Victor Schrager, The White Room @Houk

JTF (just the facts): A total of 10 pigment prints, in either 30×23 or 45×35 inches, framed in white and arrayed in the main gallery only. All of the negatives are from 2008, in editions of 11. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: There seem to be very few contemporary photographers at work today who are focused on exploring the depths and intricacies of pure abstraction. Indeed, abstraction in black and white was thoroughly investigated several decades ago; in color, the recent expeditions have been less far reaching, mostly clinging to recognizable objects that have then been arranged and photographed in such ways as to highlight their abstract qualities.
In the past decade, Victor Schrager has been on his own abstraction trajectory. Several years ago, Schrager did a series of still life images of jacket-less books, whose forms and muted colors were arranged into planes, volumes, shadows, and intricate patterns. Indebted to the work of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, the best of these images became elemental forms, blurred and indistinct.
Schrager’s new work, now on view at Edwynn Houk, continues along this path, exchanging the subtle yellows, greens and ochres of the slim volumes, for candy colored neon blocks of plastic and resin. Arranged on a mirrored black table and lit with pure white light, these objects are even less recognizable than the books, leading to a further focus on their attributes of color, form, and reflection. Echoes of the Color Field painters (particularly Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Morris Louis) are everywhere, as is the connection to Irving Penn’s frozen vegetable images.
Historical relationships aside, and while not every image in the show gets the objects placed just right, there are a handful of pictures that strongly resonate and shimmer off the wall, where the interactions of color and shape work to create both tension and harmony. As the objects have become simpler and less recognizable, the space for exploring the puzzles and complexity of abstraction have widened. As such, the images in this show seem less like the end of the road for Schrager, but just the beginning.
The artist’s website can be found here.
Collector’s POV: These images belong in a white cube of a home or apartment, whose owners are devotees of 20th century modern design/furniture. Their abstract forms and bright colors would mingle well with this aesthetic. They would unfortunately look wildly, even insanely, out of place in our old Colonial. The images are priced at $4500 and $5500, based on size.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Through January 24th
745 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10151

Martin Klimas, Flowers @Foley

JTF (just the facts): 7 color pigment prints, each 32×24, six installed in the main gallery, and a single image shown down in the first floor entryway. We were told that the show normally had several more images on display, but that they had been taken down and shipped to Photo LA. Negatives from 2006 and 2007, in editions of 5. A slim book detailing this body of work is available from the gallery for $30. (Installation shot at right.)

Comments/Context: The floral images of German photographer Martin Klimas can most clearly be described as a mashup of Robert Mapplethorpe and Harold Edgerton. In each picture, an elegant floral bouquet in a striking vase is set against a saturated color background. The unexpected part of this conceit is that the vase is in the process of exploding, having been captured at the exact instant of disintegration by careful stop motion photography. The result is a surprisingly interesting contrast between the quiet beauty of the flowers and the violent destruction of the vase. Prior to visiting this show, we thought this concept sounded a bit contrived (was this just a stunt?), but we found the execution of the idea to be first rate, and the pictures are quite a bit better and more visually engaging than we had expected.
The artist’s website can be found here.
Collector’s POV: As collectors of flower and botanical photographs, we like to think we have seen pretty much everything that has ever been done in this genre, but these works by Klimas are indeed something new and different. The best of the images are to be found in the book, as the exhibit itself has been depleted by the demands of the fair circuit. At $3000 apiece, one of these would make an attractive (and relatively inexpensive) contrast to a color Mapplethorpe floral, if hung in tandem.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Through January 17th
547 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001

Eudora Welty in New York: Photographs of the Early 1930s @MCNY

JTF (just the facts): 40 black and white images (with a slight sepia toning/aging) of Mississippi in the main gallery (blue striped wall), with an additional 11 images of New York in an adjacent room (brown striped wall). All from the 1930s. (Blurry installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The quick question “Who was Eudora Welty?” will in most cases elicit an answer (pulled from deep memories from high school) summarizing her success as a prize-winning writer of American novels and short stories set in and describing the rural South, primarily during the Depression. What is perhaps less well known is that Welty began her career as a photographer, as part of the WPA. Her first exhibit was held at the Lugene Opticians’ Photographic Galleries (a camera supply store) in 1936, and the images from this original show have been gathered together once again for this exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. In addition to the works from Mississippi, a roomful of pictures that she took during her time in New York are also on view, and these images provide an interesting contrast to the Southern collection.
Even though Welty was a white woman in her twenties taking pictures of the predominantly black towns of Mississippi, her work has the authentic feel of an insider. These are not goopy, sentimental shots of rural workers, nor are they noble testaments to the dignity of labor. They are genuine images of day to day life, full of its dust, heat, humor and simple routine. There are scenes of both farm and city life, of people working in the fields and walking the streets in their Sunday best. While the images are too well composed to be called snapshots, there is an easy-going casualness to the work that is a testament to the comfort she instilled in her subjects.
When Welty got to the big city, she seems to have at once become a tourist, and was drawn to the eye-catching cliches that everyone is fascinated by when they first see New York (elevated trains, tall buildings, sidewalk life, stairways and stoops). Her work from this period, while still focused primarily on the effects of the Depression, lacks the intimacy of the Mississippi work, and degenerates into (to my eye at least) second rate Abbott knock-offs.
Collector’s POV: Unfortunately, Welty’s best work (that from Mississippi) doesn’t fit well with our particular collecting plan. 1980’s prints of Welty’s images from the South (seemingly in editions of 20 or more) have come up at auction from time to time in the past few years, but in small numbers. Prices have been generally reasonable.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Through February 16th
1220 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10029

Broken Glass: Photographs of the South Bronx by Ray Mortenson @MCNY

JTF (just the facts): A total of 50 black and white gelatin silver prints, of varying sizes, mostly small 5×7 or reverse, with a handful of larger (20×24 or mural sized) prints as well, in a single hallway gallery. A large grid of images (77 total prints) and two glass cases containing artist books are also on display. All of the works are from 1982-1984. (Installation shot at right; image of grid below right.)

Comments/Context: With the growth and prosperity across the nation in recent years, it is often easy to forget what many urban areas went through in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ray Mortenson’s photographs take us back to a time in the South Bronx when the streets and neighborhoods resembled an abandoned war zone, with tumble down houses, destruction, and utter collapse the prevailing landscape.

Mortenson made an in depth study of this environment, in an almost anthropological way, taking pictures of both interiors and exteriors, and placing buildings in the context of their surroundings and separating them apart. The images are entirely empty; not a single person is to be found anywhere. What remains are the architectural remnants of broken walls and windows, graffiti, and rotting furniture. It is a bleak world of peeling paint, massive holes, chaos and neglect. There are echoes of Gordon Matta-Clark’s work here, minus the conceptual overlay: walls and buildings are slashed and torn, with peep hole views through the decay.

Given the depressing subject matter, it is perhaps surprising to find that these works are consistently engaging and beautiful. Mortenson has used strong contrasts of black/white, light/shadow, and line/texture to bring vitality to these abandoned rooms and buildings. Each view has been carefully composed and crafted, and the small images draw the viewer into an intimate dialogue. The work is thought provoking, in the sense that Mortenson has taken spaces that were defined by negligence and dereliction, and paid respectful attention to them. In doing so, he has exposed some glimpses of simple beauty hidden underneath.

Collector’s POV: Prior to this show, we knew nothing about the work of Ray Mortenson. Given this body of work, we have come away impressed; one of these images would easily fit into our collection. Ray Mortenson is represented by Janet Borden (site here).

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

Through March 3rd

1220 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10029

David Perkins, The Intelligent Eye

JTF (just the facts): Subtitled Learning to Think by Looking at Art. Published by the J. Paul Getty Trust in 1994. 95 pages.

Comments/Context: We received this book this Christmas from a friend who runs the education department at a museum we support. The author, David Perkins, has been working at the Harvard Graduate School of Education since the early 1970s, primarily in a group called Project Zero, where he has focused on teaching/learning, especially in the context of arts education and creativity. This slim volume is a quick read, but grounded in some compelling concepts.
The first key underlying idea is that neuroscience (study of the brain) has come along far enough in the past decades to understand some fundamental things about how our brains work. (Another excellent book on this topic is On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, site here.) In a nutshell, our brains are hierarchical systems that use our memories to continuously pattern match and draw analogies. This activity creates a flow of predictions based on this data, trying to make sense of the stimuli that surround us and place it into a context that we can understand and make use of. In 90% of our daily activities, this “experiential intelligence” works extremely well and produces “right” answers and useful “solutions”.
Perkins argues that experiencing art falls into the other 10%, where our innate systems follow routines and well worn paths that don’t serve us particularly well. In these cases, the normal day-to-day approach is too hasty, often narrow, and sometimes fuzzy and sprawling (lacking discipline). Certainly, we have all had times when we blasted through a museum or gallery show, making 50,000 foot conclusions about what we had seen, without having really spent the time to take it all in.
His thesis is that a “reflective intelligence” is required in viewing art (and in other specific areas), almost as a check on the “experiental intelligence”, where an active, thoughtful and systematic approach is taken to ensure a deeper understanding. The second half of the book is a series of example artworks (several of which are photographs) and the stream of consciousness observations people made when consciously using his framework for thinking.
There are four anchor points to his “reflective intelligence” as applied to looking at art. The first is to slow your looking down, to resolve to spend several minutes with key works, and to allow your eyes to work and generate questions, and finally, when the flow stops, to look away, and then return again with a fresh perspective. This is really about giving your brain the time and space it needs to process what is before you. The second is to make your thinking “broad and adventurous”, to break away from the obvious conclusions that your brain has already provided and to look for open-ended solutions outside the normal boundaries. This involves looking for “surprises”, connections, and even technical specifics that can trigger a new pathway of thought. The third concept is to add a layer of more analytical thought on top of the expanded ideas that were generated by the second step. To summarize this idea perhaps simplistically, the concept is to dig in and investigate these ideas that have been surfaced with some rigor, “clearly and deeply”. Perkins’ final idea is that once you have gone through the first three steps, a summing up or orchestration of all the data is needed; organization is necessary to generate final conclusions. In this section, he refers to many well known strategies for looking at art, that include description, formal analysis, interpretation, and finally judgement, that are more oriented toward criticism. In his view, while these “art specific” strategies can be useful in providing frameworks for thinking, his view is that his “reflective” approach can be used for areas beyond the world of art. The final chapters of the book are about just this topic: how to apply and transfer this art-based thinking into other realms of thought.
Collector’s POV: This is a short book, but nevertheless, quite thought provoking in terms of challenging the established ways that most people (including ourselves) fly though art exhibits. I have always thought that people had an inherent “pace” to their viewing of art (slow, fast, or somewhere in the middle), and that it is important to find people with similar pacing to enjoy your art with, or you will be driven crazy (Have you ever gone to a large museum show with someone with meaningfully slower pacing than yourself? It’s maddening.) This book has led me to reevaluate this idea, and to consider slowing myself down a bit more, and to hopefully with a little more observant mindset, find some deeper and more interesting conclusions.

Lee Friedlander, New Mexico

JTF (just the facts): Lee Friedlander, New Mexico, 2008, published by Radius Books. 74 pages. Includes 51 black and white images, with a foreword by Andrew Smith and an essay by Emily Ballew Neff. Published in conjunction with an exhibit at the Andrew Smith Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico (site here).

Comments/Context: This exhibition catalogue collects together images that Friedlander took in New Mexico over the past two decades and were shown at the Andrew Smith Gallery this past fall. These images have been drawn from several different projects, and many of the pictures were previously published in Sticks and Stones, The Desert Seen or elsewhere, and as such, this group has a little bit of an “old wine in a new bottle” feel to it.
Friedlander’s recent work, regardless of its particular subject matter (harsh desert scrub brush, fences/yard landscapes, sidewalks/roadways/shadows etc.), has settled into a common framework: square format images, full of high density patterning and visual contrasts. Going back to his earlier work of the 1960s and 1970s, Friedlander has always been interested in how the camera “sees”, where the three dimensional world is flattened into a two dimensional plane of line and form. These more current works have taken this concept several evolutionary steps further, as the images get more crowded, brimming with contradictory and chaotic motifs and constructions.
Friedlander’s newest project uses the window (and oftentimes the side mirror) of a non-descript rental car as an additional framing mechanism for his world view. Given the setting of the car, one might think of these pictures as fly-by snapshots, but indeed, they have the same careful composition of all Friedlander’s work, and the frames and posts of the car just give him an additional set of dominant lines to unbalance and divide the picture plane.
An interesting thing to consider is whether the whole construct of this exhibit, namely the New Mexico setting, matters at all. Friedlander’s work isn’t “about” his environment per se; it’s about the compositional shapes and forms that are the outgrowth of the picture making process. So whether the pictures are “of” New Mexico (or any other place for that matter) seems irrelevant. It is his vision of these places that we came to see.
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Collector’s POV: Oddly enough, we actually already own an image from this exhibit (here), which came from the Sticks and Stones series, and which we bought from Fraenkel Gallery (site here) a few years ago. Since that time, and likely as a result of the massive Friedlander touring retrospective, retail prices for Friedlander’s new work have continued to rise. We don’t have a price list from this show, but earlier last year, Friedlander’s new work was selling in the $7000 range at retail. One annoying thing about this book is that there is no listing of the images by title, date etc., so there is no way to reference the images, except by their page number. Overall, however, we continue to be amazed by Freidlander’s work, and even though this may not be his most ground breaking collection of images, we expect these pictures will likely stand the test of time quite well.

Photo Book Wednesdays

We just can’t seem to ever get enough photo books. In the past months, we felt like we haven’t devoted enough time to the amazing array of new, old, and out of print photo books that help inform our collecting passions. So we’ve decided to get more systematic about things in the new year and mark a regular day (Wednesdays) where we will review photo books of all kinds: monographs, exhibition catalogues, art/photo criticism, etc. Since books tend to hang around a long time, and are a little less time sensitive than auctions and gallery shows, we feel like it is acceptable to group them together once a week (knowing full well that we still may write about books on other days as well).

A couple of quick notes on this process:
  • You can expect that we have bought every book we review with real cash money, unless we highlight the fact that it was given to us by an artist, gallery or friend.
  • We are only going to review books that we think are worth having in your library, so there won’t be any rating system or quality gauge: if it’s here, it’s worth your time (and money) in our opinion.
  • Since we’re not a media outlet, we don’t feel obligated to only review recently published books from the current year. We buy books from all kinds of sources and discover photographers in serendipitous ways, so we will very likely (and often) review books published years or decades ago, if they are new to us.
  • As we have said before, we don’t care about signed copies, books owned previously by famous people, or even first editions. We want a clean, fine copy that we can use as reference. So you won’t find many of the super high end, limited edition, slipcase kinds of books being reviewed here.
  • We will not link to Amazon, Abebooks or elsewhere in the hopes you will click through and earn us some referral dollars. If you are inspired to follow up on a book we have reviewed, you certainly can find it without our help.
There are of course lots of places to read reviews and criticisms of photo books (in the blogosphere, 5B4 (here) is the best we have found). We hope to add a collector’s perspective to the sea of commentary and let you follow along as we educate ourselves.

Finally, below is a picture of our idea of the perfect art library. It is an image of Donald Judd’s library at his ranch in Marfa, Texas (Judd Foundation website here.) To us, it looks like a practical, comfortable, welcoming place to sit down and enjoy art books. Just imagine if all those shelves were filled with photo books…

Photo LA, January 9-11, 2009

When we lived on the West coast, Photo LA was just a quick and inexpensive plane trip down from the Bay area, and so we visited this photography show regularly every year, and more often than not, came home with something wrapped in cardboard and bubble wrap. Since we have found our way onto quite few lists, our mailbox has been full of brochures for this year’s fair, but sadly, we will not be joining the fun in Los Angeles this year.

In the past, the show was dominated by familiar California and Arizona based galleries and private dealers (Bellows, Cohen, Etherton, Fetterman, Hertzmann, Nichols, Singer, Smith etc.), but over the years, the base has expanded to included galleries, dealers and book publishers from all over, totalling just under 70 exhibitors for this week. The show had previously been held in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium (when we attended), but is now in the Barker Hangar.

In conjunction with the action in the exhibit hall, there are lectures, “collecting seminars” (as if we didn’t know how to collect already), book signings, and other events scheduled at various times over the run of the show. The “conversations” between LACMA photography curator Charlotte Cotton and David Maisel (12-1PM on 1/10) and Susan Meiselas (5-6PM on 1/10) look interesting, and we certainly wouldn’t miss the lecture by Catherine Opie (1PM on 1/11), having recently seen her retrospective at the Guggenheim.

As always, if you’re a collector going to this show, feel free to post a few comments, so the rest of us can live vicariously.

January 9-11
Barker Hangar, Santa Monica

Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography @Met

JTF (just the facts): 34 images (including a handful of smaller works in a glass case), displayed in the Modern Photography gallery, a single large, high-ceilinged room. (Installation shot at right.) The following artists are represented in this group show:

James Wallace Black
Frank Breuer (2)
James Casebere
Gregory Crewdson
Edward Curtis
Thomas Demand
Julian Faulhaber
Robert Grober
Naoki Honjo
Craig Kalpakjian
Shai Kremer
M. Laroche
David Levinthal
Philip-Lorca diCorcia (2)
Vik Muniz
James Nasmyth
Ruth Orkin
Gabriel Orozco
Stephen Shore
Taryn Simon
Joel Sternfeld
Thomas Struth
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Bernard Volta
Mark Wyse
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Comments/Context: The arguments about the concept of “truth” in photography are as old and well worn as the medium itself. For nearly every person who ardently believes in the sanctity and veracity of the photograph (especially as evidence of a documentary truth), there is another who has claimed since the beginning that all photographs are fabrications – it’s just a matter of degree (from seemingly innocent cropping and darkroom dodging/burning to outright staging and manipulation). While the arrival of digital capture and Photoshop in the past few decades have raised this question again in new and more obvious ways, this feud has been around a long time, and isn’t likely to go away any time soon.

The Met had waded into this fight with its third exhibit in its new space for contemporary photography. My first reaction when I heard about this show was that it was a pretty tired subject, well traveled already and hackneyed, with a predictable set of photographers and techniques that would be represented. And while some of the images on display here are expected (can a show about “reality” not include Gregory Crewdson?), the overall effect is much crisper and tighter than the previous two efforts in this gallery. Instead of providing an unwieldy set of wildly inventive and obviously false manipulations and distortions, the group of pictures in this show have been carefully selected to totter right on the edge of truth, with a significant number of the images being straight photographs of subjects that just look unreal, due to an unexpected change in scale, viewpoint or framing. (As an aside, I never seem to tire of tilt-shift photography, and there is an excellent example of this technique in this show by Naoki Honjo, Tokyo, Japan, 2004, above right.) There are staged pictures that look haltingly real and there are real pictures that look haltingly staged. Perhaps the takeaway here is that given more powerful tools, contemporary photographers are finding increasingly subtle ways to play with our perception of truth. These are sly and quiet games, rather than shouts and flourishes.

One interesting outgrowth of this exhibit for me was a desire to trace the influences of many of these contemporary photographers back through the history of film and the cinema, rather than through the traditional roads of still photography. A few of the images in this show seem to bear the strong influence of a cinematic eye, and it would be enlightening to understand the historical precedents in the world of film for what we are seeing in the galleries today.

Collector’s POV: While there are some terrific images in this exhibit, there were few works that would really match our particular collection. The pair of Frank Breuer images (Industrial House (Nike), 2000 and Industrial House (Philip Morris), 2000, at right) would likely be the best fit.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Through March 22nd

1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

Of National Interest: Photographs from the Collection @Art Institute of Chicago

JTF (just the facts): 53 images, divided into 7 separate groups by photographer and “nation”, displayed in three small connecting rooms on the museum’s lower level. (Installation shot at right.) Images range from the mid 1850s through the 1990s and span albumen prints, photogravures, gelatin silver prints, and color prints. The seven thematic groups include:

  • Gustave Le Gray (5 images) France
  • Alexander Gardner et al (8 images) United States Civil War
  • Edward Curtis (7 images) The North American Indian
  • Robert Frank (12 images ) The Americans
  • August Sander (11 images) People of the 20th Century/Germany
  • Gilles Peress (5 images) Northern Ireland
  • Raghubir Singh (5 images) India

Comments/Context: If there was one overarching theme that dominated this year’s unprecedented election cycle in America, it was that our nation had somehow lost its way, had forgotten what it was that had made us great, and was in need of profound frame-breaking change (in countless large and small ways) to lead us back to ourselves. Perhaps it was the fact that we had drifted so far off course that the decisions determining our path forward elicited such energy and action by the people at large. It was time to reconsider and remake the idea of our nation.

Given this dialogue going on all around us, this timely exhibit at the Art Institute chronicles how different photographers over the life of the medium have taken on the task of depicting a nation. The question then becomes, what do these pictures tell us about the general topic of nations and national character? What lessons do they show us as we consider our own direction?

Some of the “nation” projects in this exhibit have become icons of photography: Robert Frank’s incisive portrait of 1950s America, August Sander’s meticulous categorization of the German people, Edward Curtis’ collective portrait of the vanishing American Indians. As such, they are so familiar that they have lost a little of their freshness in terms of bringing forth new ideas. (That said, this many great vintage images from these three series are exhibited so rarely that they are still wholeheartedly worth seeing.)

The two 19th century series (Le Gray and Gardner) fail to elicit much about their respective nations. They tell us about soldiers, and wars, and life around these one-dimensional activities, but they don’t lead to many conclusions about the national characters that underlie the marches and conflicts. The two most recent series in the exhibit (Peress and Singh) are the most though provoking, and left us wishing there had been more images in these two groups (it’s hard to draw an even rudimentary portrait from 5 images each). The Peress images of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland are big, dark pictures, brimming with action and emotion. The Singh images of India are saturated with color and cultural contrasts. Both seem to capture well the hidden and not-so hidden vignettes and identities that make a nation unique.

In all, while the exhibit itself is a bit uneven, the idea underlying it (whether we can know and capture the spirit of a nation) is one well worth exploring. Perhaps some other 19th century projects could have been explored (Beato’s Japan?), or left out entirely in favor of two additional 20th century bodies of work.

Collector’s POV: While none of the work in this exhibit fits our particular collection, we certainly enjoyed seeing the excellent Frank and Sander vintage prints. And books by Peress and Singh will certainly be added to our photo library in the near future, so we can educate ourselves about their work more fully.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Of National Interest: Photographs from the Collection
Through January 11th

Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60603

Disfarmer Puppet Show

Here’s one for the eclectic category, recommended by another photography collector: Disfarmer, a “table-top” puppet show by Dan Hurlin based on the life and work of portrait photographer Mike Disfarmer.

Disfarmer
January 27-February 8

St. Ann’s Warehouse
38 Water Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

More Disfarmer at Fugitive Vision here and Looking Around (Time) here.

Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Art and Photography of Paris @Art Institute of Chicago

JTF (just the facts): A total of 42 photographs, 5 paintings, and 9 etchings/drawings, displayed in a single gallery on the lower level of the museum. In addition to the 14 images by Cartier-Bresson, photographs by Atget (1 image), Brassai (7 images), Kertesz (16 images), Bing (3 images), and Seuphor (1 image) are shown. The other artworks in the exhibit are by Lhote (Cartier-Bresson’s painting teacher), de Chirico, Mondrian, Dali, Picasso, and Matisse. All of the pieces in the exhibit are from the late 1920s and 1930s. (Installation shot at right.)

Comments/Context: During the holidays, we visited family in Chicago and were able to sneak off one morning for a quick visit to the Art Institute to see the two photo shows on view. So while Chicago is not our usual territory, we’ll cover both exhibits in today’s posts.

We’re all familiar with Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”, where the contents in his frame would resolve themselves into an amazing composition for only a fleeting instant, which he would capture with his camera. Many people have commented that Cartier-Bresson’s genius was not so much capturing this decisive moment, but in fact being ready, with his camera pointed in the right direction and pre-focused, before the decisive moment happened. This exhibition (in honor of the centennial of his birth) takes that concept a step further, where we see a complex mix of artistic and cultural influences that were boiling around in Cartier-Bresson’s mind and that helped to shape his photographic vision.

The exhibit is organized thematically by subject matter, where carefully selected groups of related images are juxtaposed. On one wall, Kertesz nude distortions and Brassai etched nudes are paired with Picasso and Matisse nude etchings. On another, a classic Mondrian painting is flanked by two Bing geometric Eiffel Tower images and a handful of more abstract Kertesz images. There is a trio of sea scenes (Bing, Cartier-Bresson, and Lhote), as well as groups of bicycles, faces, portraits, and intertwined bodies. All are meticulously selected and hung to show their similarities.

The major takeaway for us was the idea that Cartier-Bresson, indeed all the artists of that place and time, seemed to be liberally exchanging compositional ideas. The echoes and parallels that are seen in these pairings are too exact to be random; they had to be seeing each other’s work, thinking and talking about it, and internalizing it to such a point that the ideas were then reformed and reused. It says that the worlds of painting and photography in Paris were intertwined communities, learning from and referencing each other. Disparate ideas from surrealism, abstraction, modernism, and humanism were all borrowed and merged into Cartier-Bresson’s approach. In many ways, this exhibit seems less about Carteir–Bresson in specific (there are actually more Kertesz images in this show than Cartier-Bressons), but more about the overall artistic melting pot of the period.

As an aside, since Cartier-Bresson gave up photography in his later life and returned to drawing and painting, it would be interesting in a future exhibit to see a few of these later works juxtaposed with the images from this period to see how his vision continued to evolve.

Collector’s POV: Cartier-Bresson’s work is ubiquitous at auction, with later prints available in nearly every sale. Vintage prints from 1920s and 1930s Paris (like those in this exhibit) are much harder to come by and range from perhaps $50000 to well into six figures for more iconic pictures, assuming you could find them. Ironically, the prints from this exhibit (and this period in general one might suppose) aren’t particularly strong in terms of craftsmanship. Overall, while we don’t have any Cartier-Bresson images in our collection at the moment, we certainly came away from this show with an increased appreciation for his early work.

There were also several splendid early Kertesz images of Paris in this exhibit that we had not seen before; additionally, there was a Bing image that we have in our collection up on the wall (here). In general, this Paris period is full of tremendous photography by a variety of artists.

As background, the Cartier-Bresson Foundation site can be found here.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Art and Photography of Paris
Through January 4th (unfortunately closed yesterday we realise)

Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60603

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