PHOTO:The Shape of Things
The exhibition “The Shape of Things: Photographs from Robert B. Menschel” presents an engaging survey of The Museum of Modern Art’s multifaceted collection of photography. Borrowing its title from the eponymous work by Carrie Mae Weems, the exhibition is drawn entirely from works acquired over the past 40 years with the support of Robert B. Menschel, telling the story of photography from its beginnings.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MoMA Archive
Robert B. Menschel has made a promised gift of 162 images to the MoMA from his Collection of photographs, ranging from early to contemporary works. Made by 69 different photographers, this assemblage covers more than 150 years of photography, from an 1843 view of Paris by William Henry Fox Talbot, the English father of photography, to a 2002 Carrie Mae Weems staged portrait. They also complement nearly 350 photographs that have entered MoMA’s collection through Mr. Menschel’s support over the last 40 years. To honor Menschel’s invaluable contributions to the Museum, MoMA will presents the exhibition, “The Shape of Things: Photographs from Robert B. Menschel”, drawing entirely from the more than 500 photographic works acquired through his support, and an accompanying publication. The newly acquired photographs are focused primarily around the modern period, from late Pictorialism to the ‘60s, with a particularly strong presence of three American photographers, who are each represented with 19 or more prints: Alvin Langdon Coburn, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind. Coburn is represented by a series of 22 photogravures of London, made between 1904 and 1910, there are 19 prints by Callahan, including images made in Italy and Peru in 1968 and 1974 and there are 21 works by Siskind, many of which were part of his photographic dialogue with painterly abstraction, and especially with Abstract Expressionism. Menschel’s gift also includes a number of iconic works from the history of photography: Gustave Le Gray’s seascape “Brig on the Water” (1856), a composite image made from two different negatives, Alfred Stieglitz’s early image of New York “The Terminal” (1893), Herbert List’s “Picnic by the Baltic” (1930), Imogen Cunningham’s nude geometric composition “Triangles” (1928), a Hans Bellmer staged image from his famous Surrealist series Games of the Doll. The gift also includes small gems by less-well-known photographers that indicate the restless curiosity of the collector, from Charles Jones’s early-20th-century “portraits” of plants to a strange post-Surrealist photomontage from the .50s by Val Telberg. Also included are outstanding contemporary works by Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, John Coplans, Jan Groover, and William Wegman, among others.
Info: Curator: Quentin Bajac, Curatorial Assistant: Katerina Stathopoulou, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 11 West 53 Street, New York, Duration 20/10/16-7/5/17, Days & Hours: Wed-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:30-17:30, Fri 10:30-20:00, www.moma.org
