FLOWERS–
A couple of months ago I was invited to look over a small collection of stereo view of flowers. The person who showed it to me had arranged them on a table with the same care that someone would arrange an actual collection of flowers. She had placed a few viewers among them. There were some familiar views, of the kind usually passed over by collectors, and a few heart-stopping rarities, particularly a group of very early (1850’s) amateur hand-colored salted-paper prints. Presented all together, with such sensitivity and care, the group immediately illuminated the charming nature of this collection. Even familiar views, those typically passed-over by “advanced” collectors [I’m glad at last to have a chance to deride this concept,] glowed in the radiance of the collection as a whole.
These were among the personal remains of the fabled collection of Sam Wagstaff. He had left them with his personal materials to his intimate friend Robert Mapplethorpe. Wagstaff’s collection, as is well known, included numerous masterpieces from the history of photography. I could imagine them looking through these very viewers at these views, some surely picked up at the most mundane venues, some sent to him at his request from amateur photographers from distant places, a testament to his effort to acquire them. I wondered how this shared interest in photographed floral subjects influenced Mapplethorpe to produce his own photographs of flowers that are among his most admired works.
HANDS —
Given that my son is named HAND and “Hand” is an element behind the name “Be-hold,” my interest in the “Speaking with Hands” exhibition, selections from the Buhl Collection at the Guggenheim, was intense. Maybe because of this longstanding deeply personal involvement with this very rich subject, I came away stimulated, troubled, bothered – I’m far from being through with this.
Wow! This was just a small selection of the 1000 photographs in the collection gathered over a 10-year period. It filled several large exhibition spaces on several floors of the Annex of this great museum. The grateful acknowledgement to private dealers and auction houses could scarcely match the gratitude those dealers must have felt to this powerhouse collector. The fact that the motivation was so sincere, and so intimately thematically connected with Buhl’s great humanitarian work, makes it tough not to respond in a totally awe-struck manner.
But somehow this didn’t challenge me to think more deeply about hands in art. I can just think back to Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel “God creating Adam,” or Duerer, or even further back to ancient Egyptian friezes. One should be careful not to add to the inflation of historical significance attributed to photography. Art and culture didn’t begin with photography.
The strained academic references in the (yet beautiful and stimulating) catalog to the “B”s– Benjamin, Baudrillard, Barthes—reminded me that the academic/theory/critical world has hardly begun to appropriately deal with photography as it has “emerged” into the world of fine art since 1970. (It had, of course, been there right from its beginning but had not received general marketplace or academic acceptance.)
This exhibition hasn’t made me think more about hands, but about collections. And also “selections.” There are collections that are sold at auction, and then disbursed into different configurations. And there are collections that are sold or donated to institutions, where they are re-configured as the particular context dictates. There are museum shows that are “curated” from material in many private and institutional collections; after the show the objects return to their “home” collection. Some exhibitions are revisionist, making us see familiar works from a new perspective. Others just give us a chance to see a great range of otherwise unfamiliar works.
It is often proposed that a great collection must be a focused collection, but I’m wondering, given the resources devoted to a collection such as this, what if these resources were applied to a general collection of some of the best that became available during this 10 year period, following the whims and sensitivity of the collector? A differently curated exhibition might have been even more inspiring, and would leave the spectators more freedom to make their own discoveries, rather than lead them into over-determined concepts.
It must have been quite a thrilling adventure to find and add unexpected material to the collection. But on the other hand a collection formed just by careful but intuitive selection, without “focus,” would start to open unexpected pathways to the collector as well as to those who could view the collection.
That’s what troubled me: it’s difficult to escape lessons that are implied by the choices and the arrangement. There are so many large objects (in physical size or “import,”) it’s hard for any of them to escape the ruling concept. The collection has maintained a very high level of quality, but still….
WESTON –
As the themes of this Newsletter began to take shape, I decided to ask my Westchester County near neighbor Michael Mattis if he would write something about the great collection of Edward Weston photographs he and his wife Judy (Judith G. Hochberg) had assembled over many years. I learned they had just written separate introductions to a book, “Edward Weston: Life Work,” about to be published in connection with a major traveling exhibition of prints from their collection. Michael sent me an advance copy of the prefaces. They are so absorbing and relevant that, with his permission, I’d like to share some of what they contain.
Both collectors weave their personal lives as a couple, their careers, their collecting in general, with the evolution of their involvement with Weston’s work.
For Judy, “Learning to live with fine art was… part of the process of falling in love with my husband.” It was part of their different though intertwined childhoods, and the beginning of their relationship in High School. There were many personal links that developed between the collectors and the photographer, for example those of place – California, Chicago, New Mexico, New York. But this is not a sentimental account, but one based on profound appreciation for the subtleties of Weston’s art. Judy shows how the appreciation for Weston’s printing grew out of their previous collector interest in early European salt and albumen prints:
“Just as the grainy paper negative and salt print surface of an 1850’s architectural picture accentuates the coarseness of ancient stonework, so too the Pictorialist blurriness of an early studio-period Weston matches the softness of a bridal veil… or a summer’s haze…. Likewise, only the detail afforded by the silver chloride contact print of a later Weston can do justice to the luminescence of the subject’s surface, be it the skin of a pepper…, a stretch of sand…, or the legs of a dancer.”
The linking of her life to Weston’s is connected to his own values:
“Weston’s devotion to portraiture is an additional factor in the personal appeal he holds for me. Portraiture was his touchstone; it was the one genre that he kept up over his multifaceted four-decade career. ‘I am about through with the trees and rocks of Point Lobos for the time, nor do the vegetables or still-life indoors excite me,’ he writes at one point in the Daybooks; ‘I feel like turning to portraits for a while.’ Like a handful of other photographers…. he immortalized his circle of friends, family, and artistic colleagues with compassion and personal insight. In this way Weston seems to have opened his life to us through his art, inspiring us to open our lives to him.”
Michael, on the other hand, starts from his career as a theoretical physicist. “I have long felt that the reductivist approach of my field finds a pleasing visual counterpart in the extraordinary series of still lifes that Weston undertook over an obsessive four-year stretch starting immediately upon his return from Mexico to California in 1927…. In fact, I think of Edward Weston’s peppers, cabbages, and shells as ‘elementary particles of photography’: essential forms that, when examined closely, reveal themselves as elemental building blocks of the natural world.”
Michael’s discussion of theoretical physics in relation to Weston’s photographs illuminates both subjects, and should be read in its entirety. And he finds some affinity between Weston’s work and his own passion as a collector:
“Reading through the Daybooks.… I am constantly struck by the degree to which he brings a scientist’s single-mindedness and seriousness of purpose to every new project. How long and mightily does he struggle with his bell peppers! ‘I must have much of the scientist in me,’ he observes. If there is something slightly obsessive-seeming about Weston’s path to discovery, well, truth to say, that too resonates on a personal level, and here I speak not just as a physicist—for obsession is the hallmark of a true collector.”
Michael goes on to discuss some of the particulars of his collecting obsession, sharing sometimes amusing, revealing anecdotes about the acquisition of certain prints. The collection includes examples from “the full arc of Weston’s life work.” Furthermore, a large number of the works have a provenance that ties them directly to the maker— many coming directly from Dody Weston Thompson, the artist’s last live-in assistant and later Brett’s wife, as well as from Cole Weston, and Cole’s daughter Erica (who happened to be their neighbor in Santa Fe.)
It struck me as particularly revealing that both Judy and Michael create a real as well as subjective parallel between the “full arc” of Weston’s life and work and their own, finding points of correspondence between lives that are, in other respects, quite different. This gets at some deep essence of art. I realize that an even more deep yet insubstantial “collection” than that of bird-watching (see Newsletter No. 8 and 8a) is that of the books we may read of a certain author, or paintings of certain artist we may see over time in our travels. This is what draws us to read biographies of artists. Somehow they touch us so deeply that we feel some personal connection with the artists often over a long period of our own lives. With photography or visual art sometimes this can be represented by a group of postcards purchased in museum shops. In some cases these can have deep meaning for the “collector” though little for anyone else. (In that sense this has to do with an essential aspect of photography, as our family photographs and images from our travels can also provide a “collection” of deep private meaning—but only as “deep” as the individual is able to venture.)
It is very rare that collectors, as here, are able to actually seek out and acquire a collection of master works of a great artist that touch on their own lives, and make them available to touch others in various ways as well.