Vivian Maier: 1954, New York   ©Maloof Collection

ARTNews

Summer, 2012
Reviews, Santa Fe

Vivian Maier

Monroe Gallery of Photography

Among eccentric photographers of the 20th century, Vivian Maier stands out for her self-effacing reclusiveness. For much her life she worked as a nanny, and the tens of thousands of images she made remained unknown until a Chicago real-estate agent and amateur historian discovered them in 2007, less than two years before her death. Maier’s black and-white photos mostly depict street life in Chicago and New York, and bear comparison with the works of Helen Levitt, though Maier’s eye was more wide-ranging and her approach occasionally experimental, as when she ventured into pure abstraction in a manner reminiscent of Aaron Siskind. This show of images from the 1950s through the early ’70s offered a generous introduction to her remarkable output.
Like Levitt, Maier had an affection for children, capturing a small boy with one leg thrust forward, holding tight to a man, presumably his father, who adjusts the boy’s shoe. And like Weegee, she sometimes shot the seamier side of urban life, as in a photo of two men dragging another man down the street (Christmas Eve, 1953). But she was equally alert to the glamour of the city, paying homage to beautiful women in elegant hats and opulent furs. 

Some of the works here offered startlingly dramatic viewpoints: a man and woman, shot from above, hold hands across a restaurant table; a quartet of older women, pinned in a trapezoid of light, wait against a wall like characters in a Beckett play (1954, New York). Maier’s humorous side surfaced in an untitled image of a ragtag couple, the man standing on his head, in front of a poster for a strip joint. In another, Arbus-like shot, two men—one of them a stooping giant—inspect the goods in a shop window as a pair of curious women gape in amazement.

The show ended with a self-portrait of Maier, smiling wistfully, captured in the reflection of a mirror being unloaded in front of a drab apartment complex—as unassuming in art as she was in life.

By Ann Landi
 ©ARTnews



 

COMPOSING THE ARTIST EXHIBITION REVIEW IN ARTNEWS

Steve Schapiro: Rene Magritte, MOMA, New York, 1965

Composing The Artist
Monroe Gallery of Photography

via ARTnews
Summer, 2011 Issue
This exhibition of black-and-white photographic portraits felt like a series of encounters with some of the great writers and artists of the 20th century. Steve Schapiro’s images of René Magritte are striking for the way they seamlessly and surrealistically frame the painter in front of—and thereby illusionistically within—his own paintings. One almost expects to see words in careful cursive spelling out “This is not a Magritte” across the surface of the print, so convincingly do these images embody the self-reflective paradoxes for which the Belgian Surrealist is known.

Carl Mydans’s shot of Vladimir Nabokov leaning out a car window, looking at us with eyes that are somehow both piercing and laconic and a slight grin on his face, inspired a new level of appreciation for the writer’s prodigious wit and perverse intelligence. Iconic portraits of David Hockney, Picasso, and Warhol were also on view here, but coming face-to-face with William Faulkner was a rarer treat.

The gallery’s pairing of a Martha Holmes picture of Jackson Pollock pouring paint and an Ernst Haas image of Helen Frankenthaler caught in the same activity exposes the contrasting temperaments of the artists. Pollock crouches, cigarette dangling, flinging strands of pigment from a besmirched bucket with an expression of intensity, while Frankenthaler carefully bends at the waist to spill a quantity of paint from a parkling stainless-steel pail. She is deliberate, even delicate in her approach.

-- Jon Carver
Summer 2011

THE TOP 10 PHOTO COLLECTORS



The Top 10 Photo Collectors
ARTnews, March, 2011
by Milton Esterow


"It depends on who you talk to," a prominent curator of photography told me when I asked him to name the world's top ten photography collectors.


He was right. I asked 20 prominent dealers, auctioneers, collectors, museum directors, and curators. No one had the same list. A further survey produced a consensus, as well as comments on other major topics in the photography world.

"I have not seen anything like it," Sandra Phillips, curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, told a reporter recently. She was talking about Pier 24, a 28,000-square-foot gallery that was created last year by Andrew Pilara, a San Francisco investment banker, in an old warehouse in San Francisco that displays the collection of the Pilara Foundation, which he established. Pilara is on the list of Top Ten.

Pier 24 houses about 2,000 photographs, including works by Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Edward Burtynsky, Lee Friedlander, Robert Adams, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Dorothea Lange, Richard Misrach, and many others. Admission is free, and the space is open to the public Monday through Thursday by appointment only.

Pier 24 recently presented an exhibition of the collection of Randi and Bob Fisher, who are also on the Top Ten. Bob Fisher's parents founded Gap Inc. Among the artists in the show were Edward Weston, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, and Andreas Gursky. Other exhibitions are being planned for Pier 24.

Another topic being discussed is the increasingly global nature of the market, with great depth in France, England, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Russia, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

Unlike the contemporary art market, there is less speculation and less buying for investment with photography, according to several observers. Collectors are mainly buying because they experience the works and want to live with them.

Other observers point out that more and more collectors of contemporary art are collecting photography, including Eli Broad, who is on the ARTnews list of Top Ten art collectors and has bought many works by Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, among others. "Is Eli a photo collector? No," said one curator. "Does he have a lot of photos? Yes."

A photography auctioneer said, "We see more and more clients of other departments—Impressionist, modern, contemporary, and American painting —becoming interested in buying photography, whereas 15 years ago they would not."

The Top Ten for photography also includes Thomas Walther, who has been collecting photography for more than 30 years. In 2001 the Museum of Modern Art acquired—it was a partial gift, partial purchase—328 works by most of the leading European and American photographers of the 1920s and '30s. The list included Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Manuel Bravo, Paul Outerbridge, Berenice Abbott, and many others.

In 2000 the Metropolitan Museum presented the exhibition "Other Pictures: Vernacular Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection." Dating from the 1910s through the '60s, the photos were by anonymous amateurs and were discovered in flea markets, in shoeboxes, or in family albums.

"In the last ten years," Walther told me, "I have increasingly gone into the 19th century, with works by Gustave Le Gray, Linus Tripe, Henri Le Secq, Roger Fenton, Charles Marville, Francis Frith, William Fox Talbot, and many others."

Walther has acquired about 2,000 photographs.

"I pursue my collecting with the utmost passion," he said.

The Top Ten are listed in alphabetical order, and were selected based on how active they are rather than on the size or value of their collections.

Milton Esterow is editor and publisher of ARTnews



David Dechman
New York
WEALTH MANAGEMENT
20th century

Randi and Bob Fisher
San Francisco
APPAREL (GAP, INC.)
20th century; contemporary

Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla
New York
INHERITANCE; REAL-ESTATE DEVELOPMENT
20th century; contemporary

Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Los Angeles
ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT
20th century

Michael Jesselson
New York
WEALTH MANAGEMENT
20th century

Elton John
London; Atlanta
ENTERTAINMENT
20th century; contemporary

Andrew Pilara
San Francisco
INVESTMENT BANKING
20th century; contemporary

Lisa and John Pritzker
San Francisco
HOTELS AND INVESTMENTS
20th century; contemporary

Thomas Walther
Zurich
INHERITANCE (MACHINE-TOOL MANUFACTURING)
19th century; 20th century

Michael Wilson
London
FILM
19th century; 20th century


Related: LOEWS MAGAZINE: COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHY - If you don't think photography is worth collecting, you're missing the big picture

STEVE SCHAPIRO EXHIBITION REVIEW IN SUMMER ISSUE OF ARTNEWS

Steve Schapiro


Monroe Gallery of Photography

Titled "American Edge," this survey brought together 57 photographs taken primarily in the 1960s, highlighting Steve Schapiro's many iconic images from the apex of the civil rights movement. There is a cinematic quality to the handheld camera work featured in his slightly grainy black-and-white prints.

Steve Schapiro: Summer of 1964 Freedom Bus

Images like On the Road, Selma March, 1965 and Summer of 1964 Freedom Bus convey the restlessness of the time. Martin Luther King Jr's Motel Room Hours After He Was Shot, Memphis, Tennessee,1968 is particularly penetrating and mournful. The photograph shows an open suitcase on the floor next to a television set tuned to the local news. The TV announcer is frozen in time with a picture of King (and the dates 1929-1968) floating just above and to the right of his head.

Schapiro photographed many of the seminal political events of the decade, receiving his assignments through the legendary Black Star agency. which sent him to cover Robert F. Kennedy's successful 1964 run for the New York Senate seat.

Several candid and nostalgic photographs of the young senator were featured in the show.

A respected and sought-after portraitist, Schapiro also photographed numerous celebrities of the day, including Allen Ginsberg, Ray Charles, Andy Warhol, and Muhammad Ali. Yet, the photographs of RFK and MLK held real sway here. They have the emotional power and documentary immediacy to place us in the midst of those turbulent and crucial years. - Darius Himes

©ARTnews
SUMMER 2010

See the exhibit on-line here.