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| Guido Rey A Flemish Interior 1908 photogravure, published in Camera Work Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
"Guido Rey's adventures as a mountaineer led to his photographic career. In 1893, following several successful climbs and a book about his mountain-climbing experiences, he began to photograph mountain peaks, earning a silver medal from the Italian Alpine Club. He later went on to compose Greek and Roman classical compositions in the Pictorialist style, researching the Pompeii excavations and visiting the museums of Naples in order to insure accuracy in his depictions. Called "without a doubt the best Italian art photographer" by a contemporary, Rey began to make composite images based on Old Master painters, particularly the Dutch School style of Pieter de Hooch and Jan Vermeer. After Rey made a business trip to the United States, Alfred Stieglitz published his photographs in the influential journal Camera Work in 1908. Writing about the debate over the artistic merit of photography in 1902, Rey proclaimed: It would seem that in the end a breath of art had finally fallen on the much dishonored child of Daguerre . . . After a thousand trials, photography has acquired a new consciousness of the noble heights it might obtain, and it now seems near an ideal of beauty long since abandoned."
– curator's notes from the Getty Museum
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| Morton Schamberg Self-portrait ca. 1912 gelatin silver print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Charles Demuth In the Province (Roofs) 1920 watercolor Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Pablo Picasso Studio Corner 1921 tempera and gouache on paper Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
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| Pablo Picasso Still Life with Fish 1923 oil on canvas Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| John Singer Sargent Sketch for Perseus on Pegasus slaying Medusa ca. 1922-24 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| George Luks Noontime, St Botolph Street, Boston ca. 1923 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
"George Luks, a realist painter associated with Robert Henri and the Ashcan school, chose the crowded streets of New York City, and the urban and rural poor as his subjects. He is noted for his broadly-brushed paintings of miners, elderly women, immigrant children, and wrestlers. In a lesser-known chapter of his life, Luks painted more than a dozen oils and watercolors during an extended visit to Boston in 1922 and 1923. He was the guest of a former student, Margarett Sargent McKean, a cousin of John Singer Sargent and an aspiring artist. Margarett Sargent had been an apprentice to sculptor Gutzon Borglum in 1917, when she met Luks and began to study painting with him. By the late 1920s, she was painting strikingly modernist oils and began to exhibit her work at Kraushaar Galleries in New York."
"In 1922 Luks, fresh from a sanitarium where he was recovering from a bout with alcohol and recently divorced from his second wife, visited Sargent. By this time she was married to Quincy Adams Shaw McKean, a private banker in Boston. She later recalled that Luks had come to visit her for a weekend, but had stayed for almost a year. Not only did McKean provide living quarters for Luks, she also allowed him the use of her studio at 30 St. Botolph Street and organized an exhibition of his work in her summer house in Beverly, Massachusetts."
"McKean remembered that Luks disdained the Boston painters who remained in their prim studios painting hired nude models. He exclaimed, "Why didn't they look at Beacon Hill, Commonwealth Avenue, the Swan Boats, fruit vendors on Charles Street, the squalor of St. Botolph Street and the vigorous L Street Brownies?" Luks threw himself into painting these subjects in Boston. In Noontime, St. Botolph Street, Boston he depicted the scene outside Margarett's studio at midday when the shadows cast by the awnings were very pronounced against the old-fashioned bow-front facades of the buildings. These elliptical bays protruding from the structures on St. Botolph Street and elsewhere in the Back Bay and the South End were constructed beginning in the 1840s. They were peculiar to Boston and almost unknown in Luks's New York City. . . . In addition to painting the striped awnings against the yellow- and red-brick facades on St. Botolph Street, Luks also included an iceman carrying a block of ice with tongs . . ."
"Margarett Sargent McKean and her husband acquired many of Luks's Boston paintings, including Noontime, St. Botolph Street, Boston. In 1960 the Museum purchased two of Luks's Boston pictures."
– from notes by Janet Comey at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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| Kurt Schwitters Aphorism 1923 painted-paper and printed-paper collage Tate Gallery |
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| Charles Sheeler Vermont Landscape ca. 1924 watercolor Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Oscar Bluemner Somber and Hard 1927 gouache on paper Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
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| Pavel Tchelitchew Dancer Disrobing 1931 drawing Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Pavel Tchelitchew Set-design for 'Magic' 1936 gouache on board Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Karl Blossfeldt Nigella Damascena Spinnenkopf ca. 1932 gelatin silver print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"Karl Blossfeldt is best known for his precise photographs of plants; however, he began his career as a sculptor. . . . From 1898 to 1930 Blossfeldt taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin; during this time he amassed an archive of thousands of photographs of plants that he used as models to teach his students. Never formally trained in photography, Blossfeldt made many of his photographs with a camera that he altered to photograph plant surfaces with unprecedented magnification. His pictures achieved notoriety among the artistic avant-garde with the support of gallerist Karl Nierendorf, who mounted a solo show of the pictures paired with African sculptures at his gallery in 1926 and, subsequently, produced the first edition of Blossfeldt's monograph, Urformen der Kunst (Art forms in nature) in 1928. Following the enormous success of the book, Blossfeldt published a second volume of his plant pictures, titled Wundergarten der Natur (The magic garden of nature) in 1932. The clarity, precision, and apparent lack of mediation of his pictures, along with their presentation as analogues for essential forms in art and architecture, won him acclaim from the champions of New Vision photography."
– from notes by Mitra Abbaspour at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
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| Dante Ricci The Swiss Fountain, Rome before 1935 watercolor Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |