Six American Painters and the Photograph
Zabriskie Gallery, New York
January 30 - March 17, 2001
Zabriskie Gallery presents Six American Painters and the Photograph. The six are Konrad Cramer, Ralston Crawford, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ben Shahn, and Charles Sheeler. Most recognized as prominent American Modernist painters in the former half of the century, these artists were also accomplished photographers in their own right. This exhibition includes not only the six artists' photographs, but also examples of their paintings, drawings, and graphic work.
Jack-of-all-trades Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) took up photography in 1912 as a means of livelihood, working for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Whether working with fabric, silver, glass, paint, or photography, the center of focus was always the everyday objects themselves, and their objective representation - beauty in the utility. Light was "the great designer" that extracted, through contrast, new possibilities of form. His photographs of country furniture, early Doylestown interiors, and industrial subjects such as the Ford Rouge plant, realign Cubist proportions with American heritage, suggesting a new dimension of modern art.
Ralston Crawford (1906-1975), like Sheeler, was versatile in numerous media and worked in a mode of synthetic Cubism. He was born in Saint Catharines, Ontario, the only son of a ship captain. By way of water, he journeyed down the East coast to Latin America as a seaman for the United Fruit Company prior to settling in Buffalo, shortly after high school graduation. He began photographing in the mid thirties while traveling in Louisiana and Florida, where he encountered the factories, docks, shipyards, and cemetaries which were to thematically preoccupy his art over the next four decades. Crawford wrote that, for him, photography was an "extension" of his viewing - physical and inner - experience. As evidenced in his geometric abstractions, from industrial landscapes to bombed buildings, it was this discerning mediation of images that added dimension while bringing visual order to the temperamental and chaotic world outside.
Another New Yorker, Ben Shahn (1898-1969), was an immigrant from a socialist Jewish family who fled czarist Russia in 1906, settling in Brooklyn in 1946. During and after the depression, Shahn's camera became a tool for his political activism and artistic practice. He engaged himself in a manner of work production that abandoned a European-inflected modernism in exchange for an American social realism, the intention of which was to effect social change. In his photographs, Shahn addressed issues such as unemployment, poverty, immigration, race and class reform. His range included pictures from group protests, to "private" activity on the sidewalks of midtown and lower Manhattan, as well as the rural Southern and Midwestern U.S. Though little recognized early on, Shahn's photographs nonetheless contributed greatly to the genre of documentary photography.
For Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992), getting hold of a camera was the beginning of another obsessive artform. As a child he had built a pinhole camera, which began his fascination with "points of light," the ephemeral, epiphanic light that suggested for him "a material awareness of spirit." Having lived through the second world war, his work was partly shaped by its aftermath of spiritual and physical uncertainty. Like Rothko and Hoffman, he related to art in a sacred manner through pure forms, primitive myths, and symbolism. His still-lifes of nature from the 1940s appear like scientific exposures of stars and flowers, while his multiple-exposed portraits are pictorialistic composites at once romantic and psychological.
Good friends Konrad Cramer (1888-1963) and Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953) were proponents of photographic experimentation, particularly with spatial possibilities of the light-drawn image. After successfully breaking away from the abstraction influenced by Cubism and the Blue Rider tones of Kandinsky, the former returned to representation and produced elegant solarizations, nudes, fractured still-lifes, and interior studies that reflected modern American imagery. Unto rural Woodstock environments he made fused application of Hambridge's neo-Greek formulations, old master techniques, and a Cubist-derived vocabulary, having subsequently turned to photography after the disillusionment of hard times in the 1930s. It was also at Woodstock in the 30s that Kuniyoshi abandoned his 8 x 10 frame camera, which he had used for commercial photography, for a new handheld. Having come to America in 1906 from Okayama, Japan, his story was one of a synthesis of European Modernism, Japanese art, and American folk art. Kuniyoshi's leisure photographs of Coney Island taken from the boardwalk were flattened picture planes that informed his paintings as they belied their Oriental influences.
With the advent of the practical Leica 35mm camera in 1935, the practice of taking photographs became a necessary "tool" for the advancement, but not usurpation of painting. At least, not at first. For all of these artists, the hierachy of mediums was superfluous in a time when photography was yet considered to be a fine art. In their eyes, painting and photography simply "accommodated" one another. As painters, these six American artists were greatly responsible for moving American art away from strict assimilation of styles, shifting modernism away from European sense and scenery to the vast urban, pastoral, and industrial landscapes which was America. As photographers, they were also pioneers of the silver print and harbingers of the camera's elevation to prominence in the art world.
ZABRISKIE GALLERY
41 East 57 Street, New York, NY 10022
www.zabriskiegallery.com
