MUSEUM OF FlNE ARTS, BOSTON, PRESENTS WORKS
BY LEADING 19TH -AND 20TH - CENTURY PHOTOGRAPERS IN
CONVERSATIONS: PHOTOGRAPHY FROM THE BANK OF AMERICA COLLECTION
BOSTON, MA (February 8, 2011) -The art of conversation is explored in a new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), to highlight visual dialogues among some of the most notable photographs of the 19th and 20th centuries. Conversations Photography from the Bank of America Collection features more than 100 images, drawn from thousands in the renowned Bank of America Collection. The exhibition, on view February 9 through June 19, 2011, in the Lois and Michael Torf Gallery, is curated by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is provided by the Bank of America Art in our Communities® program.
MFA curators Anne Havinga, the Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs, and Karen Haas, The Lane Collection Curator of Photographs, chose specific photographs from the rich trove of images to initiate "conversations" between paired and sequenced works in a wide range of themes, including portraits, landscapes, street photography, and abstraction. These juxtapositions highlight contrasting subjects, periods, approaches and techniques, and also suggest connections between the artists themselves that will inspire visitors to look closely and come up with conversations of their own. Showcased are works by some of the most recognized names in photography, from 19th-century innovators Gustave Le Gray, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Carleton Watkins, to 20th-century luminaries Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Harry Callahan, and Irving Penn, as well as contemporary image makers William Eggleston, Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman, and Alec Soth.
"The MF A is delighted to present an exhibition showcasing the extraordinary photography collection of Bank of America. The Museum's relationship with the bank has been a long one and we are happy to have this unique opportunity to present the breadth and depth of its holdings-from early photographs created in the 1850s by artists such as Roger Fenton and Gustave Le Gray, to works made as recently as the last decade by such major figures as Tina Barney and Thomas Struth," said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA.
The Bank of America Collection is a global assemblage that comprises paintings, works on paper, video, photography, sculpture, textiles, and maps dating from the 18th century to the present, which it shares with the public through individual loans and the Art in our Communities program. By providing these exhibitions and the support required to host them, this program helps enrich communities culturally and economically and generates vital revenue for museums. At the conclusion of 2011, Bank of America will have loaned more than 50 exhibitions to museums worldwide.
"Bank of America is committed to strengthening artistic institutions and, in turn, the communities we serve," said Robert Gallery, Massachusetts President, Bank of America. "Sharing our collection with the public through partners such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, not only helps support one of Boston's finest local cultural anchors, but also makes business sense for the bank."
Coversations: Photography fian the Bank of America Collection, presents unique visual groupings, including images featuring visitors responding to art in museums, such as two photographs by Thomas Struth: Audience4 (2004), an intriguing view of people gazing upward at Michelangelo's David, and Musee du Louvre4, Paris(1989), an image of visitors contemplating Gericault's famous Raft of the Mrousa in a Louvre gallery. In the section focusing on people and portraiture, Julia Margaret Cameron's stunningly lifelike profile of her niece, Untitled (Mary Emily "May" Prinsep) (1870), is seen alongside Edward Weston's portrait, Tina Modotti, Mexico (1924), which offers a compelling view of his sitter's psychological state. Both images show women gazing downwards in compositions that are elegant and lyrical. Nevertheless, they are clearly women of different times: the Victorian Prinsep appears soft and demure while Modotti, the modern woman, has allowed her photographer-lover to capture her emotional state up close. Nearby these works is a group of photographs exploring the uncanny in the everyday, as seen in William Eggleston's iconic image of a tricycle, Untitled (Merrphis) (about 1970), and Lee Friedlander's T. V. in Hotel Poom, Galax, Virginia (1962), which shows an eerily disembodied child's face on a television screen.
Landscapes and seascapes are well represented in the exhibition with "conversations" arising among many of the images. Alvin Langdon Coburn's Snow in Canyon, Grand Canyon (1911) and Art Sinsabaugh's Midwest Landscape #32 (1961) suggest the artistic possibilities of the American landscape in photography from very different periods and perspectives. A dramatic ocean view by Gustave Le Gray, Seascape with Yacht and Tugboat, Normandy (1857), represents his technical virtuosity and expressiveness and is juxtaposed with the more modern, conceptual photograph New York State (1970) by Kenneth Josephson, taken nearly a century later.
The exhibition is rich in street photography, including Helen Levitt's New York (about 1940), an image of three children wearing Halloween masks on a tenement stoop, and Garry Winogrand's World's Fair, New York City (1964), a candid black and white photograph of a group of people animatedly talking and gesturing on a bench, seemingly frozen in midsentence. Contemporary urban subjects are also explored in interpretations of cityscapes, such as Vera Lutter's 135 LaSalle Street, Chicago, VI (2001), a camera obscura image of skyscrapers, and Stephane Couturier's Unter den Linden, Berlin (1996), one of his many large-scale color views of construction sites around the world.
Historic monuments and travel to exotic locales are documented in several photographs, including Francis Frith's documentary image, The Rmesseum of EI-Kurneh, Thebes, Second View (1857-58), which captures the grandeur of ancient Egypt-a sight available only to a very few intrepid travelers in the mid- 19th century-and Richard Misrach's Ticket Booth and Pyrarrid, Giza, Egypt (1989), which shows, in wry contrast, the modern tourist experience of these ancient sites. Works of abstraction and experimentation also are on view. Light Abstraction (about 1924-25) illustrates Jaromir Funke's use of soft focus that enabled him to create Cubist-inspired compositions out of everyday objects with light, shadow, and reflection. The blurring of subject matter is also seen in Thomas Ruffs d.p.b. 08 (2000), which uses speed to distort an image of Mies van der Robe's Barcelona Pavilion.
Bank of America's critically acclaimed collection of photographs had its beginning in the 1960s, when The Exchange National Bank of Chicago, a legacy Bank of America institution, launched one of the largest and most comprehensive corporate collections of photography in the world. Scholars Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, who were the foremost historians of photography at the time, amassed a collection for the bank that now spans the historical and technological range of the medium, from salt prints of the mid-19th century, to digital prints of the early 21st century. Beaumont Newhall had been the first curator of photography at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), where he organized a landmark 1937 retrospective of photography's first century, helping to establish its acceptance as a vital art form. Newhall later served as curator and director of the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, and was a professor at the University of New Mexico, where he helped initiate the first doctoral program in the field. His wife, Nancy Newhall, took her husband's place at MoMA during World War II, and authored numerous photography publications. The Newhalls' connoisseurship, continued by the bank's subsequent curators, has resulted in an extraordinary collection of rare and varied works.
"Bank of America's outstanding photography collection was initiated in the 1960s when many museums were just beginning to collect-the MFA, which previously had been the recipient of major gifts of works by Alfred Stieglitz and others, made its first purchases at this time," said Havinga. "My colleague Karen Haas and I were fascinated to learn about the acquisitions in the bank, and thrilled to find so many historically important works among the collection's contents. We are grateful to Bank of America for giving us complete freedom in making the exhibition selection, and pleased to be able to share such a broad range of icons with our public. We hope visitors will enjoy our conve-sationsapproach!"
Added Haas: "As curators, this was a rare treat to work so closely with a collection other than our own and to have the opportunity to choose an exhibition from such a richly varied group of photographs-the real challenge was what we could possibly bring ourselves to leave out! It is fascinating to consider the many ways that collections are formed over time, whether by museums, corporations, or private individuals such as Bill and Saundra Lane. We learned a great deal by studying these amazing photographs-many of them not works that we have here in Boston-and are really looking forward to having the exhibition on view at the Museum of Fine Arts for that reason."