-scale exhibition of photography and is accompanied by an 88-page illustrated book.
The exhibition presents work such as Nan Goldin’s landmark The Ballad of Sexual Dependency demonstrate some artists’ explorations of the politics of the day – in this case, the onset of the AIDS crisis – while other examples, including photographs by Tina Barney, Justine Kurland, and Paul Graham investigate class differences, marginalised communities, and social justice.
While some contemporary artists explore photographic imagery as it is filtered through and mediated by technology and the internet, others exploit photography’s ability to present a momentary, frozen narrative. Images are staged for the camera or highly manipulated through digital processes, yet they often resemble a casual snapshot or movie still. Primarily in colour and often large-scale, the photographs reference everything from classical painting and avant-garde cinema, to science fiction illustration and Alfred Hitchcock. The exhibition includes examples of these various approaches to image-making.
Telling Tales: Contemporary Narrative Photography features work by Tina Barney, Julie Blackmon, Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Mitch Epstein, Nan Goldin, Paul Graham, Jessica Todd Harper, Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, Anna Gaskell, Justine Kurland, Lori Nix, Erwin Olaf, Alex Prager, Alec Soth, and Jeff Wall.
“It all began with the drawings of Norman Rockwell. I like that sort of nostalgic feeling. Originally, I wanted to do something really happy, up-beat, after all the depression of my last series, Separation (2003). So the starting point was that everybody was going to be beautiful, and that I would ask the models to act funny. But then it somehow became terrible. I realised this was a world which has vanished. So instead, I radically simplified the images. Now, everybody is just waiting for nothing, it’s the moment after happiness. I suppose after Separation, comes the well of loneliness. It’s also been a difficult process because for the first time, I have worked without purposely using eroticism or any sexual jokes…
Dancing School is a dreary party which no one attends. The evening has been carefully mapped out, right down to the dance-steps printed on paper and placed neatly on the floor. Sheet music is open on the piano. It is just after six in the evening, but despite the party hats, this is an event reserved for eternal wall-flowers. The mood in this room is in sharp contrast to the antique print of dancing damsels at play, hanging on the wall behind the two isolated guests.”
Erwin Olaf quoted in Jonathan Turner. “Erwin Olaf: Rain,” on the M+B website Nd [Online] Cited 23/02/2023
Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler (Swiss/Irish/American, b. 1965; Swiss, b. 1962) From the series Falling Down 1996 Chromogenic print Courtesy of the artists; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York City; and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, Texas
Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler (Swiss/Irish/American, b. 1965; Swiss, b. 1962) From the series Falling Down 1996 Chromogenic print Courtesy of the artists; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York City; and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, Texas
“Telling Tales: Contemporary Narrative Photography features the work of seventeen artists who interpret stories through pictures, whether real or imagined. Spanning nearly four decades, this survey begins with the art of ground-breaking photographers who emerged during the 1970s and 1980s and continues through today. The images present a wide range of styles and themes – familiar, mysterious, humorous, perplexing – yet they are always compelling to view. Organised by the McNay, the exhibition presents over fifty photographs. Works such as Nan Goldin’s landmark The Ballad of Sexual Dependency demonstrate some artists’ explorations of the politics of the day – in this case, the onset of the AIDS crisis – while other examples, including photographs by Tina Barney, Justine Kurland, and Paul Graham investigate class differences, marginalised communities, and social justice.
“Since 2015 the McNay has focused its contemporary exhibitions on three areas our visitors had not had the opportunity to explore in depth: installation and performance art with Lesley Dill: Performance as Art and now narrative photography with Telling Tales” says René Paul Barilleaux, McNay Art Museum’s Chief Curator / Curator of Contemporary Art and the exhibition’s organiser. “This presentation is the first major contemporary photography exhibition at the McNay as well as the first to examine and expose recent developments in narrative photography.”
Many contemporary artists explore photographic imagery as it is filtered through and mediated by technology and the Internet; others exploit photography’s ability to present a momentary, frozen narrative. And even when the images are staged for the camera or are highly manipulated through digital processes, they often resemble a casual snapshot or movie still. Primarily in colour and frequently large-scale, references found in this work range from classical painting to avant-garde cinema, from science fiction illustration to the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
Quintessential American storyteller Norman Rockwell employed photographs, created in series, to compose his painted illustrations. He staged elaborate vignettes for the camera using detailed props, live models, and at times even himself. Rockwell used photography in his creative process; he did not present photographs as finished works. Many of the photographs in Telling Tales evoke Rockwell’s spirit, and, not surprisingly, several of the artists identify him as an inspiration.”
Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946) In Front of a Nightclub 2006 Color transparency and light box, Edition 2 of 3 Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Gift of Katherine S. Schamberg by exchange
I have found a hidden gem in Roberto Donetta. He has become one of my favourite photographers, this seed salesman from Bleniotal, who died in obscurity and poverty in 1932.
His photographs are like no other that I have seen. There is a directness to his photographs that is deceptively disarming, and humour as well. His theatre is the the theatre of life: the archaic life of his compatriots in the Blenio Valley. If you look at his work on the Roberto Donetta Archive website the landscapes and ambiguous object photographs are interesting, but it is in the genre of portrait photography that he really excels. This was his passion, photographing people.
Somehow, it seems as if the person being photographed has forgotten that the camera was there, as though it has disappeared from view. As the press release observes, “the people did not dissimulate [to disguise or conceal under a false appearance], indeed it’s almost as if they forgot that someone with a camera was watching, so self-engrossed do they look, serious, at one with themselves.” At one with themselves but also at one with being photographed, which is very unusual. There is little affectation here.
The details of the photographs are fascinating. The placement of the figures in Female Workers in Front of the Chocolate Factory Cima Norma for example, where the left two sitting figures have their legs crossed in the opposite direction while both rest their face in their hands, a central figure, and then two figures interlocked as in an infinity symbol looking at each other. The ‘line’ of the photograph changes from one height to another. We observe that Donetta stages his photographs with infinite care, even when there is a blank wall behind the sitter. In Family Portrait, Bleniotal there is a gorgeous touch, as the mother holds the arm of the boy on the left hand side and gently rests two fingers on his other hand. Donetta’s photographs are full of these familial and human observations.
In Group of musicians in front of a building all the men have cigarettes hanging from their mouths, even as they stare directly, unflinchingly into the camera lens. In Humoristic scene, Bleniotal the man holding the tongs can hardly suppress laughing as the theatrical photograph is being taken. Kittens or toys are held in hands while protective arms wrap around shoulders. Here are the precursors to the work of Diane Arbus, in their honesty and straight forwardness: in its modernity Children with Toys, Bleniotal even reminds me a little of Arbus’ Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967. And then there is the use of temporary backdrops, to imitate the upmarket studios of larger towns: “Donetta did imitate the decorative aesthetic of the late 19th century professional studios: he transformed interior or outdoor spaces into improvised studios by, for example, hanging up fabrics or carpets as backdrops and placing objects like chairs or tables with vases of flowers in the foreground. His portraits are carefully composed and arranged, look uncontrived, calm and archaic.”
Despite their deceptively simple nature, there is a mysterious quality to Donetta’s photographs which is enhanced through the use of these portable backdrops. The fabric backdrop and sheet to the left in A wedding couple staged in front of a cloth obscures a rock wall; the idyllic scene behind the boy in Portrait of a Boy, Bleniotal hides an earthy, rudimentary stone wall (and note the figure at the top of the image, holding the backdrop up); in Family Portrait, Bleniotal the hastily hung sheet has been decorated with leaves and branches; and in Untitled [Portrait of a women] a plain concrete wall acts as the backdrop even as a) the women looks out of the image not towards the camera; b) the eye can escape down the left hand side of the image and c) there is a ghost-like figure at the very right hand side of the image standing in what I presume is a doorway. The frontality of his photographs is also very powerful: in Untitled [Portrait of a man] the man looks like he is wearing his Sunday best jacket replete with bow tie. His legs are spread on the chair, the jacket looks to big for him, is stiff and unforgiving, his workers hands rest in his lap and he stares quizzically out of the image: calm, accepting, himself. In Portrait of Cesarina Andreazzi Lazzari, Bleniotal we (again) notice the textures in the image – the stipple, the concrete, the rocks – and then Cesarina’s stubby, dark hands clutching a bunch of flowers and a book, reminiscent of the dirt under the finger nails and dark features of the peasant boys that appear in the work of Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden.
Above all these are honest, direct and engaging photographs. You can think of Lewis Hine, Jacob Riis, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and all the FSA photographers, Diane Arbus and others, and yet they don’t come close to the modern/archaic aesthetic of this man. These photographs are a pilgrimage into a past that has long disappeared. But these faces, these people and their lives, still resonate long after they have passed. I was so moved by these photographs I was in tears the other night when I was constructing this posting, studying the intimate details of these images. That means a lot to me.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. I usually don’t publish photographs without title and date but in this instance, to gather together as many Donetta images as possible, I have published them when I have found good quality images on the internet. I believe that in this instance it is very worth while.
Many thankx to Fotostiftung Schweiz for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Roberto Donetta (1865-1932) from Ticino is one of Swiss photography’s great outsiders. He managed to survive as a travelling photographer and seed salesman, and upon his death left almost 5,000 glass plates which were preserved merely by chance. These capture the archaic life of his compatriots in the Blenio Valley, which at the time was totally isolated, and the gradual advent of modern times in a precise and sensitive way. Over a period of 30 years and in an era of great change, Donetta became a unique chronicler. At the same time, he saw himself as an artist who – self-taught – experimented freely and knew how to master his medium. His pictures are penetrating and humorous, cheerful and deadly serious – be they of children, families, wedding couples, professional people, the harsh everyday-life of women and men, or of the photographer himself. The Blenio Valley as a microcosm: with Donetta the mountain valley becomes the stage for a great Theater of the World. The exhibition will display about 120 works from the Donetta Archive, many of them on show to the public for the first time ever.
Roberto Donetta was born in Biasca on 6 June 1865. It is not known where he spent his youth. Towards the late 1870s his family most probably moved to Castro in the Blenio Valley, as his father had got a job there as a military functionary. An official register entry on the occasion of his marriage to Teodolinda Tinetti indicates that Roberto Donetta certainly lived in the valley as of 1886. He is registered there as “contadino”, a farmer, which he most likely never was. In 1892 he opened a small grocery shop in Corzoneso, but he had it for only six months. In 1894 he went to London to work as a waiter, returning just 15 months later, sick and exhausted. He then became a hawker and travelled into the most remote corners of the whole valley selling vegetable and flower seeds. As of 1900 he lived in the “Casa Rotonda” in Casserio, part of the Corzoneso municipality. He and Teodolinda meantime had seven children, one of whom died at the age of one. It was around that time that Donetta began to be involved with photography. Apparently Dionigi Sorgesa, a sculptor from Corzoneso, introduced him to the profession and also rented him a camera. Now Donetta was not only a seed merchant but also the valley’s photographer.
A Constant traveller
After turbulent quarrels about the use of their sparse income, he and his family separated in 1912: his wife and children left him in the direction of Bellinzona in search of more lucrative work. Only the youngest son, Saul, remained with his father. On 6 June 1913, his 48th birthday, some of Donetta’s belongings were seized and, for a couple of months, he had no camera, which was a great worry to him: “Not to be able to work for a period of nine months – that severed my connection with my art and made me totally destitute.” Donetta spent the years after the First World War in great solitude, constantly on the road throughout the valley. From 1927 onwards, some of his photographs were published in one of Switzerland’s first illustrated journals, L’Illustré, issued by Ringier.
On the morning of 6 September 1932, Roberto Donetta was found dead in his home. All his photographic equipment was confiscated and auctioned so as to pay off his debts to the municipality. The glass plates, however, were all left untouched. In the mid-1980s Mariarosa Bozzini rediscovered them in Corzoneso.
Between tradition and modernity
Donetta’s personality was full of contradictions. On the one hand, he expressed considerable interest in all the phenomena associated with the advent of modern achievements, such as photography. On the other hand, he was decidedly conservative when it came to the cohesion of the family or his close links with nature. The latter prevented him from leaving the valley to look for more secure work in town. He lamented the constant changes associated with road building and new railway lines, which he did not see as a blessing for the valley. In his capacity as a photographer he succumbed to the fascination of the modern, yet at the same time he expressed a deep respect for long-standing traditions and rituals.
Roberto Donetta’s passion was undoubtedly for portrait photography. The self-taught photographer not only exhibited an astonishing technical mastery in portraying people, but was also able to give free rein to his creativity – despite the fact that this particular field of photography was strongly influenced by the conventions and expectations of his clients. His numerous portraits of children are remarkable. With children he was well able to live out his delight in composing, his talent in staging small scenes. He took the young people seriously, and they in turn were his accomplices, becoming involved in his idiosyncratic ideas.
The chronicler and his style
Throughout his life Donetta accompanied life in the valley, taking commissioned photographs of the inhabitants and the representatives of the different professions, as well as of various events: a visit by a bishop, the arrival of a carousel, a flood, a fire, the construction of a railway line or a bell tower. He was also present at life’s rituals, the transitions from one age group to another, from one social group to the next, or else the prominent fixed points in the year’s cycle, be they secular or ecclesiastical: festivals, weddings, funerals, processions, outdoor church services, these were inconceivable without “il fotografo”. Donetta made photography an important part of those rituals, and over the course of time the photographer was as much a part of the valley as the parson was of the church. This is surely the source of the quality of his photographs: the people did not dissimulate, indeed it’s almost as if they forgot that someone with a camera was watching, so self-engrossed do they look, serious, at one with themselves.
The improvised studio
As Donetta did not have a studio of his own, he travelled the whole valley to take his portraits and produced only small modest prints in postcard format (ie. 7 x 11 cm), which he occasionally stamped with his initials. Often the only ornamentation was an oval vignetting or rounded edges. He regularly delivered the commissioned photographs late because, in order to save chemicals, he only developed his films infrequently. After his rounds as a seed merchant, he then struggled with his business correspondence late into the evening. His works differ greatly from the elegant, classic, gold-edged cards that people could have done those days in the city studios without long waiting periods.
Yet in his own way Donetta did imitate the decorative aesthetic of the late 19th century professional studios: he transformed interior or outdoor spaces into improvised studios by, for example, hanging up fabrics or carpets as backdrops and placing objects like chairs or tables with vases of flowers in the foreground. His portraits are carefully composed and arranged, look uncontrived, calm and archaic. Because of the long exposure times, he was concerned to eliminate chance and spontaneity as far as possible.
In addition to this, he also experimented, or simply took photographs for himself: still life, stormy scenes, cloud formations, strangely shaped cliff or tree outlines. These photographs impress us by their modernity and originality and testify to an inquisitive man with an interest in aesthetic issues.
To be honest, Robert Capa was not the most natural colour photographer, especially when you compare him to the likes of Paul Outerbridge and Saul Leiter who were working at around the same time. Even the official text from Jeu de Paume that accompanies the exhibition is littered with descriptions like “uninspired”, “the color photographs lack focus”, or worse, “Fleur Cowles at Look and Len Spooner at Illustrated were disappointed with the color images.”
His work in this medium is what I would call “observational” colour photography. The images are best when the subject is intimate, human and ‘on set’, preferably using a limited palette with splashes of subdued colour – such as in the gorgeous Model wearing Dior on the banks of the Seine, Paris, France (1948), the delicate Woman on the beach, Biarritz, France (1951), and the simpatico duo of Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre on the set of ‘Beat the Devil’, Ravello, Italy (April 1953) and Truman Capote and Jennifer Jones on the set of ‘Beat the Devil’, Ravello, Italy (April 1953). The photographs of Ava Gardner on set are also cracking images for their vitality and overall balance, as is the almost monochromatic Gen X girl, Colette Laurent, at the Chantilly racetrack, France (1952). Other ensemble tableaux might as well have been shot in black and white, such as Spectators at the Longchamp Racecourse, Paris, France (c. 1952).
Capa too often resorts to one or two strong primary colours for effect, as in Capucine, French model and actress, on a balcony, Rome, Italy (August 1951), Rambaugh Family Circus, Indiana, USA (1949) or American Judith Stanton, Zermatt, Switzerland (1950). In the the former two images the composition doesn’t work with the colour; only in the latter does it become a vigorous and joyous structural element.
Sometimes I think that Capa didn’t exactly know what to do with colour – Woman at an ice bar, Zürs, Austria (1949-1950) and Party, Rome, Italy (August 1951) are not very good at all – but here we must acknowledge an artist experimenting with a relatively new commercial medium, even as he seeks to sell these images to his clients.
Capa in Color is at his best when he employs subtlety, constructing strong human compositions with nuanced placement of shades and hues.
One of the most complex images in the posting is Anna Magnani on the set of Luchino Visconti’s ‘Bellissima’ (Rome, 1951-1952). Just look at this image: your eye plays over the surface, investigating every nook and cranny, every modular plane. The blue of the skirt, the brown of the top, the patterns of the two bikinis and the earthiness of tree and earth. I am reminded of the paintings of Paul Cézanne.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The first exhibition dedicated to Capa’s fourteen years of color photographs, Capa in Color has an ambition to evaluate and place these photographs in the timeline of his career and of their period. Capa in Color shows how color photography renewed his vision and how his work gained from a new sensibility after the war, by readapting his compositions in colour, but also to a public attracted to entertainment and to the discovery of new types of images.
Recently presented at the International Center of Photography and now available for travel, Capa in Color presents Robert Capa’s colour photographs to the European public for the first time. Although he is recognised almost exclusively as a master of black-and-white photography, Capa began working regularly with colour film in 1941 and used it until his death in 1954. While some of this work was published in the magazines of the day, the majority of these images have never been printed or seen in any form.
Capa in Color includes over 150 contemporary colour prints by Capa, as well as personal papers and tear sheets from the magazines in which the images originally appeared. Organised by Cynthia Young, curator of Capa Collections at ICP, the exhibition presents an unexpected aspect of Capa’s career that has been previously edited out of posthumous books and exhibitions, and show how he embraced colour photography and integrated it into his work as a photojournalist in the 1940s and 1950s.
Robert Capa’s (1913-1954) reputation as one of history’s most notable photojournalists is well established. Born Endre Ernö Friedmann in Budapest and naturalised as a U.S. citizen in 1946, he was deemed “The Greatest War Photographer in the World” by Picture Post in a late 1938 publication of his Spanish Civil War photographs. During World War II, he worked for such magazines as Collier’s and Life, extensively portraying preparation for war as well as its devastating aftermath. His best-known images symbolised for many the brutality and valour of war and changed the public perception of, and set new standards for, war photography.
July 27, 1938, while in China for eight months covering the Sino-Japanese war, Robert Capa wrote to a friend at his New York agency, “… send 12 rolls of Kodachrome with all instructions; … Send it “Via Clipper” because I have an idea for Life“. Although no colour film from China survives except for four prints published in the October 17, 1938, issue of Life, Capa was clearly interested in working with colour photography even before it was widely used by many other photojournalists.
In 1941, he photographed Ernest Hemingway at his home in Sun Valley, Idaho, in colour, and used colour for a story about crossing the Atlantic on a freighter with an Allied convoy, published in the Saturday Evening Post. While Capa is best known for the black-and-white images of D-Day, he also used colour film sporadically during World War II, most notably to photograph American troops and the French Camel Corps in Tunisia in 1943.
Capa’s use of colour film exploded in his postwar stories for magazines such as Holiday (USA ), Ladies’ Home Journal (USA ), Illustrated (UK), and Epoca (Italy). These photographs, which until now have been seen only in magazine spreads, brought the lives of ordinary and exotic people from around the world to American and European readers alike, and were markedly different from the war reportage that had dominated Capa’s early career. Capa’s technical ability coupled with his engagement with human emotion in his prewar black-and-white stories enabled him to move back and forth between black and white and colour film and integrate colour to complement the subjects he photographed. These early stories include photographs of Moscow’s Red Square from a 1947 trip to the USS R with writer John Steinbeck and refugees and the lives of new settlers in Israel in 1949-50. For the Generation X project, Capa traveled to Oslo and northern Norway, Essen, and Paris to capture the lives and dreams of youth born before the war.
Capa’s photographs also provided readers a glimpse into more glamorous lifestyles that depended on the allure and seduction of colour photography. In 1950, he covered fashionable ski resorts in the Swiss, Austrian, and French Alps, and the stylish French resorts of Biarritz and Deauville for the burgeoning travel market capitalised on by Holiday magazine. He even tried fashion photography by the banks of the Seine and on the Place Vendôme. Capa also photographed actors and directors on European film sets, including Ingrid Bergman in Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia, Orson Welles in Black Rose, and John Huston’s Moulin Rouge. Additional portraiture in this period included striking images of Picasso, on the beach near Vallauris, France with his young son Claude.
Capa carried at least two cameras for all of his postwar stories: one with black-and-white film and one with colour, using a combination of 35mm and 4 x 5 Kodachrome and medium-format Ektachrome film, emphasising the importance of this new medium in his development as a photographer. He continued to work with colour until the end of his life, including in Indochina, where he was killed in May 1954. His colour photographs of Indochina presage the colour images that dominated the coverage from Vietnam in the 1960s.
Capa in Color is the first museum exhibition to explore Capa’s fourteen-year engagement with colour photography and to assess this work in relation to his career and period in which he worked. His talent with black-and-white composition was prodigious, and using colour film halfway through his career required a new discipline. Capa in Color explores how he started to see anew with colour film and how his work adapted to a new postwar sensibility. The new medium required him to readjust to colour compositions, but also to a postwar audience, interested in being entertained and transported to new places.
It is surprising, even shocking to some, that famous photojournalist Robert Capa (born Budapest 1913, died Indochina 1954) photographed in colour, and not just occasionally, but regularly after 1941. His coloured work is essentially unknown. Capa is considered a master of black-and-white war photography, a man who documented some of the most important political events of Western Europe in the mid-twentieth century. His photographs of 1930s Paris, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, postwar Europe, and his last images in Indochina are known to us in black-and-white. None of the posthumous retrospective projects of his work have included colour, with a few rare exceptions..
Capa first experimented with colour in 1938, two years after Kodak developed Kodachrome, the first colour roll film. While in China covering the Sino-Japanese War, he wrote to a friend at his New York agency, Pix, “Please immediately send 12 rolls of Kodachrome with all instructions; whether special filters are needed, etc. – in short, all I should know. Send it ‘Via Clipper’, because I have an idea for Life“. Only four colour images from China were published, but Capa’s enthusiasm for colour was born. He photographed with colour film again in 1941 and for the next two years he fought hard to persuade editors to buy his colour images in addition to the black-and-white. After the war, the magazines were eager to include colour and his colour assignments increased. For the rest of his life, he almost always carried at least two cameras: one for black-and-white and one for colour film.
Jay F. Shelley, Sr., 88, of Yuma,formerly of Scottsdale, Arizona, entered Eternity on June 6, 2004. Jay was born May 16, 1916, in Long Beach, California. He was a decorated B-17 Bomber Pilot during WWII and flew 54 combat missions. He received a degree in business administration with a major in accounting from University of Montana. Jay worked as an accountant until 1979 when he retired with his wife to Scottsdale, Arizona. Capt. Jay F Shelleywas assigned to the 301st BG 32nd Squadron.
In 1941, Capa produced his first colour film story for the Saturday Evening Post, about crossing the Atlantic from New York on a convoy. Once in England, he was also able to sell these images to the English magazine Illustrated, because the two magazines did not have the same readerships.
He made the crossing again the next year, carrying a larger format camera that made bigger, more spectacular portraits of the ship’s crew. The turnaround time for Kodachrome film was several weeks. As Kodak maintained secrecy surrounding the formula, the undeveloped film had to go to a special Kodak processing plant and then returned to the photographer. It was not ideal for timely news. The magazines published few of Capa’s colour images from the UK, but he persisted in using it. In 1943, he entered the battlefields of World War II in North Africa, first traveling on a troop ship from England to Casablanca. His last colour images from the war were taken on a boat from Tunisia to Sicily in July 1943, where he debarked and moved up to Naples with America soldiers over the following months. It appears that for the rest of the war he did not use colour film, apparently discouraged by a combination of the slow shutter speed of the film, long processing times, and the uneven commitment to his colour images by the magazines.
Soon after his return from England, in the fall of 1941, Capa traveled to Sun Valley, Idaho, to do a story for life on his friends, the writers Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, whom he had met during the Spanish Civil War. After World War II, Capa sought out new relationships with magazines and holiday became one of his most important supporters.
A glamorous travel magazine that featured New Yorker – caliber writers, Holiday was launched in 1946 by the Philadelphia-based Curtis Publishing Company, which also carried The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal. Born in full colour, it was a peacetime publication catering to an ideal of American postwar prosperity. Holiday covered American cities, but immediately assigned stories on stylish international hot spots, places readers could dream of visiting with the advent in 1947 of nonstop transatlantic flights. In 1950, Holiday sent Capa to Indianapolis, and while his pictures of a nuclear family of five exploring the city are uninspired, he also photographed a family-run traveling circus. Despite Capa’s lukewarm attitude toward American culture, the colour images present a strong vision of American small-town life.
The year 1947 was a turning point in Capa’s life. He founded Magnum, the photographers cooperative agency he had dreamed of since 1938. The same year, he traveled to the Soviet Union, a trip that he had wanted to make in 1937 and then in 1941, both times unable to obtain a visa or magazine support for the trip.
He teamed up with writer John Steinbeck to report on the lives and opinions of ordinary Russians in opposition to Cold War rhetoric. Their adventures were published in the book A Russian Journal the following year and syndicated in newspapers and international picture magazines. Although the colour images were well represented in the magazines and on the cover of Illustrated for a special issue, Capa did not shoot much colour film in the Soviet Union, and no colour was included in A Russian Journal, except for the cover. Either he deemed only a few places worthy of the new medium format Ektachrome colour film that did not require special processing – chiefly Moscow and collective farms in the Ukraine and Georgia – or he had only a limited amount of film and used it sparingly. The images of Red Square take full advantage of colour film.
Some of Capa’s colour works were considerably less successful than his black-and-white photographs. This was the case with his 1948 feature on Picasso, originally sold to look as a story about the artist’s pottery, but as Capa failed to take pictures of the pottery, it became a story about Picasso and his family.
He instructed his Magnum colleague Maria Eisner: “Look gave me a definite assignment but no price so you have to insist on $200 pro black and white and $300 pro coloured page, and $250 for expenses. If they are not willing to pay a reasonable sum, you can withdraw, but Madame Fleurs Cowles was so positive on this matter and the pictures are so exclusive that I could be very surprise[d] if this doesn’t work”. Both Fleur Cowles at Look and Len Spooner at Illustrated were disappointed with the colour images, although delighted with the story, which included Capa’s now famous picture of Picasso holding a sun umbrella over his ravishing young artist girlfriend, Françoise Gilot, parading on the beach.
Hungary
In 1948, Holiday sent Capa to his native Budapest and commissioned him to write the accompanying article. Capa had been widely praised for the hilarious and self-deprecating 1947 book about his wartime exploits, slightly out of focus, so the editors were hardly taking risk by asking him to write a long article.
Holiday used four colour images in the November 1949 issue. Unlike the glamorous destinations the magazine usually covered or that Capa would later cover for them, the images and accompanying article, one of the strongest texts he wrote about a place, functioned more as a letter from Budapest. He observes with fascination and humour the clashing end of one empire with the start of another, bittersweet against the reality of what his childhood city had become. While he seemed to have had more colour film on this assignment than in Russia, it was expensive to buy and process, so he still conserved, and there are many more black-and-white negatives of similar scenes than in colour.
Morocco
Capa’s 1949 trip to Morocco was one of the few postwar stories he made concerning a political subject, but it was a complicated sell and failed as an international news story.
The assignment was muddled from the start, as it combined Moroccan politics, lead mines, and the filming of The Black Rose with Orson Welles. Paris Match first published some of the pictures in a piece about the annual tour of the country by the Moroccan leader Sultan Sidi Mohammed. Illustrated published a story with only black-and-white images about the strange effects of the Marshall Plan, in which as a French colony Morocco received American aid through France, although the French General was not recognised as the leader in charge by the U.S. State Department. Some of the best images are portraits of the Moroccan people.
Capa’s big geopolitical assignment of the late 1940s took him to Israel. He first traveled there in 1948 to cover the Arab-Israeli war, then returned in 1949, for Holiday and Illustrated, with writer Irwin Shaw.
He came back in 1950 to continue photographing the new nation in transition, focusing on the influx of refugees arriving from Europe and neighbouring Arab countries, the ongoing repair of the physical destruction, portraits of immigrants, agricultural work, kibbutzim, and various Jewish festivities. While there is only one colour image from the 1948 trip, of the Altalena ship burning in the water off the beach in Tel Aviv – a result of the conflict between extreme right-wing Irgunists and the Israeli government – by the time Capa arrived in 1949, he seemed to have all the colour film he needed. His Israel stories were picked up by all the major international picture news magazines, spurred by the 1950 publication Report on Israel, with text by Shaw and photos by Capa.
Following the success of his skiing story, Capa proposed a piece on French seaside resorts. In the summer of 1950, he traveled to Deauville in Normandy, with its racetrack and casino, photographing only in black-and-white (all that appeared in Illustrated).
He knew he could do more with the story and pitched it to Holiday as a double feature with Biarritz, in Basque Country. A year later, he returned to Deauville with colour film to photograph the scene, capturing the mix of social classes at the horse races. He then traveled to Biarritz, covering the beach, nightlife, and traditional folklore. For this story, the black-and-white and colour images complement each other – the colour adding details to the black-and-white, which set the stage. The layout, not published until September 1953, balances the colour and black-and-white with Capa’s humorous, self-deprecating text about his time in each resort.
Capucine (6 January 1928 – 17 March 1990) was a French fashion model and actress known for her comedic roles in The Pink Panther (1963) and What’s New Pussycat? (1965). She appeared in 36 films and 17 television productions between 1948 and 1990. At age 17, while riding in a carriage in Paris, she was noticed by a commercial photographer. She became a fashion model, working for fashion houses Givenchy and Christian Dior.She adopted the name, “Capucine” (French for nasturtium). She met Audrey Hepburn while modelling for Givenchy in Paris. The two would remain close friends for the rest of Capucine’s life.
In 1957, film producer Charles K. Feldman spotted Capucine while she was modelling in New York City. Feldman brought her to Hollywood to learn English and study acting under Gregory Ratoff. She was signed to a contract with Columbia Pictures in 1958 and landed her first English-speaking role in the film Song Without End (1960) for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. Over the next few years, Capucine made six more major motion pictures. They included North to Alaska (1960), a comedy, as a prostitute who becomes the love interest of John Wayne, and Walk on the Wild Side (1962), in which she portrayed a redeemed hooker, before moving to Switzerland in 1962.
Much of 1963’s hit film The Pink Panther was shot in Europe. A crime comedy that led to a number of sequels, the film starred David Niven and Peter Sellers along with Capucine. The risqué comedy What’s New Pussycat? (1965), which co-starred Sellers and Peter O’Toole, was filmed entirely in France. She continued making films in Europe until her death.
In his article on Norway for Holiday, Capa wrote: “I have revisited Budapest because i happen to have been born there, and because the place offered only a short season for revisiting. I even got to Moscow, which usually offers no revisiting at all. I kept on revisiting Paris because I used to live there before the war; London, because I lived there during the war; and Rome, because I was sorry that I had never lived there at all.”
Capa traveled to Rome for Holiday in 1951 and his pictures were published in April 1952, with a text authored by Alan Moorehead. A writer for The New Yorker at the time of the Rome assignment, Moorehead had been a correspondent for the Daily Express of London during World War II, and he and Capa had been together in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy. Capa’s accompanying colour photographs pursued a glamorous city filled with beautiful people engaged in endless partying, reflecting a Rome removed from postwar destruction and entering the period of La Dolce Vita.
Skiing was one of Capa’s favourite pastimes and he vacationed annually in Klosters, Switzerland, to relax and recuperate. In 1948, he and a Magnum colleague were trying to drum up a story on Megève, France, a popular ski resort for Parisians, on its “dual personality … simple peasant life and gay, café society set.”
Capa photographed in Zürs, Austria, in early 1949, for a Life story, although the magazine ultimately killed it. Holiday pulled in after Life dropped out and, in late 1949, signed on to a feature about the great skiing resorts of Austria, Switzerland, and France, which would become one of Capa’s most joyous and successful colour stories. In fact, it was arguably better in colour, which provided the additional elements of glitter and humour that black-and-white often missed. For two months, he traveled from the Austrian resorts of Kitzbühel, St. Anton, Zürs, and Lech, to the Swiss towns of Davos, Klosters, and Zermatt, then over the French border to Val d’Isère. In each place, he found a glamorous circle to depict: director Billy Wilder and writer Peter Viertel from Hollywood, young international ski champions, and current and ex-European royalty, including the Queen and Prince of Holland. Everyone was healthy and the mood festive. Capa found a relaxed, casual confidence in his subjects.
Paris was Capa’s de facto home from 1933 to 1939 and then as his postwar base, usually in a back room of the elegant Hotel Lancaster off the Champs-Élysées, where he was friend with the owner.
Holiday‘s editor Ted Patrick commissioned Capa to provide photographs for a special issue on Paris in 1952, and Capa brought in other Magnum colleagues – Henri Cartier-Bresson, Chim, and the young Dennis Stock. The magazine included texts by Irwin Shaw, Paul Bowles, Ludwig Bemelmans, Art Buchwald, and Colette, among others, and is a romantic paean to the city, almost a stage set for romance, gastronomy, and history. Some of Capa’s best images from this story are the quirkiest ones and play with the contrasts that he seemed to revel in, between the young and old, human and animal, high-life and low-life, particularly at the horse races, about which he noted: “The sport of kings is also the sport of concierges”. For his photographs of plein air painters, Capa wrote: “Place du Tertre is a painter’s paradise. A few stops from Sacré Coeur we find an old gentleman in beard and beret looking like an American movie producer’s idea of the kind of French painter found in Montmartre”.
Capa developed Generation X, also known as Gen X, for Magnum on the mark of the half century in late 1949. McCall’s was originally behind the project, but had pulled out by 1951, when Capa insisted on injecting more political content.
Holiday filled the void and supported the project all the way to a three-part series published in early 1953. Capa observed, “it was one of those projects, of which many are born in the minds of people who have big ideas and little money. The funny thing about this project is that it was accomplished.” He assigned the photographers, including Chim, Cartier-Bresson, and Eve Arnold, to each create a portrait of a boy and/or girl in countries where they were already working or had worked. Each subject answered a detailed questionnaire about his or her life, family, personal beliefs, and goals. The project eventually included twenty-four individuals in fourteen countries on five continents. Capa photographed all his subjects – a French girl, a German boy, and Norwegian boy and girl – in colour and black-and-white, but only the Norwegian photos were published in colour. Capa’s biographer Richard Whelan suggested that Capa’s depiction of the French girl, Colette Laurent, was an oblique portrait of himself at the time: “Her life is superficial, artificial on the surface and holds none of the good things except the material ones.”
Capa was friends with a number of movie stars and directors and incorporated them into his professional work. He met John Huston in Naples in 1944, while Huston was making films for the Army Signal Corps, and Ingrid Bergman in 1945 when she was filming in Paris, before beginning a one-year love affair.
As part of his 1948 trip to Morocco, he included a story on The Black Rose and its star Orson Welles. He photographed the set of Huston’s Beat the Devil, written by Truman Capote and filmed in the hillside town of Ravello, Italy. The cast visited the set of Viaggio in Italia in nearby Almalfi with Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, and George Sanders and Capa also dipped down to Paestum with his friend Martha Gellhorn, casting her as a caryatid in the ancient ruins. Capa covered another Huston film, Moulin Rouge, about the life of painter Toulouse Lautrec, shot in Paris and at Shepparton Studios near London. Capa’s colour portraits of the actors eschew traditional head shots and capture the varied pace and playful moments on the set.
In 1953, Capa traveled to London to cover the coronation of the young Elizabeth II with friends Humphrey Bogart and John Huston. His colour images of crowds waiting for the parade of guests before the coronation, for which he used 35mm Kodachrome, suggest a new interest in colour for colour’s sake.
In 1954, he received an invitation from Mainichi Press to travel to Japan for six weeks with Japanese cameras and an unrestricted amount of film to shoot what he liked in return for images they could publish. The trip was an easy one, but the colour photographs lack focus. He wandered around markets, documented foreign signs, watched people visiting temples and shrines, and photographed Children’s Day in Osaka, but they are little better than tourist snaps. Only a few images of a May Day workers’ celebration in Tokyo, in bright colours, show some engagement, reminiscent of his 1930s images of workers in France and Spain.
In 1953, Capa expressed his readiness “to get back to real work, and soon. What and where I do not know, but the Deauville and Biarritz and motley movie period is over.”
In the same letter, he writes of his desire to go to “Indochina, or any other proposition which would get me back to reporting on my own type of territory”. While in Japan the next year, Capa received a cable from Life asking him to cover for their photographer in Indochina. The assignment was only for a few weeks and would bring in some needed money. He reached Hanoi on May 9 and on May 25, with Time reporter John Mecklin and Scripps-Howard correspondent John Lucas, left Mandihn with two cameras, a Contax with black-and-white film, and a Nikon with colour film. Their convoy traveled along a dirt road lined by rice paddies. Moving toward Thaibinh, Capa left the convoy and walked on by himself. He photographed the soldiers advancing through the fields, and as he climbed the dike along the road, he stepped on a land mine and was killed. While the colour images are some of the strongest war pictures he made, none were used in the press at the time, probably in part because of the extra time required to process the colour film.
Jeu de Paume – Château de Tours 25 avenue André Malraux 37000 Tours
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