Displaying items by tag: Edward Weston

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College announces a major gift of over 500 photographs from photographer, curator, and collector Jack Shear. 

Shear’s extensive donation serves as a visual history of photography from its inception in the 1840s to the present day. The collection chronicles different photographic processes, techniques, and artistic approaches from an early half-plate ambrotype of Niagara Falls to a Polaroid self-portrait by a young Robert Mapplethorpe. Historic works include important examples by photographic pioneers such as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.

“Bruce Davidson/Paul Caponigro: Two American Photographers in Britain and Ireland,” at the Yale Center for British Art, is a strange but memorable pairing. It joins the Magnum photojournalist Bruce Davidson, best known for his aggressive New York street and subway photography, to a spiritually minded landscape photographer in the mold of Ansel Adams and Minor White. And although its title suggests some shared expatriate experience, a split quickly develops.

The curators, perhaps acknowledging as much, divide the third-floor galleries neatly down the middle. At times, it seems as if Mr. Davidson and Mr. Caponigro are re-enacting a classic contest in 20th-century photography, a competition between the meticulously technical, landscape-driven Bay Area School of Adams and Edward Weston, and the spontaneous street photography of Mr. Davidson’s mentors, Cornell Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson (who is said to have remarked, “The world is falling to pieces, and all Adams and Weston photograph is rocks and trees.”)

A collection of 548 photographs taken by Edward Weston and printed posthumously by his son Cole Weston — the only person Weston authorized to print from his negatives — will be auctioned by Sotheby’s in New York on Sept. 30. The house is estimating that the prints, which are being sold in a single lot, may bring as much as $3 million.

Weston began his career as a photographer in the first decade of the 20th century and produced about 1,400 images over the next four decades. His best-known and most striking work includes stark black-and-white images, desert landscapes, nudes, and inanimate objects like trees, rocks and shells, which in his photographs often look like sculpture.

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.

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, announced that it will use a series of gifts totaling approximately $4 million to expand its photography initiatives. The museum, which is home to the most comprehensive photography program in the American Southeast, began acquiring photography in the early 1970s. The High’s holdings include American works from the 20th and 21st centuries, images made in and of the South, and the most significant grouping of vintage Civil Rights-era prints in the country. 

The most substantial gift has been promised by Donald Keough, the former president and CEO of The Coca-Cola Company, and his wife, Marilyn. The couple, who helped fund the museum’s 2005 expansion, will donate $2 million to endow a permanent curatorial position in photography and support ongoing photography programs and acquisitions at the institution. Lucinda W. Bunnen, an Atlanta-based photographer and avid collector, has donated an unspecified amount that will go to the establishment of a photography gallery. Bunnen is a longtime supporter of the High’s photography initiatives and previously donated prints by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Chuck Close, and Cindy Sherman to the museum. Paul Hagedorn, an Atlanta-based artist and supporter of the High since 2005, has donated $500,000 for acquisitions and the Yellowlees Family, also longtime supporters of the museum, have donated $400,000 for the acquisition of Southern photography.

Michael E. Shapiro, the High’s Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr. director, said, “These landmark gifts represent a transformational moment for photography at the High. Photography is our fastest growing area of collecting, research and programming, and these gifts will ensure that the High can continue our commitment to new scholarship and commissioning new works by living artists. We hope that these significant gifts inspire others to support our photography programs and the growth of our collection.”

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announced that in 2016, it will unveil its John and Lisa Pritzker Center for Photography. It will be the largest exhibition space for photography in the United States. The museum is in the midst of a considerable expansion, which is being helmed by Snøhetta, a firm with headquarters in Norway and New York. The $365 million project will double the size of the museum.

The Pritzker Center for Photography is being funded by a lead gift from philanthropists and photography collectors, John and Lisa Pritzker, as well as generous donations from four additional benefactors. The nearly 15,500-square-foot center will just about triple the current amount of space for photography at SFMOMA. In addition to increased exhibition space, the center will feature an upgraded photographic study center and an interpretive space that will be the first of its kind in the country.

SFMOMA’s photography holdings currently number some 17,000 objects -- its largest collection in any medium. The collection includes works by Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, and the finest holdings of Japanese photography outside Japan. SFMOMA’s photography collection will live on-site, divided between two state-of-the-art storage vault.

The museum’s director, Neal Benezra, said, ““The new center, together with the gifts to our collection, represent a transformative development for our photography program and for the entire museum. We are extremely grateful to our trustee Lisa Pritzker and her husband, John, and to our other supporters, whose vision and generosity will make SFMOMA a global destination for anyone with an interest in photography.”

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.

United States authorities have seized over 2,200 pieces of art by pioneering American photographers including Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) and Edward Weston (1886-1958). The works, which were sent from Texas to New Jersey last year, were relocated to a warehouse in New York in July 2012. Before they were seized, the works were supposed to be shipped to Spain where they would be exhibited in a private home.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Newark, New Jersey announced in a court filing that the works, which are valued at approximately $16 million, were purchased with funds from a scheme that sold fake credits for renewable energy. The leader of the ploy is Philip Rivkin, owner and CEO of the Houston-based company, Green Diesel. Rivkin is accused of using money fraudulently funneled through his business to buy the photographs. Rivkin has not yet been charged with a crime.

The seized artworks include multiple Stieglitz prints including one his wife, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), which was sold for $675,000 and an Edward Steichen (1879-1973) print titled Greta Garbo for Vanity Fair, which was purchased for $75,000. The court filing, which was announced on Friday, March 1, 2013, asks Rivkin to forfeit the works to U.S. authorities.

The Heckscher Museum of Art presents Edward Weston: Life Work on view May 7, 2011 – July 24, 2011.

Edward Weston: Life Work surveys the fifty-year career of a giant of twentieth-century photography. The photographs of Edward Weston (1886-1958) capture the rhythms, patterns and interconnections between nature and human experience. Whether exploring still life, the human face, the landscape or the nude, Weston’s goal was never a literal recording. His experiments with form and scale in still lifes of shells, peppers and radishes, his sculptural nudes, landscapes and dune studies, and his portraits of prominent artistic and literary figures sought to depict the subject “in its deepest moment of perception.”

Weston’s photographs are renowned for their sensuous print quality and for the rich black and white scale the photographer achieved during printing. Most of the works in this exhibition belonged to the Weston family, for whom the artist often reserved his choicest prints. All are vintage, produced by the artist shortly after he shot the image, and thus represent his original vision.

Edward Weston: Life Work is drawn from the significant private collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg, who consider Weston the “Picasso of photography.”

This exhibition is organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions.

June 18–October 2, 2011
Monterey Museum of Art, 720 Via Mirada, Monterey, CA
For information call 831.372.5477
or visit www.montereyart.org

Edward Weston is among the twentieth century’s most influential art photographers and widely respected for his many contributions to the field of photography. Along with Ansel Adams, Weston pioneered a modernist style characterized by the use of a large-format camera to create sharply focused and richly detailed black-and-white photographs.

The combination of Weston’s stark objectivity and his passionate love of nature and form gave his still lifes, portraits, landscapes, and nudes qualities that seemed particularly suited for expressing the new American lifestyle and aesthetic that emerged from California and the West between the two world wars.

This major exhibition of photographs, many vintage, will also include Weston’s original diaries or Daybooks and ephemera relating to his life and travels.