The beauty of a bargain
"The Collectible Moment" shows that a strong collection can
be built on a budget.
By David Pagel
Special to The Times
Los Angeles Times
October 24, 2006
"The Collectible Moment: Photographs in the Norton Simon Museum"
is a homage to Fred R. Parker, an artist turned curator who, in 1969 and
just three years out of graduate school, left his position as director
of the Memorial Union Art Gallery at UC Davis for a job as a gloried gofer
and troubleshooter at the Pasadena Art Museum, now the Norton Simon.
The thoroughly enjoyable and surprisingly intimate exhibition is also
an inspiration to no-budget do-it-yourselfers whose journeyman enthusiasms
generate far more satisfaction and goodwill than financial remuneration
— and stand in stark contrast to the heartless professionalism that
dominates mainstream culture today.
When Parker was interviewed for the job in 1969, "photography"
was not even in its title. At his suggestion, curator John Coplans and
director Thomas Terbell Jr. added it to the title and hired Parker as
coordinator of exhibitions and acting curator of prints, drawings and
photography.
When he started, the museum's photography collection consisted of 48 works.
By the time the board was dissolved and Norton Simon took over in 1974,
Parker had increased its holdings to more than 500.
The exponential growth of the collection is remarkable because the museum
did not have an acquisitions budget for photography. Charm and hard work,
along with youthful optimism and a bit of chutzpah, did the trick for
Parker, whose passion for pictures convinced hundreds of photographers
to donate their own works to the fledgling collection.
"The Collectible Moment" fills three galleries and features
about 160 photographs by 102 artists. Nearly all are black and white,
and all are modestly scaled, most no bigger than a notebook page. Organized
by curator Gloria Williams Sander, the show is accompanied by an informative
catalog that reproduces every work in the collection and documents an
important era of California history.
The exhibition begins conventionally, with works by the most well-known
photographers clustered near the entrance. These include 12 gorgeously
formal gelatin silver prints by Edward Weston, three by Imogen Cunningham,
two by Ansel Adams, one by André Kertész and two by Brett
Weston, Edward's son. All are exquisitely printed. Nature is the subject
of most. Many are close-ups, with the camera zeroing in on details and
the photographers accentuating abstract patterns and sensuous textures
to make the visible world look strange, alien and fascinating.
Interspersed among these masterpieces of modern photography are similarly
themed pieces by less famous artists, including fine prints by Walter
Chappell, Wynn Bullock and Ruth Bernhard.
The first hint of Parker's vision is evident in three images that do not
share the organic, abstract naturalism of the majority in this section.
Roy De Carava's "Man on Subway Stairs," Lee Miller's "Joseph
Cornell With One of His Objects" and Barbara Morgan's "Spring
on Madison Square" depart from the clear-eyed realism and stylish
formalism that defined fine art photography on the East Coast. Instead,
the three took a more poetic approach to the medium and its subjects,
experimenting with its processes and seeking mystery in metaphors.
The collection's quirky personality comes clear in the second half of
the first gallery, which pairs 14 robust pictures by Manuel Alvarez Bravo
with 13 ethereal images by Frederick Sommer. The two photographers represent
the extreme ends of Surrealism's influence.
Bravo, born in Mexico, found stark beauty — as well as death, struggle
and suffering — in the street. He depicts ordinary folks grinding
out their lives amid little epiphanies. Sommer, born in Italy and based
in the U.S., stayed in the studio, where he crafted fantastically evocative
abstractions by photographing paint-covered cellophane, smoke-coated glass
and cut paper, as well as soft-focus nudes.
Their works, made from the 1930s to the early 1960s, form the bedrock
of the collection, both numerically (66 by Bravo, 30 by Sommer) and aesthetically.
The fantasy-saturated mystique of Sommer's abstract images and the bittersweet
Romanticism of Bravo's loaded narratives create the emotional atmosphere
in which the rest of the collection, mainly images from the late 1960s
and early 1970s, orbit.
The next two galleries flesh out Parker's focused yet wide-ranging vision.
(A portfolio of his works is in the collection but not in the exhibition.)
The curator, like most of the photographers whose work he collected, treated
cameras and chemicals as adaptable tools to be used to make sense of the
tumultuous times and profound social changes then sweeping America.
Most of the works are rough, raw and trippy. Gone are the refinement and
naturalism of the preceding generation's beautifully printed pictures.
In their place is a sort of hallucinatory realism, a gritty attempt to
come to terms with the image-glut of modern life and the divisive complexity
of a global world.
The pictures are scrappy, sexy and strange. Highlights include Todd Walker's
metallic tinted images of poisoned innocence, Thomas Francis Barrow's
harrowing study of TV's intrusion into individual souls and Bart Parker's
"Newport, R.I.," a mind-blowing seascape in which an island
appears to be melting down from its core.
Superimposed, manipulated imagery by Robbert Flick, Jerry N. Uelsmann,
Robert Heinecken and Edmund Teske give vivid form to a world out of joint.
Also impressive is the cockeyed, doubt-riddled realism of Henry Wessel
Jr., Hans Leopold Levi, Nathan Lyons, Scott Hyde, Anthony Hernandez and
Donald Blumberg.
All of these works add up to a vision that is distinct from the pedestrian
realism of Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, which defined
modern photography in New York. For Parker, photography's job was to get
past the surface and reveal hidden truths.
Also displayed are 45 similarly sized images from three portfolios assembled
by the graduating classes of the Institute of Design in Chicago and San
Francisco State College. They emphasize the democratic nature of Parker's
curatorial work. Each is a time capsule that reveals more about when it
was made, 1971 and '72, than the individuals who participated. Today,
such earnest, all-for-one behavior seems quaint: It's difficult to imagine
current graduate students and instructors cooperating on such a project.
But it's even more difficult to imagine a museum curator doing what Parker
did, without a budget. "The Collectible Moment" is a rare chance
to travel back to a wild time, when photography was a thrilling, risky
adventure — and some jobs were just as exciting.
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