June 5 – September 2, 2001
Galleries for Drawings, Prints, and Photographs
Masterpieces of early French photography and groundbreaking modern photographs created since 1960 – both the earliest and most recent chapters in the history of the 160-year-old medium – will be on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition celebrating the first decade of collecting by the Museum's Department of Photographs. Photographs: A Decade of Collecting will open on June 5, 2001.
"Although the Metropolitan Museum has acquired photographs since the 1920s, what the relatively new Department of Photographs has amassed during its brief existence – the short period of a decade – is astonishing," noted Director Philippe de Montebello. "Even apart from the deep enrichments of clustered acquisitions such as the Walker Evans Archive and the Rubel Collection, we can proudly display hundreds of individual works of the highest quality which were selected not just to fill important gaps in our holdings, but which – in the context of the entire photography collection – begin to recast the history of this important medium."
The French works included in the exhibition reveal the remarkable beauty and technical mastery that French photographers—many of them trained as painters—
achieved a mere decade after the invention of the medium. Landscapes suffused
with deep swathes of evocative shadow, psychologically revealing portraits,
elegantly seductive studies of the nude, and Romantic representations of the nation's ancient and medieval past all demonstrate early photography's links to the painting and print traditions, as well as the ways in which the unique character and capacity of photography set its productions apart from all art that had come before. Together these works trace the rapid development of photography from the humble and intimate creations of gentlemen amateurs to ambitious artistic expressions of Second Empire grandeur.
Among the photographs included are Gustave Le Gray's light-dappled Oak and Rocks, Forest of Fontainebleau (1849-56) and serene twilight seascape Mediterranean with Mount Agde (1856-59); Nadar's portraits of the fiery left-wing politician Eugène Pelletan (1855-59) and the affable composer Gioacchino Rossini (1856); landscapes by Edouard Baldus, including the softly atmospheric Entrance to the Port of Boulogne (1855); views of medieval architecture in Normandy by Edmond Bacot, including Saint Maclou, Rouen (1852-54); and nude studies by Julien Vallou de Villeneuve from around 1853, which served as models for painter Gustave Courbet.
"To have been able to acquire so many exceptional works from this high point of the medium's history in just the past decade is a tribute to the Department of Photographs' supporters and a great source of pride for us," said Malcolm Daniel, Associate Curator of Photographs, who organized this section of the exhibition.
The Metropolitan Museum began acquiring photographs within its Department of Prints (later known as the Department of Prints and Photographs) in 1928. An independent Department of Photographs was established only in January 1992, under the leadership of Curator in Charge Maria Morris Hambourg, who had
joined the Museum as Associate Curator of Prints and Photographs in 1985.
At the time of its establishment, the Department of Photographs already held great strength in turn-of-the-century pictures given and bequeathed by Alfred Stieglitz, and in avant-garde photography from the period between the two world wars from the collection of John Waddell, acquired by the Museum in 1987 as a gift of the Ford Motor Company and Mr. Waddell.
"During the past decade, we have focused on extending our strengths in both directions, like bookends," said Ms. Hambourg. "At one end is French photography of the 1850s and early 1860s – one of the most glorious moments in the medium's entire history – and, at the other end, a period of astonishing innovation and vitality over the last four decades as the medium has been integrated into the broader art world."
In the second gallery of the exhibition, Ms. Hambourg and Research Associate Douglas Eklund present that pregnant moment in the 1960s when one tradition—the gritty verité styles of documentary and street photography—came into its fullest flowering while another, in which the medium revolutionized the subjects and strategies of the postwar avant-garde, was just being born. Like the New Journalists of the same moment, "New Documentary" photographers such as Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand included themselves in the stories they told—an elliptical mix of commentary and confessional characterized by a mordant wit and high irony. At the same time, young artists from outside the medium took up the camera to rewrite completely the rules of the game. Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and others redefined the conditions of painting in an era of mechanical reproduction, Vito Acconci and the Vienna Actionists expanded traditional notions of sculpture to include the body, while Dan Graham, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Robert Smithson took it into the wider arena of architecture and social space. For the first time, these twin poles of documentary and avant-garde photographic
practices during the 1960s will be examined together in depth.
The final section of the exhibition, also organized by Ms. Hambourg and Mr. Eklund, will present a stunning array of diverse photographic works from the 1970s to the present that loosely follow a number of overarching themes, from the cool cultural critique of "Pictures" generation artists such as Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, and Richard Prince to the lyrical meditations of Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Nan Goldin – artists for whom the personal and the political are inextricably bound. Recent German photography will also be featured prominently, including a hallucinatory, large-scale experimental work from 1975 by Sigmar Polke, two exquisite painted photographs by Gerhard Richter, and a suite of magisterial cityscapes from the late 1980s by Thomas Struth. Also included will be photographs by Sophie Calle, Patrick Faigenbaum, Adam Fuss, Carrie Mae Weems, and others.
This section is accompanied by a selection of large-scale contemporary photographs that are installed in the first floor area adjacent to the entrance of the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing. Entitled Places in the Mind: Modern Photographs from the Collection, the selection includes work by, among others, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Gabriel Orozco, Michal Rovner, and Wolfgang Tillmans.
Conservation of the works on view was directed by Nora Kennedy, Sherman Fairchild Conservator of Photographs. Exhibition design is by Michael Langley, Exhibition Designer, with graphics by Constance Norkin, Graphic Designer, and lighting by Zack Zanolli, Lighting Designer.
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May 29, 2001
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