Modern Personalities on Film (1905-1977)

Gertrude Käsebier
Miss Dix
ca. 1905
platinum print
Art Institute of Chicago

August Sander
The Painter Otto Dix and his wife Martha
1925-26
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Brassaï
Crosswalk on the Rue de Rivoli
1937
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Irving Penn
Ballet Theatre, New York
1948
platinum palladium print
Art Institute of Chicago

Bruce Davidson
Boy and Girl at Cigarette Vending Machine
1959
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Bruce Davidson
Slumber Party
1959
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

from Upon being Asked by a Reader 
whether the Verses contained in this Book were True

And is it True? It is not True.
And if it were it wouldn't do,
For people such as me and you
Who pretty nearly all day long
Are doing something rather wrong.
Because if things were really so,
You would have perished long ago,
And I would not have lived to write
The noble lines that meet your sight . . .

– Hilaire Belloc (1923)

Irving Penn
Frederick Kiesler & Willem de Kooning
1960
platinum palladium print
Art Institute of Chicago

Duane Michals
Two Circus Performers, Paris
1962
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Duane Michals
Ray Barry
1963 and 1977
gelatin silver prints
Art Institute of Chicago

Duane Michals
René Magritte
1965
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Duane Michals
Kim Novak
1967
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Duane Michals
Warren Beatty
1967
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Duane Michals
Death comes to the Old Lady
1969
gelatin silver prints
Art Institute of Chicago

On a Sleeping Friend

Lady, when your lovely head
Droops to sink among the Dead,
And the quiet places keep
You that so divinely sleep;
Then the dead shall blessèd be
With a new solemnity,
For such Beauty, so descending,
Pledges them that Death is ending.
Sleep your fill – but when you wake
Dawn shall over Lethe break.

– Hilaire Belloc (1923)

Joel Snyder
Untitled
1971
platinum print
Art Institute of Chicago

Photography, Artistic (20th century) - Selections, part I

Heinrich Kühn
Lotte
1907
autochrome
Art Institute of Chicago

attributed to Frank Eugene
Emmeline Stieglitz
1907
autochrome
Art Institute of Chicago

Alfred Stieglitz
Frank Eugene seated at table
1907
autochrome
Art Institute of Chicago

W. Edwin Gledhill
Carolyn Even Gledhill
1910
chromogenic print
Art Institute of Chicago

André Kertész
Paris - Place de la Concorde
1925
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

A History of Photography

Prodigies flooded the market – the magnetic corset,
The one-twist tooth extractor, the camera.
At the exhibitions only the occasional
Yokel, up from the south, gaped in disbelief.

The church was not in principle opposed
To such a machine. Baudelaire granted its
Historical worth. Now, great-grandparents
Could be scrutinized, lost courtyards found,

Scenic postcards sent. Not great things,
But something, nonetheless. A few professors
Hoped that the arrested moment might explain
To men mutability's shrewd devices.

Times would become richer, the human race
More meditative. Albums accumulated;
Robbers were apprehended by alert,
Newspaper-scanning citizens; rhetoric fizzled.

A sprinkling of adventuresome sons became
Photographers, another sort of profession,
Self-taught and self-employed. "I am not
A mechanic," more than one was forced to shout.

Reality, like a dumb beast, yawned.
You saw them with their apparatuses
Roaming the quays, the moors, the poor quarters,
The parliaments. There could be, the wits

Explained, no events without photographers.
Still, who could argue with modern life;
And for every locomotive there was
Relief to be found in some melancholic stroller,

Some Sunday morning wedding, some frolicsome
Roué. No photographer (the
Psychologists noted) had ever despaired
Although a few had to be artists and speak

Of subtleties that embarrassed the unimproved
Eye. Yet everyone agreed even they
Were honest sorts, content to display their illuminations
On walls, content to lap up the world like so many

Warm-tongued cats. Mom smiled, Dad winked, the camera
Whose omnipotence the reviewers found "refreshing" blinked.

– Baron Wormser (1981)

André Kertész
Paris - Café du Dome
1925
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Lotte Stam-Beese
Portrait of Lis Beyer-Volger (at the Bauhaus)
ca. 1927
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

André Kertész
Paris - Actress Jacquie Monier in the Bois de Boulogne
1929
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

James Thrall Soby
Untitled
ca. 1930
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

André Kertész
Paris - chez Kisling
1933
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Domenico Riccardo Peretti Griva
La Gabbietta
ca. 1933
bromoil transfer print
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Béla Kalman
Untitled
1935
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Richard Nickel
Untitled (Allegheny County Courthouse)
1950
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Werner Bischof
Priests of the Modern Neiji Temple
1951
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Jacques Blanchard (1600-1638)

Jacques Blanchard
Virgin and Child with St Elizabeth and St John the Baptist
ca. 1628-29
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Jacques Blanchard
Charity
ca. 1634-35
oil on canvas
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

Jacques Blanchard
Charity
ca. 1636-37
oil on canvas
Toledo Museum of Art (Ohio)

Jacques Blanchard
Medor and Angelica
ca. 1630-35
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Jacques Blanchard
St Sebastian succoured by St Irene and Attendants
ca. 1630-38
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jacques Blanchard
Venus and Nymphs surprised by a Mortal
ca. 1631-33
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

"Jacques Blanchard was born in 1600 and was brought up, presumably in the Late Mannerist tradition, by his uncle, the painter Nicolas Bollery.  In 1620 he went to Lyons, where he worked for a time under Horace Le Blanc, and in 1624 attained what was no doubt his original goal, Rome.  Here he stayed for eighteen months, and in 1626 moved to Venice, where he spent two years, mainly studying Veronese.  About 1628 he returned to Paris, stopping on the way to carry out commissions in Turin and Lyons.  In the remaining years till his death in 1638 he seems to have achieved a success in painting small religious and mythological subjects, though he also undertook the decoration of a gallery for [Claude de] Bullion, in whose house [Simon] Vouet was also working."

"The dominant influence on Blanchard's formation was certainly the painting he saw in Venice.  For his figure types he looked at the followers of the Carracci, but in colour he was inspired by Veronese, whose cool tones and silvery lights he imitated more successfully than Vouet.  On his return to Paris he was probably influenced, both in his colour and in his figure drawing, by the works of [Orazio] Gentileschi in the Luxembourg.  He seems to have specialized in painting such subjects as Charity, of which many different versions exist [two of them above], all showing the particular type of rather delicate sentiment which appears in almost all his work.  In this painting the influence of Veronese is visible not only in the light and colour, but also in the architectural background and in the clear building-up of the group.  In other probably earlier paintings, such as the Medor and Angelica in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, he is more Mannerist, borrowing his compositional method from Tintoretto and his treatment of trees from Paul Bril.  In yet other paintings, notably Venus and Nymphs surprised by a Mortal in the Louvre, his model is evidently Rubens, whose late nudes he must have known.  It would be wrong, however, to think of Blanchard as a mere eclectic, for out of his borrowings he composed a style of his own which makes him one of the most attractive painters of his generation.  He was less ambitious than Vouet, but his small, rather intimate canvases have a delicacy lacking in the great decorator."  

– Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700, originally published by Anthony Blunt in 1953, revised by Richard Beresford and published by Yale University Press in 1999

attributed to Jacques Blanchard
The Flagellation
before 1638
oil on canvas
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Jacques Blanchard
Venus and Adonis
before 1638
oil on canvas
private collection

Jacques Blanchard
Mars and the Vestal Virgin
1638
oil on canvas
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Jacques Blanchard
Danaë
ca. 1630-33
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyons

Jacques Blanchard
Penitent Magdalen
1637
oil on canvas
Musée Fabre, Montpellier

Jacques Blanchard
St Cecilia
before 1638
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Jacques Blanchard
Descent of the Holy Spirit
(commissioned for the Mays exhibition)
1634
oil on canvas
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris

The Mays were a series of paintings in 17th- and early 18th-century Paris. The goldsmiths' guild sponsored the works, annually commissioning a religious painting from a favored artist and specifying that it be offered to the Cathedral of Notre Dame and exhibited there in early May. The tradition began in 1630 and continued with only minor interruptions until 1707.

Jacques Blanchard
Armida
before 1638
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes

Painted Scenes and Figures from the Nineteenth Century

Jean Béraud
Sunday at the Church of Saint Philippe du Roule, Paris
1877
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"When this painting was exhibited in the Salon of 1877 it was seen as a document of contemporary Parisian life.  Béraud depicts a view of the rue du Faubourg St-Honoré, which had recently become a fashionable shopping street.  The church was designed in the eighteenth century by the architect J.F. Chalgrin."

– curator's notes from the Metropolitan Museum

Samuel Butler
Mr Heatherley's Holiday - An Incident in Studio Life
1874
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"It was Heatherley's that set me wrong.  This is Butler's largest and most successful painting.  It satirises the dusty, macabre jumble out of which 'grand style' Victorian classicism was expected to arise.  Heatherley's art school in Newman Street, which Butler attended for a number of years, was run by the old man shown here, who famously never took a holiday.  His mending of a skeleton misused by students pinpoints Butler's rejection of academicism."

– curator's notes from Tate Gallery

Charles Chaplin
Young Girl Drawing
ca. 1860-66
oil on panel
Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham

"Chaplin rarely used dark colours, preferring to apply a standard palette of pastel shades of pink, blue and yellow.  His fondness for these shades accentuates his almost transparent flesh tones.  His contemporaries praised his handling of lavish fabrics, paying tribute to his life-like portrayal of satins, gauzes and taffetas." 

– curator's notes from the Bowes Museum

Thomas Eakins
Between Rounds
1898-99
oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art

"Most of Eakins's paintings after 1886 were portraits, but he returned to sporting subjects in the late 1890s with a series that he began after attending professional boxing matches at the Philadelphia Arena (then located at the intersection of Broad and Cherry Streets, diagonally across from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts).  The resulting canvases were as revolutionary in their subject matter as his rowing scenes had been more than two decades earlier."

– curator's notes from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Thomas Eakins
Billy Smith - Sketch for Between Rounds
ca. 1898
oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art

"Eakins fastidiously planned Between Rounds.  Susan Macdowell Eakins later recalled, 'In Between Rounds every person in the picture posed for him.  The interior was the Hall used by the fighters.'  Although the painting does not depict a specific bout, Eakins combined details from several to give it verisimilitude and worked diligently to capture the atmospheric effects of dust and smoke in the arena."

 – curator's notes from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

circle of Théodore Géricault
Portrait of a Young Man
ca. 1822-23
oil on canvas
Harvard Art Museums

Acquired in the 1940s by the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, at a time when the painting was still erroneously believed to be a Géricault self-portrait.

William Michael Harnett
Still Life with Bric-a-Brac
1878
oil on canvas
Harvard Art Museums

"This painting portrays a group of exotic objects from the collection of William Hazleton Folwell, the Philadelphia dry-goods importer who commissioned the work.  Comprising genuine antiques, contemporary ceramics, and modern replicas, Folwell's collection reflects the eclecticism of Victorian taste and the influence of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition held in 1876.  This international fair introduced Americans to objects form around the world and sparked widespread interest in collecting exotica."

– curator's notes from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Antonio Mancini
St John the Baptist
ca. 1890-95
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"Provenance: Until 1920, Mary Smyth (Mrs. Charles) Hunter (b. 1856 - d. 1933), London and Hill House, Epping, England.  Mrs. Hunter almost certainly acquired the painting directly from the artist.  She and her husband patronized him, and Mancini stayed with them during a visit to London in 1908.  Sold in 1920 by Mrs. Hunter to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for £2000 ($8200)."

– curator's notes from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Édouard Manet
The Brioche
1870
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"Manet reportedly called still life the 'touchstone of the painter.'  From 1862 to 1870 he executed several large-scale tabletop scenes of fish and fruit, of which this is the last and most elaborate.  It was inspired by the donation to the Louvre of a painting of a brioche by Jean-Siméon Chardin, the eighteenth-century French master of still life.  Like Chardin, Manet surrounded the buttery bread with things to stimulate the senses – a brilliant white napkin, soft peaches, glistening plums, a polished knife, a bright red box – and, in traditional fashion, topped the brioche with a fragrant flower."

– curator's notes from the Metropolitan Museum

Jean-François Millet
Retreat from the Storm
ca. 1846
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"The impending storm poses a real threat to this woman and her child, whose subsistence depends on the stray sticks of firewood they have gathered.  Throughout the 1840s the number of homeless peasants increased dramatically in France, reaching a crisis in the recession of 1847 and contributing to the fall of King Louis-Philippe in the 1848 revolution."

– curator's notes from the Metropolitan Museum

Eduardo Rosales
After the Bath
ca. 1869
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

"Este desnudo es uno de los cuadros más unánimemente admirados del pintor – hasta el punto de haber sido comparado con la Venus del espejo (National Gallery, Londres) de Diego Velázquez – aun cuando se trata, sin lugar a dudas, de un boceto.  Representa a una mujer madura en pie, desnuda ye de espaldas, que se inclina hacia la izquierda para secarse la pierna, levemente flexionada, con un paño blanco.  El cortinaje verde, que cae ampuloso por la derecha, ye la pose de la modelo, refinada y cauta, aseguran que se trata de una composición de estudio." 

– curator's notes from Museo del Prado

Paul Signac
Jetty at Cassis - Opus 198
1889
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"Between 1887 and 1891 Signac spent the warmer months pursuing his two passions, marine painting and boating, on excursions to seaside resorts.  One of five views made during a trip to the Mediterranean port of Cassis in April-June 1889, this work was singled out for praise when the series debuted at the Salon des Indépendants later that year.  At Cassis, Signac found 'white, blue and orange, harmoniously spread over the beautiful rise and fall of the land – all around the mountains, with rhythmic curves.'  Until 1894 he evoked analogies with musical compositions by inscribing each of his pictures with an opus number."

– curator's notes from the Metropolitan Museum

Alfred Sisley
The Seine at Port Marly - Piles of Sand
1875
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

"Of all the landscapes Alfred Sisley painted in and around Marly-le-Roi, where he lived from 1875 to 1878, this scene of workers dredging sand to facilitate barge traffic is perhaps the most original.  Generally, the Impressionists showed the Seine as a place of weekend leisure for Parisians, painting activities such as boating, yachting, promenading, and dining.  Sisley depicted the river during the workweek, along with some of the men who depended on it for their livelihood."

 curator's notes from the Art Institute of Chicago

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
The Streetwalker
ca. 1890-91
oil on cardboard
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"As early as 1901 the woman in this painting was identified as a streetwalker.  Her name, however, has been lost to history, only the nickname La Casque d'Or (Golden Helmet), which refers to her wig, has survived.  She sits in the garden of Monsieur Forest, Lautrec's neighbor in Montmartre."

– curator's notes from the Metropolitan Museum