1-17 of 17 Results  for:

  • Photography x
  • Collecting, Patronage, and Display of Art x
Clear all

Article

Casasola, Agustín Víctor  

Mark Castro

(b Mexico City, Jul 28, 1874; d Mexico City, Mar 30, 1938).

Mexican photographer, journalist, and collector. Casasola initially studied typography before becoming a reporter in 1894. He probably began taking photographs to illustrate his articles and in 1902 traveled to Veracruz to photograph a tour by President Porfirio Díaz. Newspapers that publicly criticized Díaz or his government were often harassed or closed, thus articles and their illustrations often focused exclusively on positive aspects of Mexican life, such as the development of infrastructure, the growth of trade, and the pastimes of the elites living in Mexico City (see Monasterio 2003, 32–41). At the same time, Casasola sometimes photographed scenes of everyday life, traveling, for example, to haciendas near Mexico City to photograph the peasant farmworkers. In these images he took care, lest he attract the ire of the government, to avoid any display of the harsh conditions that characterized life for the majority of Mexicans outside of the capital.

In 1905 Agustín and his brother Miguel were both working as photographers for ...

Article

Degas, (Hilaire Germain) Edgar  

Geneviève Monnier

(b Paris, July 19, 1834; d Paris, Sept 27, 1917).

French painter, draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor, pastellist, photographer and collector. He was a founder-member of the Impressionist group and the leader within it of the Realist tendency. He organized several of the group’s exhibitions, but after 1886 he showed his works very rarely and largely withdrew from the Parisian art world. As he was sufficiently wealthy, he was not constricted by the need to sell his work, and even his late pieces retain a vigour and a power to shock that is lacking in the contemporary productions of his Impressionist colleagues.

The eldest son of a Parisian banking family, he originally intended to study law, registering briefly at the Sorbonne’s Faculté de Droit in 1853. He began copying the 15th- and 16th-century Italian works in the Musée du Louvre and in 1854 he entered the studio of Louis Lamothe (1822–69). The training that Lamothe, who had been a pupil of Ingres, transmitted to Degas was very much in the classical tradition; reinforced by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which he attended in ...

Article

France: Art libraries and photographic collections  

Christopher Masters

See also France, Republic of

Although specialist art libraries are a relatively recent development, some of the oldest French libraries and archives contain collections of artistic importance. The most significant of these is the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, which developed from the French royal collections and which has been on its present site at the Rue de Richelieu since 1721. As well as its books, this institution also contains over 300,000 volumes of manuscripts, 15 million prints and photographs, 650,000 maps and plans and 300,000 coins and medals. Unique primary sources are possessed by the Archives Nationales, Paris, founded in 1789, whose contents are outlined in Les Sources de l’histoire de l’art aux Archives nationales. Since this guide’s publication in 1955, other important documents have entered the archive’s collections, including the papers from 1793 to 1920 of the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts. The pre-revolutionary archives remain in the possession of the Ecole (formerly the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture), whose library also includes prints, drawings and photographs. Like the Archives Nationales, the ...

Article

George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film  

Jessica S. McDonald

Oldest and largest photography museum in the United States, located in Rochester, NY. Since it opened its doors to the public in November 1949, George Eastman House has played a pivotal role in shaping and expanding the field of American photography. George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak Company, never knew his home would become a museum; he bequeathed the mansion where he lived from 1905 until 1932 to the University of Rochester to serve as the residence of its president. In 1946 a board of trustees was formed to establish George Eastman House as an independent, non-profit museum, a memorial to Eastman and his advancements in photographic technology.

Working under director Oscar Solbert, a retired US Army general and former Kodak executive, was the museum’s first curator, Beaumont Newhall. Newhall transformed the museum from one primarily concerned with the technical applications of photography to one emphasizing its artistic development. The museum became an international centre of scholarship, and in ...

Article

Häusser, Robert  

Reinhold Misselbeck

(b Stuttgart, Nov 8, 1924).

German photographer and collector. He trained as a photographer and specifically as a photojournalist before he fought in World War II. From 1950 he studied at the Schule für Angewandte Kunst in Weimar. In 1952 he moved to Mannheim, where he set up a studio and organized numerous exhibitions of contemporary art. In the following years he produced many volumes of photographs, including portraits of cities. He also produced series of pictures that are narrative in intent but dramatic and heavy in tone. Between 1952 and 1954 his work became formally stricter but lighter in tone. The earlier poetic images progressed to critical and political messages on themes such as loneliness, desolation, doubt and death. Häusser’s cryptic method of translating political content is particularly clear in The 21 Doors of Benito Mussolini (Cologne, Mus. Ludwig). Häusser was an active collector of works by German artists such as Gotthard Graubner, Karl–Otto Götz and ...

Article

Karelin, Andrey  

Kevin Halliwell

(Osipovich)

(b Selezna, Tambov province, July 16, 1837; d Nizhny Novgorod, July 31, 1906).

Russian photographer, collector, painter and draughtsman. He was born into a peasant family, and he studied briefly as an icon painter before entering the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg in 1857. After graduating in 1864, he stayed in St Petersburg to learn photography, and he opened a portrait studio in Nizhny Novgorod in 1869. Like many of his colleagues at the Academy, he had worked as a retoucher of photographs for the sake of employment, and initially he regarded photography merely as material support. He gradually became more interested in the medium, however, especially in the decade 1875–85, when it supplanted his painting.

Karelin made many photographic portraits and genre studies, and he is important in both the technical and the aesthetic sense. His studio was larger than usual, with numerous windows, top lighting and glazed walls. He disdained the use of painted props, preferring instead to use real domestic furnishings. He was especially concerned to achieve a sharp focus in all fields in the photograph, and to this end he studied optics, independently realizing the connection between the focal length of the lens and the size of the aperture for depth of clarity. To achieve his ends he therefore introduced into portrait photography the use of additional diverging and converging lenses. He also managed, through the use of lenses, to overcome the more common distortions. This technical achievement gained him many gold medals at international photographic exhibitions in the 1870s and 1880s....

Article

Le Secq (des Tournelles), Henri  

Eugenia Parry Janis

(b Paris, Aug 18, 1818; d Paris, Dec 26, 1882).

French photographer, painter, printmaker, and collector. After studying with the sculptor James Pradier and the painters Jean-Pierre Granger (1779–1840) and Paul Delaroche, he made his début at the Salon of 1842, winning a third-class medal there in 1845. He turned to photography in the wave of self-enrichment preceding the 1848 Revolution. With Charles Nègre he experimented with the waxed paper negative process of (Jean-Baptiste-)Gustave Le Gray, from whom he probably received personal instruction before 1850. Unlike other photographers, who later adopted glass negatives, Le Secq continued to use paper, at first employing photographs as studies for his genre paintings.

By 1851 Le Secq excelled at rendering ancient and medieval monuments in a pictorial style that exploited the effects of light and shadow, turning architecture into symbolic fragments evoking a rapidly disappearing historical past, which Le Secq sought to save photographically. After helping found the Société Héliographique in 1851...

Article

LIGHT Gallery  

Michal Raz-Russo

Gallery in New York dedicated to photography founded in 1971. It was the first commercial gallery in New York City devoted exclusively to exhibiting the contemporary work of living photographers. LIGHT Gallery was the brainchild of Tennyson Schad, a consultant attorney whose wife, Fern Schad, was a former picture editor at Life magazine. Schad enlisted Harold Jones, then a curator at the George Eastman House, as LIGHT’s influential first director. The gallery opened at a momentous time when a viable market for photographs was developing, museums were acquiring and exhibiting photography at an unprecedented pace, and a range of artists brought photography into the mainstream of contemporary art.

In the formative years of 1971 to 1976, LIGHT Gallery occupied the third floor of 1018 Madison Avenue in New York City, sharing the building with several other notable galleries. At its opening, the gallery’s stable of artists included Thomas Barrow (...

Article

List, Herbert  

Reinhold Misselbeck

(b Hamburg, Oct 7, 1903; d Munich, April 4, 1975).

German photographer and collector. He was a self-taught photographer but was given some support by his friend Andreas Feininger. For a long time he worked at various jobs and for the family coffee importing business. He fled from Germany in 1936 and went first to London and then to Paris, where he became a professional photographer and enjoyed a great success with publications in Vogue, Life Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Arts et Métiers graphiques and The Studio.

At this time List’s work was already characterized as mysterious, magical and surreal. In 1937 a photograph of the Lykabettos (see Metken, no. 22), one of his most characteristic and best-known works, appeared in the Arts et Métiers graphiques yearbook; it depicted a woman draped in white, holding a mirror in front of her head in which she reflects her own outstretched hand. List saw photography as one of the fine arts and referred to the influence of artistic circles on his work. As a result his photographs are close both to Pittura Metafisica (e.g. ...

Article

Man, Felix H(ans)  

Astrid Schmetterling

[Baumann, Hans Felix Siegismund]

(b Freiburg im Breisgau, Nov 30, 1893; d London, Jan 30, 1985).

British photographer, writer and collector of German birth. He began to study fine art and art history in Munich and Berlin in 1912, but had to interrupt his studies in 1914 on the outbreak of World War I. While serving as an officer at the front he began to take photographs. He resumed his studies in 1918 and in 1926 moved to Berlin, where he worked as an illustrator. Soon he gave up drawing and concentrated on photography, adopting his professional name in 1929. Between 1929 and 1934 he worked for the Münchner Illustrierte Presse and the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, for which he travelled all over Europe and North Africa and spent eight months in Canada.

Man was a leading photojournalist who contributed particularly to what later became known as ‘candid camera’ photography. His use of the light available instead of a flash made him unobtrusive, allowing him to catch his subjects unawares. Forced out of Germany by the Nazis, Man emigrated in ...

Article

Museum of Modern Art  

Deborah Cullen

[MoMA](New York)

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was founded in 1929 by patrons Lillie P(lummer) Bliss, Cornelius J. Sullivan and Rockefeller, John D(avison), jr. to establish an institution devoted to modern art. Over the next ten years the Museum moved three times and in 1939 settled in the Early Modern style building (1938–9) designed by Philip S. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone that it still occupies at 11 West 53 Street. Subsequent renovations and expansions occurred in the 1950s and 1960s by Philip Johnson, in 1984 by Cesar Pelli and in 2002–4 by Yoshirō Taniguchi (b 1937). MoMA QNS, the temporary headquarters during this project, was subsequently used to provide art storage. In 2000, MoMA and the contemporary art space, P.S.1, Long Island City, Queens, announced their affiliation. Recent projects are shown at P.S.1 in Queens in a renovated public school building.

According to founding director, Alfred H(amilton) Barr...

Article

Nojima, Yasuzō  

Kohtaro Iizawa

(b Urawa, nr Tokyo, Feb 12, 1889; d Hayama, Kanagawa Prefect., Aug 14, 1964).

Japanese photographer, painter and patron. The eldest son of a wealthy banker, he studied economics at Keio University but left in 1912 because of mild tuberculosis. By this time he had begun to work seriously as an amateur photographer, becoming a member of the influential amateur group, the Tokyo Society for Photography (Tokyo Shashin Kenkyū-kai), in 1911. His entry, Muddy Sea (see Ozawa, pp. 10–11), won second prize in the Society’s third exhibition of 1912. From 1910 to 1920 he produced photographs on a wide range of subjects, including landscapes, portraits and nudes. Particularly important as a forerunner in the photographic depiction of the nude in Japan is Woman under a Tree (1915; see Shigemori, p. 8).

During the same period Nojima, a keen art lover, extended his relationship with painters and potters such as Rȳusei Kishida, Ryūzaburō Umehara and Kenkichi Tomimoto and became their patron. He opened the Kabutoya Gadō gallery in Kanda, Tokyo, in ...

Article

Root, Marcus Aurelius  

American, 19th century, male.

Born 15 August 1808, in Granville, Ohio; died 1888, in Philadelphia.

Photographer (daguerreotypes), writer, historian, collector.

Portraits.

Born in Ohio, Marcus Aurelius Root moved to Philadelphia in 1832 to train as a portrait painter under Thomas Sully but instead decided to teach penmanship. By ...

Article

Stieglitz, Alfred  

Judith Zilczer

(b Hoboken, NJ, Jan 1, 1864; d New York, July 13, 1946).

American photographer, editor, publisher, patron and dealer. Internationally acclaimed as a pioneer of modern photography, he produced a rich and significant body of work between 1883 and 1937 (see fig.). He championed photography as a graphic medium equal in stature to high art and fostered the growth of the cultural vanguard in New York in the early 20th century.

The first of six children born to an upper-middle-class couple of German–Jewish heritage, Stieglitz discovered the pleasure of amateur photography after 1881, when his family left New York to settle temporarily in Germany. His father, Edward Stieglitz, had retired from a successful business in the wool trade with a fortune that enabled him to educate his children abroad. In ...

Article

Stieglitz, Alfred  

American, 19th–20th century, male.

Born 1 January 1864, in Hoboken, New Jersey; died 13 July 1946, in New York City.

Photographer, writer, editor, gallery owner, collector. Cityscapes, landscapes, portraits.

Pictorialism, Modernism. The Linked Ring, Photo-Secession

Alfred Stieglitz was the eldest of six children and attended New York schools before moving to Germany in 1881. There Stieglitz studied photography with photo-chemist Hermann Vogel beginning in 1883. Returning to New York in 1890, Stieglitz joined the Society of Amateur Photographers and became increasingly involved with Pictorialism. Often characterized by a soft-focus, painterly quality, the Pictorialist aesthetic appears in his pictures from this period, such as ...

Article

Warhol, Andy  

American, 20th century, male.

Born 6 August 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; died 22 February 1987, in New York.

Painter, draughtsman, printmaker, illustrator, photographer, filmmaker, writer, collector. Figures, portraits, still lifes.

Pop art, Copy art.

Andy Warhol was the son of Slovak immigrants who settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s. His father, a miner, died in 1942 after three years of illness, and his mother only spoke broken English. Despite his very humble origins, he graduated from the Institute of Applied Arts in Pittsburgh in 1949 and went to New York. There he enjoyed a successful career as an advertising artist and a poster artist. He also produced drawings of shoes for the magazine ...

Article

Witkin Gallery  

Matico Josephson

American photography gallery. The first commercially successful photography gallery in New York, founded in 1969 by Lee D. Witkin, and originally located at 237 East 60th Street. Witkin was briefly the only specialized photography dealer in New York. Although this monopoly came to an end in 1971, the gallery played an important role in developing the market for photographic prints in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Witkin Gallery showed a broad range of work by photographers Ansel Adams, Edward Steichen, Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Imogen Cunningham, Harry Callahan, André Kertész, Brassaï, and Jacques-Henri Lartigue, whom Lee Witkin sought out in the United States and in Europe. Witkin did not confine his efforts to the older generation, nor to any single genre. The gallery soon hosted encounters between photographers, collectors, and museum curators. By the mid-1970s, Witkin had also shown the work of avant-garde photographers Duane Michals, Les Krims, Jerry Uelsmann, and Lee Friedlander, photojournalistic work by W. Eugene Smith, Marion Palfi (...