Photographs in the Janos Scholz Collection

Abstract

Janos Scholz (1903–1993), who was to become one of the great cellists of the twentieth century, began collecting when he was a child in Sopron, Hungary. After completing his studies at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music, Scholz was named first cellist with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra. In 1932 he joined the Roth Quartet, and the following year he left Hungary to tour with the quartet in the United States. He became an American citizen in 1933 and made his home in New York until his death in 1993. Scholz began to collect prints and drawings in 1935 and over the next three decades he amassed an unrivalled collection ofItalian drawings. In keeping with the nature of his life as a musician, in which he shared his music through public recitals, Scholz announced in 1973 that he had decided to give his drawings to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Soon afterwards he began a new collection, one that focused upon nineteenth-century European photographs on paper.     

Alfred Stieglitz and New Yark Dada

Abstract

In February of 1921 the photographer and entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz mounted the fIrst public exhibition of his work since the closing of his pioneering art gallery, ‘291’, nearly four years earlier.1 An exhibition of 146 of Stieglitz's photographs was held at the Anderson Galleries in New York during February of 1921. This show was instrumental in helping Stieglitz ultimately to reassert his prominence in the New York art world and re-establish his status as an important American artist. Curiously, however, the manner in which Stieglitz and his associates chose to promote the photographer was somewhat unusual. They repeatedly described the camera as an extension of Stieglitz's own body, and his photographs as an extension of his spirit. As a result, they claimed that Stieglitz had achieved a profound physical and spiritual union both with his machinery and with the subjects he photographed.     

Between the wars

Abstract

During the 1930s the Julien Levy Gallery was the liveliest photographic centre in New York City. It opened in 1931, and it was Levy's plan to show photographs along with paintings and drawings and other works of art. It was at his Madison Avenue gallery that New Yorkers first saw the photographs of Atget that Berenice Abbott acquired shortly after the photographer's death, together with Julien Levy, who advanced the purchase funds. It was also there that Walker Evans had his first one-man show, and where Henri Cartier-Bresson was introduced to the American public. Through his series of exhibitions the New York public came to know the work of the avant garde in photography. Indeed, without Julien's pioneering work, the exhibition which the present reviewer organized for The Museum of Modern Art in 1937 would have been the poorer. Julien Levy has never received the recognition he deserves. Now, upon the occasion of receiving the Julien Levy Collection, partly as a gift, partly on extended loan, the Art Institute of Chicago has remedied the situation by publishing this modest but well illustrated and meticulously documented catalogue. Produced by David Travis, the museum's Associate Curator of Photography, it is, without question, the most important scholarly publication on the history of art photography between World Wars I and II. Not only does the book recreate the excitement of the discovery by Julien and his friends that photography was indeed a part of 'modern art', but it contains a wealth of information. Moreover, of the 58 photographs that are reproduced, three-quarters have not been previously published. They were made by 32 photographers. It is well to name them, for 15 have been almost entirely forgotten today. They were: Berenice Abbott, Manuel Alvarez-Bravo, Eugene Atget, Use Bing, Brassai:, Anton Bruehl, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Walter Hege, Gertrude Kasebier, Andre Kertesz, Clarence John Laughlin, Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Eli Lotar, George platt Lynes, Lee Miller, Lucia Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Nadar, Oscar Nerlinger, Paul Outerbridge Jr, Roger Parry, Man Ray, Sherril V. Schell, Charles Sheeler, Emmanuel Sougez, Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, Maurice Tabard, Umbo (Otto Umbehr), and Clarence H. White.     

Ermakov album

Abstract

When I first met Henry Ries in his home in Manhattan in the mid-1980s, I was struck by his generosity in telling me about his career. Born in 1917 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in an assimilated Jewish family, Henry (born Heinz) Ries left for New York on 13 January 1938. Initially, he found employment in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he taught photography at the Jewish community centre and could use their laboratory for his own work. He tried to enlist in the United States Army in December 1941, but this was not possible, since he was an 'enemy alien' and a recent emigrant without American citizenship. In May 1943, he joined the Army Air Corps and received American citizenship. Initially posted to the Pacific theatre, making aerial photographs of China for the 20th Bomber Command, he subsequently transferred to the European theatre, arriving in London in late May 1945. Assigned to the ‘Office Director of Intelligence’, his first job was to evaluate Heinrich Himmler's ‘secret state library’ correspondence with the SS, Hitler, Goebbels, Goring, and others, which was later utilized in the Nuremberg Medical Trial. Three months later, Ries was transferred to Berlin.     

From Public Relations to Art: Exhibiting Frances Benjamin Johnston's Hampton Institute Photographs

This article examines the circulation of a series of photographs taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia, in 1899. It looks first at their display in the context of the American Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900; second, it considers an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1966; and third, it discusses an exhibit at the Williams College Museum of Art in 2000 in which the Hampton photographs were paired with work by contemporary artist, Carrie Mae Weems. The article analyzes the context and the display techniques of each exhibition in order to show how the function of the photographs shifted from public relations material to art. In tracing this shift, the article demonstrates that the meaning of the photographs is not fixed; rather, it was constituted through different discursive frameworks.     

F. Holland Day and ‘the Beautiful Boy’: The Story of Thomas Langryl Harris and Day's Nude Study

F. Holland Day has long been recognised as a pioneer American pictorial photographer and uncompromising advocate for photography as a fine art. His work, particularly his depictions of the male nude and the crucifixion of Christ (for which he was his own model), was somewhat controversial in his lifetime and remains influential. His advocacy culminated in the mounting of the all-important New School of American Photography exhibition in London and Paris more than a century ago. Thomas Langryl Harris, on the other hand, was primarily a painter of miniature portraits and had a questionable reputation. He led a short, tragic life and today is totally unknown in the art world. This article explores the relationship between F. Holland Day and Thomas Langryl Harris, the creation of a nude study of the young man by Day and its subsequent erroneous identification as a ‘study for the crucifixion’.     

How Stieglitz came to photograph cityscapes

Abstract

Beginning in 1927, at the age of 63, Alfred Stieglitz began photographing the views of Manhattan outside the windows at the Intimate Gallery, his third-floor exhibition space on East 59th Street, and at the thirtieth-floor apartment at the Shelton Hotel, at 49th Street and Lexington Avenue, where he lived with Georgia O'Keeffe. In concerted bursts over the next four years, and then intermittently until ill-health forced the end of his picture-making in 1937, Stieglitz produced about 90 cityscapes, most of them depicting the changing views from .the Shelton and from his seventeenthfloor gallery An American Place, at 53rd Street and Madison Avenue, where he moved operations just after the stockmarket crash of 1929.1 The key set of Stieglitz's photographs in the National Gallery, Washington, DC, deposited there by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949, includes 80 New York cityscapes from 1927 and after. The collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art has, among its late cityscapes, a handful that are not present in Washington, being variants in either negative, cropping, or photographic paper. These have been donated in stages over the years by Dorothy Norman. Further examples of variations from the images in Washington are unknown at present. These hard-edged yet lush gelatine silver prints vividly document a building boom of the late 1920s and early Depression years which transformed the refined, residential ‘uptown’ that Stieglitz had known all his life into a skyscraper-ridden ‘midtown’, a centre for office rentals, luxury apartment hotels and the fme art trade (figure 1).     

Lovell Reeve

Abstract

A poet, painter, critic and political organizer, Kenneth Rexroth (1905–82) is best known for having spearheaded the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance if the 1950s, and for his association with the Beat poets. See, for instance, An Autobiographical Novel, Garden City: Doubleday 1963; and selected Poems, New York: New Directions 1984.     

Weegee's Jewishness

A New York photojournalist who specialised in scenes of crime and disaster, Weegee also made photographs reflecting his Jewish heritage, among them being pictures focusing upon assimilation, social justice and anti-Semitism. By discussing a number of such photographs, many of them published in Weegee's first books, Naked City (1945) and Weegee's People (1946), this article describes how the photographer's religiocultural inheritance influenced his imagery. At the same time, the article provides a model for future analyses of how Jewish descent affected the work of other influential Jewish-American photographers.     

Reviews

Abstract

This 1967 New York University doctoral thesis is a highly competent study of the interaction between American landscape painting and the nascent practice of photography between 1839, when the daguerreotype was introduced, and 1880, when the first successful half-tone appeared in the New York Graphic, a portent of competitive undoing for the graphic artist and his role in pictorial reproduction. Early in the period, the influence of the daguerreotype was strongly apparent in portraiture. Photography's main impact on landscape painting awaited later procedural innovations: the wet-collodion process (1851), with negatives that permitted multiple prints; the stereograph (1854), that soared into popularity after the Civil War; the dry-plate process (1871), that obviated the need for the portable darkroom. And it was after mid-century that a fully collaborative relationship between landscapist and photographer was stimulated by two developments: exploration and study of the American West by government- directed surveys, and the burgeoning of a popular illustrated press.     

Photography at the Amon Carter Museum

Abstract

This slender but handsome volume samples a tantalizing forty-eight of the 200 000 photographs in the Amon Carter Museum's holdings of American photography. Devoted to American art, the museum collects photography in three major areas, all represented here: fine art photography, historical photography and artist collections. In Singular Moments one finds great names like Ansel Adams, iconic images like Barbara Morgan's Martha Graham — Letter to the World (Swirl), documentary work by less famous practitioners such as Carl Mydans and Laura Gilpin, and fascinating glimpses into the nineteenth centmy through the lenses of unknown early photographers, especially those of the American West. The book ably reproduces a great variety of techniques, from daguerreotypes, chloride prints and photogravures to more recent processes such as dye destruction prints as well as gelatine silver prints. A bibliography gives the novice reader an excellent starting place for further reading and hints at the vast scholarship that the entire collection represents. Singular Moments invites all those interested in photography to watch this museum for future exhibitions from its enormous and evidently beautiful collection.     

Kunst and conscience

Abstract

This book owes its existence largely to the ‘discovery’ of a new cache of Zille photographs, now in the possession of one of the artist's descendants. Altogether, there are 418 negatives on glass, some glass positives, some contact prints, and about a hundred photographs of which negatives have not been traced. None of this material, had been treated with any particular care; its value had remained unrecognized, in harmony with Zille's own view of his photographic activities, as a means to a very practical end. Famous as a painter and cartoonist of the Berlin scene, he did not himself consider his photographs as Hochkunst, but there is no doubt whatever that modern sensibilities and judgements place them into that category. It is true enough that the present selection of 200 items, beautifully printed and presented one to a page, includes some trivial material, but an astonishing number of images invite comparison with the work of the more famous turn-of-the-century masters, and yield nothing at all to their superior reputations. Zille, who began photographing in 1890, might conceivably have know of Nègre, but there is no evidence that he had ever seen work by Atget, Coburn, Riis or Hine. Indeed, many of Zille's most important photographs predate some of their American parallels, and yet his images reflect the intrinsic qualities of all these artists, while at the same time exhibiting a freshness of approach which is peculiarly his own. This does not come through as a minor descant on a familiar theme; on the contrary, it is the dominant impression, important enough to secure Zille's place in any photographic Hall of Fame. The two examples available as illustrations for this review, though entirely competent, cannot by themselves confirm the impression of the originality and richness that are in store for the reader.     

Platinum Print (Photo-Graphic Art) 1913–17

In the 1920s art museums in the United States began to collect and display photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and other leading photographers as works of art. Previous scholars have acknowledged this movement's significance in Stieglitz's struggle for the institutional recognition of photography. They have, however, scarcely queried the conditions under which this movement began. This article scrutinises the circumstances under which the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, accepted prints from Stieglitz and other practitioners of the medium. It posits that the Boston Museum's decision to accept these prints was motivated by its protean curator Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy's interest in pictorialist and photo-secessionist photography's creative and political possibilities as well as in Stieglitz's life and work. Stieglitz's pictures appealed to Coomaraswamy because he recognised in them ways in which the American photographer was referencing strands of classical South Asian aesthetics to develop more inclusive and more symbolic works of American art. One of these filaments was Stieglitz's absorption of a codified language of hand gestures assumed by dancers and deities that Coomaraswamy was concurrently documenting and interpreting in his writings, photographs and films to elevate maligned traditions of South Asian sculpture and performance as Art. In recovering this narrative of Coomraswamy and Stieglitz's overlapping lives and works, this article begins to disentangle histories of collecting, of modernist photography and of the crystallisation of South Asian art history as a scholarly discipline.     

The Jersey Years; Photographer in the Circle of Victor Hugo

Abstract

An interesting and little-discussed body of photographic work is connected with the circle of Victor Hugo during the years of his exile on the island of Jersey in the English Channel, from 1852 to 1855. These works are now dispersed; a n~umber of them are in Paris, in the Museé de la Maison de Victor Hugo and in the Bibliothèque Nationale, another survives in the archivcs of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; and various other examples exist in private collections. The Jersey photographs are the result of a joint effort by Charles Hugo, the poet's son, and his friend, Auguste Vacquerie.     

New York and Photography

Abstract

This exhibition catalogue about the New York School of photography, begun long before 11 September 2001, fortuitously lifts up the city as both image and source of visual ideas. Comforting in this accidental homage, the book also offers significant essays that explore the reasons for the flourishing of photography in twentiethcentury New York. New York: Capital of Photography offers some especially thought provoking explanations. Max Kozloff, art historian, critic and photographer, traces the development of a particular way of seeing that evolved from the early years of the century in the Reform Movement through the ‘made-to-order Surrealism’ of New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Five of his six essays approach a textbook treatment of this art form in this period and place. The sixth, ‘Jewish Sensibility and the Photography of New York’, poses the intriguing thesis that the aesthetic of New York photography as a whole is a Jewish one. This idea may not be accepted as fact in actual photography history texts until another hundred years have passed, but is worthy and fascinating, in Kozloffs telling, of consideration.     

‘Beautiful Hybrids’: Caroline Gurrey's Photographs of Hawai‘i’s Mixed-race Children

In the early years of the twentieth century the Hawaiian-based American photographer Caroline Gurrey produced a much praised set of the photographs of Hawai‘i’s ‘mixed race’ children. Critics have noted that stylistically Gurrey's photographs belong to the pictorialist school and possibly even to the high art style of the Photo-Seccessionists, however research into her background and life, and the contexts in which these photographs were produced and consumed, suggests that if we want a fuller understanding of both Gurrey's intentions and these photographs' historical importance, we should also take note of the part they played in the burgeoning eugenics movement and indigenous Hawaiians' reactions to American imperialism.     

‘The art of correctly painting the expressive lines of the human face’: Duchenne de Boulogne's Photographs of Human Expression and the École des Beaux-Arts

Abstract

Admired in their day as living anatomy, the strange, powerful photographs of human expression produced by or under the direction of Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne (1806–75) functioned in two fields, medicine and fine art.¹ I would argue that these photographs' credibility in both fields derived from shared practices of ‘drawing from life’, practices laden with expectations of naturalism and legibility, as was photography in general at this time. While it was quite common during the nineteenth century that images made to serve the purposes of one of these fields were studied or circulated in the other, rarely were photographs given both scientific and artistic aims or, even less so, qualities, as Duchenne claimed for his work. Recent scholarship on Duchenne's work has tended to critique its perceived objectivity and scientific meaning by following Michel FoucauIt and unpacking the enlightened bourgeois modes of controlling, investing and understanding representations of the human body.² The exhibition catalogues published in 1999 by the Ecole nationale des beaux-arts and by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art discuss important aspects of the aesthetic context of Duchenne's photographs. However, neither one asked how and why his work was rejected by the French Academy of Fine Arts in 1863, only to become part of the fine art curriculum of the École des Beaux-Arts a decade later. To address those unstudied questions, I will examine relevant aspects of the photographs' creation, forms and functions, and their receptions by the scientific and art communities.     

Alvin Langdon Coburn

Abstract

One of the most intriguing aspects of Alvin Langdon Coburn's life began when he stopped making photographs. At thirty-six years of age, Coburn had a well established photographic career. He had photographed some of the most important people of his day and was admired and befriended by many of them. A member of the Photo-Secession and the Linked Ring, Coburn was involved in the promotion of photography as an art form. He made Vortographs in 1917 and therefore he is also credited by many as the first purely abstract photographer. Yet, in 1918, Coburn stopped photographing professionally. In his autobiography he said:     

The Album of Camille Silvy

Abstract

Camille Silvy (1834-1910), an elusive figure in the history of photography, was very successful in the brief 11 years that he produced photographs. He has been primarily known for his beautifully toned cartes-de-visite, in addition to larger images, most prominently River Scene, France. Recently, much attention has been given to this Silvy masterpiece, which has been the subject of a book and an exhibition.¹ The book, intensively researched by Mark Haworth-Booth, sheds considerable light on Silvy's life and career. One of the items that Haworth-Booth uncovered was an album or scrapbook that belonged to Silvy and now belongs to Silvy's descendants in Paris. This album served as a scrapbook or memory book and provides clues and insights into Silvy's life. It reflects his inspirations and early training, his interests, his professional accomplishments, events in his life, and his lifelong interest in documentation.