Exhibition dates: 2nd April – 24th August 2014

What a fascinating exhibition this looks to be… I wish I could see it!
Quite a few Sander photographs I have never seen before in the posting.
Sander is another photographer that would be near the top of my list.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the Pinakothek der Moderne for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

August Sander
Stadtwald [Urban Forest]
c. 1938
Gelatin silver print
23 x 29 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander
Children in the city
1930
Gelatin silver print
21.3 x 26 cm (sheet)
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander
Alter Posthof in Bacharach
1926
Gelatin silver print
15.3 x 21.4 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander
Die Familie in der Generation
1912
Gelatin silver print
21.5 x 28.6 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander
Deutz Bridge, Rhine in winter
1937
Gelatin silver print
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander
The Rhine near Boppard, Osterspey
1938
Gelatin silver print
22.9 x 29.3 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Andreas Gursky
The Rhine II
1999
Chromogenic print
1564 x 3083 mm

August Sander
View from the Mülheim Bridge, Sunrise
1938
Gelatin silver print
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander’s epochal cycle People of the 20th Century is considered one of the most important works in the history of art and photography of the last century.

Sander’s photographic typology of German society did not only fascinate artists, writers and philosophers of that period but, at the same time, formed an important point of reference for the artistic concept contemporary photographers had of themselves. This is also reflected in the Munich publisher Lothar Schirmer’s photographic collection, the starting point of which was a group of some 80 works by Sander comprising not only portraits, but also landscapes and urban pictures, acquired in the early 1970s.

This batch of works, acquired from the artist’s estate back in the 1970s, comprises not only more than 40 originals of Sander’s famous portraits, including masterpieces such as the Stammmappe focussing on farmers in Westerwald, the portrait of the artist Heinrich Hoerle in the austere style of New Objectivity and Handlanger, with its impressive visual directness, but also a rare group of lesser known Rhineland landscapes and vedute of Cologne from the 1930s. Precisely the last two groups of works mentioned are enduring proof that Sander’s vision of an equally authentic and veritable document of the times was not only to be limited to people within their social and societal structure but should also include their immediate surroundings, the landscape and the urban environment – an aspect that, for a long time, was given little attention in analyses of the photographer’s work since his death in April, fifty years ago.

In view of the undisputed importance of Sander’s portraits, it is surpising that a more extensive selection of the photographer’s work is only now to be seen in the exhibition People in a River Landscape – and that in Munich too, although there were in fact a number of links between the artist and the city. Sander’s pioneering photography book, Antlitz der Zeit, was published in 1929 by the Munich-based Kurt Wolff Verlag; one year later, his works were to be seen in the exhibition Das Lichtbild – one of the rare presentations of Sander’s works anywhere before 1933; and in the 1960s and ’70s his extensive estate was stored not far from Munich.

Sander’s photographs from this collection will be exhibited for the first time in their entirety and be displayed in dialogue with works by contemporary artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth and Jeff Wall. The selection will be extended by a rare group of extraordinary photographs taken in Berlin by Heinrich Zille in the late 19th /early 20th century and enlarged by Thomas Struth almost 100 years later.

The exhibition presents a both representative and focussed cross section of Sander’s photographic oeuvre. At the same time it shows the medium of photography in a wider perspective by placing individual groups of works by Sander in dialogue with those of contemporary artists. Starting with a typology by Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose encyclopaedically structured work can be regarded as an immediate successor to Sander’s photographic credo, the selection – supplemented by works from the holdings of the Sammlung Moderne Kunst – includes Andreas Gursky’s Rhine picture, urban views by Thomas Struth and Jeff Wall and portraits by Thomas Ruff and Cindy Sherman, among others. The interplay between the past and the present, between small-format, black-and-white prints and colour images the size of large canvases, between austere documentary works and staged and digitally processed pictures, not only illustrates the immediate relevance of Sander’s concept, far beyond any temporal or formal distinctions, but also how photography has become established as an artistic form of expression in its own right within the context of contemporary art. This topic will be explored in greater depth in the accompanying series of lectures Why Photography Matters, at which the artists Hilla Becher and Thomas Struth, as well as the art historians Wolfgang Kemp and Michael Fried will be speaking. As a modest homage to another historical precursor, the exhibition finishes with a rare group of photographs of Berlin by Heinrich Zille taken at the turn of the century, which Thomas Struth enlarged and reinterpreted in 1985 using the original negatives.”

Press release from the Pinakothek der Moderne website

Jeff Wall
The Thinker
1986
Large-format slides in lightbox
216 x 229 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
Courtesy of the artist
© Jeff Wall

August Sander
Handlanger [Odd-job man]
1928
Gelatin silver print
43.0 x 28.5 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #127
1983
© Cindy Sherman / Courtesy Schirmer/Mosel München

August Sander
The Architect [Hans Poelzig]
1929
Gelatin silver print
40 x 29.8 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Thomas Ruff
Portrait (T. Ruff) [Selfportrait]
1987
C-Print/Diasec
210 x 165 cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander
Der erdgebundene Mensch [The Earthbound Human]
1910
Gelatin silver print
29.2 x 23.1 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander
Bauernpaar – Zucht und Harmonie [Peasant Couple - Breeding and Harmony]
1912
Gelatin silver print
29.5 x 23.1 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Thomas Struth
Alte Pinakothek, Self-portrait, Munich
2000
© Thomas Struth / Courtesy Schirmer/Mosel München

August Sander
Painter [Heinrich Hoerle]
1928
Gelatin silver print
59.3 x 47.7 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Pinakothek der Moderne
Barer Strasse 40
Munich

Opening hours:
Daily except Monday 10am – 6pm
Thursday 10am – 8pm

Pinakothek der Moderne website

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Exhibition dates: 9th May – 31st August 2014

Here’s winking at you, sweetie…

My apologies for the slightly out of focus nature of some of the installation photographs, but I had to take them quickly as I walked through the gallery with co-curator Simon Maidment. If you relied on the nine press images supplied by the NGV (bottom of the posting), you would have no idea of the complexity of this artists work nor would you possess an understanding of the scale, intimacy, brashness, beauty and confrontational visibility of the art. You would also have no idea what a stunning installation the NGV has produced to display the work.

Simply put, this is the best exhibition I have seen in Melbourne this year.

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David McDiarmid (1952-95) – activist (the first gay person ever to be arrested in Australia) and multi-dimensional artist – proves the personal IS political AND influential. His work moves from early personal narratives through decorative to visually commanding and confrontational art. As homosexual identity transits from camp to gay to queer, McDiarmid deconstructs and redefines this identity using context as a FOIL for his art making. As Robert Nelson in his excellent review of the exhibition in The Age newspaper observes, “McDiarmid’s expression of the erotic is an act of protest as well as festivity. When McDiarmid began in full fervour, gay sex was not only reviled but illegal; and as he ended his career, homosexuality seemed to pass from the police to the undertaker. He began his expose of gay eroticism in the spirit of a demonstration and ended it as an act of compassion.”1

Well said. Homosexuality was illegal were McDairmid started making art and was deathly when he himself succumbed to the Grim Reaper. But during the journey that he took the key thing to remember is that McDiarmid never “passed” as something he was not. He was always up front, out there, doing his thing since he was first arrested in 1971. He was always pushing the boundaries, offering a wider perspective on social histories and political contexts. He questioned the marginalization of minorities (Secret Love, 1976), the boundaries of self and society and examined taboo and transgression in a conservative society. He lived at the cutting edge of culture. Later, he waged a life and death struggle for HIV/AIDS funding, awareness and compassion with a fierce determination combined with sparkling wit, humour and sardonic aphorisms. Sexual politics and safe sex campaigns went hand in hand.

Of course, sexuality and sexual identity were at the core of his creativity. He explored the urban gay male world and the struggle for gay rights, sexual and emotional sensibilities and the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS. Early work was influenced by time spent in New York (where he knew Keith Haring) and San Francisco, where he experienced the development of the clone scene and the music of the clubs. His mode of construction has a lot in common with folk and women’s art (in particular patchwork and quilting) coupled with the use of contemporary materials (such as holographic foil).

McDiarmid’s later work becomes more symbolic and universal but still contains that cutting edge of the personal (DEMENTED QUEEN REMEMBERS HER NAME – forgets to die; POSITIVE QUEEN FEELS NEGATIVE – goes shopping). In the most amazing room of art I have seen this year, McDiarmid uses reflective cut and tiled holographic foils to create moving tribute and biting comment on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In this darkened room the viewer is surrounded by tiles that “scintillate in spectral transience, changing their colours holographically according to your movement. The image is blunt and horny but also melancholy and scary; and similarly the medium impenetrable, deflecting the gaze and forcing you to change perspective.” (Robert Nelson)

But it’s more than that. You are surrounded by metallic flesh and embedded amongst the iridescence is both love and hate, life and death, winking eyes and holographic rainbow coloured skulls. Body language (1990, below) contains the names of McDairmid’s dead lovers woven into its fabric, a Swastika with the word AIDS for a head and the desire for the anus as a man pulls his arse cheeks apart. But here’s the rub – the tiny, puckered hole contains a holographic image of a winking eye, inviting you in, sharing the death/life joke with you. It’s a classic. In this room it feels as though you are surrounded by the fires of hell as the opalescence of the work changes from footstep to footstep, from positive to negative, from love to hate – and the pure beauty of the work is overwhelming. These are absolutely stunning works of art by any mark of the imagination, up there with the very best art ever made in Australia. His famous Rainbow Aphorisms series 1994 (below) are strong but they are are not a patch on the silver foil works. Less successful are the textile and costume designs, the weakest part of the exhibition.

One question springs to mind. Would his art have been as strong without the impetus of “death art” behind it? What would it have looked like?

I wonder which direction his art would have taken after his initial investigation of gay male identity had he not contracted HIV/AIDS and started making art about the disease. This strong focus gives the work the impetus and grunt it needed to move from the purely decorative and graphic, ney camp in some cases, to work with serious gravitas. In these later works McDiarmid lays it all on the line and just goes for it. I am so glad he did. They are powerful, concise, confrontational, beautiful, shimmering renditions of a soul living life to the full while he still had time.

It’s a pity the NGV has not advertised and promoted this exhibition more extensively. With a stunning catalogue, insightful research, amazing installation and world class art this is one exhibition you shouldn’t miss in Melbourne this winter.

Dr Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog

ART BLART: THE ONLY PLACE TO SEE INSTALLATION PHOTOGRAPHS OF THIS EXHIBITION ON THE WEB.

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Many thankx to Simon for allowing me to take the installation photographs during our discussion and to the NGV for allowing me to publish them, along with the nine press images at the bottom of the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Unidentified photographer
David McDiarmid at his first one-man show ‘Secret Love’, Hogarth Gallery, Sydney, 1976
1976
Silver gelatin photograph
Dennis Altman Collection, Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (ALGA)

David McDiarmid
Installation photograph of early works including, in the case, Vest (c. 1972), hand-embroidered by McDiarmid with the words ‘sydney gay liberation’ as a gift for John Lee with photographs of McDiarmid and artist Peter Tully used as a wallpaper on the wall behind at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne

David McDiarmid
Installation photograph of early works including Secret Love art show, poster (1976, far left), Secret Love (1976, top centre left), Ken’s Karate Klub (1976, centre below left) and Tube of joy (1976, above right) – all from the Secret Love series, 1976 except KKK – at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne

David McDiarmid
Secret Love
1976
From the Secret Love series, 1976
Metallic paint, red fibre-tipped pen, coloured pencil, collage of cut photo-offset lithograph and red and black ink on graph paper
78 x 66 cm
Collection of Paul Menotti and Bryce Kerr, Sydney

David McDiarmid
Secret Love
1978
Collage of cut colour photo-offset lithographs on plastic, metal and plastic
135 x 142.8 cm
Collection of Bernard Fitzgerald, Sydney

David McDiarmid
Secret Love (detail)
1978
Collage of cut colour photo-offset lithographs on plastic, metal and plastic
135 x 142.8 cm
Collection of Bernard Fitzgerald, Sydney

David McDiarmid
Various artworks from 1978 including Strangers in the night (top second left), Mardi Gras (top fourth left), Juicy fruit (top second right) and Real confessions (bottom second left)
All National Gallery of Victoria

Bush Couture, Sydney (fashion house) (front)
Linda Jackson (designer)
David McDiarmid (painter)
Paua kimono
1984
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Interview with co-curator Simon Maidment

MB: First of all Simon, can I ask how long have you been at the National Gallery of Victoria and what brought you to the institution?

SM: I’ve been at the NGV since June 2013 and I joined because of a new vision for the gallery which is making contemporary art a priority, both in collecting practices in the exhibitions that the NGV holds. Recently, there has been a real push for change, precipitated by the appointment of Max Delany who is a friend and colleague I respect a lot and who has been really supportive of my career.

MB: So what was your background in terms of training?

SM: I studied as an artist and immediately before coming to the NGV I was undertaking my PhD at The University of Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts Centre for Ideas with Elizabeth Presa as one of my supervisors.

MB: And what new knowledge was your PhD based around?

SM: It investigated curatorial practices that could be thought of as context responsive, looking at artists who seek to enact some sort of social and/or political change.

MB: So this exhibition would be perfect to fit into that…

SM: Yes, indeed… so largely my background has been working with living artists. I have done a few shows in which I have worked with existing bodies of work, but I have done a lot of shows where I have been facilitating artists works. I started as an artist working in media arts – sound, video, projection and digital technologies – and often worked as a studio assistant for more senior artists, people like Sue Ford, Susan Fereday, Ian de Gruchy and my role with them became more and more about facilitation. Then the directorship of Westspace came up and I got that, and my focus turned more from collaboration and working as a studio assistant to facilitation. I became a curator because basically that is what I was doing.

MB: So can you tell me Simon, what was the lead in time for this exhibition? I know it was postponed and delayed at various times, what were the reasons for that?

SM: It was kind of before my time so I am not really sure, but there have been different curators at different times from the NGV involved with the project. So Ted Gott was involved with the exhibition, even before he began work at the NGV. Ted was involved with David’s estate with Sally Gray, my co-curator, right from the start, so he’s been an advisor to Sally right from the start of this long journey. I think the initial discussion about the show was with Ted, and then when Jason Smith was in my position he was involved in this project. When I was talking with Sally the very first discussions about holding the exhibition at the NGV was maybe 15 years ago…

MB: So to finally get it here and up on the walls…

SM: So when I started 11 months ago there was really very little in place. So Max Delany and Sally started a conversation about working towards this show probably about 14 months ago. When Tony Ellwood started he was like, “We’re doing this show.” He’s a big fan of David McDiarmid. He was very familiar with his work so I think that helped speed things along and he really facilitated getting this exhibition done. It was scheduled for 2011.

MB: To get it together from start to finish in 14 months is pretty amazing really…

SM: It was a lot of work but bearing in mind how familiar Sally is with the material we kind of had a real head start.

MB: But then you have to pull it all together from lenders and institutions that hold works and that would have been very intensive. Then to design it all and to make it look like it does. It looks fantastic! Everyone at the opening was just smiling and having a good time, looking at the work, remembering.

SM: I knew the work en masse would blow people away.

MB: Reading the catalogue, you can see that David comes from a period where there was a ground swell of social movements, which was almost like one movement. Everybody went to everyone else’s rallies and they all protested together. David McDiarmid was the very first gay person to get arrested in Australia and at the moment I am digitally restoring the image of him being marched away by two policemen at the ABC protest in Sydney. It is so degraded it will take a long time to restore but it is a really important image. Out of that there comes a real social conscience, fighting for your rights and freedom. So leading on from that, when you think about having this exhibition here now (after Ted Gott’s seminal exhibition Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS at the National Gallery of Australia in 1994), you observe that marginalised voices rarely enter institutional centres of art, rarely enter the mainstream art. It’s usually ARI’s or small public galleries. Not that the artist is gay (because they are just artists) but that the CONTENT addresses gay issues – which is why it’s so fantastic to see this exhibition here at the NGV.

So were there any barriers here to doing David’s show?

SM: No, not really. I think one of the really important things to note is that they show would not have really happened without the large gift from the estate. Becoming the key holder and custodian of David McDiarmid’s work added extra emphasis and responsibility about doing the right thing. At that point the organisation is implicated in that legacy and somehow we have to disseminate the work out into the community.

MB: It is quite a confronting show, how do you think the general public will respond to it?

SM: I have done a couple of tours of people through the exhibition, members and other, and one of the things that has been surprising to me, in a way, which has only become apparent when I have been describing the show in which David makes work in response to particular social and political conditions and contexts… is how different things are. AIDS is now not a terminal illness. To speak to a younger generation than even myself, they have no idea about dying from lack of a viable treatment, of AIDS being a death sentence.

MB: Last night I had a cry for all the people I had loved and lost. But it’s not just the public coming in to see this exhibition, it’s young gay men who don’t ever see anybody ill, don’t understand about the side effects of taking the medication, about what living with HIV is like. They don’t understand the struggle that went on for them to live as they do now. Do you think they will engage with that?

SM: We have structured the show in a way that teases those things out. One of the aspects of McDiarmid as a figure that I find very interesting is that, in 20 short years of practice, he spanned incredible key moments and periods of change in broader society and also within gay society. The legal, medical, institutional change… and really looking at that 20 years is looking at a period of immense social change. The narrative of the exhibition is then to reflect on that broader cultural shift through the biography of one person.

MB: It’s interesting when I looked at the show, when you start making work as an artist it’s always about personal narratives – lovers, friends, places – which then widens out into more universal concerns. You can see in David’s early work him scribbling, writing and really intimately notating his world, investigating his self and his relations to the world around him. And then to take that insight and then to mould it into these reflective images into the Rainbow Aphorisms at the end is an incredible journey. Stephen Alkins was saying to be last night that even the last works were still grounded in this humorous, ironic look at life. He as a really important multimedia artist when you actually study the work.

SM: Just to pick up on one aspect that you are mentioning, and going back into my own background, one of things that Max Delany and I have been talking about that has in some ways illuminated this project is that, in the 1970s and 80s that saying ‘The personal is political’, is very important. David’s work is talking very much about the political as his own biography. Perhaps there is a shift in his later work to a more symbolic realm, and I would argue that nowadays artists working in a political and social context and to affect social change is not so much now as a personal identity – a woman, a black man, a gay man – it’s not necessarily about individual identities anymore, in some ways those battles seem to have been won within Western society. Actually for artists now in this context it’s more about neo-liberalism or capitalism. So it tends to be more on an institutional level and people tackling that in a much more symbolic realm. For instance I am thinking of such people as Jeremy Deller, an English artist who engages with British history and in particular his Battle of Orgreave, a reenactment of the actual Battle of Orgreave which occurred during the UK miners’ strike in 1984.

MB: People like Tom Nicholson in Australia, then, who did the Monument for the flooding of Royal Park (2008-2010), a proposition for the scattering of nardoo sporocarp throughout Royal Park, a vast Park in Melbourne’s inner north which was Burke and Wills departure point, now commemorated by a small cairn.

SM: Exactly. Artists like Tom are working in very propositional ways about memory, social imagination, monuments and memorialisation. All those kind of things are very much within a symbolic realm now. McDiarmid’s work fills the personal and then moves into the symbolic.

MB: But then Stephen Alkins said it was always personal to David, still based in the personal. He was very loyal to his friends, he was a very quiet person, very loving person with great energy. But he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and I think that this comes out of that culture of standing up for yourself and being strong because of the stuff we had to go through to where we are today. Seeing this exhibition actually shows you that difference and what we had to fight for.

SM: There’s a real drive there in that last room. He made so much work, across so much media, at the end of his life – that impending death drive was the source of so much creativity.

MB: McDiarmid was heavily influenced by international artists such as Keith Haring but he never really showed overseas. What do you think about that diaspora, that going overseas and then returning home to then begin exhibiting?

SM: Well the earlier work is, as you say, heavily influenced by the New York scene, the clone scene that was prevalent in the 80s – San Francisco, New York – so he’s definitely channelling those places… Interestingly, unlike many other artists, his art practice is nearly all Australian.

MB: Finally, what do you think is is his legacy in terms of his standing as an artist?

SM: In the last ten years of his life he was heavily involved as a community artist. He was incredibly busy and incredibly involved with things like the organisation of the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras and the design of the posters and floats. He was director of Mardi Gras from 1988-90 and he worked up float designs for various groups. You really get a sense of, as you said, of the solitary work of an artist and a real commitment to that work. In terms of his legacy as an artist, I don’t think that we will know until the exhibition is over. His work, such as the Rainbow Aphorisms, has been distributed widely but not really in an art context, and certainly not in a museum show such as this. People have not had the opportunity to visualise his work as a whole body of work until now.

MB: That brings me to the international context. The Keith Haring Foundation relentlessly promotes his work through books, exhibitions and conferences throughout the world. Do you think that you will start promoting his work overseas to other galleries and getting it into international exhibitions?

SM: I think the book will open a lot of doors. Because his work reproduces so well, because his writing is so interesting there is a broad range of voices for the scholars to investigate. But I think because the work reproduces so beautifully that will be hugely important. One of the aspects that the book will hopefully communicate to a younger audience is that of an infected muscular, sexually active, virile man not an emaciated artist… but to understand that and where that came from, and how radical that was at the time. I think that is one of the legacies that people will take away from David’s work. He is one of the artists that has been really instrumental in redefining that imaginary representation of a dying gay man.

MB: I remember seeing those + and – posters in gay sex venues, and thinking to myself, wow those are so amazing, who did those!

SM: Yes, those posters are about not closing down, about always been open to possibilities.

MB: Thank you so much Simon for taking the time to talk to me, it’s been great.

SM: Always a pleasure.

Dr Marcus Bunyan with Simon Maidment for the Art Blart blog June 2014

Simon Maidment is Curator of Contemporary Art at the NGV.

David McDiarmid
Installation views of various Sydney party posters with a black and white background wallpaper of David and the HIV Living group’s Day of the dead skeleton for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, 1992 (commissioned by the AIDS Council of NSW) at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne

David McDiarmid
Sleaze Ball, Horden Pavilion, 12 October 1985
1985
Screenprint printed in black and gold ink
91.2 x 65 cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gift of the artist, 1991

David McDiarmid
So I walked into the theatre
1984-85
Synthetic polymer paint, iron-on transfer, and cotton thread on cotton
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
Gift of the Estate of David McDiarmid, 1998

David McDiarmid
So I walked into the theatre (detail)
1984-85
Synthetic polymer paint, iron-on transfer, and cotton thread on cotton
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
Gift of the Estate of David McDiarmid, 1998

So I walked into the

theatre and lit a cigarette

I looked around. Then I

saw Tony. He lives in

Brooklyn and has a nice

beard and greasy hair.

He didn’t acknowledge

me, but I expected that.

I’d already made it with

him several times before

and each time, he pretended

was the first. He had

even told me his name

once, and that he lived

with a lover. We always

have great sex, but he doesn’t

want me to do anything

but stand there. He has

an incredible mouth…

David McDiarmid
Disco kwilt
c. 1980
Artbank collection

David McDiarmid
Installation view of works from the series Kiss of Light, 1990-92 including at left Mighty real 1991 with Kiss of Light 1990 right at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne
Collage of cut self-adhesive holographic film on enamel paint on plywood

David McDiarmid
Mighty real (detail)
1991
From the Kiss of light series 1990-92
Collage of cut self-adhesive holographic film on enamel paint on plywood
144.5 x 123.6 cm
Collection of Bernard Fitzgerald, Sydney

Detail of one of David McDiarmid’s holographic film art works showing the winking eyes

David McDiarmid
Body language
1990
From the Kiss of light series 1990-92
Collage of cut self-adhesive holographic film on enamel paint on plywood
152.4 x 121.8 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

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There is a holographic winking eye in the arsehole of this work

David McDiarmid
Thinking of you (detail)
1990
Collage of cut self-adhesive holographic film on enamel paint on plywood
140 x 120 cm
Collection of Steven Alkins, Mullumbimby, New South Wales

Installation photograph of the last room showing, at left on the wall, work from the Rainbow Aphorisms series 1994 with in front Totem works 1992-95 at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne

David McDiarmid
Standard bold condensed
1994
Screenprint on mylar on colour laser print
255.7 x 242.3 cm (overall)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of the Estate of David McDiarmid, 1998

David McDiarmid
Works from the Rainbow Aphorisms series
1994, printed 2014
Computer generated colour inkjet prints
149.1 x 110 cm (image and sheet each)
Collection of the McDiarmid Estate, Sydney

Peter Tully (1947-1992)

David McDiarmid
Australia 1952-1995
Lived in United States 1979-1987

Ron Smith
born Australia (1950s)
Totem works
1992-95
Anodised aluminium, found objects (installation)
Dimensions variable
Collection of Ron Smith, Woonona, New South Wales

Installation photograph of the last room showing, at right on the wall, work from the Rainbow Aphorisms series 1994 with in front Totem works 1992-95, then at left on the wall Pictograms 1995 at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne

David McDiarmid
Pictograms
1995
Vinyl and reflective plastic on aluminium

“I never saw art as being a safe thing. I know that exists but that’s not something that involves me.”

David McDiarmid, 1993

The vibrant, provocative and pioneering work of leading Australian artist, designer and gay activist David McDiarmid will be presented in a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. Defying classification, McDiarmid’s work encompasses the complex and interconnected histories of art, craft, fashion, music, sex, gay liberation and identity politics.

David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Mewill bring together more than 200 works, including the artist’s early gay liberation work; New York graffiti and disco quilts; fashion collaborations with Linda Jackson; his pioneering Rainbow aphorisms andGothic aphorisms digital work; material he produced as Sydney Mardi Gras Artistic Director; posters created for the AIDS Council of NSW; and, his significant and highly influential international campaigns developed in the context of AIDS, sexual politics and safe sex in the 1990s.

Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV, said, “The NGV is pleased to be staging this retrospective of an artist whose work had enormous impact on both the gay liberation movement and the international dialogue around AIDS, and whose clear messages of liberation, equality and emancipation continue to resonate today. David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me explores the social history, as well as political and art historical context, that informed McDiarmid’s work, which inspires through its courage, poetry, exuberance and cultural impact.”

Defying classification, the work of David McDiarmid encompasses the complex and interconnected histories of art, craft, fashion, music, sex, gay liberation and identity politics; happily residing in the spaces between high and low art, popular culture and community engagement. At once kaleidoscopic, celebratory and darkly humorous in tone, the artist’s idiosyncratic, highly personal and at times, confessional work highlights the redefinition and deconstruction of identities – “from camp to gay to queer” – drawing on the experiences of a life intensely lived in Melbourne, Sydney and New York. Charting the shifts in politics and individual and community expression that unfold across the decades of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, this exhibition also reveals McDiarmid’s artistic and grassroots political response to the impact of HIV / AIDS during the 1980s and beyond, for which he is best known internationally.

Recognising the cultural climate in which the artist worked, including the burgeoning of the gay rights movement, and a decade later, the advent of the AIDS crisis, the playful and provocative nature of McDiarmid’s work was critically related to changes that were occurring throughout this time to sexual identity and politics in Australia.

Dr Sally Gray, Guest Curator, said, “McDiarmid’s work speaks so eloquently of its time yet its importance and relevance endures today. David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me is the first exhibition in which the full scope of McDiarmid’s creative oeuvre is on display and is the culmination of painstaking research, with the support of many of his collaborators, friends and fans.”

David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me will coincide with the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne in July 2014.

This exhibition includes coarse language and sexual content. Press release from the NGV website

William Yang
Artist David McDiarmid photographed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales adjacent to his giant Q artwork on the gallery’s facade for Perspecta May, 1995
1995
© Reproduced with permission of William Yang

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-87)
Judy
1976
from the Secret love series 1976
Metallic paint, red fibre-tipped pen, cut photo-offset lithograph and red and black ink on graph paper
78.0 x 66.0 cm
Collection of Paul Menotti and Bryce Kerr, Sydney
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-87)
Strangers in the night
1978
Collage of cut coloured paper and photocopy on mulberry paper
62.6 x 50.7 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Proposed acquisition
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-87)
Hand and heart
1984
Synthetic polymer paint on cotton
250.0 x 230.0 cm
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Gift of the Estate of the late David McDiarmid, 1998
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-87)
Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, poster
1989-90
Colour photo-offset lithograph
69.0 x 49.0 cm
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Gift of Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Limited, 1995
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-87)
Untitled
1990-95
Self-adhesive holographic film and self-adhesive colour plastic on plastic
122.7 x 122.7 cm
Collection of Bernard Fitzgerald, Sydney
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-87)
Discard after use
1990
from the Kiss of light series 1990-92
Collage of self-adhesive holographic film on enamel paint on plywood
61.2 x 61.2 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift from the Estate of David McDiarmid, 1998
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-87)
I want a future that lives up to my past
From the Rainbow aphorisms series 1994, printed 2014
computer generated colour inkjet prints
149.1 x 110.0 cm
Collection of the McDiarmid Estate, Sydney
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-87)
Q
From the Rainbow aphorisms series 1994, printed 2014
Computer generated colour inkjet prints
149.1 x 110.0 cm
Collection of the McDiarmid Estate, Sydney
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Federation Square
Corner of Russell and 
Flinders Streets, Melbourne

Opening hours:
10am – 5pm
Closed Mondays

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Exhibition dates: 31st March – 1st September 2014

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

Weegee (American, born Ukraine (Austria), Złoczów (Zolochiv) 1899-1968 New York)
Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces
January 27, 1942, printed c. 1983
Gelatin silver print
31.8 x 41.4 cm. (12 1/2 x 16 5/16 in.)
Gift of Aaron and Jessica Rose, 1983
Rights and Reproduction: © Weegee / International Center of Photography

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925-1972)
Occasion for Diriment
1962
Gelatin silver print
18.0 x 18.7 cm (7 1/16 x 7 3/8 in.)
Rogers Fund, 1967
© The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Ralph Eugene Meatyard was a photographer and optician who spent the last two decades of his life in Lexington, Kentucky, producing an eccentric body of work at some remove from the photographic mainstream. He often posed his family and friends in enigmatic tableaux with props such as dolls and rubber masks, imbuing his images with a haunting Surrealist sensibility. The curious title of this photograph stems from Meatyard’s passion for odd names, puns, and peculiar words and phrases. Diriment is a made-up word, a Lewis Carroll-like compound of “dire” and “merriment” that suggests a mood of high-spirited fun and hilarity fraught with anxious undertones.

Lee Friedlander (American, born Aberdeen, Washington, 1934)
Shadow, New York City
1966, printed 1973
Gelatin silver print
16.0 x 24.1 cm. (6 5/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1990

Robert Frank (American, born Zurich, 1924)
Covered Car – Long Beach, California
1955
Gelatin silver print
21.4 x 32.7 cm (8 7/16 x 12 7/8 in.)
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005

“Photography is a medium prized for its capacity to expose, lay bare, make visible. For many artists, the camera is, above all, a tool for revealing what would otherwise remain unnoticed. As Diane Arbus once said: “I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.” At the root of this artistic impulse is a keen fascination with that which is hidden, obscure, or hitherto unseen. This exhibition presents a selection of contemporary photographs and video from the permanent collection that variously explores the medium’s dynamic interplay between concealment and revelation.

Some of the artists featured here use the camera to reveal subjects or places ordinarily hidden, as in Vera Lutter’s majestic view of the interior of a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant or Miguel Rio Branco’s lush image of a tapestry’s seamy underside. Others address instances of geopolitical obfuscation: Fazal Sheikh’s aerial photographs of the Negev desert in southern Israel record the traces of Bedouin villages that have been transformed into forests or farmland, while Mishka Henner collects images of stylishly censored high-security sites on Google Earth. In Vault (2011), Thomas Demand takes his inspiration from current events, meticulously re-creating a storeroom in which thirty missing works of art were discovered during a recent police raid.

The tension between publicity and privacy – the simultaneous desire to be looked at and to evade the merciless gaze of the camera – animates the work of artists as diverse as Arbus, Lutz Bacher, Jack Pierson, and Taryn Simon. In her video, The Nightingale (2003), Grace Ndiritu explores the tradition of the veil and its complex poetics of exposure and effacement. Complementing the contemporary works on view is a selection of earlier photographs in which the primary subject is hidden or obscured – a brief anthology of playfulness, shame, and seduction.

Fazal Sheikh (American, born 1965)
Desert Bloom (various numbers)
2011
Excerpt from the Erasure Trilogy
Inkjet print
Image: 40 × 60 cm (15 3/4 × 23 5/8 in.) Sheet: 52.1 × 72.1 cm (20 1/2 × 28 3/8 in.) Frame: 73.7 × 53.3 cm (29 × 21 in.)
Purchase, Jane P. Watkins Gift, 2013

In 2011 the French photographer Frederic Brenner invited eleven prominent photographers to spend six months in residence in Israel and the Occupied Territories, or West Bank, to explore the area’s complexity and to create bodies of work that might broaden and reframe the conversation about the region. Among those invited was Sheikh, an artist best known for his sensitive black-and-white portraits of people living in displaced and marginalized communities around the world. Sheikh’s project takes the form of a trilogy titled Erasure, of which Desert Bloom is the central part. The images were made during several months of flying above the Negev desert and are intended to articulate the rapid transformation of the region. On the one hand, they invoke the Israeli endeavor to “make the desert bloom,” and on the other, they reveal traces of the Negev’s history: the construction of towns for the Bedouin, the natural erosion of the land, the demolition of local dwellings, the remains of military installations, the afforestation campaigns of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), and the transformation of nomadic desert regions into farmland.

Thomas Demand (German, born 1964)
Vault
2012
Chromogenic print
220 x 276.9 cm (86 5/8 x 109 in.)
Purchase, Louis V. Bell Fund; Alfred Stieglitz Society, The Fledgling Fund, through Diana Barrett and Robert Vila, Joseph M. and Barbara Cohen Foundation Inc. and Hideyuki Osawa Gifts, 2013
© Thomas Demand / Artist’s Rights Society (ARS), New York

Demand’s photographs of the paper constructions he builds in his studio are typically based on photographs related to politically charged real-world events. He begins with an existing image, usually culled from the news media, which he translates into a three-dimensional life-sized model made of colored paper and cardboard. The models are then carefully lit and photographed, after which they are destroyed. Three times removed from the scenes they depict, Demand’s works are masterpieces of pictorial ambiguity that occupy a mesmerizing middle ground between reality and artifice.

Vault is based on a police photograph of a storeroom at the Wildenstein Institute in Paris, where thirty paintings and sculptures that had been missing for decades were discovered during a police raid in 2011. The missing artworks belong to the heirs of a French Jewish family displaced during the Holocaust. In Demand’s picture, as in the photograph on which it is based, the framed paintings – which include works by Degas, Manet, and Morisot – are turned to face the walls and remain tantalizingly hidden from view.

Vera Lutter (German, born Kaiserslautern, 1960)
Pepsi Cola Interior II: July 6-13, 2000
2000
Gelatin silver print
Overall installation: 90 3/4 in. × 14 ft. 3/4 in. (230.5 × 428.6 cm) Sheet (A): 90 in. × 55 3/4 in. (228.6 × 141.6 cm) Sheet (B): 90 in. × 55 3/4 in. (228.6 × 141.6 cm) Sheet (C): 90 in. × 55 3/4 in. (228.6 × 141.6 cm) Frame (each): 90 3/4 × 56 1/4 in. (230.5 × 142.9 cm)
Purchase, Joseph M. and Barbara Cohen Foundation Inc. Gift, 2001
© Vera Lutter

While the basis for Lutter’s technique – the camera obscura – is older than photography itself, her images and subject matter are wholly modern. This enormous negative print was made inside a room-sized pinhole camera that Lutter built in a derelict Pepsi-Cola bottling plant on the East River in Hunters Point, Queens. After pinning three huge sheets of photographic paper opposite the camera’s pinhole aperture, she worked inside the camera to monitor and manipulate the light during the weeklong exposure. The bottling plant itself closed in 1999 and was later demolished.

Mishka Henner (British, born 1976)
Staphorst Ammunition Depot, Overijssel
2011, printed 2014
From the series Dutch Landscapes
Inkjet print
31 1/2 × 35 7/16 in. (80 × 90 cm)
Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2014
© Mishka Henner

In his “Dutch Landscapes” series, Henner selects and reproduces images of the Netherlands found on Google Earth. The multicolored shapes punctuating these landscapes were created not by the artist but at the behest of the Dutch government. When Google Earth was introduced in 2005, satellite imagery of the entire planet became freely accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. This sudden visibility created concerns among many governments, who required Google – or its image suppliers – to obscure the details of sites deemed vital to national security. While most nations employed standard techniques, such as blurring, pixilation, or digital cloning, the Dutch chose to conceal hundreds of sites – including royal palaces, army barracks, and fuel depots – with bold, multicolored polygons. “There is of course an absurdity to these censored images,” Henner has written, “since their overt, bold and graphic nature only draws attention to the very sites that are meant to be hidden. Yet this contradiction seems perfectly apt for the absurd fear of terror that has come to dominate the cultural landscape of the last decade.”

Now You See It: Photography and Concealment, an installation of 25 works at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, focuses on the dynamic interplay between concealment and revelation in contemporary photography and video art. The featured works, all from the Museum’s Department of Photographs, range from a late 19th-century photograph by Pierre-Louis Pierson to a recently acquired work by Thomas Demand.

The installation presents works by artists who use the camera to reveal subjects or places ordinarily hidden from view, as well as works that explore broader themes of secrecy and obscured or partial vision. A highlight of Now You See It is Thomas Demand’s photograph Vault (2012). The image is based on a police photograph of a storeroom at the Wildenstein Institute in Paris, where 30 paintings and sculptures that had been missing for decades were discovered during a police raid in 2011. In Demand’s picture, as in the photograph on which it is based, the framed art works are turned to face the walls, remaining tantalizingly hidden from view. Other highlights include Vera Lutter’s haunting view of the seldom seen interior of the Pepsi Cola bottling plant in Queens, New York, Pepsi Cola Interior II: July 6-13 (2000), and Fazal Sheikh’s Desert Bloom (2011), a series of aerial photographs of the Negev desert. In Grace Nditru’s acclaimed video The Nightingale (2003), the artist explores the tradition of the veil and its complex associations of exposure and effacement. Accompanied by a recording of the Senegalese singer Baaba Maal, Ndiritu evokes a rapid-fire series of cultural references as she performs a hypnotic, Scheherazade-like series of gestures and movements with a piece of fabric, swiftly transforming it from turban to blindfold, and do-rag to noose to niqab. The tension between publicity and privacy, inherent in the field of photography, is explored in works by artists as diverse as Diane Arbus, Lutz Bacher, Jack Pierson, and Taryn Simon. The 20th-century photographs on view present the theme of concealment in a literal way and include Weegee’s Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces (January 27, 1942) and Helen Levitt’s Kids in a Box, on the Street, New York City (c. 1942).

Now You See It: Photography and Concealment is organized by Mia Fineman, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
[Kids in a Box, on the Street, New York City]
c. 1942
Gelatin silver print
Image approx.: 9 × 6 in. (22.9 × 15.2 cm)
Promised Gift of Mrs. Robert O. Levitt
© Estate of Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
[Kids on the Street Playing Hide and Seek, New York City]
c. 1942
Gelatin silver print
9 3/4 × 6 3/4 in. (24.8 × 17.1 cm)
Promised Gift of Mrs. Robert O. Levitt
© Estate of Helen Levitt

Attributed to Juliette Alexandre-Bisson (French, 1861-1956)
[Birth of Ectoplasm During Séance with the Medium Eva C.]
1919-20
Gelatin silver print
11.8 x 8.9 cm (4 5/8 x 3 1/2 in.)
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 2001

Bill Wasilevich (American, active 1940s)
Jimmy “One Eye” Collins After Arraignment
1946
Gelatin silver print
18.6 x 14.4 cm (7 5/16 x 5 11/16 in.)
Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2008
© Steve Schapiro/Corbis

Grace Ndiritu (British, born 1976)
The Nightingale
2003
Video
Gift of the artist, 2009
© 2003 Grace Ndiritu, Courtesy Grace Ndiritu and LUX, London

Before a camera fixed on her face and neck and accompanied by a recording of the Senegalese singer Baaba Maal, Ndiritu performs a hypnotic, Scheherazade-like series of gestures and movements with a piece of fabric, swiftly transforming it from turban to blindfold, from do-rag to noose to niqab. Both jubilant and unsettling, the video evokes a rapid-fire series of cultural references, counterposing the enforced modesty of the Islamic world with Western fantasies of exoticism. Ndiritu, who studied textiles at the Winchester School of Art, acquired this simple red-and-white scarf while traveling in India and carried it with her as a talisman through years of global exploration.

Jack Pierson (American, born 1960)
The Lonely Life
1992
Chromogenic print
Frame: 76.2 × 101.6 cm (30 × 40 in.)
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2000
© Jack Pierson

In 1994, Pierson was invited by the Whitney Museum of American Art to show his photographs alongside a group of works by Edward Hopper (1882-1967) that the artist selected from their vast holdings. Like Hopper, Pierson creates works that are inherently cinematic in their scope and effects; both are primarily concerned with mood, atmosphere, and exhibit a particularly urban kind of melancholy. His greatest asset, however, is an almost overwhelmingly lush palette, which he uses to depict objects of desire or scenes that are unabashedly sensual and emotional. An excellent example of the artist’s high-key chromaticism, The Lonely Life describes the unique brand of loneliness shared by the performer and the fan, both of whom (like Pierson) are doomed to experience existence solely through the intoxications of art.

Pierre-Louis Pierson (French, 1822-1913)
Scherzo di Follia
1861-67, printed c. 1930
Gelatin silver print from glass negative
39.8 x 29.8 cm (15 11/16 x 11 3/4 in.)
Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005

Virginia Oldoini, Countess Verasis de Castiglione (1837-1899), created a sensation when she appeared on the social scene in Paris in 1855, having been sent by the Italian statesman Cavour to secretly win Napoleon III over to the cause of Italian unity by “any means she chose.” Within months, the statuesque beauty was the mistress of Napoleon III and a much-talked-about ornament of the lavish balls so prevalent during the period. After the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, she led an increasingly secluded existence, which gave rise to fantastic speculation about her affairs. As the years went by, her mental stability declined and she ventured out only at night, shrouded in veils.

The countess’s raging narcissism found in photography the perfect ally; Pierre-Louis Pierson produced over seven hundred different images of her. In a reversal of roles, the sitter would direct every aspect of the picture, from the angle of the shot to the lighting, using the photographer as a mere tool in her pursuit of self-promotion and self-expression.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198
T: 212-535-7710

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Thursday: 9.30 am – 5.30 pm*
Friday and Saturday: 9.30 am – 9.00 pm*
Sunday: 9.30 am – 5.30 pm*
Closed Monday (except Met Holiday Mondays**), Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day

The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

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Exhibition dates: 13th June – 31st August 2014

Artists: Micky Allan, Virginia Coventry, Gerrit Fokkema, John Gollings, Tim Handfield, Ian North, Robert Rooney, Wes Stacey

This is another stimulating exhibition at the Monash Gallery of Art, a gallery that consistently puts on some of the best photography exhibitions in Melbourne each year. Kudos to them.

Each of the eight artists in this exhibition present mainly conceptually based work. Each body of work is individually strong but in the context of the exhibition they come together seamlessly to form a kind of giant jigsaw puzzle of images, a series of impressions of Australia and the road: work that responds to the experience of automotive travel in Australia, announcing “the road-trip as the quintessential Australian journey, highlighting the challenges to life and culture that accompanied suburban expansion and the ways that Australians embraced the road during the 1970s and ‘80s.”

It is a pleasure to finally see Ian North’s colour series Canberra suite (1980-81, below). Having seen but a few images online, to see the whole body of work in the flesh was illuminating. While lacking the formal rigour and structure of some of the other work in the exhibition, I enjoyed the natural simplicity of the photographs, their planned naïveté, which perfectly captures the suburbs of Canberra at that time. I also delighted in the intimacy of the small silver gelatin prints of Micky Allan’s Mock-up for ‘My trip’ 1976 (1976, below) with their pithy aphorisms such as “Need help?” when the car is bogged.

Another great series is Wes Stacey’s spunky The road (1974-75, below) – small automated chemist shop prints with their 1970s colours and rounded corners all housed in cheap plastic sleeves pinned to board. This series is beautifully resolved which today allows for a sensually self-indulgent nostalgia to form for the time in which they were taken. The cars, the colours, the travel, people and places so evocatively captured on an Instamatic camera form a captivating narrative of “the sense of movement and adventure that underpins a road trip in a relatively cheap and expedient way.” Another strong series of photographs are by Tim Handfield who I have always thought is an excellent photographer with a good eye. As can be seen by the four images in this posting, Handfield is a master at handling form, structure and colour in the image field. In these photographs he almost seems to compress the space inside the photograph so that they have a vaguely threatening presence.

Finally, there is the wonderful Surfers Paradise Boulevard (1973, below) by John Gollings. The artist’s riff on the American artist Ed Ruscha’s book Every building on the Sunset Strip (1966) – which presented composite black and white panoramas of each side of Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip – Gollings vision is in glorious Ektacolour film which highlights the sensuality of what can, at that time, be seen as a sleepy surf coast town. The shock comes on seeing the main strip of the town and envisioning in your mind what a monster it has become today… how human beings almost always despoil the very thing that is beautiful and valuable in a spiritual sense (such as my favourite place in Australia, Byron Bay). This fragmented, Hockney-esque view of the vernacular forms of cultural expression perfectly captures the insouciance of a town that doesn’t yet know what’s going to hit ‘em – through an ideal representation of contemporary urban space and the automotive experience of it.

Dr Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog

.
Many thankx to the Monash Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan and Monash Gallery of Art

Installation view of Ian North’s series Canberra suite 1980-81 at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

Installation views of Wesley Stacey’s series The road 1974-75 at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

This exhibition brings together a range of photographic projects that responded to the experience of automotive travel in Australia during the 1970s and ’80s. The work in this exhibition shows that there was a strong relationship between photography and the road in Australian culture at this time. Photography helped to make sense of the particular experience of movement made possible by faster cars and better roads; at the same time, it helped to demonstrate the challenges to life and culture that accompanied suburban expansion and the rise of the road in Australia.

The road is one of the great subjects in Australian visual culture. In many of our greatest films, books and works of art, the road is a place where personal identity is negotiated, where the national story unfolds, and where culture, technology and nature come together at times in extraordinary ways. MGA’s latest exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 brings together a range of photographic projects that explore the road as experienced by many Australians in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Presenting the work of eight prominent Australian artists, The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 announces the road-trip as the quintessential Australian journey, highlighting the challenges to life and culture that accompanied suburban expansion and the ways that Australians embraced the road during the 1970s and ‘80s. Using a range of strategies – from Instamatic cameras and chemist-shop printing, to expansive composite panoramas and photographic grids that replicate the experience of the modern city – these photographers helped to make sense of the particular experience of movement and landscape made possible by faster cars and better roads, in a way only photography could.

The exhibition features some of the most significant photographic projects produced by Australian photographers during this period. Wes Stacey’s mythic series of over 300 photographs The road presents an epic travelogue of road trips made by the artist in his Kombi Van during 1973 and 1974. The exhibition also features John Gollings’s monumental, ten-metre long streetscapes of Surfers Paradise Boulevard from 1973, as well as Robert Rooney’s iconic Holden park, featuring the artist’s Holden car parked in 20 different locations across Melbourne. The road also features work by two of Australia’s most important feminist photographers, Micky Allan and Virginia Coventry, who both challenged many of the gendered assumptions about the road, automotive travel and Australian life during the ‘70s and ‘80s.

As MGA Curator Stephen Zagala notes, “The road has often provided Australian photographers with a means to an end, whether a landscape or a picturesque community in some distant part of the country. But as this important exhibition shows, during the 1970s, the road took on a whole new meaning for Australian photographers. It provided a space for innovation and experimentation, and also a photographic reconsideration of Australian life.”

Gallery Director Shaune Lakin states, “The history of MGA – with its genesis in the late 1970s – is intricately linked to The road, one of our most important exhibitions of the year. Relatively cheap and accessible petrol, increased private car ownership, and a vastly improved network of roads encouraged the suburban expansion of Melbourne, and MGA is one of the many legacies of this expansion. We are proud to present this exhibition, which provides an as-yet untold account of Australian photography and has such a close historical association with our gallery.”

Press release from the MGA website

Installation views of Micky Allan’s Mock-up for ‘My trip’ 1976 (1976) at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

Micky ALLAN
b. 1944, Australia

Micky Allan’s My trip is a conceptual art project based on a road trip that she made through country Victoria in 1976. Allan’s conceptual premise was to photograph everyone who spoke to her and then invite these people to use her camera to photograph whatever they chose. Allan also recorded the conversations that transpired in these encounters, and subsequently compiled all these elements as a photographic essay that was printed and distributed as a broadsheet. Like many road trip narratives, Allan’s My trip conceptualises travel as a trajectory of chance encounters that illuminate social differences.

Micky Allan completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne in 1967 and a Diploma of Painting at the National Gallery School in 1968. Allan began taking photographs in 1974 after joining the loosely formed feminist collective at Melbourne’s experimental arts and theatre space the Pram Factory. In this context Allan was part of a vibrant community of feminist artists that included Sue Ford, Ruth Maddison, Ponch Hawkes and Virginia Coventry, who taught her how to take and print photographs. Allan is well-known for reclaiming the antiquated practice of hand-colouring monotone photographs, as a way of investing the photo-mechanical process with subjective qualities. She has often used the theme of travel to embed her practice in a personal journey of discovery.

Installation views of Virginia Coventry’s series Service road 1976-78 (detail) at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

Virginia Coventry
born Australia 1942
Service road
1976-78
1 of 34 gelatin silver prints and two text panels
26.5 x 32.5 (each)
Collection: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Courtesy of the artist and Liverpool Street Gallery (Sydney)

Virginia Coventry
born Australia 1942
Service road
1976-78
1 of 34 gelatin silver prints and two text panels
26.5 x 32.5 (each)
Collection: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Courtesy of the artist and Liverpool Street Gallery (Sydney)

Virginia Coventry
born Australia 1942
Service road
1976-78
1 of 34 gelatin silver prints and two text panels
26.5 x 32.5 (each)
Collection: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Courtesy of the artist and Liverpool Street Gallery (Sydney)

Virginia Coventry
born Australia 1942
Service road
1976-78
1 of 34 gelatin silver prints and two text panels
26.5 x 32.5 (each)
Collection: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Courtesy of the artist and Liverpool Street Gallery (Sydney)

Virginia COVENTRY
b. Melb 1942

Virginia Coventry’s Service road continued the artist’s interest in reflecting social and emotional experiences that differed from dominant, particularly masculine positions and experiences. The series presents two rows of reverse-angle photographs of houses and empty blocks that line a service road near the recently-completed Princes Freeway at Moe, Victoria. The weatherboard houses and the scene no doubt reflect the experience of many Australians living in postwar suburban developments who commuted between home and work, in this case the thousands of men who worked at the nearby Yallourn and Morewell power stations. Coventry photographed these homes and empty blocks as if viewed from a car passing by. Coventry has also included a number of views of the road, seen from inside the homes. The dark interiors take on a particular psychological and emotional countenance, one that contrasts starkly with the brightly lit outside. In this way, the series illuminates the experience of many women for whom the service road was a place of loneliness and dislocation.

Virginia Coventry studied painting at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology during the early 1960s, before undertaking postgraduate studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. While painting and drawing have remained a constant part of Coventry’s practice, she started taking photographs during the mid-1960s and developed a significant reputation during the 1970s for her photographs and installations. Her photographic work often comprised sequences of images combined with text and other fragments, and examined the relationship of landscape, place and power – particularly in relation to the experience of women. Her photographs were included in a number of key exhibitions of the period, including Three women photographers at George Paton Gallery, the Sydney Biennales of 1976 and 1979, Ten viewpoints (Australian Centre for Photography, 1976), and Self portrait/self image (Victorian College of the Arts, 1980).

Gerrit FOKKEMA
b. 1954, Papua New Guinea; Australia since 1958.

During the 1970s Gerrit Fokkema used the spacious streetscapes of Canberra to compose surreal photographs of contemporary urban life. In Exit Canberra and Ligertwood Street, the infrastructure of new suburbs has become overgrown with grass while waiting to be populated. The road itself doesn’t appear in these photographs, but its presence is alluded to with street signs and a lamp post. In this way, Fokkema suggests that these places exist at the ‘end of the road’ or on a ‘road to nowhere’. The optimistic skies that feature in these photographs seem to mock the aspirations of Canberra’s town planners.

Gerrit Fokkema studied photography at Canberra Technical College (1974-77) while working as a press photographer. In 1980 he moved to Sydney to work for the Sydney Morning Herald, and in 1986 he left the paper to pursue a freelance commercial career. Throughout his professional life Fokkema has maintained a personal photographic practice and exhibited his work on numerous occasions. He held his first solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography in 1975, where he exhibited regularly throughout the late 1970s. His photographs are executed in a social-documentary mode, with a particular interest in urban landscapes and situated portraits of ‘everyday’ Australians.

Installation and detail views of John Gollings’ work Surfers Paradise Boulevard 1973 (details) at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

John GOLLINGS
b. Melb 1944

John Gollings is best known for his architectural photography, and has over the last four decades photographed most of Australia’s and Asia’s most significant architectural projects. In 1973, Gollings travelled to Surfers Paradise to photograph its buildings, streetscape and signage. He had recently read influential architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour’s book Learning from Las Vegas (1972), which asked architects to pay closer attention to vernacular forms of cultural expression in favour of heroic or monumental architecture of the past. Gollings was also familiar with the work of the Californian artist Ed Ruscha, notably his book Every building on the Sunset Strip (1966), which presented composite panoramas of each side of Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip. For many urbanists at the time – including the authors of Learning from Las Vegas – Ruscha’s book realised an ideal representation of contemporary urban space and the automotive experience of it.

Gollings undertook a depiction of Surfers Paradise Boulevard that drew on Ruscha’s composite panorama of Sunset Strip. Sitting on the bonnet of a V8 Valiant station wagon, Gollings drove up and down Surfers Paradise Boulevard on a quiet Sunday morning, progressively photographing each side of the strip with his Nikon camera using Ektacolour film. The resulting composite panorama has become a remarkable historical record of an urban setting that has undergone radical transformation in the time since 1973.

Installation view of Tim Handfield’s work Babinda 1981 at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

Installation view of Tim Handfield’s work Gordonvale 1981 at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

Tim Handfield
born Australia 1952
Promenade
1985
Silver dye bleach print
51.0 x 67.0 cm
collection of the artist
courtesy of the artist and M. 33 (Melbourne)

Tim Handfield
born Australia 1952
Bayview Heights, Cairns
1980
Silver dye bleach print
51.0 x 67.0 cm
collection of the artist
Courtesy of the artist and M. 33 (Melbourne)

Tim HANDFIELD
b. Melb 1952

These photographs come from an extended series of pictures taken by Tim Handfield on the road. The series features images of the roadside landscape of places Handfield travelled through and visited along Australia’s eastern seaboard during the 1980s. The photographs relate to a broad body of often diaristic postwar literature, cinema and visual arts that considered the particular experience of the world made possible by the road (at least in the West). In this way, the pictures reflect the dominance of American culture at this time, when earlier assumptions about the road as a place of quest and opportunity were giving way to accounts of the road as a place of boredom, sameness and danger. The series is also about the particular experience of travel and landscape in Australia, at a time when the impending bicentennial of European settlement led many to reconsider the assumptions upon which Australian life was based.

Tim Handfield has been working at the forefront in Australia of new colour photographic processes since the mid-1970s. Spending extended periods of time in the United States during the early to mid-1970s, Handfield became interested in the work of American photographers such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, who found deadpan beauty in the banality of American suburban life. After returning to Australia, Handfield sought out non-dramatic urban sites, which he photographed in highly formal ways. These images were ideally served by the Cibachrome printing process, a dye destruction positive-to-positive photographic process noted for the purity of its colour, clarity of image and archival stability.

Ian North
born New Zealand 1945; arrived Australia 1971
Canberra suite
1980-81
1 of 24 chromogenic prints, printed 1984
37.0 x 46.0 cm (each)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through the NGV Foundation with the assistance of David Symen & Co. Limited, 2001
Courtesy of the artist

Ian North
born New Zealand 1945; arrived Australia 1971
Canberra suite
1980-81
1 of 24 chromogenic prints, printed 1984
37.0 x 46.0 cm (each)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through the NGV Foundation with the assistance of David Symen & Co. Limited, 2001
Courtesy of the artist

Ian NORTH
b. 1945, New Zealand; Australia from 1971.

Ian North developed his Canberra suite while living in Canberra during 1980-84. The suite reflects North’s experience of the particular suburban interface that is so intrinsic to Walter Burley-Griffin’s vision of Canberra. Having grown up in New Zealand, making artwork about the sublime urban spaces of Wellington, North brought a particularly soulful sensibility to Australia’s suburban capital. Canberra suite also reflects North’s professional experience of the city. He moved to Canberra in 1980 as the first Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia. A key feature of NGA’s collection development at the time was the acquisition of work by contemporary American photographers, including prints by William Eggleston and Stephen Shore and books by Ed Ruscha. After work hours, North made a pastime of wandering the streets of Canberra and taking photographs in a similar vein. Like his American contemporaries, North embraced the roadside as an uncanny threshold between public and private space, systematically documenting the everyday in order to imbue it with a sense of mystery.

Ian North initially studied art history and spent most of his professional life working as a curator and an academic. Alongside his career as a curator, North developed a substantial artistic practice which flourished when he moved away from museum-based work. Working with photography and painting, North’s art practice focuses on the representation of the landscape.

Installation views of Robert Rooney’s series Holden Park 1 & 2, May 1970 at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

Robert ROONEY
b. Melb 1937

Robert Rooney’s Holden Park 1 & 2, May 1970 is one of the key works of postwar Australian photography. The work comprises a grid of photographs depicting Rooney’s Holden car parked at 19 different sites around the artist’s East Hawthorn home, locations which Rooney chose at random from a street directory. Holden Park draws on a range of influences that include the photographic books of American conceptualist Ed Ruscha, the absurd topographies of the Swiss conceptualist Daniel Spoerri, and the American composer John Cage’s interest in chance as a creative principle. However, and while the work is very ‘literate’ in relation to these influences, Holden Park is very much a product of postwar Melbourne. Rooney has always maintained a strong interest in the suburban experience and the way that Melbourne has developed around this experience. While it would be disingenuous to say that Holden Park is a product of social history, it was certainly informed by and reflects the sensation of driving around Melbourne’s suburbs on a Sunday afternoon.

Robert Rooney is one of Australia’s best-known artists. Rooney studied art and design at Swinburne Technical College and quickly developed a significant reputation for his abstract painting and art criticism. Rooney gave up painting during the early 1970s and for over a decade focussed largely on photographic work. Using an Instamatic and later a 35 mm camera, Rooney photographed in great detail his suburban life, organising his pictures according to gridded frameworks that seemed to distil the rigour of European and American conceptualism and performance art, the humour of Pop Art, and the particular countenance of Australian suburban life during the 1970s. Examples include AM/PM of 1974, for which Rooney photographed his bed each morning and night for 107 days, and Garments 1972-73, for which he photographed the clothes he would wear each day for 107 days.

Installation views of Wesley Stacey’s series The road 1974-75 (detail) at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

Wesley Stacey
born Australia 1941
The road (details)
1974-75
304 chromogenic prints
9.0 x 12.7 cm (each)
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist

Wesley STACEY
b. 1941 Australia

Wesley Stacey’s The road is an epic travelogue that documents a series of specific road trips made by the artist in his Kombi Van during 1973 and 1974. This project grew out of Stacey’s interest in Instamatic cameras and automated colour printing, which became readily available during the early 1970s. Remote Australian landscapes are a persistent theme in Stacey’s photography, but these new technologies allowed him to document the sense of movement and adventure that underpins a road trip in a relatively cheap and expedient way. The road was initially exhibited as a series of sequential panels at the Australian Centre for Photography in 1975, and then re-configured as a series of photobooks containing 305 prints. A second version containing 280 photographs was printed for the National Gallery of Australia in 1984.

Wesley Stacey studied drawing and design at East Sydney Technical College (1960-62) before working as a graphic designer and photographer for the ABC in Sydney and the BBC in London through the 1960s. In the late 1960s he worked as a magazine photographer in Sydney and from 1969-75 worked as a freelance commercial photographer. In 1973 Stacey helped establish the Australian Centre for Photography and was a member of its inaugural board of management. In 1976 Stacey moved to the Bermagui area of the NSW South Coast, where he purchased land and established a rudimentary bush camp where he continues to live.

Text © Monash Gallery of Art 2014

Monash Gallery of Art
860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill
Victoria 3150 Australia
T: + 61 3 8544 0500

Opening hours:
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 Exhibition dates: 21st February – 1st September 2014

For my best friend, sculptor Fredrick White.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the art.

Giacomo Balla
The Hand of the Violinist (The Rhythms of the Bow) (La mano del violinista [I ritmi dell'archetto])
1912
Oil on canvas
56 x 78.3 cm
Estorick Collection, London
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

Giacomo Balla
Abstract Speed + Sound (Velocità astratta + rumore)
1913-14
Oil on unvarnished millboard in artist’s painted frame
54.5 x 76.5 cm
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553.31
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome
Photo: Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Francesco Cangiullo
Large Crowd in the Piazza del Popolo (Grande folla in Piazza del Popolo)
1914
Watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paper
58 x 74 cm
Private collection
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

Filippo Masoero
Descending over Saint Peter (Scendendo su San Pietro)
c. 1927-37 (possibly 1930-33)
Gelatin silver print
24 x 31.5 cm
Touring Club Italiano Archive

Ivo Pannaggi
Speeding Train (Treno in corsa)
1922
Oil on canvas
100 x 120 cm
Fondazione Carima – Museo Palazzo Ricci, Macerata, Italy
Photo: Courtesy Fondazione Cassa di risparmio della Provincia di Macerata

Bruno Munari and Torido Mazzotti
Antipasti Service (Piatti Servizio Antipasti)
1929-1930
Glazed earthenware (manufactured by Casa Giuseppe Mazzotti, Albisola Marina)
Six plates: 21.6 x 21.6 cm diameter each; one vase: 11.7 x 7.6 cm
The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami Beach, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
© Bruno Munari, courtesy Corraini Edizioni
Photo: Lynton Gardiner

“From February 21 through September 1, 2014, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe, the first comprehensive overview in the United States of one of Europe’s most important 20th-century avantgarde movements. Featuring over 360 works by more than 80 artists, architects, designers, photographers, and writers, this multidisciplinary exhibition examines the full historical breadth of Futurism, from its 1909 inception with the publication of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s first Futurist manifesto through its demise at the end of World War II. The exhibition includes many rarely seen works, some of which have never traveled outside of Italy. It encompasses not only painting and sculpture, but also the advertising, architecture, ceramics, design, fashion, film, free-form poetry, photography, performance, publications, music, and theater of this dynamic and often contentious movement that championed modernity and insurgency.

About Futurism

Futurism was launched in 1909 against a background of growing economic and social upheaval. In Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” published in Le Figaro, he outlined the movement’s key aims, among them: to abolish the past, to champion modernization, and to extol aggression. Although it began as a literary movement, Futurism soon embraced the visual arts as well as advertising, fashion, music and theater, and it spread throughout Italy and beyond. The Futurists rejected stasis and tradition and drew inspiration from the emerging industry, machinery, and speed of the modern metropolis. The first generation of artists created works characterized by dynamic movement and fractured forms, aspiring to break with existing notions of space and time to place the viewer at the center of the artwork. Extending into many mediums, Futurism was intended to be not just an artistic idiom but an entirely new way of life. Central to the movement was the concept of the opera d’arte totale or “total work of art,” in which the viewer is surrounded by a completely Futurist environment.

More than two thousand individuals were associated with the movement over its duration. In addition to Marinetti, central figures include: artists Giacomo Balla, Benedetta (Benedetta Cappa Marinetti), Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero, and Enrico Prampolini; poets and writers Francesco Cangiullo and Rosa Rosà; architect Antonio Sant’Elia; composer Luigi Russolo; photographers Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni); dancer Giannina Censi; and ceramicist Tullio d’Albisola. These figures and other lesser-known ones are represented in the exhibition.

Futurism is commonly understood to have had two phases: “heroic” Futurism, which lasted until around 1916, and a later incarnation that arose after World War I and remained active until the early 1940s. Investigations of “heroic” Futurism have predominated and comparatively few exhibitions have explored the subsequent life of the movement; until now, a comprehensive overview of Italian Futurism had yet to be presented in the U.S. Italian art of the 1920s and ’30s is little known outside of its home country, due in part to a taint from Futurism’s sometime association with Fascism. This association complicates the narrative of this avant-garde and makes it all the more necessary to delve into and clarify its full history.

Exhibition Overview

Italian Futurism unfolds chronologically, juxtaposing works in different mediums as it traces the myriad artistic languages the Futurists employed as their practice evolved over a 35-year period. The exhibition begins with an exploration of the manifesto as an art form, and proceeds to the Futurists’ catalytic encounter with Cubism in 1911, their exploration of near-abstract compositions, and their early efforts in photography. Ascending the rotunda levels of the museum, visitors follow the movement’s progression as it expanded to include architecture, clothing, design, dinnerware, experimental poetry, and toys.

Along the way, it gained new practitioners and underwent several stylistic evolutions – shifting from the fractured spaces of the 1910s to the machine aesthetics (or arte meccanica) of the ’20s, and then to the softer, lyrical forms of the ’30s. Aviation’s popularity and nationalist significance in 1930s Italy led to the swirling, often abstracted, aerial imagery of Futurism’s final incarnation, aeropittura. This novel painting approach united the Futurist interest in nationalism, speed, technology, and war with new and dizzying visual perspectives. The fascination with the aerial spread to other mediums, including ceramics, dance, and experimental aerial photography.

The exhibition is enlivened by three films commissioned from documentary filmmaker Jen Sachs, which use archival film footage, documentary photographs, printed matter, writings, recorded declamations, and musical compositions to represent the Futurists’ more ephemeral work and to bring to life their words-in-freedom poems. One film addresses the Futurists’ evening performances and events, called serate, which merged “high” and “low” culture in radical ways and broke down barriers between spectator and performer. Mise-en-scène installations evoke the Futurists’ opera d’arte totale interior ensembles, from those executed for the private sphere to those realized under Fascism.

Italian Futurism concludes with the five monumental canvases that compose the Syntheses of Communications (1933-34) by Benedetta (Benedetta Cappa Marinetti), which are being shown for the first time outside of their original location. One of few public commissions awarded to a Futurist in the 1930s, the series of paintings was created for the Palazzo delle Poste (Post Office) in Palermo, Sicily. The paintings celebrate multiple modes of communication, many enabled by technological innovations, and correspond with the themes of modernity and the “total work of art” concept that underpinned the Futurist ethos.”

Text from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum website

Tullio Crali
Before the Parachute Opens (Prima che si apra il paracadute)
1939
Oil on panel
141 x 151 cm
Casa Cavazzini, Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Udine, Italy
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome
Photo: Claudio Marcon, Udine, Civici Musei e Gallerie di Storia e Arte

Fortunato Depero
Little Black and White Devils, Dance of Devils (Diavoletti neri e bianchi, Danza di diavoli)
1922-23
Pieced wool on cotton backing
184 x 181 cm
MART, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome
Photo: © MART, Archivio fotografico

Gerardo Dottori
Cimino Home Dining Room Set (Sala da pranzo di casa Cimino)
early 1930s
Table, chairs, buffet, lamp, and sideboard; wood, glass, crystal, copper with chrome plating, leather, dimensions variable
Private collection
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
Photo: Daniele Paparelli, courtesy Archivi Gerardo Dottori, Perugia, Italy

Umberto Boccioni
Elasticity (Elasticità)
1912
Oil on canvas
100 x 100 cm
Museo del Novecento, Milan
© Museo del Novecento, Comune di Milano (all legal rights reserved)
Photo: Luca Carrà

Enrico Prampolini and Maria Ricotti, with cover by Enrico Prampolini
Program for the Theater of Futurist Pantomime (Théâtre de la Pantomine Futuriste)
Illustrated leaflet (Paris: M. et J. De Brunn, 1927)
27.5 x 22.7 cm
Fonds Alberto Sartoris, Archives de la Construction Moderne–Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
By permission of heirs of the artist
Photo: Jean-Daniel Chavan

Carlo Carrà
Interventionist Demonstration (Manifestazione Interventista)
1914
Tempera, pen, mica powder, paper glued on cardboard
38.5 x 30 cm
Gianni Mattioli Collection, on long-term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome
Photo: Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Luigi Russolo
“The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto” (“L’arte dei rumori: Manifesto futurista”)
Leaflet (Milan: Direzione del Movimento Futurista, 1913)
29.2 x 23 cm
Wolfsoniana – Fondazione regionale per la Cultura e lo Spettacolo, Genoa
By permission of heirs of the artist
Photo: Courtesy Wolfsoniana – Fondazione regionale per la Cultura e lo Spettacolo, Genoa

Mino Somenzi, ed., with words-in-freedom image Airplanes (Aeroplani) by Pino Masnata
Futurismo 2, no. 32 (Apr. 16, 1933)
Journal (Rome, 1933)
64 x 44 cm
Fonds Alberto Sartoris, Archives de la Construction Moderne–Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne EPFL), Switzerland
Photo: Jean-Daniel Chavan

Fortunato Depero
Heart Eaters (Mangiatori di cuori)
1923
Painted wood
36.5 x 23 x 10 cm
Private collection
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome
Photo: Vittorio Calore

Umberto Boccioni
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio)
1913 (cast 1949)
Bronze
121.3 x 88.9 x 40 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Lydia Winston Malbin, 1989
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Image Source: Art Resource, New York

Benedetta (Cappa Marinetti)
Synthesis of Aerial Communications (Sintesi delle comunicazioni aeree)
1933-34
Tempera and encaustic on canvas
324.5 x 199 cm
Il Palazzo delle Poste di Palermo, Sicily, Poste Italiane
© Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, used by permission of Vittoria Marinetti and Luce Marinetti’s heirs
Photo: AGR/Riccardi/Paoloni

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Avenue (at 89th Street)
New York

Opening hours:
Monday – Wednesday, Friday 10 am – 5.45 pm
Saturday 10 am – 7.45 pm
Thursday closed

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum website

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Exhibition dates: 13th June – 31st August 2014

Artists: Jane Brown, Cameron Clarke, Zoë Croggon, Therese Keogh, Phuong Ngo, Meredith Turnbull, Wolfgang Sievers
Curated by Naomi Cass and Kyla McFarlane

Curated by CCP Director Naomi Cass and Kyla McFarlane, this intelligent exhibition features the work of six early career artists who respond in diverse ways to renowned Australian photographer Wolfgang Sievers (1913-2007). It was a joy to see again the large vintage silver gelatin, almost clinically composed photographs by Sievers. The light, tonality and stillness of the images make them seem mythic, modern and monumental.

Each artist offers a unique “take” on Sievers influence on Australian photography and design, including his interest in refugees and human rights issues and the representation of the dignity of labour (although the machine is more often represented in Sievers work with a distinct lack of human presence and the act of work itself).

My personal favourites were Phuong Ngo’s intimate silver gelatin photographs in four groups of sweat shop workers in Vietnam, people on boats coming to Australia, photographs of textile workers in Australia and photographs of his mother. Phuong Ngo’s shared stories of young Vietnamese refugees and the journeys taken by their mothers told through photographs is very moving, but only after you are told what the four bodies of images are about. Positioned in the small Gallery Four it was also difficult to associate this installation with the rest of the exhibition. Initially I thought it was a separate exhibition until the linkages were told, the light dawned, and the connections were made.

While Cameron Clarke’s photographs of Ford factory workers and machinery are meticulously lit and digitally observed, producing a strong body of work, it is Jane Brown’s gridded analogue triptych which steals the show (see photographs below). These are superbly rich and textured photographs, beautifully seen and resolved within the shifting mise-en-scène. Brown’s images kinetically flow from one image to another even as they are self contained within a modernist grid. In some instances the artist has used the same photograph within the triptych but cropped in a different manner, which pushes and pulls the viewer into a different perspective on the subject matter. This is highly intelligent art making that observes the self contained nature and monumentality of Sievers work and reworks it, lucidly commenting on the dis/integration of these spaces and industries in the present day.

This series of work is the best sequence of photographs I have seen this year and any institution worthy of their salt should snap up these works for their collection.

Dr Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog

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Many thankx to the Director Naomi Cass and the CCP for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan 2014

Jane Brown
Triptych. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield
2014
3 panels of 9, 6 and 6 selenium toned, fibre-based, gelatin silver prints

Installation photographs of Jane Brown Triptych. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield 2014 (details) at the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Jane Brown
Staircase. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield, 2014
2014
Fibre-based, gelatin silver print

Jane Brown
Mining machinery, Line of Lode Miners Memorial Complex, Broken Hill 2014-06-10
2014
Brown toned, fibre-based, gelatin silver print
Courtesy the artist

Installation photograph of Jane Brown’s work at the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Wolfgang Sievers
Gears for the Mining Industry, Vickers Ruwolt, Burnley, Victoria, 1967
1967
Gelatin silver photograph
49.6 x 39.3 cm
National Library of Australia, Wolfgang Sievers Photographic Archive

Wolfgang Sievers
Sulphuric Acid Plant Electrolytic Zinc, Risoon, Tasmania, 1959
1959
Gelatin silver photograph

Installation photograph of the work of Meredith Turnbull (foreground) and Zoë Croggon (rear wall) at the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Zoë Croggon
John Holland Constructions, Ginninderra Bridge (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
70 cm x 86 cm
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

Zoë Croggon
Comalco Aluminium Used in the Construction of the National Gallery of Victoria [7] (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

Zoë Croggon
Comalco Aluminium Used in the Construction of the National Gallery of Victoria [18] (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

Zoë Croggon
Westgate Bridge (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

“Six early career artists, working in photography through to installation, have responded in diverse ways to renowned Australian photographer Wolfgang Sievers (1913-2007), icon of 20th century Australian photography. Sievers’ commercial practice exemplifies mid-century positivism and modernity, and the mythmaking role of photography. As a German Jewish immigrant, he had a strong interest in refugees and human rights issues as well as an expressed commitment to representing the dignity of labour. The Sievers Project presents key historical works as a context for engaging the past through the present.

Photographers Jane Brown and Cameron Clarke have followed in his footsteps to industrial clients Sievers photographed and valorised, finding sites that are visually dynamic within industries now in decline. Through her intrepid, research-based practice, Therese Keogh has developed a materially-rich work from the starting point of a single, anomalous photograph Sievers took at the Roman Forum in 1953. Meredith Turnbull draws on his connections with Melbourne’s design community in the 1950s and 60s, including Gerard Herbst and Frederick Romberg. In Sievers’ photographs of industrial sewing machines and their machinists, Phuong Ngo finds shared stories of young Vietnamese refugees and the journeys taken by their mothers. Zoë Croggon positions fragments of Sievers’ iconic architectural photographs against found photographs of the human body in movement.”

Text from the CCP website

Foreword to the catalogue

The Sievers Project follows a number of exhibitions over the last five years where CCP has opened up a vista on contemporary practice by exhibiting early work by living artists such as Bill Henson, Kohei Yoshiyuki and Robert Rooney, as well as historical photography, alongside contemporary work. As a commissioning exhibition we have titled this a ‘project’ to point towards the year-long research period integral to the exhibition, capturing the curatorial gesture of inviting early career artists to engage with the past.

The Sievers Project represents a significant curatorial endeavour for CCP, the tale of which is recounted in the Introduction. It would simply not have taken place were it not for the willingness and generosity of Julian Burnside AO QC to participate, through allowing the artists research access to his Wolfgang Sievers collection and lending work from it for the exhibition, as well as contributing an essay for this catalogue.

I acknowledge the artists for setting out on this project and for returning with thoughtful and excellent work. It has been a pleasure to both engage with and exhibit the work of Jane Brown, Cameron Clarke, Zoë Croggon, Therese Keogh, Phuong Ngo and Meredith Turnbull.

The Sievers Project has been dignifi ed by contributions by a number of experts and I wish to acknowledge Professor Helen Ennis, Australian National University School of Art who has also contributed a catalogue essay; Madeleine Say, Picture Librarian, Eve Sainsbury, Exhibitions Curator and Clare Williamson, Senior Exhibitions Curator, State Library of Victoria; Maggie Finch, Curator of Photography, National Gallery of Victoria and Professor Harriet Edquist and Kaye Ashton, Senior Coordinator, RMIT Design Archives, who all took time to speak about Sievers and share his work with the artists.

Opportunities to commission artists are relatively rare and funding through the inaugural Early Career Artist Commissions Grant from the Australia Council has enabled the project. CCP is pleased to acknowledge this recognition and support. We are delighted that Lovell Chen Architects & Heritage Consultants have provided further critical support to realise the project, for which we are grateful. We see a germane link between Lovell Chen and the premise of The Sievers Project.

The Besen Family Foundation are champions for enabling CCP to produce catalogues for selected exhibitions. I acknowledge the Foundation for their long-standing and generous engagement with CCP. We thank the National Library of Australia for providing permission to reproduce Sievers’ work in this catalogue.

The Sievers Project has provided a welcome opportunity for CCP to engage with colleagues in the fi eld of architecture and we are delighted to acknowledge a partnership with the Robin Boyd Foundation to present public programs. We are grateful to Tony Lee from the Foundation for his interest in the project.

Without doubt CCP’s ability to both present contemporary art well and look after artists is greatly enhanced through the longstanding and generous support of Tint Design and Sofi tel Melbourne on Collins. CCP is pleased to present a parallel exhibition of The Sievers Project at the 2014 Melbourne Art Fair and we thank the Melbourne Art Foundation for enabling CCP to bring the exhibition to broad new audiences. For the Art Fair exhibition we are also indebted to Christine Downer, previous CCP Board member and current supporter, for the loan of a major Sievers work.

The Sievers Project has been ably assisted by Philippa Brumby, curatorial intern. Co-curator Dr Kyla McFarlane and I thank Philippa for her wide-ranging skills over a substantial period of time. Lastly, I acknowledge Kyla for her excellent curatorial work and for the pleasure of collaborating with such a playful, dedicated and steely intellect.

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Naomi Cass, Director, CCP

And what about his Legacy?

A response to this necessarily combines elements of certitude and speculation. Sievers himself was totally committed to ensuring his legacy as a photographer. He spent years meticulously cataloguing and documenting his work and was assiduous in placing as much of it as he could in major photography collections around the country – art galleries and libraries. The bulk of his archive, a staggering 65,000 negatives and prints, was acquired by the National Library where it has been digitised and is available online to users in perpetuity. But there is another aspect to his preoccupation with legacy that has troubled me over the years – his desire to control the readings of his work, to ensure that he ‘owned’ the contextualisation and interpretation of it. As I see it, some of the framing narratives he constructed were retrospective and are misleading because they are not borne out by the evidence, that is, by the photographs themselves. This is especially apparent in his insistence that the relationship between ‘man and machine’ was central to his industrial photography. In my assessment of his enormous archive, images that extol this interaction are actually relatively few in number. They are outweighed by thousands and thousands of other industrial scenes in which the worker is locked into the dreary, repetitive tasks associated with mass production, or is not present at all having been displaced by machines that are far more efficient than humans will ever be. In other words, the bulk of Sievers’ own photographs contradict his central tenet of the dignity of labour in the modern machine era. The most important aspect of his legacy is undoubtedly his photographs and the astonishingly vast, high quality body of architectural and industrial work he produced between 1938 and the early 1970s. My view is that his black and white photography is the best although he did not agree with me, arguing that his colour photography, with its expressive and dramatic qualities, was equally fine. For me, it is his black and white images that are visionary, their precision, clarity and drama embodying the belief in progress that underpinned modernity. I would also suggest Sievers’ legacy isn’t confined to his photography. As a man he cared deeply about the world and wanted it to be better. He was closely involved in the restoration of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s buildings in Berlin in the 1990s and in the re-evaluation of his own father’s reputation (Professor Johannes Sievers was an expert on Schinkel and had used his young son’s photographs in his books on the architect in the 1930s). Wolfgang donated his photographs to fund-raising campaigns for human rights and remained a passionate antiwar activist until his death.

What would he have thought about this project?

I suspect that he would have been thrilled to know that his contribution to Australian life and photography is the touchstone for the six photographers involved in the project and that his work continues to be appreciated.

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Professor Helen Ennis is Director of the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at ANU School of Art, Canberra.

Installation photographs of the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Installation photograph of the work of Therese Keogh (detail) in the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Installation photograph of the work of Meredith Turnbull (detail) in the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Therese Keogh
In the Forum Romanum (after Sievers)
2013
Graphite on paper
Courtesy the artist

Cameron Clarke
Loui Nedeski, Ford Motor Company, Geelong
2014
Archival inkjet print
50 x 63 cm
Courtesy the artist

Cameron Clarke
Küsters Washer, Bruck Textiles, Wangaratta (detail)
2014
Archival inkjet print

Cameron Clarke
Theis Dye Jets, Bruck Textiles, Wangaratta (detail)
2014
Archival inkjet print

Phuong Ngo
Untitled
2014
from the Mother Vietnam series
Inkjet print
Courtesy the artist

Centre for Contemporary Photography
404 George St, Fitzroy
Victoria 3065, Australia
T: + 61 3 9417 1549

Opening Hours:
Wednesday – Saturday, 11am – 6pm
Sunday, 1pm – 5pm

Centre for Contemporary Photography website

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Exhibition dates: 27th May – 31st August 2014

“Young heart, old soul.” And then the vulnerability in those eyes…. that burn right through you.

Such sensitivity, such presence. Glorious. All of them!

Marcus

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Many thankx to Fundación Mapfre for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Vanessa Winship
Untitled from the series Imagined States and Desires. A Balkan Journey
1999-2002
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship
Untitled from the series Imagined States and Desires. A Balkan Journey
1999-2002
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship
Untitled from the series Imagined States and Desires. A Balkan Journey
1999-2002
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship
Untitled from the series Black Sea. Between Chronicle and Fiction
2002-2010
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship
Untitled from the series Black Sea. Between Chronicle and Fiction
2002-2010
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship
Untitled from the series Black Sea. Between Chronicle and Fiction
2002-2010
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship
Untitled from the series she dances on Jackson. United States
2011-2012
© Vanessa Winship

“Fundación Mapfre opens its new photography gallery at Paseo de Recoletos 27 with the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to the work of British photographer Vanessa Winship. Curated by Carlos Martín García, the show offers visitors a complete overview of Winship’s work, featuring a broad selection of photographs from all of her series, starting with her initial project in the Balkans and ending with her work in Almería this year, produced by Fundación Mapfre and due to receive its first public showing at this exhibition.

Vanessa Winship (Barton-upon-Humber, United Kingdom, 1960) studied at the Polytechnic of Central London during the 1980s at the time when postmodern theory was beginning to permeate the practice of photography and cultural studies. These ideas are reflected in the artist’s deliberate remove of all potential documentary content from her photography in order to concentrate instead on notions more related to identity, vulnerability and the body. Accordingly, since the 1990s Vanessa Winship has worked in regions which, in the collective imaginary, are associated with the instability and darkness of a recent past and with the volatile nature of borders and identities. Her images, in black and white, challenge the perception of photography’s immovable truth. Meanwhile, the formal choice of black and while reflects a deliberate shift from the photograph as narrative and constitutes, in the words of the artist herself, a “marvelous instrument of abstraction that enables us to move between time and memory.”

Vanessa Winship is one of the most renowned photographers on the contemporary international scene. In 2011 she was the first woman to win the prestigious Henri Cartier-Bresson (HCB) award. Her other distinctions include winning first prize in the Stories category of the World Press Photo awards in 1998 and 2008, the Descubrimientos award at PhotoEspaña in 2010, and the Godfrey Argent Prize in 2008, bestowed by the National Portrait Gallery in London.

A tour of the exhibition

I lived and worked in the region of the Balkans, Turkey and the Caucasus for more than a decade. My work focuses on the junction between chronicle and fiction, exploring ideas around concepts of borders, land, memory, desire, identity and history. I am interested in the telling of history, and in notions around periphery and edge. For me photography is a process of literacy, a journey of understanding.

Vanessa Winship

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The Vanessa Winship exhibition adopts the form of a chronological journey through each of the series that make up her oeuvre, featuring a selection of 188 photographs.

Between 1999 and 2003 Vanessa Winship traveled through the regions of Albania, Serbia, Kosovo and Athens, coinciding with the armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia and resulting in her series Imagined States and Desires. A Balkan Journey. This project was a fundamental step in defining her photographic vision and in her decision to break with contemporary reportage and the traditional concept of the photojournalist. The images that make up this series mostly center on the tragedy of the exodus of Kosovar Albanian refugees from Serbia to neighboring countries. They are a collection of snapshots that reflect the volatile nature of borders, ethnic groups and creeds while asserting that identity is not bestowed by territory but is ingrained in individuals, wherever they go. The fragmentary nature of the series, its condensation into micro-stories, lays the foundations for her future practice.

In 2002 Vanessa Winship moved to the Black Sea region and over the next eight years traveled through Turkey, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. Her work in this area gave rise to one of her most renowned series, Black Sea: Between Chronicle and Fiction. In this series, she presents her vision of the area and the residents of the regions around the shores of the Black Sea, which she presents as a natural border – challenging all notions of geopolitical or historically established limits – of the vital space of each nation, and even of the distinction between public and private space. Winship’s work therefore focuses on the aspects that endure beyond the action of politics: collective rituals, modes of transportation, recreational spaces, and the movement of human beings up and down the coastlines.

In Black Sea, portraits of Turkish wrestlers and Ukrainian wedding guests allow Winship to elaborate on her reflections and explore the concepts of sexual differentiation governing societies: on one hand, Turkish wrestling, a direct descendant of Greco-Roman wrestling and an icon of masculinity in the country; on the other, participation in a wedding ceremony as a means of self-presentation in society for young Ukrainian women.

In both of these series, the images are accompanied by brief notes written by the artist, either expressing a single thought or a short description, which create a deliberately incomplete narrative. For Winship, these notes are meant to remind us of the power of text to evoke an image.

Sweet Nothings: Schoolgirls of Eastern Anatolia (2007), produced during her travels through Eastern Europe, is a key project in Vanessa Winship’s evolution as a photographer. It is an almost serial collection of portraits of schoolgirls from the rural area of Eastern Anatolia, a region bordering with Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iran where the plurality of ethnic groups is silenced by the proliferation of uniforms, of both schoolchildren and military personnel. On a certain level, the school uniforms recall the tools used by states to classify the population, to “mark” their territory and neutralize the plurality of areas, as in Eastern Anatolia where the ethnic and geographic borders are not as clearly defined as they are on maps. This fact – the presence of uniforms – represents a framework for action, a boundary for the project, and allows Winship to further develop her interest in faces, gestures, and the sense of belonging to a group or community.

Georgia, another region on the shores of the Black Sea, is the setting for the series produced by between 2008 and 2010, in which she mostly focuses on portraits. Georgia. Seeds Carried by the Wind is a detailed study of the faces the photographer came across. These are portraits of youths and children, mostly individuals who, when grouped together, appear almost without variation as same-sex pairs. The collection suggests an energetic, survivor country. These images are combined with a series of colored photographs (the only ones in Winship’s entire output) that accompany tombstones in a cemetery. The two collections establish an interesting dialogue between different generations of Georgians and, simultaneously, between the artist herself and the original anonymous photographer. Meanwhile, the landscapes and stones that complete the series evoke a premature death. By combining landscape and portrait as places where the traces of identity, history and present are imprinted, this series is a key project in Winship’s work as it prompts a debate about her practice and the issues posed by the two genres.

In 2011 Vanessa Winship received the prestigious Henri Cartier-Bresson (HCB) photography award. The project for she won the prize led to the series she Dances on Jackson. United States (2011-2012), produced in the United States, a country which she represents as of great uncertainty, where the weight of the recent past is manifested through public works and constructions which are either underused or have fallen into disuse, and where the faces of anonymous individuals and groups reveal their disillusionment with the promises of the American dream. This series also constitutes Winship’s definitive approach to landscape photography, a genre which has gained increasing prominence in her output. Short texts written by the author replace the gradual disappearance of the portrait, operating as narratives of the missing photographs. In she Dances on Jackson. United States the geographic leap to the other side of the Atlantic defines the characters that people Winship’s earlier photography.

Before embarking on her trip to the United States, Winship worked in her home town on the estuary of the Humber river (2010), for which this series is titled. In this project, we again witness the growing preeminence of landscape in her work. This process culminates masterfully in her most recent series, produced in Almería, which represents the reaffirmation of her work as a landscapist and the total absence of the human figure. In January 2014, for the purposes of this exhibition, the artist moved to Almería, a place marked by rootlessness and its border nature and geological diversity, to carry out her latest project. Winship has focused on photographing the geological formations along the coastline of Cabo de Gata and the devastation of the area following the proliferation of intensive agriculture based on greenhouse production. The land of gold, Spaghetti westerns and marble now appears as a land of plastic and, like all other places Winship has photographed, seems to be located in a place suspended in space and time. All of the images in this section of the show reflect the rapid transformation of the region following the introduction of greenhouses, a radical systemic change and altered coexistence brought about by the arrival of communities of immigrants and their access to consumer society customs. Almería, as Winship’s photographs clearly show, continues to be a fragmented landscape in which urban and rural collide and where the “non-place” that is the greenhouse acts as a metaphor for the area’s instability and vulnerability.

Catalogue

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring all the images on display and specially commissioned essays about the work of Vanessa Winship by Neil Ascherson, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa and Carlos Martín García. The catalog will also include two excerpts from Campos de Níjar (Níjar Country) and Coto Vedado (Forbidden Territory) by Juan Goytisolo, as well as a biography-timeline, an updated bibliography, and a selection of the texts the photographer uses to complement her series, in the manner of a “travel diary”. To date there are only two monographs on Winship, one devoted to the Black Sea series and one to Sweet Nothings, which means that this catalog will be the first and most incisive historiographical approximation to her entire oeuvre.”

Press release from Fundación Mapfre

Vanessa Winship
Untitled from the series Almería. Where Gold Was Found
2014
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship
Untitled from the series Almería. Where Gold Was Found
2014
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship
Untitled from the series Black Sea. Between Chronicle and Fiction
2002-2010
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship
Untitled from the series Georgia. Seeds Carried by the Wind
2008-2010
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship
Untitled from the series Sweet Nothings: Schoolgirls of Eastern Anatolia
2007
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship
Untitled from the series Humber
2010-2011
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship
Untitled from the series she dances on Jackson. United States
2011-2012
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship
Untitled from the series Georgia. Seeds Carried by the Wind
2008-2010
© Vanessa Winship

FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE – Instituto de Cultura
Paseo de Recoletos, 23
28004 Madrid, Spain
T: +34 915 81 61 00

Opening hours:
Sunday 11.00 am – 7.00 pm
Monday 2.00 – 8.00 pm
Tuesday 10.00 am – 8.00 pm
Wednesday 10.00 am – 8.00 pm
Thursday 10.00 am – 8.00 pm
Friday 10.00 am – 8.00 pm
Saturday 10.00 am – 8.00 pm

Fundación Mapfre website

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Exhibition dates: 29th June – 7th September 2014

These were the only press images I could get for this exhibition. I would have liked to have seen many more!

Marcus

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Many thankx to the ONE Archives for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Histoire de l’art de l’antiquité
1781
Leipzig: J. G. I. Brietkopf

Winckelmann was murdered in Trieste on June 8, 1768. The frontispiece to this French translation of the History presents an allegory of his death designed by his friend, the painter Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717-1799)

George Platt Lynes
Nicholas Magallanes and Francisco Moncion in Balachines’s Orpheus II
1948
Gelatin silver print
8 x 10 inches
Private Collection

Edwin Townsend
Tony Sansone
c. 1950s
Gelatin silver print
9.5 x 7.5 inches
Collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York

James Bidgood
Pan
1965
Digital C-print
22 x 22 inches
Courtesy of the artist and ClampArt, New York

“Organized by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art and curated by scholar Jonathan David Katz, The Classical Nude and the Making of Queer History investigates how the visual iconography of Greco-Roman culture has acted as a recurring touchstone in the development of same-sex representation. Within the canon of western art history, images of the classical past have acted as a sensitive barometer for the shifting constructions of what we today call LGBT or queer culture. The classical past is queer culture’s central origin myth, and tracing how this tradition has been utilized by queer artists over time offers far more information about the cultural context that appropriates the classical than it does about that past itself.

Examining the classical nude across centuries of artistic production, this exhibition considers four major periods: Antiquity, the Renaissance, the nineteenth century, and the modern/contemporary period. Drawn almost exclusively from the collections of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York, the objects are diverse in medium and format. While all periods are represented, the majority of the works illustrate how artists in recent history have utilized classical iconography and themes to explore same-sex desire. It is in the recent past, as artists reimagined a classical legacy that had not accounted for diverse gender and racial perspectives, that we find queer culture’s relationship to the classical tradition at both its most complex and dynamic.

This presentation at the ONE Gallery is a condensed preview of a show to open at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in October 2014. Containing over ninety-five objects, the exhibition in New York will include works by Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo, Jacopo Pontormo, Andrea Mantegna, F. Holland Day, Romaine Brooks, Claude Cahun, Herbert List, Jess, Paul Cadmus, and Pierre et Gilles, in addition to the works presented here, and will be accompanied by a scholarly exhibition catalogue.”

Text from the ONE Archives website

Alonze James Hanagan (aka Lon of New York)
Howard Hunter
c. 1950s
Gelatin silver print
13.25 x 7 inches
Collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York

Artist unknown
Replica of The Warren Cup
original c. mid-1st century AD
Silver
Unnumbered issue from edition of twelve
Collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York. Image of the original courtesy of The British Museum

Bruce LaBruce with Nina Arsenault
Tripartite Goddess I, II, III
2011
Archival photograph
Signed on verso 1/10
18 x 28 in.

Austin Young
Dani Daniels, Los Angeles
2011
Archival inkjet print
Edition 1/10

Wilhelm Von Gloeden
Untitled
1895
Albumen silver print
9 x 6.75 inches
Collection of Sinski/McLaughlin

Friedrich O. Wolter
Drei Grazien (Three Graces)
Date unknown
Photograph
5.5 x 3.5 inches
Collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York

Del LaGrace Volcano
The Three Graces, Jasper, Suzie and Gill, London
1992
Digital C-print
30 x 23.5 inches
Collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York

ONE Archives Gallery & Museum
626 North Robertson Boulevard
West Hollywood, CA 90069

Opening hours:
Thursday: 4 – 8pm
Friday, Saturday and Sunday: 1pm – 5pm
Closed Monday through Wednesday

ONE Archives website

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Exhibition dates: 15th March – 7th September 2014

A bumper posting on probably the most important photo-media artist who has ever lived. This is how to successfully make conceptual photo-art.

A revolutionary artist, this para-photographer’s photo puzzles are just amazing!

Marcus

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Many thank to MoMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF FEMALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Figure Horizon #1
1971
Ten canvas panels with photographic emulsion
Each 11 13/16 x 11 13/16″ (30 x 30 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Le Voyeur / Robbe-Grillet #2
1972
Three canvas panels with bleached photographic emulsion and pastel chalk
14 x 40″ (35.6 x 101.6 cm)
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Museum Purchase with National Endowment for the Arts support

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Child Guidance Toys
1965
Black-and-white film transparency
5 x 18 1/16″ (12.7 x 45.8 cm)
The Art Institute of Chicago. Gift of Boardroom, Inc.

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Lessons in Posing Subjects / Matching Facial Expressions
1981
Fifteen internal dye diffusion transfer prints (SX-70 Polaroid) and lithographic text on Rives BFK paper
15 x 20″ (38.1 x 50.8 cm)
Collection UCLA Grunwald Center for Graphic Art, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Gift of Dean Valentine and Amy Adelson

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Kodak Safety Film / Taos Church
1972
Black-and-white film transparency
40 x 56″ (101.6 x 142.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Photography Fund

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
As Long As Your Up
1965
Black-and-white film transparency
15 1/2 x 19 5/8″ (39.4 x 49.8 cm)
The Robert Heinecken Trust, Chicago. Courtesy Petzel Gallery, New York

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Periodical #5
1971
Offset lithography on found magazine
12 1/4 x 9″ (31.1 x 22.9 cm)
Collection Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons, New York

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Six Figures/Mixed
1968
Layered Plexiglas and black-and-white film transparencies
5.75 x 9.75 x 1.5″ (14.61 x 24.77 x 3.81 cm)
Collection Darryl Curran, Los Angeles

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Figure / Foliage #2
1969
Layered Plexiglas and black-and-white film transparencies
5 x 5 x 1 1/4″ (12.7 x 12.7 x 3.2 cm)
Collection Anton D. Segerstrom, Corona del Mar, California

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Kaleidoscopic Hexagon #2
1965
Six gelatin silver prints on wood
Diameter: 14″ (35.6 cm)
Black Dog Collection. Promised gift to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
24 Figure Blocks
1966
Twelve gelatin silver prints on wood blocks, and twelve additional wood blocks
14 1/16 x 14 1/16 x 13/16″ (35.7 x 35.7 x 2.1 cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of Jeanne and Richard S. Press

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Multiple Solution Puzzle
1965
Sixteen gelatin silver prints on wood
11 1/4 x 11 1/4 x 1″ (28.6 x 28.6 x 2.5 cm)
Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation

The Museum of Modern Art presents Robert Heinecken: Object Matter, the first retrospective of the work of Robert Heinecken since his death in 2006 and the first exhibition on the East Coast to cover four decades of the artist’s unique practice, from the early 1960s through the late 1990s, on view from March 15 to September 7, 2014. Describing himself as a “para-photographer,” because his work stood “beside” or “beyond” traditional ideas associated with photography, Heinecken worked across multiple mediums, including photography, sculpture, printmaking, and collage. Culling images from newspapers, magazines, pornography, and television, he recontextualized them through collage and assemblage, photograms, darkroom experimentation, and rephotography. His works explore themes of commercialism, Americana, kitsch, sex, the body, and gender. In doing so, the works in this exhibition expose his obsession with popular culture and its effects on society, and with the relationship between the original and the copy. Robert Heinecken: Object Matter is organized by Eva Respini, Curator, with Drew Sawyer, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition will travel to the Hammer Museum, and will be on view there from October 5, 2014 through January 17, 2015.

Heinecken dedicated his life to making art and teaching, establishing the photography program at UCLA in 1964, where he taught until 1991. He began making photographs in the early 1960s. The antithesis of the fine-print tradition exemplified by West Coast photographers Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, who photographed landscapes and objects in sharp focus and with objective clarity, Heinecken’s early work is marked by high contrast, blur, and under- or overexposure, as seen in Shadow Figure (1962) and Strip of Light (1964). In the mid-1960s he began combining and sequencing disparate pictures, as in Visual Poem/About the Sexual Education of a Young Girl (1965), which comprises seven black-and-white photographs of dolls with a portrait of his then-five-year-old daughter Karol at the center.

The female nude is a recurring motif, featured in Refractive Hexagon (1965), one of several “photopuzzles” composed of photographs of female body parts mounted onto 24 individual “puzzle” pieces. Other three-dimensional sculptures – geometric volumes ranging in height from five to 22 inches – consist of photographs mounted onto individual blocks, which rotate independently around a central axis. In Fractured Figure Sections (1967), as in Refractive Hexagon, the female figure is never resolved as a single image – the body is always truncated, never contiguous. In contrast, a complete female figure can be reconstituted in his largest photo-object, Transitional Figure Sculpture (1965), a towering 26-layer octagon composed from photographs of a nude that have been altered using various printing techniques. At the time, viewer engagement was key to creating random configurations and relationships in the work; any number of possibilities may exist, only to be altered with the next manipulation. Today, due to the fragility of the works, these objects are displayed in Plexiglas-covered vitrines. However, the number of sculptures and puzzles gathered here offer the viewer a sense of this diversity.

Heinecken’s groundbreaking suite Are You Rea (1964-68) is a series of 25 photograms made directly from magazine pages. Representative of a culture that was increasingly commercialized, technologically mediated, and suspicious of established truths, Are You Rea cemented Heinecken’s interest in the multiplicity of meanings inherent in existing images and situations. Culled from more than 2000 magazine pages, the work includes pictures from publications such as Life, Time, and Woman’s Day, contact-printed so that both sides are superimposed in a single image. Heinecken’s choice of pages and imagery are calculated to reveal specific relationships and meanings – ads for Coppertone juxtaposed with ads for spaghetti dinners and an article about John F. Kennedy superimposed on an ad for Wessex carpets – the portfolio’s narrative moves from relatively commonplace and alluring images of women to representations of violence and the male body.

Heinecken began altering magazines in 1969 with a series of 120 periodicals titled MANSMAG: Homage to Werkman and Cavalcade. He used the erotic men’s magazine Cavalcade as source material, making plates of every page, and randomly printing them on pages that were then reassembled into a magazine, now scrambled. In the same year, he disassembled numerous Time magazines, imprinting pornographic images taken from Cavalcade on every page, and reassembled them with the original Time covers. He circulated these reconstituted magazines by leaving them in waiting rooms or slipping them onto newsstands, allowing the work to come full circle – the source material returning to its point of origin after modification. He reprised this technique in 1989 with an altered issue of Time titled 150 Years of Photojournalism, a greatest hits of historical events seen through the lens of photography.

Installation views of Robert Heinecken: Object Matter at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Photos by Jonathan Muzikar
© The Museum of Modern Art

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Breast / Bomb #5
1967
Gelatin silver prints, cut and reassembled
38 1/2 x 38 1/4″ (97.8 x 97.2 cm)
Denver Art Museum. Funds From 1992 Alliance For Contemporary Art Auction

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Then People Forget You
1965
Gelatin silver print
10 3/8 x 12 15/16″ (26.3 x 32.8 cm)
The Art Institute of Chicago. Gift of Boardroom, Inc.

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Cliche Vary / Autoeroticism
1974
Eleven canvas panels with photographic emulsion and pastel chalk
39 1/2 x 39 1/2 in. (100.3 x 100.3 cm)
Collection Susan and Peter MacGill, New York

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Surrealism on TV
1986
216 35 mm color slides, slide-show time variable
The Robert Heinecken Trust, Chicago; courtesy Cherry and Martin Gallery, Los Angeles
© 2013 The Robert Heinecken Trust.

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Shiva Manifesting as a Single Mother
1989
Magazine paper, paint and varnish
Collection Philip F. Denny, Chicago
© 2014 The Robert Heinecken Trust

Transparent film is also used in many of Heinecken’s works to explore different kinds of juxtapositions. In Kodak Safety Film/Christmas Mistake (1971), pornographic images are superimposed on a Christmas snapshot of Heinecken’s children with the suggestion in the title that somehow two rolls of film were mixed up at the photo lab. Kodak Safety Film/Taos Church (1972) takes photography itself as a subject, picturing an adobe church in New Mexico that was famously photographed by Ansel Adams and Paul Strand, and painted by Georgia O’Keeffe and John Marin. Presented as a negative, Heinecken’s version transforms an icon of modernism into a murky structure flanked by a pickup truck, telephone wires, and other modern-day debris.

Heinecken’s hybrid photographic paintings, created by applying photographic emulsion on canvas, are well represented in the exhibition. In Figure Horizon #1(1971), Heinecken reprised the cut-and-reassemble techniques from his puzzles and photo-sculptures, sequencing images of sections of the nude female body, to create impossible undulating landscapes. Cliché Vary, a pun on the 19th-century cliché verre process, is comprised of three large-scale modular works, all from 1974: Autoeroticism, Fetishism, and Lesbianism. The works are comprised of separately stretched canvas panels with considerable hand-applied color on the photographic image, invoking clichés associated with autoeroticism, fetishism, and lesbianism. Reminiscent of his cut-and-reassembled pieces, each panel features disjointed views of bodies and fetish objects that never make a whole, and increase in complexity, culminating with Lesbianism, which is made with seven or eight different negatives.

In the mid-1970s, Heinecken experimented with new materials introduced by Polaroid – specifically the SX-70 camera (which required no darkroom or technical know-how) – to produce the series He/She (1975-1980) and, later, Lessons in Posing Subjects (1981-82). Heinecken experimented with different types of instant prints, including the impressive two-panel S.S. Copyright Project: “On Photography” (1978), made the year after the publication of Susan Sontag’s collection of essays On Photography (1977). The S.S. Copyright Project consists of a magnified and doubled picture of Sontag, derived from the book’s dustcover portrait (taken by Jill Krementz). The work equates legibility with physical proximity – from afar, the portraits appear to be grainy enlargements from a negative (or, to contemporary eyes, pixilated low-resolution images), but at close range, it is apparent that the panels are composed of hundreds of small photographic scraps stapled together. The portrait on the left is composed of photographs of Sontag’’ text; the right features random images taken around Heinecken’s studio by his assistant.

Heinecken’s first large-scale sculptural installation, TV/Time Environment (1970), is the earliest in a series of works that address the increasingly dominant presence of television in American culture. In the installation, a positive film transparency of a female nude is placed in front of a functioning television set in an environment that evokes a living room, complete with recliner chair, plastic plant, and rug. Continuing his work with television, Heinecken created videograms – direct captures from the television that were produced by pressing Cibachrome paper onto the screen to expose the sensitized paper. Inaugural Excerpt Videograms (1981) features a composite from the live television broadcast of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration speech and the surrounding celebrations. The work, originally in 27 parts, now in 24, includes randomly chosen excerpts of the oration and news reports of it. Surrealism on TV (1986) explores the idea of transparency and layering using found media images to produce new readings. It features a slide show comprised of more than 200 images loaded into three slide projectors and projected in random order. The images generally fit into broad categories, which include newscasters, animals, TV evangelists, aerobics, and explosions.

Text from the MoMA press release

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Figure Cube
1965
Gelatin silver prints on Masonite
5 7/8 x 5 7/8″ (15 x 15 cm)
The Robert Heinecken Trust. Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Figure in Six Sections
1965
Gelatin silver prints on wood blocks
8 1/2 x 3 x 3″ (21.6 x 7.6 x 7.6 cm)
Collection Kathe Heinecken. Courtesy The Robert Heinecken Trust, Chicago

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Fractured Figure Sections
1967
Gelatin silver prints on wood blocks
8 1/4 x 3 x 3″ (21 x 7.6 x 7.6 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Photography Council Fund and Committee on Photography Fund

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
The S.S. Copyright Project: “On Photography” (Part 1 of 2)
1978
Collage of black and white instant prints attached to composite board with staples
b 47 13/16 x 47 13/16″ (121.5 x 121.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchased as the partial gift of Celeste Bartos

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Recto/Verso #2
1988
Silver dye bleach print
8 5/8 x 7 7/8″ (21.9 x 20 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mr. and Mrs. Clark Winter Fund

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Figure Parts / Hair
1967
Black-and-whtie film transparencies over magazine-page collage
16 x 12″ (40.6 x 30.5 cm)
Collection Karol Heinecken Mora, Los Angeles

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
V.N. Pin Up
1968
Black-and-white film transparency over magazine-page collage
12 1/2 • 10″ (31.8 • 25.4 cm)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gift of Daryl Gerber Stokols

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Typographic Nude
1965
Gelatin silver print
14 1/2 x 7″ (36.8 x 17.8 cm)
Collection Geofrey and and Laura Wyatt, Santa Barbara, California

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Are You Rea #1
1968
Twenty-five gelatin silver prints
Various dimensions
Collection Jeffrey Leifer, San Francisco

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Are You Rea #25
1968
Twenty-five gelatin silver prints
Various dimensions
Collection Jeffrey Leifer, San Francisco

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931–2006)
Cybill Shepherd / Phone Sex
1992
Silver dye bleach print on foamcore
63 x 17″ (160 x 43.2 cm)
The Robert Heinecken Trust, Courtesy of Petzel Gallery, New York

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
MANSMAG: Homage to Werkman and Cavalcade
1969
Offset lithography on bound paper
8 3/4 x 6 5/8″ (22.2 x 16.8 cm)
The Robert Heinecken Trust, Chicago

The Museum of Modern Art
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New York, NY 10019
T: (212) 708-9400

Opening hours:
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Friday, 10.30 am – 8.00 pm
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Exhibition dates: 7th February – 7th September 2014

Bruce Davidson
Untitled from the Brooklyn Gang series
1959

Danny Lyon
Crossing the Ohio River, Louisville, 1966
1966
Silver gelatin print

Each cool figure was considered with the following historical rubric in mind and possesses at least three elements of this singular American self-concept:

1. an original artistic vision carried off with a signature style
2. cultural rebellion or transgression for a given generation
3. iconic power, or instant visual recognition
4. a recognized cultural legacy

Every individual here created an original persona without precedent in American culture. These photographs capture the complex relationship between the real-life person, the image embraced by fans and the media, and the person’s artistic work.

What does it mean when a generation claims a certain figure as cool? What qualities does this person embody at that historical moment? American Cool explores these questions through photography, history, and popular culture. In this exhibition, cool is rendered visible, as shot by some of the finest art photographers of the past century.

When less – less famous, less obvious – is more

I don’t know about you, but the photographs chosen to represent American “cool” in this exhibition – 39 of which are shown in the posting out of a total of 108, but the rest are mainly of the same ilk – seem to me to be a singularly strange bunch of images to choose for such a concept. Personally, I find very few of them are “cool”, that is a mixture of a social charge of rebellious self-expression, charisma, edge and mystery with a certain self-made sense of style.

The only images that I find definitely “cool” among this bunch are, firstly Bob Dylan, closely followed by Jackson Pollock (notice the skull lurking behind him) and Susan Sontag. There is no proposition of cool in these three photographs, the people in them just are. The rest of the photographs, and there really are some atrociously plain and boring portraits among this lot (including a poor portrait of James Dean), really don’t speak to me of cool, don’t speak to me of anything much at all. How you could ever think that the portrait of Willie Nelson, 1989 (printed 2009, below) is cool is beyond me… and what is it with the reprints of the photographs, not originals but modern prints made years later? Perhaps the National Portrait Gallery needed to look beyond their own collection for a more rounded representation of American cool.

The two photographs I have included above are my top picks of American cool, and neither are in the exhibition. These iconic American images don’t feature famous people, they are not “posed” for the camera, and yet there is that ineffable something that makes the people in them absolutely, totally cool. THIS IS AMERICAN COOL: their own style, their own rebelliousness and mystery without possibly realising it = a naturalness that comes from doing their own thing, making their own way. Perhaps that is the point that this exhibition misses: you don’t have to be famous to be “cool”. A portrait is not just a mug shot. And an original persona does not have to come with fame attached.

This exhibition just doesn’t cut the mustard. The whole shebang needed a bloody good rethink, from the concept (does a generation have to “claim” someone is cool? is it necessary or desirable to portray American Cool through media images? do they have to be famous or instantly recognisable people to be “cool”) to the choice of images which could better illustrate the theme. Surely the qualities that person embodies changes from moment to moment, from photographer to photographer, from context to context (just look at the portraits of a haggard James Dean). To attempt to illustrate three elements in a single photograph – good luck with that one!

Marcus

PS I have added the videos to add a bit of spice to the proceedings… in them you can, occasionally, feel the charisma of the person.

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Many thankx to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Bob Willoughby
Billie Holiday
1951 (printed 1991)
Gelatin silver print
Image: 25.2 x 35.3 cm. (19 15/16 x 13 15/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Rare live footage of one of the first anti rascism songs ever.

Roger Marshutz
Elvis Presley
1956
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 40.6 x 50.8cm (16 x20″)
© Estee Stanley

Herman Leonard
Frank Sinatra
c. 1956
Gelatin silver print
Image: 16.5 x 24.1cm (6 1/2 x 9 1/2″)
Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University

Marcia Resnick
David Byrne
1981
Gelatin silver print
Image: 21.8 x 32.5 cm (8 9/16 x 12 13/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Julian Wasser
Joan Didion
1970
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.3 x 34 cm (9 9/16 x 13 3/8″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation.

Roy Schatt
James Dean
1954
Gelatin silver print
Image: 34.7 x 42.2cm (13 11/16 x 16 5/8″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

William Claxton
Steve McQueen
1962
Gelatin silver print
Image: 40 x 58.7cm (15 3/4 x 23 1/8″)
Fahey Klein Gallery

Martin Schoeller
Tony Hawk
1999 (printed 2010)
Archival pigment print
Image: 58.5 x 58.6 cm (23 1/16 x 23 1/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

What do we mean when we say someone is cool? Cool carries a social charge of rebellious self-expression, charisma, edge and mystery.

Cool is an original American sensibility and remains a global obsession. In the early 1940s, legendary jazz saxophonist Lester Young brought this central African American concept into the modern vernacular. Cool became a password in bohemian life connoting a balanced state of mind, a dynamic mode of performance, and a certain stylish stoicism. A cool person has a situation under control, and with a signature style. Cool has been embodied in jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and Billie Holiday, in actors such as Robert Mitchum, Faye Dunaway, and Johnny Depp, and in singers such as Elvis Presley, Patti Smith, and Jay-Z. American Cool is a photography and cultural studies exhibition featuring portraits of such iconic figures, each of whom has contributed an original artistic vision to American culture symbolic of a particular historical moment. They emerged from a variety of fields: art, music, film, sports, comedy, literature, and political activism. American Cool is the zeitgeist taking embodied form.

American Cool is captured by a roll call of fine-art photographers from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Annie Leibovitz, from Richard Avedon to Herman Leonard to Diane Arbus. This exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essays by Joel Dinerstein, the James H. Clark Endowed Chair in American Civilization and Director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, and Frank H. Goodyear III, co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and former curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery.

Unidentified Artist
Jack Nicholson in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
1975
Gelatin silver print
Image: 17.3 x 25.1cm (6 13/16 x 9 7/8″)
The Kobal Collection

John Cohen
Jack Kerouac
1959
Gelatin silver print
Image: 15.9 x 24.1cm (6 1/4 x 9 1/2″)
Sheet: 20.2 x 25.4cm (7 15/16 x 10″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Leo Fuchs
Paul Newman
1959 (printed 2013)
Modern archival print
Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14″)
© Alexandre Fuchs

William Paul Gottlieb
Thelonious Monk at Minton’s Playhouse, New York City
1947
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 25.4 x 20.3cm (10 x 8″)
Estate of William Gottlieb

Thelonious Monk Quartet – Round Midnight
Thelonious Monk(p) Charlie Rouse(ts) Larry Gales(b) Ben Riley(ds)
Recorded in Norway 1966 dvd “LIVE in ’66”

Peter Hujar
Susan Sontag
1975
Gelatin silver print
Image: 37.1 x 37.6cm (14 5/8 x 14 13/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Michael O’Brien
Willie Nelson
1989 (printed 2009)
Chromogenic print
Image: 38.1 x 38.1cm (15 x 15″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Introduction

What do we mean when we say someone is cool? To be cool means to exude the aura of something new and uncontainable. Cool is the opposite of innocence or virtue. Someone cool has a charismatic edge and a dark side. Cool is an earned form of individuality. Each generation has certain individuals who bring innovation and style to a field of endeavor while projecting a certain charismatic self-possession. They are the figures selected for this exhibition: the successful rebels of American culture.

The legendary jazz saxophonist Lester Young created the modern usage of “cool” in the 1940s. At first it meant being relaxed in one’s environment against oppressive social forces, but within a generation it became a password for stylish self-control. This exhibition does not reflect our opinion of who’s cool. Each cool figure was considered with the following historical rubric in mind and possesses at least three elements of this singular American self-concept:

1. an original artistic vision carried off with a signature style
2. cultural rebellion or transgression for a given generation
3. iconic power, or instant visual recognition
4. a recognized cultural legacy

Every individual here created an original persona without precedent in American culture. These photographs capture the complex relationship between the real-life person, the image embraced by fans and the media, and the person’s artistic work.

What does it mean when a generation claims a certain figure as cool? What qualities does this person embody at that historical moment? American Cool explores these questions through photography, history, and popular culture. In this exhibition, cool is rendered visible, as shot by some of the finest art photographers of the past century.

The Roots of Cool: Before 1940

The stage was set for the emergence of cool as a cultural phenomenon in the early 1940s by a series of sweeping transformations in the first decades of the twentieth century. The figures in this first section were not called cool in their day but were leading exemplars of new energies that were changing the social contours of American life. A fresh rebelliousness was revealed in the new film capital of Hollywood, in modernist literature and art, in emerging youth entertainments, and in a new music called jazz. The advent of technologies such as radio, film, and the automobile and the increasing diversity in America’s booming cities accelerated the pace of change. Though Prohibition in the 1920s sought to regulate American morality by ending the consumption of alcohol, this period saw the expression of a new independence among young people and others historically on the margins of public life. In particular, both African Americans and women sought and began to attain freedoms long denied. Cool has long denoted a person’s sense of calm and composure. Charismatic individuals such as those featured here contributed greatly to the changing mores in American society before World War II. Cool would ultimately serve as the term that would describe this new rebel.

Exhibition dates: 7th June – 14th September 2014

One of the greats – mainly for his series Gypsies, Invasion and Exiles.

Powerful images – strong, honest, respectful, beautifully composed but above all gritty, gritty, gritty. There is a dark radiance here, an ether/reality, as though the air was heavy with melancholy, emotion, loss, violence, isolation and, sometimes, love. No wonder he describes his work as a “theater of the real.” Humanism, and photography, at its most essential.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“I try to be a photographer. I cannot talk. I am not interested in talking. If I have anything to say, it may be found in my images. I am not interested in talking about things, explaining about the whys and the hows. I do not mind showing my images, but not so much my contact sheets. I mainly work from small test prints. I often look at them, sometimes for a long time. I pin them to the wall, I compare them to make up my mind, be sure of my choices. I let others tell me what they mean. [To Robert Delpire] My photographs, you know them. You have published them, you have exhibited them, then you can tell whether they mean something or not.”

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Josef Koudelka

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Czech-born French artist Josef Koudelka belongs in the firmament of classic photographers working today. Honored with the French Prix Nadar (1978), the Hasselblad Prize (1992), and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award (2004), Koudelka is also a leading member of the world-renowned photo agency Magnum. This exhibition, his first retrospective in the United States since 1988, is also the first museum show ever to emphasize his original vintage prints, period books, magazines, and significant unpublished materials.

Koudelka became famous in anonymity through the worldwide publication of his daring photographs of the Soviet-led invasion of Prague in August 1968. Just 30 years old at the time, Koudelka had already worked for a decade, principally on Gypsies, for which he visited Roma populations for weeks at a time in his home country and later abroad over the course of years. This ambitious series beautifully combines a sense of modern history with timeless humanism.

Choosing exile to avoid reprisals for his Invasion photographs, Koudelka traveled throughout Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, camping at village festivals from spring through fall and then printing in wintertime. His photographs of those decades became the series Exiles. Since the late 1980s Koudelka has made panoramic landscape photographs in areas massively shaped by industry, territorial conflict, or – in the case of the Mediterranean rim – the persistence of Classical civilization.

Tracing this long and impressive career, this exhibition draws on Koudelka’s extensive holdings of his own work and on recent major acquisitions by the Art Institute, including the complete surviving contents of the debut presentation of Gypsies in 1967 (22 photographs), as well as ten Invasion images printed by the photographer just weeks after the event. Also on display are early experimental and theater photographs and some of the photographer’s beautifully produced books – which stretch dozens of feet when unfolded. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, which after its debut at the Art Institute travels to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.

Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website

Josef Koudelka
Various images from the series Gypsies
Book printed 1975; new Aperture edition 2011

Aperture’s new edition of Koudelka: Gypsies (2011) rekindles the energy and astonishment of this foundational body of work by master photographer Josef Koudelka. Lavishly printed in a unique quadratone mix by artisanal printer Gerhard Steidl, it offers an expanded look at Cikáni (Czech for “gypsies” ) -109 photographs of Roma society taken between 1962 and 1971 in then-Czechoslovakia (Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia), Romania, Hungary, France and Spain. The design and edit for this volume revisits the artist’s original intention for the work, and is based on a maquette originally prepared in 1968 by Koudelka and graphic designer Milan Kopriva. Koudelka intended to publish the work in Prague, but was forced to flee Czechoslovakia, landing eventually in Paris. In 1975, Robert Delpire, Aperture and Koudelka collaborated to publish Gitans, la fin du voyage (Gypsies, in the English-language edition), a selection of 60 photographs taken in various Roma settlements around East Slovakia.

Josef Koudelka
Czechoslovakia (Kadañ)
1963, printed 1967
from the series Gypsies
The Art Institute of Chicago, restricted gift of Artworkers Retirement Society
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Josef Koudelka
Romania
1968, printed 1980s
from the series Gypsies
The Art Institute of Chicago, promised gift of Robin and Sandy Stuart
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Josef Koudelka
Slovakia (Rakúsy)
1966, printed 1967
from the series Gypsies
The Art Institute of Chicago, restricted gift of Sandy and Robin Stuart and Photography Gala Fund
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.

“The unforgettable photographs of acclaimed Czech-born, French photographer Josef Koudelka (b.1938), including eyewitness images of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, have not been shown at a major U.S. museum since 1988. These documentary works as well as extensive selections from the photographer’s work going back to 1958 – including his renowned series Gypsies, Exiles, and a variety of recent panoramic photographs – will feature in the major retrospective exhibition Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful, from June 7 through September 14, 2014. It is the first museum show ever to emphasize Koudelka’s original vintage prints, period publications and unpublished study materials.

Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful, which takes place in the Abbott (182-4) and Bucksbaum (188) galleries on the ground floor of the Modern Wing, draws primarily on Koudelka’s extensive holdings of his own work. For decades, the photographer has exhibited new and recent prints of images that have grown iconic through frequent exhibitions and reproductions, while holding back the earliest, vintage prints – until now. For example, over the years there have been more than one dozen solo exhibitions of Gypsies and numerous reprints of the book of the same name, which has appeared in two editions and six languages. Among the rarities that will be included in Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful is the only surviving maquette for the first book version of Gypsies, which Koudelka had to leave unfinished at his exile from Prague in 1970.

Koudelka’s habit of revisiting past projects while simultaneously advancing into new territory will be squarely on view in Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful. Twenty-two original photographs from the very first show of Gypsies, held in Prague in 1967, will be displayed for the first time since that date. In an adjacent room, a different selection from the series, printed at a different size and in another way, will also be shown. Similarly, extremely rare vintage prints of Invasion, made and circulated anonymously to the press directly following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, will be shown alongside much larger prints commissioned soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when Koudelka returned from exile and had his first post-Soviet exhibition in Prague.

Also on display will be selections from his early experimental photographs and years of work with Prague theater companies, made during the flowering of the Czech stage and cinema in the 1960s.

Koudelka was born in a small Moravian town in 1938 and moved to Prague, then the capital of Czechoslovakia, in the 1950s. He studied aeronautical engineering while practicing photography obsessively from 1958; in 1966, he turned full-time to a photographic career. Already in 1961, Koudelka had begun his most ambitious life project, Gypsies, for which he visited Roma populations for weeks at a time, principally in Slovakia. The rigorously humanist pictures became his calling card at home and internationally in the later 1960s after being published in the Swiss magazine Camera and shown to curators and photography representatives around Western Europe and the United States. Meanwhile, Koudelka’s Invasion photographs became famous after they appeared worldwide to commemorate the first anniversary of the events of August 1968. Worried about reprisals even though the images had been published anonymously, Koudelka chose to leave his country in May 1970.

In exile Koudelka adopted a semi-nomadic existence. He followed village festivals, pilgrimages, and Roma gatherings throughout the United Kingdom (his country of asylum in the 1970s), Spain, Italy, and France (his principal residence from 1981, and country of citizenship from 1986), photographing throughout the year and printing largely in wintertime. The world-famous photography agency Magnum, which had stewarded publication of the Invasion photographs, became Koudelka’s home base and as he says his “family.” Koudelka’s photographs of these years were gathered together in 1988 as Exiles, which will also be part of the exhibition.

Since the late 1980s Koudelka has made panoramic landscape photographs in areas massively shaped by industry, territorial conflict, or – in the case of the Mediterranean rim – the persistence of Classical civilization. The final gallery of Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful will showcase six of these mural-size black-and-white images, as well as three of the impressive accordion-fold books that Koudelka has made of them since 1989, some of which stretch to more than 100 feet long.

Despite his peripatetic life, Koudelka’s moving and stunning photographs have made him one of the most sought-after figures in print and at exhibition. Honored with the French Prix Nadar (1978), the Hasselblad Prize (1992), and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award (2004), Koudelka remains today a leading member of Magnum.

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, overseen closely by the artist and designed by the Czech firm Najbrt Studio. Edited by Matthew S. Witkovsky, the Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator of Photography at the Art Institute, the book provides extensive new information on Koudelka’s formative years in Prague during the thaw of the 1960s, as well as the first complete history of Gypsies, its twists and turns from 1961 through 2011. Amanda Maddox, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which has co-organized the exhibition, provides fresh knowledge on Koudelka’s underrepresented decade in England and the UK. Stuart Alexander and Gilles Tiberghien, two longtime friends of the photographer, have contributed illuminating essays on Koudelka’s years in France and his fascination for panoramic landscape, respectively.”

Press release from the Art Institute of Chicago

Josef Koudelka
France
1987

Josef Koudelka
Lisbon, Portugal
1975

Josef Koudelka
Ireland
1972, printed 1987/88
from the series Exiles
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Josef Koudelka
Spain
1975

Josef Koudelka
St. Procopius Abbey graveyard, Lisle
Nd

Josef Koudelka
Poland
1958
The Art Institute of Chicago, Photography Gala Fund and restricted gift of John A. Bross
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

“Drama was an important part of Koudelka’s early career: In a literal sense, because he worked for a theater magazine in the ’60s, creating fantastically emotive images, but also because theatricality was, and still is, deeply embedded in the photographer’s world view. The week in 1968 when young Czechoslovakians stood up against invading Soviet forces occurred when he was working as a stage photographer, and so it became not only a tragedy but also a drama to be recorded. Likewise, his “Gypsies” series, created in the same period, is described by Koudelka as a “theater of the real.”

Through dynamic composition and juxtaposition, Koudelka’s work challenges us to differentiate between spectacle and reality, and while there is no positive indication that one is valued over the other, this is not at all the same as the disbelief in reality that is characteristic of postmodernism. As he puts it, “You form the world in your viewfinder, but at the same time the world forms you.”

In a sense, Koudelka does not want us to become too comfortable with his works as definitive statements. Instead, he crops bodies in images abruptly; we often see people cut off at the knees or ankles, visually and figuratively separating them from the Earth. In other works, disembodied arms and legs jut into the space of the photograph, making scenes surreal and reminding us that whatever coherency the composition has, we can never see the whole picture of what’s really going on. Even with the more poetic and purposefully aesthetic panorama prints of his later “Chaos” series – monumental testaments to the violence we enact both on the natural world and upon each other – through the pitted insistence of film grain and the lack of bright tones or highlights, we are not permitted redemption through “art” or the creation of “beautiful” objects.

In this respect Koudelka’s work, in its celebration of the imperfect, has more in common with the aesthetics of the haiku poet Basho, or the tea master Sen no Rikyu, than with the luscious highly detailed color images that largely dominate the world of contemporary art photography.”

John L. Tran. Josef Koudelka: the theatrics of life

Josef Koudelka
Untitled (Student on tank, eyes crossed out)
1968
from the series Invasion
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Josef Koudelka
Untitled
Various images from the series Invasion
1968

The Art Institute of Chicago
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Chicago, Illinois 60603-6404
T: (312) 443-3600

Opening hours:
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The museum is closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s days.

The Art Institute of Chicago website

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Exhibition dates: 21st March – 14th September 2014

When I started experimenting with a camera in the early 80s, my first experiments were with mirrors, shoes, tripod legs, cotton buds and reflections of myself in mirrors (with bright orange hair). I still have the commercially printed colour photos from the chemist lab!

Henri’s sophisticated, avante-garde, sculptural compositions have an almost ‘being there’ presence: a structured awareness of a way of looking at the world, a world in which the artist questions reality. She confronts the borders of an empirical reality (captured by a machine, the camera) through collage and mirrors, in order to take a leap of faith towards some form of transcendence of the real. Here she confronts the limitless freedom of creativity, of composition, to go beyond objectivity and science, to experience Existenz (Jaspers) – the realm of authentic being.

These photographs are her experience of being in the world, of Henri observing the breath of being – the breath of herself, the breath of the objects and a meditation on those objects. There is a stillness here, an eloquence of construction and observation that goes beyond the mortal life of the thing itself. That is how these photographs seem to me to live in the world. I may be completely wrong, I probably am completely wrong – but that is how these images feel to me: a view, a perspective, the artist as prospector searching for a new way of authentically living in the world.

I really like them.

Marcus

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Thankx to the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich for allowing me to publish five of the photographs in the posting. The other images have all been sourced from the internet. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Florence Henri
Composition
Nd

Florence Henri
Composition
1931

Florence Henri
Composition No 10
1928

Florence Henri
Abstract Composition
1928
Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

“The photographs and photo-montages of Florence Henri (1893-1982) attest to her broad artistic education and an unusual openness for new currents in the art of the time.

The artist, who had studied the piano under Ferruccio Busoni in Rome and painting in Paris under Fernand Léger, in Berlin under Johann Walter-Kurau and in Munich under Hans Hofmann, spent a brief semester as a guest at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1927. Although photography was not part of the curriculum at the Bauhaus at this time, lecturers such as László Moholy-Nagy and Georg Muche, as well as pupils including Walter Funkat and Edmund Collein experimented intensively with this medium. It was here that Florence Henri gained the inspiration to become a photographer herself.

That same year she returned to Paris, stopped painting and devoted herself thoroughly to photography. She created extensive series of still lifes and portrait and self-portrait compositions, in which the artist divided up the pictorial space using mirrors and reflective spheres, expanding it structurally. The fragmented images created this way point to the inspiration Florence Henri gained from Cubist and Constructivist pictorial concepts.

Through her experimental photography Florence Henri swiftly became a highly respected exponent of modern photography and participated in numerous international shows such as the trailblazing Werkbund exhibition ‘Film und Foto’ in 1929. After World War II, however, the artist no longer pursued her photographic interest with the same intensity as before, devoting herself instead almost exclusively to painting. This most certainly also contributed to her photographs largely falling into oblivion after 1945.

The emphasis in the exhibition Florence Henri. Compositions in the Pinakothek der Moderne has been placed on the artist’s compositions using mirrors and her photo-montages, It comprises some 65 photographs, including the portfolio published in 1974, as well as documents and historical publications from the holdings of the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation. As such, Ann and Jürgen Wilde significantly contributed towards the rediscovery of this exceptional artist’s work. Her photographic oeuvre now has a permanent place within the art of the avant-garde.”

Press release from the Pinakothek der Moderne website

Florence-Henri
Still-Life Composition
1929

Florence Henri
Abstract Composition
1932

Florence Henri
Still-life with Lemon and Pear
c.1929

Florence Henri
Little Boot
1931

Florence Henri was born in New York on 28 June 1893; her father was French and her mother was German. Following her mother’s death in 1895, she and her father moved first to her mother’s family in Silesia; she later lived in Paris, Munich and Vienna and finally moved to the Isle of Wight in England in 1906. After her father’s death there three years later, Florence Henri lived in Rome with her aunt Anni and her husband, the Italian poet Gino Gori, who was in close touch with the Italian Futurists. She studied piano at the music conservatory in Rome.

During a visit to Berlin, Henri started to focus on painting, after meeting the art critic Carl Einstein and, through him, Herwarth Walden and other Berlin artists. In 1914, she enrolled at the Academy of Art in Berlin, and starting in 1922, trained in the studio of the painter Johannes Walter-Kurau. Before moving to Dessau, Henri studied painting with the Purists Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne in Paris. She arrived at the Bauhaus in Dessau in April 1927. She had already met the Bauhaus artists Georg Muche and László Moholy-Nagy and had developed a passion for Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel furniture. Up to July 1927, Henri attended the preliminary course directed by Moholy-Nagy, lived in the Hungarian artist’s house, and became a close friend of his first wife,Lucia Moholy, who encouraged her to take up photography. From the Moholy-Nagys, Henri learned the basic technical and visual principles of the medium, which she used in her initial photographic experiments after leaving Dessau. In early 1928, she abandoned painting altogether and from then on focused on photography, with which she established herself as a professional freelance photographer with her own studio in Paris – despite being self-taught.

Even during her first productive year as a photographer, László Moholy-Nagy published one of her unusual self-portraits, as well as a still life with balls, tyres, and a mirror, in i10. Internationale Revue. The first critical description of her photographic work, which Moholy-Nagy wrote to accompany the photos, recognizes that her pictures represented an important expansion of the entire ‘problem of manual painting’, in which ‘reflections and spatial relationships, overlapping and penetrations are examined from a new perspectival angle’.

Mirrors become the most important feature in Henri’s first photographs. She used them both for most of her self-dramatizations and also for portraits of friends, as well as for commercial shots. She took part in the international exhibition entitled Das Lichtbild [The Photograph] in Munich in 1930, and the following year she presented her images of bobbins at a Foreign Advertising Photography exhibition in New York. The artistic quality of her photographs was compared with Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy and Adolphe Baron de Mayer, as well as the with winner of the first prize at the exhibition, Herbert Bayer. Only three years after the new photographer had taken her first pictures, her self-portrait achieved the equal status with her male colleagues that she had been aiming for.

Up to the start of the Second World War, Henri established herself as a skilled photographer with her own photographic studio in Paris (starting in 1929). When the city was occupied by the Nazis, her photographic work declined noticeably. The photographic materials needed were difficult to obtain, and in any case Henri’s photographic style was forbidden under the Nazi occupation; she turned her attention again to painting. With only a few later exceptions, the peak of her unique photographic experiments and professional photographic work was in the period from 1927 to 1930.

Even in the 1950s, Henri’s photographs from the Thirties were being celebrated as icons of the avant-garde. Her photographic oeuvre was recognized during her lifetime in one-woman exhibitions and publications in various journals, including N-Z Wochenschau. She also produced photographs during this period, such as a series of pictures of the dancer Rosella Hightower. She died in Compiègne on 24 July 1982.”

Text from the Florence Henri web page on the Bauhaus Online website

Florence Henri
Parisian Window
1929

Florence Henri
The Forum
1934

Florence Henri
Rome
1933-1934

Florence Henri
Abstract Composition
1929

Florence Henri
Self-portrait in a mirror
1928

Florence Henri
A Bunch of Grapes
c. 1934

Florence Henri
Composition
1932
Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Florence Henri
Untitled, USA
1940

Florence Henri
Paris Window
1929
Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Florence Henri
Portrait
1928
Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Florence Henri
Self Portrait
1928
Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Pinakothek der Moderne
Barer Strasse 40
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Opening hours:
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Thursday 10am – 8pm

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Exhibition dates: 6th June – 4th September 2014

I remember some time in the dim distant past when Cindy Sherman’s photographs actually had relevance and were important in and of themselves… but perhaps my memory is playing tricks with me. Memory is a strange thing for we remember only fragments of fragments, like an echo chamber, a distant echo of something (the construction of identity and gender) that was once cutting edge, now overtaken by reality itself – on the red carpet, in the cosmetic surgery offices, in the media mags. Once there may have been an original, an original Cindy Sherman, an original idea, but now there just seems to be pastiche after pastiche of a Sherman nobody is sure ever really existed.

There are certainly some horrors among this posting, images that I wish I had never seen, and never really wish to see again. As the amount of ‘Untitled’ works rises (untitled is such a cop out!) the numbers, and the body count, become irrelevant. The early work, through the 80s to the early 90s, had important things to say but now the artist formally know as Sherman is earth mother goddess to all, and ancestral trickster to many. Enough please!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to the Kunsthaus Zürich for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation view of Cindy Sherman – Untitled Horrors at Kunsthaus Zürich
Photo: Lena Huber

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #93
1981
Chromogenic color print
61 × 121.9 cm
Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #122
1983
Chromogenic color print
89.5 × 54 cm
Vanmoerkerke Collection, Belgium
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #129
1983
Chromogenic color print
89.7 × 59.3 cm
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, Donation: The New Carlsberg Foundation
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New Yor

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #146
1985
Chromogenic color print
184.2 × 125.4 cm
Skarstedt Gallery, New York
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #153
1985
Chromogenic color print
170.8 × 125.7 cm
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #170
1987
Chromogenic color print
179.1 x 120.7 cm
Collection Metro Pictures, New York
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #216
1989
Chromogenic color print
221.3 × 142.5 cm
Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

“From 6 June to 14 September 2014, the Kunsthaus Zürich plays host to a major retrospective featuring American artist Cindy Sherman (b. 1954). Sherman is one of the leading exponents of staged photography. In her work she deals with issues of identity, (gender) roles and physicality, almost always using herself as the model. Cindy Sherman’s earliest works were created in 1975. Preceding the celebrated ‘Untitled Film Stills’ (1977-1980), these photographs were produced at home using an external shutter release, yet they were already concerned with the issues of identity and role play that are central to her oeuvre. The exhibition Cindy Sherman – Untitled Horrors includes a selection of these early and rarely shown works as well as her latest pieces, some of them monumental and covering entire walls. Sherman references the techniques and forms of advertising, cinema and classical painting.

THE THREATENING HEART OF UNTITLED HORRORS

The principal focus of the overview, which has been compiled by the Kunsthaus together with the artist, is the threatening and grotesque. The retrospective’s subtitle, ‘Untitled Horrors’, is partly a reference to the exhibition’s content, but also a play on the fact that Cindy Sherman invariably labels her photos ‘Untitled’. She leaves it to the viewer to read the pictures in their own way, inviting them to develop the stories behind them as they see fit, and come up with their own titles.

110 WORKS IN TOTAL

The presentation includes all the key works from the various phases of Cindy Sherman’s artistic career. Iconic pieces from the early period, such as the famous ‘Untitled Film Stills’ series, reminiscent of Italian Neo-Realism and American film noir, appear alongside the later photographs of ‘Hollywood/Hampton Types’ (2000-2002), while the ‘Clowns’ (2003-2004) encounter the ‘Sex Pictures’ series from 1992. These juxtapositions reveal the remarkable consistency with which, throughout her long career, the artist has engaged with fundamental issues of human existence and repeatedly explored new avenues of formal expression. Curated by Mirjam Varadinis and created in association with the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the 110-work presentation dispenses with a linear or chronological approach, choosing instead to create unexpected combinations that shed new light on the oeuvre of this important artist and her exploration of the self through film and photography.”

Text from the Kunsthaus Zürich website

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #235
1987-1991
Chromogenic color print
228.6 × 152.4 cm
Private collection, courtesy Segalot LP, New York
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #304
1994
Chromogenic color print
154.9 × 104.1 cm
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #324
1996
Chromogenic color print
146.7 × 99.1 cm
Collection Metro Pictures & Skarstedt Gallery
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #348
1999
Gelatin silver print
97,8 × 66 cm
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #352
2000
Chromogenic color print
68.6 × 45.7 cm
Collection Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #363 (Bus Riders I)
1976/2000
Gelatin silver print
18.9 x 12.7 cm
Tate; purchased with funds provided by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, 2001
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #420
2004
Chromogenic color print (2-teilig)
Each: 182.4 × 115.8 cm
Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #458
2007-2008
Chromogenic color print
195 × 147 cm
Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #544
2010 / 2012
Chromogenic color print
172.7 × 254 cm
Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #549-C
2010
Pigment / print on PhotoTex, adhesive fabric,
Dimensions variable
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Kunsthaus Zürich
Heimplatz 1
CH–8001 Zurich

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Wed/Thu 10 am – 8 pm

Kunsthaus Zürich website

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Exhibition dates: Cecil Beaton at Wilton: 3rd May – 14th September 2014
Cecil Beaton at Home: Ashcombe & Reddish: 23rd May – 19th September 2014

Bright Young Things, Costume Balls And Country House Parties
From The Roaring ’20s To The Swinging ’60s
An Exhibition Of Cecil Beaton Photographs
Designed And Curated By Jasper Conran

What a gay old time!

Frippery and finery taken by that dandy doyen of chic Cecil Beaton, partying in a highly structured class society that is seemingly oblivious to the approaching horrors of the Second World War (which only adds to the photographs air of insouciance). It must have been so much fun.

The thing is, Beaton was a talented artist who captured it all with total aplomb. To go from the haughty, stylish Georgia Sitwell, Renishaw (1930, below) to the Arcadian beauty of Rex Whistler (1927, below); from the formal organisation of The 15th Earl and Countess of Pembroke dressed for the coronation of George VI (1937, below) to the classic beauty of Princess Natasha Paley (1930s, below); or the structure and stillness of Alice von Hofmannsthal (1937, below) to the vivaciousness and movement of Lady Plunket (Dorothé) and Mr Maurice (1937, below) – takes a consistency of vision and an understanding of craft that few photographers possess.

The photograph of  Lady Plunket is particularly astonishing… to see this composition in the twinkling of an eye: the movement, the joy, the flower in the hair, the women with the crossed legs in the background, and just the sheer grace of the couple, he suspended on one foot, she flying through the air. Unforgettable.

Marcus

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Many thankx to Sotheby’s, Wilton House and The Salisbury Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

East Front of Wilton House
© Wilton House Trust

Cecil Beaton at Wilton installation view
© The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Cecil Beaton
Edith Olivier, Mayor of Wilton, as Queen Elizabeth I for a pageant at Wilton
1932
© Cecil Beaton Archive, Sotheby’s

Edith Maud Olivier MBE (31 December 1872 – 10 May 1948) was an English writer, also noted for acting as hostess to a circle of well-known writers, artists, and composers in her native Wiltshire… Olivier had lived with her father and younger sister Mildred, and it was after Mildred died in 1927 that she started to engage a broader social circle. She formed a profound friendship with Rex Whistler and acted as a frequent hostess to an elite, artistic, and largely homosexual, social set which included Cecil Beaton, Siegfried Sassoon, William Walton, and Osbert Sitwell.

Her first novel, The Love Child was published in 1927, and was followed by further novels, biographies, including one of Alexander Cruden, and the autobiographical Without Knowing Mr Walkley. (Text from Wikipedia website)

Cecil Beaton
Georgia Sitwell, Renishaw
1930
© Cecil Beaton Archive, Sotheby’s

Georgia Doble, the Canadian-born wife of Sacheverell Sitwell, was born in 1906 to a banker of Cornish descent. She met Sitwell at a party in 1924 while participating in the social gaiety of the London season. Georgia was familiar with Sitwell’s Southern Baroque Art and enjoyed his company, but she waited almost a year before accepting his marriage proposals. They were married in Paris on October 12, 1925. Their first son, Reresby, was born in 1927 and his younger brother, Francis, in 1935.

Georgia found it difficult to blend in with the Sitwell family, which had more than the usual share of dynamics. She did her best to play the self-assigned role of muse, but Sitwell was not a social man and Georgia missed the busy whirl of London. She attended many social events without him, which led to a great deal of friction between them. They both had affairs over the years, but remained deeply attached to one another throughout their lives. Georgia died in 1980.

Cecil Beaton
Lady Plunket (Dorothé) and Mr Maurice
1937
© Cecil Beaton Archive, Sotheby’s

Cecil Beaton
Stephen Tennant (1906-1987), William Walton (1902-1983), Georgia Sitwell (1905-1980), Zita Jungman (1903-2006), Rex Whistler (1905-1944) and Cecil Beaton (1904-1980), Wilsford, 1927
1927
© Cecil Beaton Archive, Sotheby’s

Stephen James Napier Tennant (21 April 1906 – 28 February 1987) was a British aristocrat known for his decadent lifestyle. During the 20s and 30s, Tennant was an important member – the “Brightest”, it is said – of the “Bright Young People.” His friends included Rex Whistler, Cecil Beaton, the Sitwells, Lady Diana Manners and the Mitford girls. He is widely considered to be the model for Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford’s novel Love in a Cold Climate; one of the inspirations for Lord Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and a model for Hon. Miles Malpractice in some of his other novels.

Sir William Turner Walton OM (29 March 1902 – 8 March 1983) was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera. His best-known works include Façade, the cantata Belshazzar’s Feast, the Viola Concerto, and the First Symphony.

Zita Jungman‘s accounts of her fellow bright young things of the 1920s stress their high vocal pitch and decibel level – “shrieking”, “screaming”, “howling with laughter”. So it is significant that when, in 1926, Cecil Beaton met Zita, who has died aged 102, in the Gargoyle Club, Soho, he responded to her quietness and understanding. She was, he wrote, a “thoroughly unflashy” original… The antics of the bright young things were relatively innocent: bottle parties, fancy dress balls and pageants, with cocktails and fast cars. The Jungman girls, along with clever Alannah Harper, Eleanor Smith and Loelia Ponsonby, staged treasure hunts, using their connections to arrange a fake edition of the Evening Standard or Hovis loaves baked to order with clues inside. 

Enter aspirant photographer Beaton. He had spotted the sisters at a performance of Edith Sitwell’s Facade, and met Zita again in Venice rehearsing for a ball. Alannah Harper modelled for him; Zita followed. He was financially thrilled. “They certainly would get into the papers … so very saleable.” She spent hours before the lens in the Beaton house: “She loved doing her hair in various exotic ways and looked quite beautiful and quite extraordinarily funny. She is a perfect young lady.”

Beaton described the sisters as “a pair of decadent 18th-century angels made of wax” and wrote of Zita: “With her smooth fringes, and rather flat head, like a silky coconut, like a medieval page, and with her swinging gait, she looks very gallant, very princely. But she can, if she wishes, easily become a snake-like beauty, with a mysterious smile and a cold glint in her upward slanting eyes.” Her reaction to the pictures was to “lay back in a chair looking at them for ages, never speaking, just occasionally grunting a grunt of satisfaction”.

Text by Veronica Horwell in The Guardian, Friday 3 March 2006

Cecil Beaton
Rex Whistler
1927
© Cecil Beaton Archive, Sotheby’s

Reginald John “Rex” Whistler (24 June 1905 – 18 July 1944) was a British artist, designer and illustrator.

Reginald John Whistler was born in Britain on 24 June 1905, at Eltham, Kent, the son of Harry and Helen Frances Mary Whistler. In May 1919 he was sent to boarding school at Haileybury, where he showed a precocious talent for art, providing set designs for play productions and giving away sketches to prefects in lieu of “dates” (a punishment at Haileybury, similar to “lines” whereby offenders are required to write out set lists of historical dates).

After Haileybury the young Whistler was accepted at the Royal Academy, but disliked the regime there and was “sacked for incompetence”. He then proceeded to study at the Slade School of Art, where he metStephen Tennant, soon to become one of his best friends and a model for some of the figures in his works. Through Tennant, he later met the poet Siegfried Sassoon and his wife Hester, to both of whom Whistler became close.

Upon leaving the Slade he burst into a dazzling career as a professional artist. His work encompassed all areas of art and design – from the West End theatre to book illustration (including works by Evelyn Waugh and Walter de la Mare, and perhaps most notably, for Gulliver’s Travels) and mural and trompe-l’oeil painting. Paintings at Port Lympne Mansion (within Port Lympne Wild Animal Park), Plas Newydd, Mottisfont Abbey and Dorneywood among others, show his outstanding talent in this genre. During his time at Plas Newydd he may well have become the lover of the daughter of the 6th Marquess of Anglesey, the owner of the house, who had commissioned him to undertake the decorative scheme. Whistler and Lady Caroline Paget are known to have become very close friends and he painted numerous portraits of her, including a startling nude. Whether this painting was actually posed for or whether it was how Whistler imagined her naked is a matter of debate.

His most noted work during the early part of his career was for the café at the Tate Gallery, completed in 1927 when he was only 22. He was commissioned to produce posters and illustrations for Shell Petroleum and the Radio Times. He also created designs for Wedgwood china based on drawings he made of the Devon village of Clovelly. Whistler’s elegance and wit ensured his success as a portrait artist among the fashionable; he painted many members of London society, including Edith Sitwell,Cecil Beaton and other members of the set to which he belonged that became known as the “Bright Young Things”. His murals for Edwina Mountbatten’s 30-room luxury flat in Brook House, Park Lane, London were later installed by the Mountbattens’ son-in-law, decorator David Hicks, in his own houses.

Whistler’s activities also extended to ballet design. He designed the scenery and costumes for Ninette de Valois and Gavin Gordon’s Hogarth-inspired 1935 ballet The Rake’s Progress.

When war broke out, although he was 35, Whistler was eager to join the army. He was commissioned into the Welsh Guards as Lieutenant 131651. His artistic talent, far from being a stumbling block to his military career, was greatly appreciated and he was able to find time to continue some of his work, including a notable self-portrait in uniform now in the National Army Museum. In 1944 he was sent to France following the D-Day landings.

In July he was with the Guards Armoured Division in Normandy as the invasion force was poised to break out of the salient east of Caen. On the hot and stuffy 18 July his tank, after crossing a railway line, drove over some felled telegraph wires beside the railway, which became entangled in its tracks. He and the crew got out to free the tank from the wire when a German machine gunner opened fire on them, preventing them from getting back into their tank. Whistler dashed across an open space of 60 yards to another tank to instruct its commander, a Sergeant Lewis Sherlock, to return the fire. As he climbed down from Sherlock’s tank a mortar bomb exploded beside him and killed him instantly, throwing him into the air. He was the first fatality suffered by the battalion in the Normandy campaign.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Palladian Bridge at Wilton House
© Wilton House Trust

“Sotheby’s and Wilton House will pay tribute to the life and work of the photographer, writer and Oscar-winning designer Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) with a new exhibition of photographs from Sotheby’s Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, designed and curated by Jasper Conran. Capturing the spirit of country house parties and costume balls, the exhibition will showcase previously unseen images from one of Britain’s most celebrated photographers, giving a fascinating glimpse into his life and a vivid portrait of a charmed age.

Staged at Wilton House in Wiltshire where Beaton was entertained by his friends the Pembroke family at grand parties and pageants for over 50 years, the exhibition will run between 18th- 21st April and 3rd May – 14th September 2014.

Described as “a worldly Peter Pan” who never aged1, Cecil Beaton – the acclaimed photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair - was at the forefront of the fashion for costume and pageantry which swept through British society in the 1920s. Immortalised in the Noël Coward song ‘I’ve been to a marvellous party’, “Dear Cecil arrived wearing armour/Some shells and a black feather boa…,” Beaton was renowned for his flair for fancy dress and costumery, later winning Oscars, Academy and Tony awards for his designs. He invited friends from all over the world to legendary parties at his Wiltshire home Ashcombe, where guests arrived “in the knowledge that they were to exchange reality for a complete escape into the realms of fantasy.”2

As fancy dress became a popular feature of country house parties, and costume balls a highlight of the social calendar, Beaton seamlessly integrated his high-society personal life with his professional artistic quest to experiment with photography and fashion. Using the settings of Britain’s grandest country houses as the perfect backdrop, Beaton persuaded his friends to sit for him in their exotic costumes, often designed by him, for these most unconventional of photographs.

This fascinating collection of photographs will be displayed in a new exhibition space, especially renovated for the event at Wilton House. Situated just a few miles from Beaton’s country houses Ashcombe and Reddish, Wilton was the location for costume balls and theatrical events enjoyed and photographed by Beaton for over 50 years. Despite being pushed into a river at the first Ball he attended there in 1927, Beaton later became great friends with the Earls of Pembroke. Over time he photographed and chronicled the lives of three generations of the family in the surroundings of the house which he described as “perhaps the most wonderful piece in all Wiltshire’s heritage of domestic architecture… at every time of year, in all weathers, unfailing in its beauty.”3 On 14th January 1980, just three days before his death, Beaton celebrated his 76th birthday with a lunch party hosted by the family.

The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive 

Sotheby’s is the privileged guardian of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, a matchless repository of over 100,000 negatives, 9,000 vintage prints and 42 scrapbooks from the celebrated photographer’s personal collection. Cecil Beaton negotiated the transfer of his private archive to Sotheby’s in 1977 in order to preserve its role for future generations. Today, the collection – some of which is still stored in Beaton’s original filing cabinets – is available for use as a picture library, lending images to be reproduced on the printed page and for exhibition worldwide.

Further photographs from the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive will be displayed at Salisbury Museum’s exhibition Cecil Beaton at Home: Ashcombe & Reddish between 23rd May – 19th September 2014. This exhibition will bring together original photographs, artworks and possessions from Cecil Beaton’s two Wiltshire homes, Ashcombe and Reddish which served as retreats, inspirations, and stages for impressive entertaining, to present a fascinating picture of Beaton’s extraordinary life.”

1 Hugo Vickers, Cecil Beaton: The Authorised Biography, Introduction, p. xxiii
2 Cecil Beaton, Ashcombe: The Story of a Fifteen-year Lease, p. 33
3 Cecil Beaton, Ashcombe: The Story of a Fifteen-year Lease, p. 35

Press release from Sotheby’s

Cecil Beaton
Cecil Beaton on the Palladian bridge at Wilton House, September 1968 (detail)
1968
© Cecil Beaton Archive, Sotheby’s

Cecil Beaton
Alice von Hofmannsthal, Ashcombe, 1937, in her Costume for “The Gardener’s Daughter” for “The Anti Dud Ball” at the Dorchester Hotel, 13 July 1937
1937
© Cecil Beaton Archive, Sotheby’s

Cecil Beaton
Princess Natasha Paley
1930s
© Cecil Beaton Archive, Sotheby’s

Princess Natalia Pavlovna Paley (Наталья Павловна Палей), Countess de Hohenfelsen (December 5, 1905 – December 27, 1981) was a member of the Romanov family. A daughter of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich of Russia, she was a first cousin of the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II. After the Russian revolution she emigrated first to France and later to the United States. She became a fashion model, socialite, vendeuse, and briefly pursued a career as a film actress…

Ethereal and glamorous, Princess Natalia would not follow any fashion trend, but would dictate her own. Hats and gloves were her signature. With deep-set gray eyes and pale blond hair, she became a sought after model establishing an image for herself in the Parisian elite becoming a well known socialite. As a model, she appeared in many magazines including Vogue. She was a favorite model for the great photographers of her time: Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, Andre Durst and George Hoyningen-Huene. (Text from Wikipedia website)

Cecil Beaton
The Countess of Pembroke acting in Beaton’s musical “Heil Cinderella”
1939
© Cecil Beaton Archive, Sotheby’s

Cecil Beaton
The 15th Earl and Countess of Pembroke dressed for the coronation of George VI
1937
© Cecil Beaton Archive, Sotheby’s

Cecil Beaton
The Countess of Pembroke in her Robes for the Coronation of George VI
1937
© Cecil Beaton Archive, Sotheby’s

Cecil Beaton
Cecil Beaton in “All the Vogue”, Cambridge
1925
© Cecil Beaton Archive, Sotheby’s

Beauty, decadence and a damned good party: Cecil Beaton at Salisbury Museum

The not so private world of Cecil Beaton – photographer to the Royals, painter, designer of interiors, stage and costume and secret diarist – seems to have been as opulent as his professional career was varied. If we are to believe his candid diaries, it was a world of decadent parties and languid weekend soirees full of bright young things who caroused at his Wiltshire homes against a backdrop of sumptuous interiors and fabulous gardens.

The first of these private pleasure houses was Ashcombe, which he rented for £50 a year between 1930-45. It was followed by Reddish, which Beaton purchased in 1945 and lived in until his death in 1980. By all accounts both were splendid residences, and the stream of celebrities and society people who came and went were photographed by Beaton or captured in his notoriously frank scrapbooks and diaries.

And it is these extravagant worlds that can be glimpsed at Salisbury Museum who, with the help of the vast Cecil Beaton Archive at Sotheby’s, are teasing them back to life. A tantalising glimpse into the photographer’s more hidden moments and the celebrity in-crowd of friends and acquaintances he lavishly entertained, the exhibition brings together 183 unique photographs (including 35 vintage prints) exhibited with some of his artworks and personal possessions within recreations of the interiors.

But it’s the cast of players that grabs the attention; bohemian aristocrats, socialites and some of the biggest stars of the stage, screen, fashion and art world form a procession of decadence that stretched across five decades from 1930-1980. Famous faces include Truman Capote, Leslie Caron, David Hockney, Bianca Jagger and Ivor Novello interspersed here with private snaps of his great loves – the Hollywood icon Greta Garbo, with whom he had an affair, and millionaire art collector Peter Watson, with whom (we are told) he didn’t.

But as well as the society faces the exhibition includes images of the photographer’s inspired garden designs at Reddish and his theatrically-styled home interiors at Ashcombe, which he created so he could ‘live in scenery’, inspired by his visit to Hollywood in 1929. Work in progress shots show the making of Beaton’s fantastical ‘Circus Bedroom’ in 1932 with freshly painted murals of a circus clown, a girl on a merry-go-round horse and a jolly fat lady.

The bedroom was apparently created “on a rainy weekend in 1932″ by a typically decadent gang of dazzling society types that included artists Rex Whistler, ‘Jack’ von Bismarck, Oliver Messel, Lord Berners, Edith Olivier, Jorg von Reppert Bismarck and of course Beaton himself. Whistler also designed Beaton’s theatrical four-poster ‘carousel’ bed with gilded unicorns, stripey circus-top canopy and barley twist bedposts. Beaton is pictured with Watson amidst this baroque creation. And visitors can experience it for themselves courtesy of a full-scale recreation reconstructed for the very first time since it was broken up in 1945. A fascinating glance into a decadent disappeared world.

Text by Richard Moss on the Culture 24 website

Rex Whistler
Ashcombe House
1930s
© Private Collection

Cecil Beaton
Frontispiece montage for Cecil Beaton’s Scrapbook, 1937, Ashcombe
1937
© Private Collection

Cecil Beaton
Cecil Beaton on the front steps of Reddish House, Broad Chalke, June 1947, Reddish
1947
© Cecil Beaton Archive, Sotheby’s

Cecil Beaton
Cecil Beaton in his first costume of the night (the famous ‘Rabbit’ outfit) for the Fete Champetre, in his Circus bedroom, 10 July 1937, Ashcombe
1937
© Getty Images/ Time Life

Cecil Beaton
Dorian Leigh photographed for ‘Modess… because’ campaign, Reddish House, Broad Chalke, 1950s, Reddish
1950s
© Johnson & Johnson

Dorian Leigh (April 23, 1917 – July 7, 2008), born Dorian Elizabeth Leigh Parker, was an American model and one of the earliest modelling icons of the fashion industry. She is considered one of the firstsupermodels and was well known in the United States and Europe.

Henry Lamb
Portrait of Cecil Beaton
1935
© Private Collection

Henry Taylor Lamb MC RA (Adelaide 21 June 1883 – 8 October 1960 Salisbury) was an Australian-born British painter. A follower of Augustus John, Lamb was a founder member of the Camden Town Groupin 1911 and of the London Group in 1913.

Lamb is noted for his unusual portraits, as exemplified by his well-known picture of an elongated Lytton Strachey. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1940 and was made a full Member in 1949. He was a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery from 1942 and of the Tate Gallery from 1944 to 1951. His auction record was set at Christie’s in London in June 2006 when his 1910 Breton Boy oil on panel fetched £60,000. As well as the Imperial War Museum, works by Lamb are held in regional museums throughout Britain, in the British Government Art Collection and in the National Gallery of Canada, which received the majority of Lambs portraits of Canadian troops at the end of World War Two.

Wilton House
Wilton, Salisbury
SP2 0BJ, United Kingdom
+44 1722 746714

Opening hours:
11.30 am – 5.00 pm Sundays to  Thursdays and Bank Holiday Saturdays
The House is CLOSED on Fridays and Saturdays (except Bank Holiday Saturdays)

The Salisbury Museum
The King’s House,
65 The Close, Salisbury
SP1 2EN
Tel: 01722 332151

Opening hours:
Monday to Saturday 10.00 – 17.00
Sunday 12.00 – 17.00

Wilton House website

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Exhibition dates: 24th May – 14th September 2014

A good friend of mine, who should know what she is talking about, observed that you cannot look at Dupain’s photographs of Paris without first looking at his commissioned photographs of the then new Embassy of Australia. Unfortunately, I could only find one photograph online to show to you, Embassy of Australia, Paris, France (1978, below), but you get the idea. Dupain’s The Paris ‘private’ series were taken during a couple of days off that he had from the commissioned job. Basically they are tourist photographs, a record of things Dupain wanted to see in Paris on one of his few overseas trips. Most of them are disappointing images, serviceable but disappointing.

Having studied Eugène Atget I expected more from Dupain. In these photographs he tends to shoot obliquely into the object of his attention, directing the lead in and vanishing point(s) within the image. For example, in Untitled (the balustrade of Pont Alexandre III) and Untitled (Pont Alexandre III with sculptural balustrade) (both 1978, below), Dupain allows the bridge parapet to lead the eye into the image, while the vanishing point is positioned at far right. Neither are very successful as formal compositions. The same can be said of Untitled (statue of Maréchal Joffre, Place Joffre, Champ-de-Mars) (1978, below) with the vanishing point this time at the left of the image. More successul is Dupains’s Untitled (staircase to the park, looking toward Bassin des Serruriers, Domaine de Chantilly) (1978, below) with its foreshortened out of focus entrance, geometric planes and multiple exit points – but then he goes and spoils it with the simplistic Untitled (staircase and statue of Anne de Montmorency 1886 by Paul Dubois, Domaine de Chantilly) (1978, below) taken at the same location. The best image from the series is undoubtedly Untitled (the statue of Christ at the portal of La Sainte-Chapelle) (1978, below) with its restrained and refined aesthetic. A beautiful image and a wondrous space. The photograph of the people at the Eiffel Tower is also a cracker.

As I said at the beginning, these are tourist art photographs of Paris, but they could have been so much more.

Marcus

.
Many thankx to The Art Gallery of New South Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Max Dupain (1911-92) is one of the leading figures of 20th-century Australian photography. The group of 21 photographs in his Paris ‘private’ series was taken when he travelled to Paris in 1978 with architect Harry Seidler to photograph the Australian Embassy, designed by Seidler. The series consists of transcendent photographs of Paris. Dupain had studied the work of Eugène Atget, and there is a similar enigmatic atmosphere to be found in Dupain’s examination of the city. Primarily depicting 18th- to 19th-century landmarks such as the ornate Alexandre III bridge, the Grand Palais and Chantilly, this compilation offers a view of the city and its environs shaped by layers of history, mythology and art.

Given to the Gallery by Penelope Seidler in memory of her husband and the photographer, this portfolio is shown alongside other photographs of made and natural structures by Dupain from the 1930s to the 1980s.

Max Dupain
Embassy of Australia, Paris, France
1978
Silver gelatin print

Max Dupain
Untitled (cars on rue de Rivoli)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Silver gelatin print
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

“I like to involve myself in, maybe, a small area geographically and work it out, as simple as that” said Max Dupain in a 1991 interview.1 During his lifetime the photographer visited only three countries outside of Australia. His 1978 trip to Paris was made together with architect Harry Seidler, whose newly built Australian embassy building Dupain was commissioned to document. The long professional association between the architect and the photographer stretched back to the early 1950s, soon after Seidler’s arrival in Australia. Dupain, through his expressive architectural photographs, was closely involved in popularising the modernist aesthetic espoused by Seidler’s starkly functional buildings.

Conversely, the set of 21 photographs of Paris which Dupain compiled and presented to Seidler as a personal gift, does not contain any images of modern architecture. Primarily depicting 18-19th century landmarks such as the ornate Alexandre III bridge, the Grand Palais and Versailles this compilation offers a view of the city and its environs shaped by layers of history, mythology and art. Dupain was nonetheless well read in modern French culture and aware of photographers such as Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

The Parisian images vary from pure architectural studies to compositions with an almost literary scope. They demonstrate Dupain’s signature trait of combining the formal and social aspects of photography. In some of the works, Dupain gives classical architecture the same reductive treatment he brought to modern buildings. Stripped of embellishments, these photographs bring to the fore the essence of order, logic and harmony which lies at the core of classicism. The presence of human figures in photographs such as that of Napoleon’s statue on the balcony of Les Invalides adds a dramatic element to the compositions. Dupain wanted “to extract every ounce of content from any exciting form and I want to give life to the inanimate.”2 Time and the built environment converge in this personal ode to Paris, manifesting the incessant flow of life and the connectedness of past with the present.

1. Max Dupain interviewed by Helen Ennis in Max Dupain: Photographs, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1991, p. 13
2. Max Dupain, “Max Dupain – modernist”, exhibition catalogue, State library of NSW, Sydney, 2007, p. 9

Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website

Max Dupain (Australia 22 Apr 1911 – 27 Jul 1992)
Untitled (statue of Maréchal Joffre, Place Joffre, Champ-de-Mars)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
30.0 x 33.7 cm image
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Australia 22 Apr 1911 – 27 Jul 1992)
Untitled (staircase to the park, looking toward Bassin des Serruriers, Domaine de Chantilly)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
30.5 x 36.7 cm image
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Australia 22 Apr 1911 – 27 Jul 1992)
Untitled (staircase and statue of Anne de Montmorency 1886 by Paul Dubois, Domaine de Chantilly)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
31.2 x 30.3 cm image
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Untitled (the balustrade of Pont Alexandre III)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Untitled (Pont Alexandre III with sculptural balustrade)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Untitled (the glass dome of Grand Palais)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Untitled (interior staircase and cart wheels)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Untitled (cannon with a guard standing in a doorway)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Untitled (the statue of Christ at the portal of La Sainte-Chapelle)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Untitled (Place Vendôme with the column)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Australia 22 Apr 1911 – 27 Jul 1992)
Untitled (tree on Boulevard de la Tour Maubourg, with Hôtel des Invalides in the distance)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
35.6 x 30.2 cm image
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Untitled (mythological sculptural group at the Grand Palais)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Untitled (woman with pram in Jardin des Tuileries)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Untitled (group of people near the Eiffel tower)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Untitled (Les Invalides)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Untitled (Napoleon’s statue on the balcony of Les Invalides)
1978
From The Paris ‘private’ series
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in honour of Max Dupain AC and Harry Seidler AC 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
© Estate of Max Dupain. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

“An exhibition of 36 photographs – 21 of which were taken in Paris in 1978 by one of Australia’s most well-known photographers, Max Dupain (1911-92) – will go on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Donated to the Gallery by Penelope Seidler in 2012, this will be the first time the Paris ‘private’ series portfolio will have ever been seen publicly. Max Dupain had gifted these works to renowned architect Harry Seidler and in a handwritten note he wrote:

I owe you so much. For nearly twenty five years I have dwelt on your philosophy of architecture. We register alike about clear thinking, logic of application, poetry of form etc etc. [sic] I have tremendous regard for architecture as a stabilising force in this turbulent society and I think my best work will ultimately show the significance of this by virtue of the photographed form thrown up by architecture and by engineering.

Dupain made the trip to Paris, his second outside Australia and his first to Europe, to accompany his long-time colleague and friend, Harry Seidler (1923-2006). Dupain’s task was to photograph the Australian Embassy there, which Seidler had designed (completed 1977). The pair were not only friends but shared a deep appreciation for form and light, for the modernist curves in space that can be created both architecturally and photographically.

Dupain explored many monuments around Paris. These impressions of a place he was seeing for the first time reveal his exploration of a new city and its sites, varying from formal compositions of photographic space, such as the image of Napoleon’s statue on the balcony of Les Invalides, to more personal or candid moments, as with the group of people captured beneath the Eiffel Tower. Many photographs depict 18th- and 19th-century landmarks such as the ornate Alexandre III bridge, the Grand Palais and Chantilly; the compilation offers a view of Paris and its environs shaped by layers of history, mythology and art.

Despite the diversity of subject matter across the 21 images, Dupain always maintained his signature poise and rigour, appreciation of the way light interacts with the objects it touches, and attention to the composition of photographic space through a play of scale.

In addition to the Paris ‘private’ series, 15 of Dupain’s photographs of architectural and botanical forms will be on display. Almost all are taken in and around Sydney; some of the flowers are from Dupain’s Castlecrag garden and iconic Sydney buildings such as the Opera House are included. These images cover 50 years of the photographer’s practice from 1933 to 1983, and indicate his enduring appreciation for the order, logic and harmony which lie at the core of classicism, the movement that produced many of the iconic Parisian monuments he saw, and for the modernism which Seidler endorsed through his work.”

Press release from the AGNSW website

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Pyrmont silos
1933, printed later
Gelatin silver photograph
Purchased 1976

Pyrmont silos is one of a number of photographs that Dupain took of these constructions in the 1930s. In all cases Dupain examined the silos from a modernist perspective, emphasising their monumentality from low viewpoints under a bright cloudless sky. Additionally, his use of strong shadows to emphasise the forms of the silos and the lack of human figures celebrates the built structure as well as providing no sense of scale. Another photograph by Dupain in the AGNSW collection was taken through a car windscreen so that the machinery of transport merges explicitly with industrialisation into a complex hard-edge image of views and mirror reflections. There were no skyscrapers in Sydney until the late 1930s so the silos, Walter Burley Griffin’s incinerators and the Sydney Harbour Bridge were the major points of reference for those interested in depicting modern expressions of engineering and industrial power.

Dupain was the first Australian photographer to embrace modernism. One of his photographs of the silos was roundly criticised when shown to the New South Wales Photographic Society but Dupain forged on regardless with his reading, thinking and experimentation. Some Australian painting and writing had embraced modernist principles in the 1920s, but as late as 1938 Dupain was writing to the Sydney Morning Herald:

“Great art has always been contemporary in spirit. Today we feel the surge of aesthetic exploration along abstract lines, the social economic order impinging itself on art, the repudiation of the ‘truth to nature criterion’ … We sadly need the creative courage of Man Ray, the original thought of Moholy-Nagy, and the dynamic realism of Edouard [sic] Steichen.”1

1. Dupain, M 1938, “Letter to the editor,” in Sydney Morning Herald, 30 March
© Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Monstera deliciosa
1970
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of the artist 1981
© Max Dupain, 1970. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Nasturtium leaves
1981
Gelatin silver photograph
40 × 50.4 cm
Gift of Edron Pty Ltd 1995 through the auspices of Alistair McAlpine
© Estate of Max Dupain, licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Australia Square and Calder sculpture, Sydney
1968
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of the artist 1981
© Estate of Max Dupain, licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
The magnolia
1983
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of the artist 1986
© Max Dupain, 1983. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Max Dupain (Born Australia 1911, died 1992)
Stair rail
1975
Gelatin silver photograph
Gift of the artist 1981
© Max Dupain, 1975. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

Art Gallery of New South Wales
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Exhibition dates: 3rd June – 21st September 2014

Curated by José Roca and María Wills Londoño (adjunct curator)

Another artist investigating the medium of photography in totally fascinating ways… breaking the glass, deconstructing the support, fragmenting the image, questioning the imprint of photography – in memory, in the photographs physicality, in what leaves an impression, in what remains. The un/stable image, in flux, in sediment, investigated through “work [that] defies systematic classification because he works in so many different media: photography, printmaking, drawing, installations, video and sculpture.” Such inventiveness over such a long period of time “developing special techniques to produce images that reveal themselves as a kind of counterpoint to photography and the “decisive moment” it once claimed to capture.” Ephemeral photography that is truly remarkable.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the 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.

This summer, the Jeu de Paume, which is celebrating 10 years devoted to the image, will be inviting the public to discover Oscar Muñoz (born in 1951), Colombia’s most emblematic artist, who has been producing a body of work for nearly forty years that centres on the capacity of images to preserve memory.

CALI-DOSCOPE: CITY FRAGMENTS

Oscar Muñoz
Ambulatorio [Ambulatory]
1994
Aerial photograph enclosed in security glass, wood and aluminium, 36 units
100 x 100 cm each
Courtesy O.K. Centrum, Linz

Muñoz emerged on the Colombian art scene with his series of large-format hyperrealist drawings in charcoal on paper that revealed his interest in the social implications of empty or deteriorating spaces. This group includes drawings from the series entitled Inquilinatos [Tenement Houses] (1979) and Interiores [Interiors] (1980-1981). Also on display are works referring to Cali’s urban life, such as Ambulatorio [Ambulatory] (1994), El Puente [The Bridge] (2004), Archivo Porcontacto [Bycontact Archive] (2004-2008), which are images of a specific period and specific places in the city, and A través del cristal [Through the Glass] (2008-2009), the latter a way of introducing an absent cultural reference through sound.

Cali recurs in Muñoz’s work as a contextual reference or a support. This is literally the case with Ambulatorio, an aerial photograph of the city blown up to a monumental scale and laid out in a regular grid. Each segment of the photograph is fixed to a piece of security glass, which breaks into pieces when the viewer walks on the work. Each break creates another random mesh of lines over the urban image of a chaotic city in which rational planning and the unstructured coexist in a way typical of all modern South American cities.

THE SUPPORT RECONSIDERED

Oscar Muñoz
Cortinas de Baño [Shower curtains]
1985-1986
Acrylic on plastic, 5 elements
190 x 140 cm and 190 x 70 cm each, dimensions variable
Banco de la República collection, Bogotá

Having achieved international renown as an exceptional draughtsman, in the 1980s Muñoz gradually abandoned paper as a support and experimented with new techniques of drawing and printmaking, using unconventional materials and supports such as acrylic applied to damp plastic and charcoal dust on water. This group includes the series Cortinas de Baño [Shower Curtains] (1985-1986), Tiznados [Tainted] (1990), Narcisos secos [Dry Narcissi] (1994-1995) and Simulacros [Simulacra] (1999).

In Cortinas de baño Muñoz experimented for the first time with an unconventional support, in this case an everyday plastic shower curtain, in order to construct an image from a photograph transferred onto a silkscreen mesh. In the printing process, executed with an airbrush through previously prepared silkscreen, the image was transferred onto an unstable surface, with the artist preventing the pigment from being totally fixed by sprinkling water on it.

Oscar Muñoz
Narcisos (en proceso) [Narcissi (in process)]
1995-2011
Charcoal dust and paper on water, Plexiglas, 6 elements
10 x 50 x 50 cm each, overall dimensions: 10 x 70 x 400 cm
Courtesy of the artist

Narcisos was a key series in the artist’s quest to dematerialise the support of the photographic image. Muñoz developed a new technique unprecedented in the history of art and probably never to be encountered again – that of printing on water. The earliest photographic images emerged from water, from the chemical baths that fixed the silver salts in different gradations of intensity produced by the action of light. The support was an incidental necessity. Muñoz has referred to the three phases in the process of Narcissi as allegories of an individual’s progress through life: creation, at the moment when the charcoal dust touches the surface of the water; the changes that come about during evaporation; and death, at the moment when the dried out dust finally settles at the bottom of the container. The result, which the artist has called Narcisos secos, is both the final image and the death of the process: the remains of a photograph that possessed a life after it was fixed for posterity. In this sense, Dry Narcissi are the record of a double death of the image.

Oscar Muñoz
Narciso [Narcissus]
2001
Single-channel video 4:3, colour, sound, 3 min
Courtesy of the artist

Muñoz’s first work in video was Narciso, in which he dramatically presented the processes developed in his Narcissi of the 1990s (in which the evaporation was invisible to the naked eye) by making the water disappear in a few minutes. As in those earlier works, a self-portrait floats on the surface of the water but the drain in the sink and the sound of running water foretell for the viewer what the image’s final fate will be. In reality, there are two images here: that of the subject and that of its shadow on the white bottom of the basin. The images gradually come closer together, as if to suggest that life is a constant quest for self-understanding. However, at the moment when the two images are about to coincide, it is already too late: they fuse into a single distorted stain that disappears down the drain.

Oscar Muñoz
Re/trato [Portrait/I Try Again]
2004
Single-channel video projection 4:3, colour, no sound, 28 min
Courtesy of the artist

About the exhibition

“Through a multifaceted body of work that moves freely between photography, printmaking, drawing, installation, video and sculpture, eliminating the borderlines between these disciplines through innovative practices, Oscar Muñoz (Popayán, Colombia, 1951) explores the capacity of images to retain memory.

In 1826, for the first time in history the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce succeeded in fixing the elusive image produced by the camera obscura, a device known since antiquity. In contrast to painting or drawing, the camera obscura was able to obtain an image from life without the assistance of the human hand and in real time: what it could not do was freeze it or fix it onto a support in order to extract it from the passing of time. It could thus be said that the essence of the photographic act does not lie in taking the image but in permanently fixing it. What, then, is the status of the image in the instant prior to the moment when it is fixed for posterity?

If the ontology of photography lies in fixing a moving image for all time, extracting it from life, we might say that Oscar Muñoz’s work is located in the temporal space prior (or subsequent) to the true decisive moment when the image is fixed: that proto-moment when the image is finally about to become photography. In that sense, it could be said that Muñoz’s work is protographic.

The exhibition

Born in 1951 in Popayán (Colombia), Oscar Muñoz is regarded as one of the country’s most important contemporary artists, whilst also garnering attention on the international art scene. A graduate of the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Cali, he has built up over a period of four decades a body of work whose images deal with the realm of memory, loss and the precarious nature of human life. Muñoz’s work defies systematic classification because he works in so many different media: photography, printmaking, drawing, installations, video and sculpture.

“Protographs” (a term coined to evoke the instant just before or just after that split-second when the photographic image is captured and frozen for ever) presents his major series grouped by theme. These themes poetically and metaphorically juxtapose Muñoz’s own past and the different material states of the image. For example, he combines the dissolution, deterioration or disintegration of the image with the inherent fragility of memory and the impossibility of making time stand still; or the image’s evaporation and transformation with the tension between rationality and chaos in our urban societies. Finally, in the main part of his work, he creates ephemeral images that, as they disappear, invite the spectator to share in an experience that is simultaneously rational and sensual.

Oscar Muñoz began his career in the 1970s in Cali in a period when a whirlwind of cultural and cross-disciplinary activity saw the emergence of a generation of writers, photographers and filmmakers who today play a leading role in the contemporary art scene (with Carlos Mayolo, Luis Ospina, Fernell Franco and Andrés Caicedo to name but a few). At that time, Muñoz was drawing with charcoal on large-format supports presenting a cast of sad and sometimes sordid characters with a deep emotional charge. The main characteristics of his work emerged at an early stage. These include a profound and tireless interest in social questions, an original approach to materials, the use of photography as an aid to memory and the exploiting of the dramatic possibilities afforded by the play of shadow and light in defining the image. Moreover, the artist developed a phenomenological approach to minimalism by insisting on the relationship between the artwork, the spectator and the surrounding exhibition space.

In the mid-1980s, Oscar Muñoz moved away from traditional artistic methods and began to experiment with innovative processes that created a real interactive exchange with the spectator. This was the time of a radical reassessment of his artistic practices, whether drawing, printmaking, or photography, and a questioning of the relationship between the artwork and its surroundings. He abandoned traditional formats and techniques, whilst preserving something of their roots and wellsprings, to investigate ephemerality, highlighting the very essence of the materials themselves and their poetic associations. His use of the fundamental elements – water, air and fire – refers to the processes, the cycles and the transcendental manifestations of life, our very existence and death itself. “My work attempts to understand why the past and the present are so full of violent acts,” says the artist. By choosing to use a diverse selection of media and to apply innovative and unique processes, Oscar Muñoz blurs the boundaries between artistic disciplines.

The “Protographs” exhibition showcases a career that has lasted nearly forty years. It presents series of works grouped around the artist’s major themes, starting with his works on paper and his series of large format hyperrealist drawings in charcoal (1976-1981) – bearing witness to his deep interest in social context – and the drawings and engravings that he started making in the 1980s, which marked the relinquishing of paper for an exploration of unconventional materials and processes (printing on damp plastic, the use of sugar and coffee, etc.); continuing with his experiments in the 1990s and 2000s on the stability of the image and its relationship to the processes of memory; and including his latest works (2009-2014), characterised by a continual process of appearance and disappearance, including a new work produced specifically for the exhibition.”

Text by José Roca and María Wills Londoño

IMPRINTS

Over the last decade, Muñoz has created a series of works on the indicative relationship between the object and its image, making use of contact printing, a characteristic printmaking process. This was the case with La mirada del Cíclope [The Cyclops' Gaze] (2001-2002), Intervalos (mientras respiro) [Intervals (While I Breathe)] (2004) and Paístiempo [Countrytime] (2007), as well as series from a number of other periods.

Oscar Muñoz
Aliento [Breath]
1995
Metal mirrors, screen-printed with grease, 7 mirrors
Diameter: 20 cm each
Courtesy of the artist

The series Aliento comprises portraits printed in photo-silkscreen with grease on small round metal mirrors located at eye level. The mirrors initially seem blank and the printed image only reveals itself when the viewer, having recognised himself/herself, breathes onto the circular mirror. During this brief moment the reflected image is replaced by the printed image (photographs taken from obituaries) of a deceased person who fleetingly returns through the viewer’s breath.

Oscar Muñoz
La mirada del cíclope [The Cyclops' Gaze]
2002
Digital print on paper, 6 photographs
50 x 50 cm each one
Courtesy of the artist

La mirada del cíclope, in which the subject is considered in relation to death, uses one of the oldest techniques of portraiture and printmaking: a mould made by direct contact, in this case of the artist’s own face. This sculptural object (inspired by the ancient Roman tradition of funerary masks) becomes two-dimensional when it is captured by the camera’s single eye (hence the title). Lacking references to volume, the viewer’s eye cannot decide if the object represented is concave or convex, in a play of perceptual opposites: negative/positive, presence/absence, reality or illusions. Quoting Pierre Bourdieu, Muñoz has noted that “the imagines of ancient Rome are exactly equivalent to the social nature of some modern photographs; they play an important role in the tortuous act of mourning: we accept a reality by ‘becoming accustomed to the unreality of its images’.”

Oscar Muñoz
Horizonte [Horizon]
2011
From the series Impresiones débiles [Weak Impressions]
Charcoal dust print on methacrylate
4 elements, 85 x 73.5 cm each
Galerie mor. charpentier, Paris

The earliest successful images taken by Niépce were proto-photographs that did not survive intact as images because the light that had created them continued to affect them until they eventually succumbed to darkness in an inexorable fade to black. This is what happens in film photography when a photograph is not properly rinsed and the developing agent continues to act, or when the photographic paper is directly exposed to the action of light. However, the image can also move towards clarity. In Impresiones débiles, Muñoz employs photographs of great historical and political significance for Colombia and subjects them to a process that makes them seem like “washed out” photos in which over-exposure to light has made the image deteriorate to the point of near invisibility. The works that make up this series are in fact prints rather than photographs, given that they are silkscreens made with charcoal dust on acrylic. The variable distance between the silkscreen mesh and the support allows the artist to single out a different element from the original photograph in each print, making it more highly defined than the rest. The “variable focus” in this series questions another of the supposedly essential characteristics of photography, namely the camera’s systematic, technical objectivity in relation to its subjects.

THE IMAGE IN FLUX

In his most recent works, Muñoz depicts images in a process of continual appearance and disappearance. These are subtle impressions with varying emphases on the different parts of the image that are literally in flux and cannot be fixed, such as those produced by a camera obscura. This section includes the video Cíclope [Cyclops] (2011), the installation Editor solitario [Solitary Editor] and the work Sedimentaciones [Sedimentations] (2011), the latter comprising three tables with projections of documents that are constantly created and destroyed. The exhibition ends with the highly personal Fundido al blanco [Fade to White] (2010).

Oscar Muñoz
Fundido a blanco (dos retratos) [Fade to White (Two Portraits)]
2010
HD Video, colour, sound, 7 min 40 s
Courtesy of the artist

Fundido a blanco (dos retratos) is an autobiographical work: a family portrait with Muñoz behind the camera, constituting the third side of a temporal triangle that includes his mother and father. It is, in other words, a memorial. Rather than making their features more clear, the strong light that bathes the scene makes them imprecise and ethereal. Muñoz has referred to the intense light in Cali at a certain time of day, when people seem to “disintegrate”, and also to the blinding brilliance of the sun when the artist came out after seeing a film at the city’s film club. The central figure in Fundido a blanco momentarily falls asleep now and then, entering into the light. Rather than fixing that figure at a precise moment of its existence, in the manner of a photographic portrait or snapshot, Muñoz creates a portrait that develops in time. Fundido a blanco is one of the artist’s most moving works, an image that touches the viewer. Its power may perhaps lie in the fact that for the first time in his extensive output, we are here seeing a specific subject rather than the generic representation of one.

Oscar Muñoz
Sedimentaciones [Sedimentations]
2011
2 HD video projections, colour, sound, 42 min 27 s, 41 min 42 s, on wooden tables
Courtesy of the artist

The strategy of dissolving the image reappears in Sedimentaciones, a photographic development table on which there are numerous photographs arranged in lines, with various blank sheets between them. The photos are extremely varied in nature, ranging from universally known images to others that are very specific to a Colombian context, personal portraits by the artist and anonymous, generic images. There are two developing trays at opposite corners. A hand takes a photograph from the table and puts it in a plastic tray filled with liquid in which the image dissolves. The paper emerges white and is then randomly placed in one of the lines. On the other side of the table another hand takes up one of the empty sheets and slides it into another tray. On taking out the sheet, the image has magically re-formed on it and the hand places it in the line of photographs. The process starts again in the other corner. Through this alternation we thus witness the ceaseless life and death of the image (see video below).

MORE WORK

Oscar Muñoz
El juego de las probabilidades [The Game of Probabilities]
2007
12 colour photographs
47 x 40 cm each with frame
Courtesy of the artist and Sicardi Gallery, Houston

Oscar Muñoz
Línea del destino [Line of Destiny]
2006
Single-channel video 4:3, black and white, no sound,
1 min 54 s
Courtesy of the artist

Oscar Muñoz
Pixeles [Pixels]
1999-2000
Coffee stains on sugar cubes, Plexiglas
9 panels 35 x 35 x 3 cm each
Courtesy of the artist and Sicardi Gallery, Houston

OSCAR MUÑOZ: “Protographs” in progress from Jeu de Paume / magazine on Vimeo.

The magazine’s camera has gone behind the scenes of Oscar Muñoz’ exhibition Protographs at the Jeu de Paume. It attempts to show how the artist and his assistant, Juliana Guevara, produce unstable images, using unconventional materials and supports such as water, charcoal dust, grease on metal, the spectator’s breath, and shower curtains. Since the early 80s, Muñoz has been developing special techniques to produce images that reveal themselves as a kind of counterpoint to photography and the “decisive moment” it once claimed to capture.

Narcissi (1995), Breath (1995), Simulacra (1999), The Collector (2014): all these works question the fragile status of images and the way they live - and die – in our memory.

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