"Modernist Photography 1910−1950," an exhibit currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, covers a critical time period, in which the growth of photography as an art medium was significant in its reflection of the rapid technological developments of the early 20th century.
The exhibit is in the new Art of the Americas Wing and is nestled between modernist and abstractionist exhibits — works by Stuart Davis, Georgia O'Keefe, Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollack — and a room celebrating realism, with pieces by Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and George Bellows.
The exhibit is mostly concentrated in one room of the wing, and the small scale of the photographs on display makes for an intimate reflection upon early photography and its historical implications. This intimacy provides a nice contrast to the dynamic and sometimes overwhelming rooms drenched in kinetic sculptures and Pollack splatters.
The works in this exhibit were pulled from the museum's own cache and the Lane Collection, part of the estate of a mid−century industrialist and his wife. The photographs range in content from nudes and still lifes, to the machine age and the American city, to Edward Weston's 1941 illustrations for a new edition of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," covering rural and city landscapes. Featured artists in the exhibit include Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Charles Sheeler and Ansel Adams.
There is a prevailing tension in the exhibit between the handcrafted look of pictorialism and a more naturalistic abstraction. What role does the photographer have in the work? If he or she has composed the piece with meaning and intention and if the piece is successful in the communication of its aesthetic or thematic message, does that validate the photographer as an artist and the photograph as a piece of art?
Stieglitz, a prominent early 20th−century photographer and advocate for photography as a legitimate art, championed a more "straight photography" that would celebrate natural subjects by flattening out forms and making them abstract. This abstraction has the power to nullify any social or spatial context that the subject might otherwise connote, and in this specific rendering of the subject, the photographer asserts an artistic voice.
A set of four gelatin silver prints by Sheeler entitled "Nude" (1918−19) are particularly attention−grabbing. These photographs, taken of the photographer's wife, Katharine Baird Shaffer, celebrate this sort of artistic voice that was so revolutionary for early 20th−century photographers. When I first looked at these photographs, I recognized them as a series of beautiful and abstract shapes, complementing each other in bizarre but interesting ways. Then I took a few steps closer, and realized that what I was looking at was actually a body. The curve of her leg, the roundness of a nipple, the protrusion of an elbow — all become recognized as individual segments of a greater whole.
The importance of individual parts to a whole brings to mind machinery and the many changes that modernization brought. The odd angle of the camera in each frame and the absence of the subject's face from the work removes her identity as both an individual and a human, effectively transforming her body into a sculptural form that provokes a feeling of anonymity.
There is a sense of wonder and mystery to her body that, when viewed alongside her apparent loss of identity, may be referential of art history's traditional manner of representing women. One of the main focuses of these photographs is the plumpness of her body parts. Her legs, stomach and arms all fold into each other in a very evocative way that connotes traditional womanly qualities of nourishment and comfort. Unlike most traditional paintings of nude women, however, her body is not sexualized or objectified, but is instead realized.
Sheeler renders the subject's body into a sculptural object and, in doing so, asserts himself as an artist, not merely a technician. Early photographers struggled with their validity as artists; many critics viewed painting, the prevailing medium up to this time, as the finest of fine arts.
Now, within the span of 100 years, we have come to recognize photography as a valid art form to be celebrated and studied, criticized and appreciated. For a chance to enjoy all "Modernist Photography 1910−1950" has to offer, visit the exhibit any time between now and July 3. Or better yet, make several visits, as prints from the Museum's collection will be rotated periodically.
