Displaying items by tag: robert frank

At its October 2015 Board of Trustees meeting, the National Gallery of Art acquired a large number of drawings, prints and photographs that greatly strengthen its collection. Highlights include extraordinary drawings by Pieter Jansz Saenredam (1597–1665) and Hans Rottenhammer (1564–1625), a bound volume with over 200 15th-century woodcuts, as well as a painting from the Thesaurus series by Mel Bochner (b. 1940). Promised photographs include numerous outstanding gelatin silver prints by Diane Arbus (1923–1971), Richard Avedon (1923–2004), and Robert Frank (b. 1924).

“Cheap, quick, and dirty, that's how I like it,” Robert Frank is said to have replied when he first heard about the plans for his exhibition at Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany titled “Robert Frank, Books and Films, 1947-2014." Rather than present his works as pristine prints in a white cube atmosphere, the exhibition features Frank’s photographs on inkjet-printed rolls of newsprint, up to four meters long, glued directly to the hallways of the museum.

Frank’s status as a photographer is legendary, as is his skepticism about the established art market.

An unprecedented exhibition at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center will present Robert Frank’s American photographs from the 1950s as a cohesive whole. Frank, a Swiss-born photographer, is best known for his profoundly influential book “The Americans.” In 1955 and 1956, with support from a Guggenheim Fellowship, Frank traveled throughout the United States photographing ordinary people in their everyday lives. The book, which was published in France in 1959, features 83 photographs, mostly from those travels. Frank explored the various levels of the country’s social strata, both high and low, unveiling a ubiquitous sense of loneliness, alienation, and angst. For the first time ever, the exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center will explore the largely forgotten photographs that pre-dated and followed Frank’s canonical work.

“Robert Frank in America” features 130 photographs drawn primarily from the Cantor’s collection. Donated to the institution in the mid-1980s by Stanford alumnus Bowen H. McCoy and his colleague Raymond B. Gary, the Cantor’s holdings span the full range of Frank’s photographic career before he turned to filmmaking in the early 1960s.

On 11 and 12 December 2014 Sotheby’s New York will present 175 Masterworks To Celebrate 175 Years Of Photography: Property from Joy of Giving Something Foundation, a single owner sale of the most significant collection of photographs in private hands today. The works to be offered date from photography’s earliest years in the 1840s to contemporary 21st Century color images and include major photographs from all of the medium’s most important practitioners including: Julia Margaret Cameron, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Gustave Le Gray, Irving Penn, August Sander, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston, among others. The collection was meticulously put together over decades by Howard Stein (1926-2011), one of photography’s greatest collectors, whose vision and keen understanding of the medium informed his purchases. Mr. Stein donated the collection to the Joy of Giving Something Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the photographic arts, which is the sole beneficiary of the sale. Highlights will be shown in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Paris prior to the full exhibition in New York. The pre-sale estimate of $13/20 million is the highest ever for a Photographs auction.

This fall, Phillips will sell photographs from the Art Institute of Chicago’s illustrious collection. Works by Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston and Irving Penn will be offered during sales in October in New York and in November in London.

The Art Institute of Chicago began organizing photography exhibitions in 1900 and has been building its own collection for nearly 65 years. Ellen Sandor, Chair and Curator of the Art Institute of Chicago’s photography department, said, “In 2014 we celebrate our fortieth anniversary as a separate curatorial department and the fifth anniversary of our dedicated galleries in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing. Those two anniversaries represent continuity and change—both essential to our progress. We have spent three and a half years to assess our holdings, with a view to refining and diversifying the collection as well as better understanding the treasures that we possess. Proceeds from the sale will support future acquisitions, and we are grateful to Phillips for working with such care and consideration on this sale.”

The two sales will be complemented by an online selling exhibition in December. Highlights from the collection will go on view in New York, Chicago and London prior to the sales.

An exhibition titled At War with the Obvious: Photographs by William Eggleston is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. William Eggleston (b. 1939) became pioneering force in modern photography during the 1960s and helped legitimize color photography as a respected art form. He also popularized the dye-transfer color process, a practice that until then was primarily used by commercial photographers. Eggleston, who remains a prominent figure in the modern art world, draws inspiration from a number of sources including the photography of Robert Frank (b. 1924) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) as well as the musical compositions of Johann Bach.

A native of the Mississippi delta region, Eggleston’s photographs often depict the inhabitants as well as the physical landscape of the area. Drawn to seemingly ordinary subject matters, Eggleston is able to evoke a sense of complexity and raw beauty from the mundane. Often featuring roadside snapshots, backyard barbeques, parking lots, and diners, Eggleston’s photographs act as a lush interpretation of the American vernacular.

At War with the Obvious commemorates the Met’s acquisition of 36 dye-transfer prints by Eggleston, which took place in the fall of 2012. The addition fleshed out the museum’s Eggleston collection and included his first portfolio of color photographs from 1974, 15 prints from his seminal book, William Eggleston’s Guide (1976), and seven other important works from a career that has spanned over 50 years.

At War with the Obvious features a number of Eggleston’s most recognizable images including Untitled (Peaches!) (1970), Untitled (Greenwood, Mississippi) (1980), and Untitled (Memphis) (1970). The exhibition will be on view through July 28, 2013.

Treasures of the Alfred Stieglitz Center: Photographs from the Permanent Collection opened on December 22 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Drawing from the institution’s impressive permanent collection, the exhibition features rarely seen works by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884), and Charles Aubry (1803-1883). The show includes a selection of modern and contemporary works including pieces by Robert Frank (b. 1954) and Diane Arbus (1923-1971), visually tracing the history of photography and its evolution as a medium. There are also a number of recent acquisitions on view.

The core of the exhibition is a collection of works by Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), one of the foremost figures in twentieth-century American art, and his protégé, Dorothy Norman (1905-1997). The featured works were created during the years of their creative exchange, which spanned from 1929 until Stieglitz’s death in 1946. As a result of her close relationship with Stieglitz, Norman helped found the Alfred Stieglitz Center at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1968 when she donated her vast art collection to the institution.

Treasures of the Alfred Stieglitz Center will be on view through April 7, 2013.

The Vancouver Art Gallery received a generous donation of photographs including American photographer Robert Frank’s (b. 1924) historic work, Parade, Hoboken, New Jersey (1955) from his landmark series, The Americans. Other new acquisitions include photographs by Greg Girard (b. 1955), Rodney Graham (b. 1949), Aaron Siskind (1903-1991), and over 100 works by Canadian artist Charles Gagnon (1934-2003).

Gagnon, a prominent figure in Quebec’s art world, was a student of the work of Frank. The gift of 111 of his photographs was made possible by Gagnon’s estate. The works join an already substantial collection of the artist’s work at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which includes paintings and works on paper.

Andrew Gruft and Claudia Beck, art patrons who have made a number of generous donations to the Gallery over the years, are responsible for many of the most recent acquisitions including the Frank addition. Gruft and Beck were pivotal in the formation of the Gallery’s collection and helped make the museum one of the most notable institution’s for historical and modern photography.

A prophet in the wilderness of modernity, the photographer Robert Adams has devoted almost five decades to decrying what fecklessly industrious humans have done to the landscape of the American West.

“Robert Adams: The Place we Live,” a splendid retrospective exhibition of more than 250 prints dating from the 1960s to 2009 at the Yale University Art Gallery here, surveys an oeuvre that is as compelling for its understated style as for its moral ferocity. Accompanied by a beautiful three-volume catalog produced by Yale University Press in collaboration with Mr. Adams, the exhibition was organized by Joshua Chuang, the gallery’s assistant curator of photographs, and Jock Reynolds, its director.