Photography Between the Wars Selections From the Ford Motor Company Collection the Metropolitan...

8/12/2019 Photography Between the Wars Selections From the Ford Motor Company Collection the Metropolitan Museum of

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METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART BULLETIN SPRING 19^ ^i ..r

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PH0TOGRA 1Y

8ETWEN THE WARS

SE EC ONS ROM

CO E CT 0 N

MARA M0RfJ HAMBOURG

THEMETROPOLITANIJSEUM


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Thephotographs re to becreditedasfollows:FordMotorCompanyCollection,Giftof FordMotorCompanyandJohnC.Waddell,1987.

THE METROPOLITANMUSEUM OF ARTBULLETINSpring1988VolumeXLV,Number4(ISSN 026- 1521)Published uarterly 1988byTheMetropolitanMuseum f Art,FifthAvenueand82ndStreet,NewYork,N.Y.10028.Second-classost-age paidat New York,N.Y.andAdditionalMailing ffices.TheMet-ropolitanMuseum of ArtBulletin sprovidedas a benefit o Museummembersandavailableysubscrip-tion.Subscriptions18.00a year.Single opies$4.75. Fourweeks'noticerequired orchangeof ad-dress. POSTMASTER:end addresschanges o MembershipDepart-ment,TheMetropolitanMuseumof Art,FifthAvenueand82ndStreet,New York,N.Y.10028.Backissuesavailable n microfilm,rtmUniversityMicrofilms,13N. FirstStreet,AnnArbor,Michigan.ol-umes I-XXVIII1905-1942) avail-able asa clothbound eprint et oras individualearlyvolumes romTheAyerCompany,Publishers,Inc., 9 Main treet,Salem,N.H.,03079, or fromthe Museum,Box700, MiddleVillageN.Y. 1379.GeneralManager f Publications:JohnP O'Neill.Editor nChiefofthe Bulletin:oanHolt.AssistantEditor:RobertMcD.Parker.Design:BettyBinns ndDavidSkolkin.

Separationsor the tritoneillustrationsy RichardBenson,Newport,Rhode Island.PrintedbyAcmePrintingCompany,nc.,Wilmington,Mass.

A DECADE AFTER THE ESTABLISHMENT of the Department of Prints in the fall of 1916,the Metropolitan Museum began to collect photographs. The keystoneof our holdings is thework of Alfred Stieglitz and a matchless collection of photographs by his most talented con-temporaries hathe gaveto the Metropolitanin 1933. Stieglitz and his fellow Photo-Secessionists,working in soft-focus painterly techniques, won for the medium a large measure of respect-ability in the two decades before the First World War. After the war a new generation ofphotographersturned awayfrom painterly styles and took radicallydifferent directions. Someof these young artists espoused the aesthetic principles of current avant-garde movements-Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, Constructivism;others were unaligned. But they all sharedthe belief that photography provided the appropriatetechnology and methods to record newforms of modern life. Indeed, much of the most progressive art of the 192(s and 30s owes agreat debt to their photographic visions.Until last year this crucial period between the two World Wars was not well representedat theMetropolitan. Original photographs from this period are rare: very few were printed andmost of the best are closely held by a small group of prescient collectors. Therefore theacquisition in 1987 of John C. Waddell's magnificent collection of some five hundred Euro-peanand American works made between the wars is a majorevent. Mr. Waddell's sure eye andhistorical knowledge, his assiduity and stringent standardsof authenticity and print quality,have shaped this collection into a remarkableconspectus of modern photography'speriod ofgreatest invention and expansion.The Metropolitan acquired the collection through the generosity of Mr. Waddell, who do-nated approximately one-third of its value, and through the good offices of Robert A. Taub,Vice-President of the Ford Motor Company, who is himself a collector of photographs. Mr.Taub's enlightened view of corporate philanthropy provided the Museum with an unprece-dented grant, which is, as far as we know, the largest corporategift made to a museum for anacquisition. In this age of escalating costs for works of art of all kinds, Ford's grant is mostheartening and, we hope, precedent setting.The initiative for procuring this collection for the Metropolitan, where it is known as theFord Motor Company Collection of Photography, originated with Maria Morris Hambourg,Associate Curator of Prints and Photographs, who is also author of this Bulletin. Her textserves as a striking introduction to the larger selection of works that will constitute The NewVision, an exhibition scheduled to open at the Museum in September 1989. The exhibitionand its catalog have also been underwritten by the Ford Motor Company.

Philippe de MontebelloDirector

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INTRODUCTION THE EXPLOSIVE DEVELOl'MENT of photography as a medium of untold expressivepower and as a primary vehicle of modern consciousness occurred during the twodecades immediately following the Great War. In the aftermath of this first total,mechanizedconflict, avant-gardeartists,commercialillustrators,andjournaliststurnedto photography s if seekingto discoverthroughits mechanismsand materials omethingof the soul of contemporary industrial society. Photographers did not follow theirparticular vocations separatelyas is often done today, nor were they segregated bytheirallegiances o American,French,or German, Dadaist, Constructivist,or Surrealistfactions. Such conceptual divisions would facilitate the telling of this story, but theywould be inaccurate. In actualpractice photographywas seldom isolated in precincts;it flowed over the boundariesdefining schools and movements. Existing at the nexusof art, life, and communication, this truly internationaland interdisciplinarymediumcould no longer be limited to any set of applications nor circumscribed by a singlestyle. Its potential was as large and flexible as the culture it reflected was volatile;neither could maintain a constant form.Since its invention in 1839 photographyhas performed various functions, but it hasconventionally been regarded in art as a servant of painting or a lesser partner ofprintmaking. Although groups of photographers periodically attemptedto elevate thestatusof the medium-particularly in the 1850s and again around 1900-it was notuntil the years between the wars that a radical shift of attitudes led artists of diversepersuasionsto conscript photographyto give form to their visions, form that no othermedium could so convincingly convey.Photography became a favored arena for artistic exploration in this period for justthe reason it had long been relegated to the periphery: it was thought to be uncon-taminatedby the aesthetic aims and conventions of High Art. The revolt against thesanctityof paintingthatoccurredduring the First World Warencouraged engagementwith the content of actual existence. Photography was a perfect vehicle for such anaim since it was believed to provide both an artistic tabula rasa and a direct link tothe real world.This rediscoveryof photographyas a particularlymodern art was encouragedby twoassociated attitudes. The first celebrated its impersonal, machinelike qualities. Thespeed and scientific precision of the camera seemed entirely appropriateto a worldtransformedby instantcommunication,industrialproduction,and masstransportation.

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The second delighted in the surrealism of photography'sstraightforwardreport andits chameleonlike mutability. The camera confirmed the strangeness of the modernworldby pointing rightat itsmysteries r by evokingthemthroughtechnicalconjuration.These avant-garde perceptions of photographywere supplemented by the modernistposition that turned to account the medium's intrinsic language of light and shadow,chemical and technical responses, and formal properties. Photographers explored thewaysthe camera inscribes the objectiveworld on film and on paper,and they embracednot only accurate description of a normative sort but also novel vantage points andother characteristicallyphotographic modificationsof conventional vision.These approaches were rarely practiced discretely or exclusively; they overlappedwithin individuals and were shared between groups through a constant mingling ofideas and images in studios, cafes, and international exhibitions, as well as throughmyriad small magazines and publications. The intense and vital experimentation inphotography was further cross-fertilized by association with film, advertising, andthe picture press. By the Second World War photography'sresources had been sothoroughly diversified and enlarged that it had become the twentieth century's mostubiquitous form of art and visual communication.The synoptic view of these many developments offered by the Ford Motor CompanyCollection cannot be demonstrated within the limits of this publication. The selectionof photographs reproduced here can provide only an abbreviated introduction to theleading practitioners of the new photographyand to the revolutionary ideas implicitin their visions.

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MAN RAYCompass1920Gelatin silverprint45/8 x 33/8 inches

19871 100.40

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MAN RAYAMERICAN1890-1976PAGE5

JUST1 BEFORE WORLI) WAR the French artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabiaintroducedan artisticrevolution, later called Dada, to New York. In America the po-litical edge of this iconoclasticattitudewas turnedto a witty and irreverentquestioningof traditional artisticgoals. Duchamp's mock-seriouspresentationsof banal manufac-tured objects and Picabia's dysfunctional machine drawings seemed outrageous to apublic whose firsthand knowledge of contemporary European art was limited toexhibitions at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery 291 and the Armory Show of 1913.Following the example of Duchamp and Picabia, Man Raybegan making Dada con-structions. The inventions were droll but the artist did not intend only to be funny;he wanted to confront the viewer with creations that questionedthe authorityof logicand science over the imagination.Compasss such a work: a magnet and pistol are proposedas an instrumentof orienta-tion. If we acceptit as such, our fates are as arbitraryas in a game of Russian roulette.Yet Man Ray's contraptiondoes not work; it hangs against a wall and cannot revolvelike the free-floating needle of a normal compass. It functions, rather,as a sign. Asmagnets respond to invisible physical forces and guns to personal compulsions,so Compasspointsto the mysterious predictabilityof our deepesturges. This menacingnote is only ironic, however,for the pistol is but a child's toy and the oddly quiescentstill-life presentationis as benign as the elegant tones and surface of this small, finelyfinished print.Thus Compassnot only rejectspainting for a combination of objects that disturb anddelight us, it also proposes that we consider this photograph, and not the originalassemblage, as art. This subversive notion was natural to those who valued artisticgestures more than definitive art objects, and, in fact, Man Ray uncoupled the mag-net and pistol for use in later works. This unique print, then, is but the memory of aprovocativeidea, and as such is a quintessentialDada invention: purely cerebralyetmaterial (as Man Raysaid of Duchamp's LargeGlass), whimsical yet deadly earnest.

RAOUL HAUSMANNFRENCH,BORN IN AUSTRIA1886-1971PAGE7

WHILE MAN RAYPLAYED ironically with notions of violence and disorientation in NewYork, these states were expressed forcefully by the Berlin Dadaists, who had moreclosely experienced the insanity and carnage of war. Raoul Hausmann, one of thefounders of the Berlin group in 1918, wasa brillianttacticianand theoristfor the move-ment. Immersed in the technological world of machines and masscommunication, he6


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RAOUL HAUSMANNABCD, 1924 or laterGelatinsilverprint515/16 X 315/16 inches

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composed phonetic poems, devised a machine to link hue and musical tone, and madeboth abstract and figurative collages. Hausmann's search for new and appropriatelymodern materials led him to use clippings, posters, photographs, and other scraps,which were not only the detritus of the actual world but also symbolic, if shattered,representationsof it. Cut and pasted together in explosive centrifugal patterns, thesebits of word and image formed a new kind of picture full of conflicting viewpointsand whirling energy.ABCD is an exceptionally dense and personal work of this kind. In the center is aphotographof Hausmann (c. 1918); below it, a flyerannouncing his performanceofa phonetic poem ( The Soul of Margarine )at one of KurtSchwitters'sMerz ( Junk )evenings in Hanover in 1923. Where Hausmann's right ear should be are the lettersVOCE ( voice ) inside an earlikeellipse of the star-spangledheavens; he lettersABCD,a prototypical Dada poem, are projected toward galaxies of stars. Hausmann'smonocle is overlaid with a web of lines that alludes to the mechanical revolution inmodern vision and recalls the Mercator lines on the two global maps below. That theimagination knows no boundaries is further suggested by another map, locatingRimbaud's ravels n North Africa, andby a Czech banknote,a reminderof Hausmann'svisits to Prague for Dada soirees in 1920 and 1921. The tickets to the Kaiserjubileeindicate the oppressive social milieu in which the artist functions, and the intention-ally shocking diagram of an obstetrical examination, the organic necessity of hiscreative acts.ABCD thus gives voice to a revolution in seeing, to the creation from inmost neces-sity of a vital, disruptive, and more realistic art for an altered and violent world. Inthe guise of a condensed artistic history of its maker, it is a paradigm for the radicalrenewal of vision through Dada.

PAUL STRAND CERTAINWORKS FARTcrystallize in their form and precipitate in their reception theAMERICAN concerns of an epoch. This photograph of striated shadows falling through a porch1890-1976 railing onto a tipped-over table is such a work. It is among the first virtual abstrac-tions made intentionally with a camera.PAGE10

In 1915 Picabia'smachine-partpaintingsat 291 and the Cubistexhibitionat the ModernGallery were the talk of the New York avant-garde. Paul Strand, who had initially8


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photographedin the soft-focus pictorial mode, found such works puzzling but stimu-lating. I had a feeling something very important was happening, he said, and Iwanted to find out more about it. During that summer and the next he made still-lifearrangementsto learn howyou build a picture, what a picture consistsof, how spacesare related to each other, how spacesare filled, how the whole thing must have a kindof unity.When Strandbrought his summer'sharvest to 291 and opened his portfolio, Stieglitzimmediately recognized Strand's momentous accomplishment. Before him was anextended series of carefully wrought abstractionsand semi-abstractionscomposed ofshadows, shapes, and forms, many of them scarcely recognizable as tables, bowls, orother objects. Here were photographsthat all but dispensed with the theretofore es-sential prerequisite of realistic description.Having almost despaired of educating the current generation of photographers tomodern artistic trends, Stieglitz suddenly discovered in the work of this talenteddisciple the achievements of a master. He accordingly dedicated the last two issues ofhis journal Camera Work(1917) to Strand's photographs, which he praised as in-formed, intelligent, pure to the point of brutality, the direct expression of today.

THE MARKEDEARLYROMISEof Morton Schamberg's precocious machine paintingsand semi-abstracturban photographs suggests that he could have become one of thegreat American artists of his generation had he not died of influenza in 1918. Untilhis death he shared a studio with Charles Sheeler, a fellow student in the classes ofWilliam Merritt Chase. Working in tandem, the two artists progressively updatedtheir academic training, garnering more recent ideas in Europe on a trip in 1909,and thereafter, in New York. In 1912 they took up photography to earn a living:Sheeler worked for architects;Schamberg took society portraits. Within two yearsthey had become acquaintedwith Stieglitz and were beginning to use the camera fornoncommercial ends.In 1917 Schamberg took four views of industrial buildings that demonstrated hisfluentmanipulationof the latestartisticidioms. He probablyknew both A.L. Coburn'sphotographsof New York(1912) and Stieglitz'sviews from the window of 291 (1915);these relied upon flattenedperspective, vertiginous height, or atmosphericconditions9

MORTONSCHAMBERGAMERICAN1881-1918PAGE I


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PAUL STRANDAbstraction,TwinLakes,Connecticut, 916Silver andplatinumprint13 x 95/8 nches

198/I I IUU. I

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MORTON SCHAMBERGUntitled, 1917Gelatinsilverprint93/8 x 7/2 inches

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for their effects. Schamberg's photographswere constructeddifferently-from boldclean-edged blocks of tone relieved by various textures and patternsand quick tele-graphic jots of emphasis. The articulationof the pictures is at once linear, like blue-prints, and volumetric, like axonometricdrawings. That this photographis perceivedas continually shifting between flat design and believable space is a lesson learnedfrom Cubism, while the slicing angle and jagged edges are more characteristicofItalian Futurism. The simplification of tonal structure to produce abstraction waswidely practiced, perhaps closest to home by Paul Strand, Marius De Zayas, andArthur Dove, all of whom were part of the 291 circle.While the sources for Schamberg'svision can be enumerated, they cannot account forthe photograph'ssuccess. The man-made world is handled with such exquisite preci-sion that it is hardly surprising to learn that this unique print belonged to Sheeler andsurely influenced his great ChurchStreetEl of 1920.

LEWIS HINE MACHINE TECHNOLOGY WASSO PERVASIVEand integral a part of daily life in the firstAMERICAN quarterof this centurythat it became a majortheme and preoccupationof two genera-1874-1940 tions of artists. Attitudes toward the machine were inconsistent and even within thesame individuals, frequently ambivalent. While structural integrity,clean lines, andPAGE14 efficiency were generally construed as positive values, they did not make the crowdedinhumane conditions or frenetic pace of mechanized life any less problematic.

Lewis Hine saw both sides of the issue. For a decade he documentedthe conditions oflife and work in mills, mines, and sweatshopsfor the National Child Labor Commit-tee. From this experience he knew the degradation and misery of mechanizationwithout regulation. After the war Hine could no longer support himself solely withwork from social agencies but also had to take assignments from industrial enter-prises. He became understandablyself-conscious about the concerns his photographswere made to serve and began to promote his skills as interpretive not documentary.Steamfitter eflects Hine's ambivalent situation. Like a good machine, the picture iscarefully constructed and its parts work together. Variantsof the picture show themechanic more bowed and subjectedto the machine, but this version, depicting him

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with flexed arms, legible features, and in a more upright postureof coiled energy, isthe noblest. Revealing the mechanic'sdeep involvement with his task and his muscu-lar application to it, this print-which is large and very rich-seems to illustrateHine's conviction that the more machines we use, the more do we need real men tomake and direct them.For all his straining sinew, however,the mechanic'sattitudeonly seemsrealistic. It isin fact as generic, deliberate, and conceptuallystylized as the would-be walking pos-ture of an Archaic Greek kouros. It is precisely this dichotomy between realisticreport and symbolically effective artifice that makes Steamfittera classic icon of themachine age.

PAUL OUTERBRIDGE FOR PAULOUTERBRIDGE exquisite taste and its perfect embodiment constituted life'sAMERICAN principal interest and occupation. Unswerving pursuit of these ideals earns such1891-19S9 individuals a place in the circle of true aesthetes, but whether or not we admire theireffort has little to do with their success;our opinion depends almost entirely upon thePAGE15 coalescence of their idea of beauty and our own.

Outerbridge has escaped such ordinary judgment because his work is split betweentwo antipodaltendenciesdifficult to reconcile and altogetheradmire, or to ignore. Onthe one hand, in the 1930s, he made portraits, still lifes, and nudes with the painstak-ing carbrocolor process. These resplendent, stylized works are swankyand baroque,consciously artificialand icily erotic. When they fall short, which is often, they arelike Hollywood failures of the period-mannered, coy, and patentlyfalse-but whenthey work, they are luscious. On the other hand, early in his career, Outerbridgemade black and white studies of neat, small things-a glass of wine, a bowl of eggs, atin cracker box. He contact-printed the negatives on platinum paper in order toachieve the finest detail, rendered in a rich range of silky-smooth tonal gradations.Marmon Crankshaft,presumably made on assignment for the manufacturer of theMarmon automobile, is one of the best pictures of this kind. Concisely seen andcarefully lit, these superbly craftedminiatures seem not to representmundane thingswith specific functions (a detachablecollar, a crankshaft) but nameless constructs-irreducible, enigmatic, and seductive.

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LEWIS HINESteamfitter, 921Gelatin silverprint16/2 x 12 inches

198/.1 lUV.lb1

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PAUL OUTERBRIDGEMarmonCrankshaft, 923Platinumprint47/16 x 33/8 inches

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MARTIN MUNKACSIAMERICAN,BORN IN HUNGARY1896-1963PAGE18

ERICH SALOMONGERMAN1886-1944PAGE18

MARTIN MUNKACSI IS BEST KNOWN in the United States for his spontaneousaction-filled fashion photographs published in Harper's Bazaar in the thirties. Bringingfashion out of the studio and injecting it with athletic movement was an innovation atthe time, but for this photographer it was also a return to the source of his art.Munkacsi arrived in Budapest from a small town in Transylvaniaat the age of six-teen, with poems in his pocketand a will to succeed. Within two yearshe was workingas a reporterand columnist for the daily paper,and before long, as writer, editor, andphotographerfor a weekly sports supplement. In the lattercapacity,he made unprece-dented stop-action pictures of skiers, soccer players, and motorcycliststhat had sensa-tional impacton the printedpage. Their surprising effectwas like that of slow-motionfilm but more confounding, for the beginning and end of the action were missing.These pictures of movement were utterly still. With perfect timing Munkacsi hadreleased the shutter to record a split second otherwise invisible to the human eye.In 1927 Munkacsi moved to Berlin, bringing with him photographssuch as Motor-cyclist, Budapest hat secured him a three-yearcontract with the House of Ullstein,publishersof the enormously popularillustratednewspaperBerlinerIllustrierteZeitung.The concision, imagination, and verve of the photographshe took for Ullstein dur-ing the next seven years earned him deserved fame throughout Europe. The youngHenri Cartier-Bresson was one of those who learned from Munkacsi's single-shotapproachhow to condense the essentials of an action iQtoa terse and elegant epigram.

IF T1HEFIRSTSlYLISTIC INNOVAT'IONS in press photographycame from sports coverage,the second depended upon German advances in camera technology: the miniature(35mm) camera and the rapid lens, both introduced in 1924. The lens made itpossible to take instantaneousphotographs indoors in normal light. There was onedrawback: this lens was mounted on a plate camera, which meant that photographerscould not snapawaylike modern reporterswith motorized equipment but had to waitfor a single opportune instant. The technology required the photographerto be pa-tient, inconspicuous, and a shrewd judge of human behavior.

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The first person to meet these conditions professionally was Erich Salomon, a well-bred Berliner trained as a lawyerand working for Ullstein. By virtue of his properdemeanor and relatively discreet equipment, Salomon managed to gain entrance topoliticalconferences,wherehe photographeddignitariesin unguardedmoments.Whenthe Rumanian delegate to the League of Nations was speaking in 1928, Salomoncaught her in the midst of an impassioned appeal for peace. Reeling with emotion, thepoetess is riveting; but what gives the photograph its peculiar torque is the contrastbetween her abandoned delivery and the partially obscured, impassive faces behindher. It was for photographssuch as this, and for Salomon's contribution in particular,that the phrase candid camera was coined.

ANONYMOUS IN ART ORCENTURIEShe sky was heavenly. Its radiance implied a positive spiritualPAGE9 presenceand only very infrequently, in the form of comet or eclipse, an omen. Todaya ball of fire in the sky is no longer a rare portent but the archetypical symbol ofhuman folly and failure. Our familiaritywith images of atomic bombs and exploding

planesandrocketsmakes t difficult to recapture he horror of firstseeingthe sky aflame.If contemporaryviewers are more drawn to this photograph for its dramatic beautythan repelled by its devastating report, this is only partly due to lost innocence: thespectacularlyluminous plume of gas momentarily blinds us to the passengers'fates,which the black silhouettes on the mooring rig pointedly recall.The explosion of the Hindenburg in 1937 was one of the earliestairborne cataclysmsknown to the world with hallucinatory immediacy. Previously, the experience ofbeing instantly present at a remote disasterwas limited to verbal reports transmittedby wireless. This was the case, for example, upon the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.

Only twenty-five years later rapid advances in rotogravure illustration and interna-tional news services sped the awful experience around the globe and with no need oftranslation.The universallanguageconveyingthe spectaclewas, of course, photography.

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MARTIN MUNKACSIMotorcyclist,Budapest,c. 1923Gelatin silver print11/2 x 93/i6 inches

ERICH SALOMONMadame Elena Vacarescu,1928Gelatin silver print415/ 6 x 6'5/l6 inches

1987.1100.61

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1987.110032ANONYMOUSExplosionof theHindenburg,Lakehurst,New Jersey,May 6, 1937Gelatin silverprint1015/16 X133/4 inches

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CHARLES SHEELERAMERICAN1883-196SPAGE22

THIS PICTURE ISTHE KEY image in a group of some three dozen photographstakeninDetroit in 1927 for the Ford Motor Company.Although the requestwas madethroughthe N.W. Ayeradvertising agency, the assignment was editorially unrestrictedand notaimed at a specific marketing campaign. It was, exceptionally,envisioned as a hand-somely paid opportunity for artistic documentation.On the recommendationof Edward Steichen, who turned down the projectbecauseofan exclusive contract with anotheragency, the job was offered to Charles Sheeler,whowas well known for his paintings and photographs of American vernacular art andarchitecture. Sheeler believed that forms created for the best realization of theirpracticaluse wereanalogous n their individualeconomyand in the efficientworkingofthe partstowardthe consummation of the whole to his artisticstrategiesfor construct-ing pictures. This vision endowed the man-made world with a rationalharmonythatseemed, deceptively, to lie entirely within it.The precise and just relation of parts in CrisscrossedConveyorsproduces rhythms asordered and harmonious in their complexity as a miracle of nature seen under amicroscope. The picture's remarkable organic coherence and upward-springing en-ergy caused the Swiss photographerRobert Frank to comment that Sheeler's image ofFord's plant in fact depicted God'sfactory. Indeed, there is no greater illustration oftechnological utopia.

ALFRED STIEGLITZAMERICAN1864-1946PAGE23

THE ACUTEAWARENESSof change characteristicof the modern age occupied the artist'seye and imagination in various ways. Skyscrapersand factories were salient symbolsof this concernand, like the machine, seemed appropriatepictorialsubjectsbecause thebasic condition for their existence was the dynamic transformationof daily life.Although tall buildings first appeared in downtown New York at the turn of thecentury,skyscrapersdid not takeroot in midtown until the late 1920s. The new forestof art deco towers fascinated Alfred Stieglitz, who witnessed its growth from thewindows of his apartmentat Lexington Avenue and 49th Street and from his galleryat 509 Madison Avenue. In 1932, when he took the photographreproduced here, hecould see Rockefeller Center under construction;and in the previous two yearshe hadseen the erection of the Empire State, Chrysler, and McGraw-Hill buildings, theBarbizon Plaza, St. Moritz, and Waldorf Astoriahotels, andthe RCA tower(now theGeneral Electric building, which fills the right side of the photograph). Thus we20


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should not be surprised if the sequence of pictures he made of the midtown skylinecelebrated its astonishing growth and change.While Stieglitz's skyscrapers do express an optimistic spirit of constructive enter-prise, they impress us more as the manifest, constituent forms of a new Americanlandscape. In LookingNorthwest rom the Shelton, for example, Stieglitz did not de-scribe vertiginous canyonsand pinnacles, but a terrain as balanced, measured, andeasy of access as any painted by Claude Lorrain. Although the format is vertical, andthus untraditional for a landscape, the picture works in a traditional manner,estab-lishing a remarkablycontrolled incremental diminution of scale towardthe distanceand a stepped lightening of mass from bottom to top. By centering his camerajustbelow the horizon and waiting for precisely the right slant of light, Stieglitz built animage of tectonic permanenceand stability as awesome in its authoritativeconvictionas the fabled monuments of the ancients. If we could but trust the image to the ex-clusion of all others, we would believe that the tiered ziggurats of this civilizationwould stand for all time.

ALEXANDERRODCHENKORUSSIAN1891-1956PAGE24

LIKE MANY ARTISTS IN RUSSIA after the Revolution, the Constructivist painter andphotographerAlexander Rodchenkobelieved it possible to elevate the populace to theRevolutionarycausethrough visual education. He recognized that most photography,like most representationalpainting, was mired in the conventions of earlier ages.Images in both media were composed according to Renaissancerules of perspectivethatprojectedviews upon the pictureplane, straight-onand statically.With the camerathis effect was produced by photographing in the banal, usual way-as Rodchenkosaid, from the navel. Rejecting that traditionalmode, the artistworked to surprisehis comrades with unusual views taken from above, below, or on the diagonal.Landscapepresenteda special problem for the avant-gardeof this period, becausethevery notion of landscape is conditioned by the normative view and its pastoralandsublime associations were irrelevant to the modern metropolitan spirit. Indeed,Rodchenko found the pictorial prospectsof the natural setting of his country housedownright boring until he hit upon the idea of viewing the surrounding trees as ifthey were factorysmokestacksor telephone poles towering above him in the city. Hisraking shot from below is revolutionary, for it proposes vertigo instead of sylvancalm, the component part instead of the ensemble, and contingent truth instead offamiliar homilies.21


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CHARLES SHEELERCrisscrossedConveyors,FordPlant, 1927Gelatinsilverprint95/l6 x 77/16inches

1987. 100.1

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ALFRED STIEGLITZLookingNorthwestfrom theShelton,1932Gelatin silver print9'/2 x 7?/2 nches

1987.1100 1

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ALEXANDERRODCHENKOPine Trees n PushkinPark, 1927 or beforeGelatin silverprint11/2 x 93/16inches

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ALBERTRENGER-PATZSCHGERMAN1897-1966PAGE26

ALBERT RENGER-PATZSCHWAS A PROFESSIONALPHOTOGRAPHER who used the cameranot to interpretor transform but to catalog. The making of photographsdid not leadhim to invent, experiment, or seek beyond the evident; the processwas more like thesystematiccollection of scatteredpieces of a mosaic. His inventory of the materialworld, a sort of alphabet, he said, was to be called Thingsbut instead was publishedin 1928 as The World s Beautiful. The 100 images in the book emphasize form andstructure, are grouped in categories(plants, materials, architecture, industry,and soforth), and effectively suggest that natural and man-made things are of equal andsimilar visual interest. In this context it is clear that (in photographic terms at least)the shape, surfaces, and arrangementof a stack of aluminum pots are as beautiful asthe foxglove's cascadeof freckled blossoms.

Although Renger-Patzsch'sapproachwas an effort to purge photographyof painterlycontaminationby artistsand amateurs, the book was hailed immediately as a parallelto a neo-realist movement in German painting called New Objectivity. In fact, itsimportancewas much more general and far-reaching. Renger-Patzsch'sinsistenceonrestricting his means to the medium's inherent qualities (which he saw as descriptiveand realistic)and his reductiveequationof aestheticized, impersonalobjectswith con-tent are classic tenets of the modernist position in photography.

EDWARD WESTONAMERICAN1886-19S8PAGE28

BY WORKINGTHROUGH SOFT-FOCUSPICTORIALISM to the straight approach of Strand,Stieglitz, and Sheeler, Edward Weston arrived at a theoretical position easily mis-taken for that of Renger-Patzsch. The influence of Stieglitz was especially critical. ItfurnishedWeston not only with an exampleof acuteattentionto pictorialstructure andsharp-focustechnique, but also with a theory of immanence, which provided thatthephotographer invest the objects he depicted with the exaltationtheir contemplationinduced. The meaningful link between the photographer'ssubject and his spiritualstate, which Stieglitz termed equivalence, became for Weston the intuitive under-standing and recognition relating obvious reality to the esoteric.If it could be said that Renger-Patzsch was a sort of nominalist, who understoodbeautyas the unique propertiesof each individual thing, then Weston was more of a

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ALBERTRENGER-PATZSCHDigitalis, 1928Gelatin silver print91/16 X 63/4 inches

1 I/. 1 UU. ,U

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Neoplatonist who construed beauty as the universal essence immanent in the particu-lar. Hence the foxglove (p.26) remains itself, a specific example of the genus digi-talis, whereas Weston's bedpan bears little comparison with other examples on theshelf. The picture, which Weston nicknamed form follows function, is more pre-possessingthan the object'sutilitarianfunction might initially suggest; the bedpanhasbecome modern sculpture- of stately,aloof dignity, Weston wrote, perhaps withtongue in cheek. The glorification of its phallic form was in fact directly inspired byBrancusi'ssculptures, which Weston had long admired in reproductionand which hefinally saw at the home of the collector WalterArensberg a few daysbefore the photo-graph was made.

AUGUST SANDER THIS PHOTOGRAPHWAS NTENDED as a representative image of a type of modernGERMAN man. Incisive and graceful in its own right, it acquiresdeeper significancewhen seen187a6-194 in the context of the thousands of other photographs of German citizens that AugustSander took for his monumental portrait survey, The Face of Our Time. Had thePAGE29 Nazis allowed its publication, this book would have documentedall levels of German

society between the wars.Using a large stand camera and a slow lens, Sander elicited from his subjectsthe fixedintensity and self-conscious presence characteristicof much nineteenth-centurypor-traiture. When photographing farmers and tradesmen, he could fall back upon tradi-tional popular imagery for a model, but industrialists, cashiers, secretaries,and radioannouncers belonged to a new urban society that had, as yet, no characteristicmodeof self-representation. Sander generally posed these modern metropolitancitizens intheir place of work or against a white wall in his studio.In this studio photograph of a high school student, it seems that the photographerimposed nothing on the youth, but rather inveigled him to disclose himself as hewished ideally to be seen. If the picturerecallsthe preening nonchalanceof high schoolseniors in their yearbooks, this is a testimonyto Sander'sremarkableability to extractthe typical from the specific;and if the fashions now seem outdated, this is a point forthe student'ssense of current style. Only Sander himself, or perhaps an historian ofcostume, could tell us whether the young man'ssartorialefforts were as successful ashe evidently thought they were.

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EDWARD WESTONBedpan,January30, 1930Gelatinsilverprint958 x 6 inches

1987.1100.134

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AUGUST SANDERHigh SchoolStudent,Cologne,1926Gelatinsilverprint93/8 x 512 inches

1987.110082

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MAN RAYAMERICAN1890-1976PAGE32

THE DIAGNOSTIC SPIRIT that informed Sander'sundertakingwas precisely the kind ofrational mind-set the Dadaists and Surrealists meant to escape. As Andre Bretonwrote in the firstManifestoof Surrealism 1924), Our brains are dulled by the incur-able mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable.After moving to Paris in 1921, Man Raydiscovereda wayto deal with realitythatdidnot analyze, assess, or classify it, but displaced it to an ambiguous free-floatingrealmof mysteriousassociations. In this realm the world was no longer depicted asa calcula-ble, definite place but as a dimensionless dark dream space. To achieve this Man Raypracticeda technique that was an inventive cross between photographyand the idea ofcollage but did not involve the camera. In the darkroom he carefully placed objectsdirectly on the photographic paper in patterns governed by his intuitive sense ofpoetic juxtaposition and abstract composition; he then exposed the paper to light.Insteadof recording reflectedlight from the surface of objectsas camera images do,the photogram, or rayograph as it was dubbed, revealsthe contoursand densities ofobjects by the degree of light they absorb or displace.Those who would soon become Surrealistsimmediately recognized that this astonish-ing manner of registering light freed the objective world from the regimen of realis-tic representation. The mechanical deformation, precise, unique, and right, wasfixed, smoothed, and filtered like hair through a comb of light, wrote Tristan Tzarain the introduction to Les Champsdelicieux(1922), a portfolio of Man Ray'searliestrayographs, including this one.

MAURICE TABARDFRENCH1897-1984PAGE33

THE PHOTOMONTAGE AND THE PHOTOGRAM were more than novel alternatives tothe straight approach, they opened photography to unprecedentedexperimentation.While they may be described as discrete techniques, in practice they were unrestrictedcreative strategies that invited permutation through variation and combination.Maurice Tabard, who created this image, brought to it his knowledge of Man Ray'swork as well as his own diverse experience as a professional portraitist, advertisingphotographer, and X-ray technician. He assembled the picture in the darkroom,printing through several more or less transparentsheets, at least two of which werenegatives-one made from a photogram of a pair of gloves and the other of a nude

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leaning on a stool in front of a reflector lamp in Tabard'sstudio. The conflation ofspace that occurred in the printing preventsthe nude from altogether inhabiting anyone space, exceptthat of the imagination. There she uncannilypartakesof Pygmalion'sstatue and Botticelli's Venus,all the while remaining a Parisian model, vintage 1929,who just took off her stockings.Her simultaneous existence on several planes is reminiscent of Paul Eluard's poemThe Beloved (1924):She is standing on my eyelidsand her hair is inside mine,She is the shape of my hand,She is the color of my eyes,She is surrounded by my shadowsLike a rock by the sky.

UMBO(OTTO UMBEHR)GERMAN1902-1980PAGE34

Her eyes always openedShe never lets me sleepHer dreams in broad daylightMake sunlight evaporate,Make me laugh, cry and laugh,Speak without a thing to say.

WHEN UMBO WASSTUDYING at the Bauhaus (1921-23), the de Stijl painter, architect,and theoretician Theo van Doesburg briefly lived and taught in Weimar, where heexercised considerable influence on Bauhaus ideology. Although van Doesburg hadbeen allied with Piet Mondrian in adherence to the orthogonal grid, during thisperiod he began to adoptthe more dynamic diagonal principles of abstractionfavoredby El Lissitzky and the Russian Constructivists.The essential design of Mysteriumder Strasse s clearly based upon the Constructivistideals introducedby van Doesburg and adoptedby the Bauhausupon Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's appointment in 1923; however,the photograph representsmuch more than asuccessful rendering of abstract principles. This image of a Berlin street may bepavedwith Constructivist form, but it is overlaid with a dark Surrealistfigurationofthe unfettered imagination.Umbo presentsus with an eerie diagramof an urban netherworld roamedby doppel-gangers. This is not whathe saw when he looked out his window, but what he discov-ered when he took an overhead view of the streetand turned it upside down. Throughthis delightfully simple yet inspired inversion, the photographer discloses another,more subjective, angle of the camera'sseemingly objective report.

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MAN RAYRayograph,1922Gelatinsilverprint813/16 x 67/8 inches

1987.1100.294

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MAURICE TABARDComposition,1929Gelatinsilverprint9 x 67/8 inches

1987.1100141

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IV/.l Iuu.qvUMBO (OTTO UMBEHR)MysteriumderStrasse,1928Gelatinsilverprint11/-8 x 91/4 inches


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LASZLOMOHOLY-NAGYAMERICAN,BORN IN HUNGARY1895-1946PAGE 6

LUCIA ANDLASZLOMOHOLY-NAGY'SRESENCEat the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1928 en-couragedstudent interest n photographybut, surprisingly,no workshopwas establishedin this medium until after their departure.Early Bauhausphotographywas an artisticsideline taken up by masters and students for personalenjoyment and for document-ing school activities and productions. The unstructured nature of this pursuit helpedto generate a spontaneous, experimental creativity, which Moholy-Nagy endorsedin his book PaintingPhotographyFilm (1925).One technique he championed was the fotoplastik, a picture assembled from cutoutphotographsconnectedby hand-drawngeometric'schemas.The disposition of the pic-ture partswas neither as random as Dada collages, nor as rigorously formal as Con-structivistabstractions;t wassuggestive but nonnarrative ike mostSurrealistimagery.While fotoplastikswere much used in advertising, most of Moholy-Nagy's works inthis genre sprang from inner need and expressed deeply personal and political con-cerns. In the Name of theLaw sells no productand tells no story. It is a piercing-butpolitically inexplicit and thus uncensorable-presentation of the excruciatingtensionsof life in fascist Germany, and of the vulnerability of all targetsof absolute power.

EL LISSITZKYRUSSIAN1890-1941PAGE38

THE NOTION THAT SPACE is not fixed nor matter discrete, and that both are pliabledimensions relative to time and personal subjectivity is fundamental to modern con-sciousness. In the interwar period many artists independently recognized or deliber-atelypursued imagerythat illustratedthis new perception. One artistespeciallyattunedto these novel concepts was El Lissitzky, a Russian painter and graphic designer.A bohemian tossed salad of high spirits and shared ideas, In the Studio representsLissitzky himself (at the bottom of the photograph), his wife-to-be, Sophie Kiippers(on her side directly abovehim), and other friends. Although everyone in the picturewas photographedseparately-sitting in chairs, on steps, or lying down on the studiofloor-their bodies interlaceand interpenetraten a swirling, conceptual pace.Lissitzkyaccomplished this by progressively rotating his camera while calculating the stillinvisible position of each figure on his negative. The result of his highly imaginative,somersaulting multiple exposure is a particularly apt expression of the artist's visionof a world floating in space.

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LASZLOMOHOLY-NAGYIn theName of theLaw,1927Gelatinsilverprint93/8 x 73/16 inches

1987.1 100.230

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EUGENE ATGETFRENCH1857-1927PAGE38

WHEREAS EL LISSITZKYWASKEEN to articulate new concepts of space and time, EugeneAtget was largely impervious to the aims and methods of modern art and devotedmost of his long career to interpreting the past. However, in the yearsafter the FirstWorld War, his interest in vernacularart led him to explore certain manifestations ofcontemporarylife as part of his intensive documentation of historic French culture.He may have been interested in mannequins, for example, for the material evidencethey provided of societal convictions and aspirations. For him these contemporaryartifactsseemed perhapsas telling in their fashion as the garden statuaryat Versailles.The face value of Avenuedes Gobelins s its reporton the art of commercial displayandthe style of men's clothing in Paris in 1925. The incongruous reflection on the win-dow denies this common coin; it not only muddles the report, but it also invites thecompany of well-dressed mannequins to leave their rarified vitrine world and holdaudience with us in the street.While the documentaryterms of Atget's art admittedonly that the picture described what he had seen, others understood that the way hehad seen was as radical and unnerving as any intentionally avant-garde provocation.Indeed, the picture'stransparent amination of real and artificial,outdoor and indoor,fluid and static, shimmer and substance dissolves the traditional boundaries betweenfact and imagination and makes them one.

CLARENCE JOHNLAUGHLINAMERICAN190S-198SPAGE39

MONOCHROMATIC AND TWO DIMENSIONAL, black and white photographs are by theirvery natureabstractionsof reality.Since the earliestdaysof the medium some photog-raphershavechosen to explore this condition artistically,but the penchantfor outrightplay, for juggling with the medium's abstracttendencies, became commonplace onlyduring the yearsbetweenthe wars. Contemporarypainting, film, andsetdesign markedthe direction, but the perceptualgames characteristicof photography n this periodalsogrew from an increasedawarenessof the peculiar waysthe cameradescribes the world.One could sayof this picture by ClarenceJohn Laughlin that Cubism establishedtheparametersof the playing field. However, the Cubist grid that Laughlin wielded didnot evolve gradually from the structured relations of the picture's forms, it was anexisting screenhe preemptedfor the game. His strategieswere exactframing and selec-tive focus; these makethe mesh fence vibrate and in places disappear.Thus Laughlin's

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EL LISSITZKYIn theStudio, 1923Gelatinsilverprint41/4 x 31/4 inches

EUGENE ATGETAvenuedesGobelins,1925Gold-toned lbumenprint811/V6 x 613/16 inches

1987.11001 13

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CLARENCEJOHNLAUGHLINBirds Insideand Out,1935Gelatin silverprint13/2 x 101/8 inches

1987.1 100

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picture teasesthe viewer with questions it delights in evading: if the birds are not in-side or out but inside and out, isn't the relation of the picture to reality skewed anduntrustworthy?Or to put it anotherway,does the photographer et the birds loose andstill net his prey?

ELLEN AUERBACHAND GRETE STERNGERMANb. 1906; b. 1904PAGE 2

JAMES N.DOOLITTLEAMERICANactive 1920sand 30sPAGE 3

ANDRE BRETON POINTED OUT in the first Manifesto of Surrealismthat the power themannequin exercised upon the modern imagination was as strong as that of ruinsupon the minds of the Romantics. This fascination, which Freud recognized as aconfusion of the animate and inanimate, lies at the heart of many photographs madebetween the wars.Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern, operating as the commercial team of Ringl & Pit,exploited just this ambiguity in their advertisement for a popular hair tonic. Thekohl-rimmed eyes, cupid's-bow mouth, and porcelain skin of the mannequin arepatently artificial, yet the coiffure and eyebrows are of human hair. When weultimately recognize that the hand holding the bottle of Petrole Hahn is also real-infact living-we momentarilyvacillate between knowing it impossible and wonderingwhether this sloe-eyed doll might not be alive after all.A similar effect is produced by James Doolittle's photograph. The airbrushed skin,paintedlips, plucked brows, and curled eyelashesand hair are as artfully contrived asthe hat, fur, andgloves. Without hesitation,we know this faceto be Marlene Dietrich's,but the icy, mannered perfection of the movie star'spersona mingles so thoroughlywith the photographer'sservice to its image that we are not altogether certain he didnot create this persuasive piece of idolatry from a wax figurine.Becausephotographyplaysso freely with the boundariesof the actual and the artificial,it frequently functions, like trompe-l'oeil painting, in an intermediate realm whereappearances pretend to be real but have only fictive truth. Whether the object ofdesire in these pictures is realistic artifice or idealized reality is thus at once immate-rial and precisely the point.

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HANS BELLMERFRENCH,BORN IN SILESIA1902-1975PAGE42

LISETTE MODELAMERICAN,BORN IN AUSTRIA1906-1983PAGE44

FOR SURREALISTSTHE FEMALE ODY representedthe ideal resolution of the antinomybetween inner and external reality, between disembodied desire and physical form.Their treatment of this theme ranged from mysticallyricism to morbid obsession. Inthe latter genre, Hans Bellmer's incessant construction, reconstitution, and photo-graphic presentation of his dolls was surely the most exhaustive manipulation offeminine imagery of the period.This photographwas first published in the magazine Minotaure n 1934. It is still themost frequently reproducedof Bellmer's pictures, in part because it is not as explicitas most of his later hand-colored photographs. Its attractionalso derives from thedoll's expression, which hovers insidiously between provocativepout and paranoia.The question remains: is Bellmer's completely artificial construction, which simul-taneously arouses and repels the viewer, more engaging and thus perceptibly moreanimate than either of the two accompanying photographs?

BORN TO COMFORT AND CULTURE in Vienna, Lisette Model was trained as an artistand as a musician by Arnold Schonberg. She continued her studies in Paris after 1921and became a photographer only in 1937, when she borroweda friend's camera. Herfirst pictures, taken that year,were of people on the beachfrontpromenade in Nice.Astonishingly confident for a beginner, these early images presagemost of the artisticquestions Model would pose in America during the next forty years.Model was in search of the individuals spawned by modern urban culture who wereat home nowhere but in that element and who only indirectly or perversely observedtraditional codes of social etiquette. Her photographs are not judgments but detec-tions of that peculiar fauna in its natural habitat. This photograph of a gamblerdrowsing eyes half-open like a cat in the sun tells as much about his cunning at thetables as it does of his custom of whiling awaythe afternoons alone in the companyofothers equally alone.

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ELLEN AUERBACHAND GRETE STERNPetroleHahn, 1931Gelatinsilverprint97/16, x 11/16, inches

HANS BELLMER

La Poupee,1933-34Gelatinsilverprint8916 x 121/8 inches

OPPOSITEJAMES N. DOOLITTLEMarleneDietrich, c. 1931Gelatin silver print1618 x 123/4 nches

1987 1100.261

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1987.1100.26

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1987.1100.87LISETTE MODELGambler,PromenadedesAnglais, Nice, 1937Gelatinsilverprint111/4x 9/8 inches


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BRASSAI(GYULA HALASZ)FRENCH,BORN INTRANSYLVANIA1899-1984PAGE6

THE SURREALIST DESIRE TO REMOVE rtistic activity from the precincts of the con-scious mind and relocate it in the unconscious led not only to the exploration of newartistic strategies but also to the exploration of certain fields of subject matter.Onesuch terrain of appropriate magery was the city at night-an illicit region of mysteryand shadow, prostitutesand thugs, libido and crime.Brassaimade his name as chronicler of the night. He survived as a penurious immi-grant artist in Paris by reporting for foreign newspapersand occasionallyby illustrat-ing his articles with photographs. In 1930 he began photographing Paris by night,not for a particulararticle but to capture in permanentform the magic of his noctur-nal ramblings in the companyof the writers Leon-Paul Fargue, Henry Miller, Ray-mond Queneau, and other noctambules. n 1932 Charles Peignot published sixty-twoof his photographsas a book, Paris de nuit. This survey of the activities and topogra-phy of the capitalafter dark maintainedan editorial balanceof high and low life, andwhile it touched on the underbelly of the city, it did so demurely.For obvious reasons the seamyside of the Paris night had never been properly photo-graphed. It requiredthe irrepressiblespirit and sure eye of this bohemian who movedcomfortablyin any companyto infiltrate the Parisian underworldand stage the incon-trovertibly right forms for these roles. A measure of Brassai'sresounding success isthat the members of Big Albert's Gang, la mome Bijou, and all the others are notjust examplesof a picturesque genre but classic prototypes.As such, they have becomethe unconscious models for scores of aspiring night crawlers of the twentieth-centurystage and screen.

BILL BRANDTBRITISH,BORN IN GERMANY1904-1983PAGE47

RAISED IN AN ENGLISH-GERMAN HOUSEHOLD in Germany, Bill Brandt began hisphotographiccareer in Man Ray'sstudio in Paris after a contemplative spell of recu-peration in a Swiss sanitorium and some psychoanalyticalinvestigation in Freud'sVienna.When he settledpermanentlyin London around 1930, he shed his Continentalpastand quickly became the preeminentEnglish photographerof his generation. Hisportraitsare among the most striking of the period, and his extended meditation onthe nude is more richly inventive thananycomparablegroup of contemporaryworks.Despite these achievements, Brandt remains best known for his early work, whichrecords his impressions of his adopted country.

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BRASSAI(GYULA HALASZ)Big Albert'sGang,Place d'Italie, c.1932Gelatinsilverprint91/4 x 615/16 inches

1987.1100.151? GilberteBrassai

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BILL BRANDTSohoBedroom,1936Gelatinsilverprint91/8 X 73/4 inches

1987.1100.77

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Impression is perhapsthe wrong word, for the connotationis fleeting and variable,whereas many of Brandt'sphotographsof the thirties were reenactmentsof images hehad carried in his mind's eye since childhood. Characteristicallystark and economi-cal, Brandt's graphic style as well as his choice of subject were informed by theillustrations in British books and by the British and German posterart he very muchappreciatedas a youth.When Brandt recognized an event, character, site, or scene as a peculiarly accuraterealization of his vision of English life, he asked either the original performers ormembers of his family to reenact the tableau before his camera. There was nothingarch or self-conscious in this recycling of notions absorbed as a child; the photogra-pher's method was more indirect and stealthy. The power of Brandt's imagery isrootedin his uncannyaptitudefor framing only the essentialsof a given scene, in muchthe waywe retain a single resonant mage from the tangledskeinof a significantdream.SohoBedrooms hard to improve upon. The composition, with its central corner spliceof black and white, could not be simpler. The light is just sufficient to pick out thelovers and the bed, and the only thing we might think superfluous-the spray offlowers-is in fact precisely the glancing detail that catches in our mind.

BERENICE ABBOTT THE SEEMINGLY RANDOM MOVEMENT of human beings in the city-their unitaryAMERICAN positions in the ceaseless round of life-is deftly evoked in Berenice Abbott'sphoto-b. 1898 graph from an elevated New York subway platform. It gives the atomizationof social

~~~PAGE 9 ~activity a visual form as apt and casually devastating as Tristan Tzara's contemporarypoem ApproximateMan, in which these lines appear: we leave with those leavingarrive with those arriving/leave with those arriving arrive when the others leave.

Abbott knew Tzara and others of the European avant-garde, for she had lived brieflyin Berlin prior to moving to Paris, where she worked closely with Man Ray beforeestablishing herself as an independent and successful portrait photographer. WhenAbbott returned to the United Stateson the Mauretaniain 1929, it was as an Ameri-can expatriate steeped in European visions. One of these was, of course, that NewYork was the most energized, quintessentially modern city in the world.

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1987.1100156BERENICE ABBOTTTheEl at Columbus venueandBroadway,1929Gelatin silverprint57/ x 8 inches

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This photograph represents the moment of transition when the photographer,freshoff the boat, saw New Yorkthrough European eyes. The angled overhead view withits spatial incongruities and the search for meaning in chance relationshipswere aban-doned by Abbott soon thereafter. In the thirties she proceeded to photograph NewYork architecture in the straightforward plain style characteristic of (and necessaryto) documentary pursuits. It is with this importantwork and the humane and histori-cal vision it embodies that the photographer is usually identified.Like her extraordinaryParisian portraitsand her later scientificphotographs, The Elat ColumbusAvenue and Broadway proves that its maker is inordinately equipped tointerpretdiverse aspectsof the modern world with a camera. That she elected not topursue the range of interests manifest in this stylish and intellectually pregnant pic-ture was certainly relatedto the American attitudes towardphotographyshe met uponher homecoming on the eve of the Depression.

ANDRE KERTESZ IT IS DIFFICULTTO IMAGINE world without the jingles, blurbs, and glosses thatAMERICAN, furnish our existence as ineluctably as motel-room decor. Yet it was only in the lastBORN IN HUNGARY half of the nineteenth century that visual advertising began to approachthe ubiquity1894-1985 of today, and only in the early years of this century that artists frequently found ad-PAGE 1 vertisements useful for their purposes. Prospectusesposters catalogues, Guillaume

Apollinaire wrote in 1913, sing poetry for today.The effect of Dubo, Dubon, Dubonnetdepends in large part upon Andre Kertesz'ssensitivity to the poetry available in the advertisements papered on a boulevard walland attached to a sidewalk bench. A.M. Cassandre's famous poster for the aperitifplays alliteratively upon the breakdown of the product's name: Dubo (du beau,

beautiful ), Dubon (du bon, good ), Dubonnet. This blithe patter appears in abold collage across the top of the picture, providing a jaunty refrain for the solitarywoman seated below. Absorbed in her thoughts, she is as oblivious to this cheery mes-sage as to the inviting smile of the top-hattedgigolo at her shoulder. Kertesz saw theseironies and in the same instantknew that the pedestriandeparting the poignant sceneshould not be allowed to make his getaway.

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ANDRE KERTESZDubo, Dubon, Dubonnet,1934Gelatinsilverprint93/8 x 71/1 6 inches . jj

9UI;D~O~~~~~~~~~UBO,~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~18 100

1987.1 1 0.

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HENRICARTIER-BRESSONBarrio Chino, Barcelona,1933Gelatin silver print13 /16 x 9 /4 inches

1987.1100.125

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HENRICARTIER-BRESSONFRENCHb. 1908PAGE52

INPHOTOGRAPHY,s in any skill or art, there may come a moment when, after muchapplication and training, the individual finally hits his stride. Then, like a runnerwhose effort seems ecstasy,the photographeris possessedof limitless resources. Withluck and vigilance this state of grace may continue for some time. Yet for HenriCartier-Bresson he momentoustransition nto greaterknowledgeand surenessoccurredalmost at the outset, after little application and less training. What is more, he hadthree extraordinaryyearsof grace-1932, 1933, and 1934-when it seemed that nosubject matterwas too dull or farfetched for his sharp pictorial query to probe its in-most ambiguities and larger consequences.The relation of the sleeping fruit vendor to the graffito on the wall in Barrio Chino,Barcelona s a visual conundrum with several possible interpretations.Whatever pri-vate speculations Cartier-Bresson had about its meaning, he saw at once that theresemblance of the drawn head to the real one was remarkableand that in his picturetheir juxtaposition would remain endlessly enigmatic.

WALKER EVANSAMERICAN1903-1975PAGE54

WALKEREVANSETOUTTOBEAWRITER n the model of Gustave Flaubert. He broughtto photographythe same intention, which was to createcontent in a plausible realitycomposed of selected revelatory details concisely described. His analytical methodaimed not at scientific but human truths, and his mature pictures are dissembling inthe subtlest way. His classic, plain style would have us believe that the meaning hefound in the precise identificationof his subject would have been there without hispicture of it.This photographis one of the earliest in which Evans succeededat his task. It is not asresolved in its structure as the pictures he would soon produce, but its message isessentiallyclear. Cradled in the warmth of a day at an amusement parkand describedin the specifics of wristwatches, suspenders, and other fashionable accoutrements ofthe time, the content lies within what we are given to see. The true crux of Evans'spicture, like the focus of the couple's attention, is private-and probably as sensualand embracing as the effect of the cooling breeze.

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WALKEREVANSConeyIsland, 1928Gelatinsilverprint8 x 5'3/16 inches

1987. 100.110

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HELEN LEVITTThreeKidson a Stoop,1940Gelatin silverprint65/16 x 9 inches

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HELEN LEVITTAMERICANPAGE55

LIKE HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON, Helen Levitt practiced photographywith a small handcamerain the street. She made tender depictions of ordinary people talking, playing,and otherwise going about the routine business of life in New York. What makes thephotographs exceptional is that they reveal to those who will look the timeless andprofound human meanings of commonplace attitudes and situations. Her photogra-phy is metaphorical, but it is so intuitive and light-handed as to seem positivelyartless.Levitt's photographsand the wayof seeing they embody are the subjectof an eloquentessay by her friend James Agee. Although he hesitated to discuss individual picturesfor fear of curtailing future interpretations, his prose is in fact a perfect accompani-ment to Levitt's pictures, and hardly clips their imaginative wings. His acute insightsonly inspire further looking. He had this to sayabout ThreeKidson a Stoop: In theirrelative postures, and attitudes towardtheir masks, the three children are a definitiveembodiment of the first walk into the world's first morning.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authorwarmly hanksEllenHandy,oanHolt,ColtaIves,ChristopherPhillips,oelSnyder, ndJohnWaddell or theircritical eadings f the text. ChristopherPhillipslsogenerously haredhisfactualknowledge,nparticularhe unpublishedesearch hat nforms he note onCharlesSheeler.We aregratefulo the WilliamH.LaneFoundationorpermissiono reproduce he imageon page22,and to GilberteBrassaior the imageon page46.In he interestof directcommunication e havespared he generalreadernotesandbibliographicalreferences.Those who seek further nformationmayconsultTheNewVision,o be published yTheMetropolitanMuseum f Artin 1989.Thispublicationsdedicated o JohnWaddell,who so well understandshe valueof the insightshesepicturesproffer.

M.M.H.

FRONTOVERUpperleft:FlorenceHenri,French, orninAmerica,1895-1982. Femmeauxcartes,1930.II x 8'3/l6 nches. 1987.1100.85.Upperright:LuciaMoholy,British, orninCzechoslovakia, 899,orLaszl6Moholy-Nagy.ortraitfLsszl6Moholy-Nagy,925-26. 10 x 77/8 nches.1987.1100.69.Lowerleft:LuciaMoholy,PortraitfFranzRoh,1926.45/16 X 3 /8inches.1987.1100.105.Lowerright:

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