The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens has acquired a rare, intact Carleton Watkins album of the Sunny Slope farm and distillery. The album, which dates to the 1880s, includes 27 circular photographs that measure five inches in diameter on six-and-a-half-inch-square paper. Intact Watkins albums are rare, and a number of albums have been broken up in recent years. The Huntington album seems to be the only known intact album of Watkins’ circular prints.
“It’s so unusual, so rare,” Huntington photography curator Jennifer Watts said. “Basically through neglect there may be some Watkins albums that are still out there. I can’t think of another album like this that I’ve seen. There’s certainly never been an example here going back many decades.”
The album was just acquired for the Huntington Library by its photography curator, Watkins expert Jennifer A. Watts. In December, 2011, Watts came on Episode No. 8 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast to talk with Green about the last major event in Watkins scholarship: The publishing of a catalogue raisonne of Watkins’ mammoth-plate prints.
Read more: Today on Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green tells the story behind this album and details some of the reasons the pictures are fantastic.
Hear from Watts: Download Episode No. 8 of The MAN Podcast to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. See images of works discussed on the show.
On the second segment of this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast, Katherine Siegwarth discusses her new Amon Carter Museum exhibition “Big Pictures.” The exhibition goes back to the 1860s to demonstrate that size in photography pre-dates the ‘Big Germans’ and that photographers have almost always wanted to make their prints bigger. It opens on March 5 and runs through April 21. Siegwarth is the Carter’s Luce Curatorial Fellow for Photographs.
This is a 1864 Charles Leander Weed from the Amon Carter’s collection: The Vernal Fall, 350 Feet High. Yo-semite Valley, Mariposa County, Cal. Back in 1859, Weed had became the first photographer to visit Yosemite. While there, he took a series of 10-inch-by-14-inch pictures.
In 1861, Carleton Watkins became the second photographer to travel into Yosemite. Watkins’ pictures weight in at about 22-inches-by-18-inches, almost three times the size of Weed’s pictures, a factor that helped them become world-famous.
Sometime between Watkins’ first visit to Yosemite and 1864, Weed got himself a bigger camera and went back to the valley. This is one of the pictures he took on that later trip.
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This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Emmet Gowin and Frank Gohlke. Their photographs taken after the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens are on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the exhibition “American Vesuvius: The Aftermath of Mount Saint Helens by Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin.” The show opens Sunday and is on view through May 12.
On May 18, 1980 Mount Saint Helens erupted with a force equivalent to 1,600 of the atomic bombs that decimated Hiroshima, Japan. The eruption killed nearly sixty people and destroyed or damaged over 60,000 acres of wilderness.
This is a detail from one of Gohlke’s 1982 pictures of the area near Mount Saint Helens. It’s one of several pictures in which Gohlke presents a dramtically tilted landscape, a la Timothy O’Sullivan. On this week’s MAN Podcast, I asked Gohlke if he was consciously dipping into O’Sullivan’s bag of tricks, or if he was reflexively responding to the landscape he was in.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. To see dozens of images of the works discussed on this week’s program, visit Modern Art Notes.
Image: Frank Gohlke, Looking SW across Blowdown toward Valley of South Toutle River, 8 miles NW of Mount St. Helens, Washington (detail), 1982. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Emmet Gowin and Frank Gohlke. Their photographs taken after the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens are on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the exhibition “American Vesuvius: The Aftermath of Mount Saint Helens by Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin.” The show opens Sunday and is on view through May 12.
On May 18, 1980 Mount Saint Helens erupted with a force equivalent to 1,600 of the atomic bombs that decimated Hiroshima, Japan. The eruption killed nearly sixty people and destroyed or damaged over 60,000 acres of wilderness.
In many of his pictures from Mount Saint Helens, Emmet Gowin engages the long history of abstraction in photography. See a larger version of the picture here.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. To see dozens of images of the works discussed on this week’s program, visit Modern Art Notes.
Image: Emmet Gowin, Ash Over New Snow, the South Flank of Mount Saint Helens, 1983.
In the wake of the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980, Frank Gohlke made five trips to what was left of the mountain and the surrounding area. On each trip (in 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1990) he took the same picture of the confluence of Pine Creek and the Lewis River. Each picture (which I’ve stacked above) is in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Click on the year above to see that year’s picture at 2000 pixels wide.
Gohlke’s pictures don’t show only the impact of the volcano’s eruption, though the rapid push of ash through the area is evident in the first picture of the series: the gushing ashflow is what stripped the fallen tree of its bark some 30 feet up the tree, eventually toppling it. The pictures also show the forest being logged roughly concurrent with the eruption and its aftermath: The river bank in the second picture shows the remnants of a clear-cut, and in the fourth and fifth pictures you can see uniformly planted seedlings filling in.
Gohlke and I talked about this series of pictures at length on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast, which also features artist Emmet Gowin. Their photographs taken after the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens are on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the exhibition “American Vesuvius: The Aftermath of Mount Saint Helens by Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin.” The show is on view through May 12.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. To see dozens of images of the works discussed on this week’s program, visit Modern Art Notes.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Emmet Gowin and Frank Gohlke. Their photographs taken after the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens are on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the exhibition “American Vesuvius: The Aftermath of Mount Saint Helens by Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin.” The show opens Sunday and is on view through May 12.
On May 18, 1980 Mount Saint Helens erupted with a force equivalent to 1,600 of the atomic bombs that decimated Hiroshima, Japan. The eruption killed nearly sixty people and destroyed or damaged over 60,000 acres of wilderness. Ash from the eruption was deposited on at least 11 states. In the months after the eruption, both Gowin and Gohlke traveled to Mount Saint Helens and gained access to the blast zone. Both men expected to photograph the power of the blast, but once their they both found that other components of the Mount Saint Helens story interested them as well.
Gowin first came to prominence in the 1970s with a series of pictures he took of his wife and family in southern Virginia. Later, and notably after his Mount Saint Helens pictures, he would turn his interest to the impact man has had on the American West. Gowin took to the air to photograph man-altered landscapes such as the Hanford Site, a mostly decommissioned nuclear production facility and Cold War test sites in Nevada. He’s been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions including in 1990 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Between 2002 and 2004 the Yale University Art Gallery organized “Changing the Earth” an exceptional show that examined Gowin’s interest in the ways Americans have massively changed the land.
Gohlke has long had an intense interest in the American landscape and in the relationship people have with place. His pictures have demonstrated the impact of massive forces on the landscape – he photographed the aftermath of a massively destructive tornado in Wichita Falls, Texas in 1979 and of course Mount Saint Helens – but his work has also examined our presence in quieter landscapes, such as the grain elevators in the upper Midwest. In 2005 the Museum of Modern Art and curator Peter Galassi devoted an exhibition to his Mount Saint Helens photographs.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device or to listen in your browser, click here. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. To see dozens of images of the works discussed on this week’s program, visit Modern Art Notes.
Image: Emmet Gowin, Spirit Lake and Mount Saint Helens, 1983.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features two new exhibitions that look at American art and the Civil War.
The second guest is Huntington curator Jennifer Watts, who tells us about “A Strange And Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning and Memory in the American Civil War,” her new exhibition of more than 200 pictures and other objects from the Huntington’s famed Civil War-related collections. This picture, of shallow graves barely covered by earth, is by Andrew J. Russell. It’s of Alexandria National Cemetery, the Union burial ground in Alexandria, Va., near where Arlington National Cemetery is now. Many of them are available in zoomable high-res on the Huntington’s exhibition website.
This week’s program also features “The Civil War and American Art,” which opens today at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey reveals how artists such as Winslow Homer, Sanford Gifford and Frederic Church, responded to the war in their work. The show’s catalogue, published by Yale University Press, is a smart, strikingly exciting page-turner, the best book about American art I’ve read all year.
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Image: Andrew J. Russell, Soldiers’ Burying Ground, Alexandria, Va., May 1863 (detail), 1863. Collection of The Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features the new Museum of Fine Arts Houston exhibition “War Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath.” Anne Wilkes Tucker, the show’s co-curator (along with MFAH’s Will Michaels and Natalie Zelt) joins me to discuss the exhibition and the related 600-page book from the MFAH and the Yale University Press.
The show, which opens this weekend and runs through February 3, includes almost 500 objects, images by more than 280 photographers on six continents, all of it covering 165 years of war. The exhibition and catalogue are presented thematically, with sections on war-related topics such as recruitment, training, daily routine, patrol, the wait, the fight itself, leisure time and more.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See more images discussed on this week’s show. Also, check out — and ‘like’ — our new Facebook page!
Image: Herbert Baldwin, Charles Bean, France (detail), ca. 1916-17. Collection of the Australian War Memorial.
If you want to show people Clyfford Stills online, there’s really only one place to go: SFMOMA’s website. (The Met’s site is down and its Stills are mediocre, the Albright-Knox’s dozens of Stills are reduced to tiny JPEGs and the Hirshhorn’s collection site is unusable even when it’s usable. And it’s been down for days.)
One of SFMOMA’s best Stills is a painting that illustrates something abstract expressionism and Still expert David Anfam and I talked about on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast: The way Still worked through the figure on the way to abstraction. This untitled 1945 Still (above, detail) was once called Self-Portrait, and features a vaguely figurative shape on the left (this JPEG shows the ‘head’ in the upper-left of the painting) and a palette and what seems like an abstraction of the artist’s hand on the right. Until Anfam’s most recent research, it was the most important, most widely known example of Still moving from the figure toward abstraction.
Anfam is the first guest on this week’s show. In recent years Anfam has been working with the Still Museum on its collections and installations. He is also the author of the catalogue raisonnes of Mark Rothko’s paintings and Conrad Marca-Relli. The museum has also just published “Clyfford Still: The Artist’s Museum,” which features a major essay by Anfam on Still’s life and work. (Amazon offers the book for $25 off.)
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
The second guest on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast is curator/historian Mia Fineman, who talks about her new Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Faking It: Manipulating Photography Before Photoshop.”
The show goes back to nearly the beginning of photography to reveal how artists have been manipulating their pictures since nearly the start of photography. (You can see a JPEG of just about every picture in the exhibition here, or you will be able to once the Met’s website is back online. In the wake of Sandy, it’s down.) The exhibition is accompanied by one of the best art history books of the season. It’s published by the Met and is distributed by the Yale University Press. It’s also almost $25 off via Amazon.
This is a detail from Henry Peach Robinson’s Fading Away (1858), a composite from five separate negatives built into a picture of family tragedy. Many of Robinson’s contemporaries lambasted his technique once he revealed it, but 150 years hence they’re now a staple of advertisements, movie posters and the like.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
Image: Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away (detail), 1858. The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media Museum, Bradford, UK.
The second guest on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast is curator/historian Mia Fineman, who talks about her new Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Faking It: Manipulating Photography Before Photoshop.”
The show goes back to nearly the beginning of photography to reveal how artists have been manipulating their pictures since nearly the start of photography. (You can see a JPEG of just about every picture in the exhibition here.) The exhibition is accompanied by one of the best art history books of the season. It’s published by the Met and is distributed by the Yale University Press. It’s also almost $25 off via Amazon.
One of the topics Fineman and I discuss is the dialogue between photographers and artists who were already manipulating everything they saw: Painters. Here’s an example of French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec posing for photographer Maurice Guibert — who made him both the artist and the artist’s subject!
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
Image: Maurice Guibert, Untitled [Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as Artist and Model] (detail), ca. 1890. Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art via Wikipedia Commons.
On Modern Art Notes: Considering the GOP’s latest night of racist stereotyping (with some help from Carrie Mae Weems).
Image: Carrie Mae Weems, Black Man Holding Watermelon from “Ain’t Jokin’”, 1987-88.
It’s a full day of Brady on Cave to Canvas. Lots of remarkable pictures!
Mathew Brady, Bull Run, Virginia, c. 1860-65
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Carrie Mae Weems. A new retrospective exhibition of Weems’s work titled, “Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video,” opened last week at Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts.
Among the works Weems and I talked about was her 2001 meditation on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, including how Weems became interested in exploring their story and whether she’s had her own DNA/genealogy studied. (Short answer: Look for it soon on PBS!) See the entire arc of “The Jefferson Suite” here.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See more images of artworks discussed on the program.
Image: Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (detail) from The Jefferson Suite, 2001. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. See the entire series of 33 prints on Weems’s own website.
Child labor still exists in many countries around the world. In India, the government has proposed new legislation that it says will address the country’s child labor problem, Amy Kazmin reported in The Washington Post last week.
“Cotton-Mill Worker, North Carolina,” 1908, Lewis W. Hine, The J. Paul Getty Museum
