Exhibitions | 1999 | Fraenkel Gallery

Early Portraits

Erin Nelson — Thu, 13 Jul 2000 04:32:29 +0000

Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to announce its representation of RICHARD AVEDON with an exhibition of Early Portraits from the late 1940s through the early 1970s. Portraiture has always been at the core of Avedon’s work, and this exhibition re-examines, primarily through vintage prints, both well-known and entirely unfamiliar images that set the tone for much photographic portraiture of the late twentieth century.

Though enormously influential, Avedon’s commercial work has largely overshadowed the photographs he made for his own purposes:

Avedon has said that by doing work for the magazines “I created my own Guggenheim fellowship,” meaning that his commercial work subsidized his more personal projects.

Avedon’s personal projects have been many and varied, spanning the map of contemporary social history. Avedon’s studio has served as a site through which a vast number of the twentieth century’s most important historical figures have passed. Included in the exhibition will be portraits of Marcel Duchamp, Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol’s Factory, Dwight Eisenhower, Rudolf Nureyev, and Rose Mary Woods, among many others. Seen together, these photographs become testament to Avedon’s role as one of our era’s most vigilant and passionate observers.

Rose Mary Woods, Secretary, Washington D.C., 7/30/75, 1975

gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 inches (image & sheet) [25.4 x 20.3 cm]

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Fifteen Photographs

Erin Nelson — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 04:17:49 +0000

Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of rare vintage photographs by MAN RAY. These photographs, admired and studied by scholars for many decades, typify the revolutionary trends set by Man Ray and his fellow participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Stunning in their iconographic stature, these vintage prints map Man Ray’s artistic progress from 1921, when he first moved from New York to Paris, through the early 1930s, by which time he was a leader among the Surrealists. To study these photographs is to witness Man Ray’s uncanny ability to transform the ordinary into the fantastic.

Among the pieces on view during the exhibition will be the exceedingly rare large-format rayographs that Man Ray made at the beginning of his career as a serious artist. As a way of seeing, this autobiographically named technique challenged conceptions of the physical world and its translation into visual media. Of Man Ray’s style it is said:

Man Ray’s captivating rayograph of The Banjo is one such example displayed in the exhibition. Also included in the show is the rare and intimate view Self-Portrait in Studio, the imaging of the self inherent both in the artist’s physical presence and in that of two of his rayographs depicted on his studio walls.

Self-Portrait in Studio, 1925

gelatin silver print, 6-11/8 x 4-1/2 inches

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20Twenty: Anniversary Exhibition

Erin Nelson — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 21:37:09 +0000

In the fall of 1999, Fraenkel Gallery will celebrate its twentieth anniversary with a special exhibition entitled 20Twenty. Including works by sixty-eight photographers and spanning the history of the medium, the exhibition will focus on masterworks as well as entirely unknown photographs by anonymous practitioners. Artists include Arbus, Brassai, Cornell, Duchamp, Eggleston, Kertesz, LeWitt, Man Ray, Modotti, Rodchenko, Ruscha, Stieglitz, Strand, and Warhol, among many others.

Larmes de Verre (Glass Tears), 1933

gelatin silver print, 8-7/8 x 11-1/4 inches

Moving backward, forward, and sideways through the past 160 years, the works on view interweave in unexpected ways themes that photographers have addressed since the invention of the medium. The exhibition begins with Thomas Eakins’s rare platinum-print of The Swimming Hole (1883), an intensely subtle study of aspects of the human form. The image concentrates on a group of Eakins’s students on a field trip to Mill Creek, near Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and was used as a study for his painting of the same name at the Amon Carter Museum, Forth Worth.

Photography’s ability to imbue an object with metaphysical power is felt in Edward Weston’s unique platinum print of a woman’s back, Francis Frith’s view of the pyramids at Dashoor, and Brancusi’s heretofore unknown study of an orchid placed on a glass pedestal. The varying ways artists have used the medium as a tool for investigating aspects of the self are seen in Andy Warhol’s early photobooth self-portrait, the Countess of Castiglioni’s extravagantly formal studio display from 1860, and Florence Henri’s intense self-study in a mirror dated 1928. Photography’s innately surrealist aspects are vividly demonstrated in Hans Bellmer’s La Maitrailleuse en Etat de Grace (1937), a disturbing triptych in which the artist has isolated aspects of his well-known sculpture with white gouache, Eugene Atget’s study of a group of headless mannequins, and Diane Arbus’s vintage print of the Albino Sword Swallower at a Carnival, MD, from 1970.

The exhibition and book conclude with a suite of photographs that acknowledge photography’s absolute dependency on the eye itself, with Man Ray’s undisputed masterwork Glass Tears (1933), Walker Evans’s never-before-published portrait of Berenice Abbott, whose stare bores directly into the center of his camera’s lens, and John Gutmann’s 1939 fragment of a face, entitled Memory.

A 184-page hardcover catalog illustrating every work in 20Twenty is being published to accompany the exhibition. The book includes a complete exhibition history spanning the gallery’s first twenty years, and an afterword by Jeffrey Fraenkel.

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San Francisco Album (1854–1865)

Erin Nelson — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 04:43:13 +0000

Originally published in 1856 as photographs of the Most Beautiful Views and Public Buildings of San Francisco, G.R. Fardon’s San Francisco Album is the earliest existing photographic record of an American city and one of the earliest of any city in the world. The album is unmatched as a historical document of the city during the years of rapid growth, burgeoning prosperity and increasing density in the wake of the Gold Rush. Equally, the plates themselves are compelling aesthetic objects, surviving as some of the earliest photographs made on paper in the United States. Exhibited will be thirty salt prints dating from 1854-56, from an extraordinary example of the album acquired last year by Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York. Fardon’s detailed images depict among other subjects, a booming downtown, a rural South Park, the famous Merchant’s Exchange on Battery Street, Fort Vigilance, City Hall, as well as a four-part panorama of the city taken from atop Nob Hill.

View of North Beach, from Telegraph Hill, ca. 1856

salt print, 6-1/4 x 8-1/4 inches (image & sheet)

San Francisco Album: Photographs by George Robinson Fardon is the first serious, comprehensive look at the San Francisco Album as well as Fardon’s other known work, his life and artistic contributions. The Gundlach Album, highlighted here, takes its name from the family which held it in their collection for the last 140 years. It is one of only nine surviving albums and the only one not held in an institutional collection. San Francisco Album: Photographs by George Robinson Fardon is accompanied by a 176- page hardcover catalogue including critical essays by four distinguished scholars.

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Woman Thinking River

Erin Nelson — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 04:48:36 +0000

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Golden Gate

Erin Nelson — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 21:56:07 +0000

Begun in 1997, the project is yet another chapter in Misrach’s ever-growing thesis on the fundamental changes which humanity exacts on nature. Although a seemingly immutable structure, Misrach demonstrates how looking upon the Golden Gate Bridge is a constantly changing experience, resonant with the erratic complexity of the natural world. Each photograph evidences how light and weather alter one’s view. This fact is further highlighted by the consistent perspective Misrach takes in composing each shot. It is not the act of photographing which embellishes the day-to-day changes of this landscape, rather it is something beyond the control of the camera. Misrach takes the position of its steady transcriber.

Golden Gate, 10.31.98, 4:32 pm, 1998

pigment print, 20 x 24 inches (mount) [50.8 x 61 cm]

Golden Gate, 10.31.98, 5:22 pm, 1998

chromogenic color print, 20 x 24 inches

Golden Gate is tangent to Misrach’s earlier bodies of work, varying from depictions of cloudscapes to his celebrated photographs of the desert. As Misrach says of his larger photographic project:

Long considered one of the most significant and influential photographers working in color, Misrach’s work continues to embody his uncommon sensitivity to materials, light and atmosphere. His use of the cumbersome 8 x 10 inch view-camera fills the photographic print with dense and rewarding detail. Misrach has received numerous fellowships and awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Met with great acclaim, a recent exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art entitled Crimes and Splendors; the Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach chronicled much of his work to-date.

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The Man in the Crowd: The Uneasy Streets of Garry Winogrand

Erin Nelson — Tue, 13 Jul 1999 05:18:12 +0000

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