Copyright 2000 www.cosmopolis.ch Louis Gerber All rights
reserved.
Walker Evans
biography and exhibition
Exhibition: Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York (ended in May
2000), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (June 2 - September 12, 2000),
Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (December 17, 2000 - March 11, 2001).
Catalogue: Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York in association with
Princeton University Press, Princeton. March 2000, Hardcover, 318 p., including the 176
exhibition and other photographs and six essays by Maria
Morris Hambourg, Douglas Ecklund, Jeff L. Rosenheim and Mia Fineman. Get
the catalogue from Amazon.com or from Amazon.co.uk
On the left: Walker Evans [Coal dock Workers,
Havana], 1933. Photograph: catalogue.
It was the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA) in New York which mounted the first important exhibition of American
photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) and published Evan's classic book American
Photographs in 1938. A second MoMA retrospective and catalogue was
organized in 1971. After the artist's death, more books and traveling
exhibitions followed.
The present exhibition and catalogue are
the first based on the unrestricted access to the artist's extensive
papers (manuscripts, diaries, field notes, correspondence, personal
library, collections) and stores of negatives. They were acquired by the
MoMA in 1994. The materials have since been sifted, organized, catalogued
and constitute the Walker Evans Archive within the MoMA's department of
Photographs. Because Evans left his entire output to posterity, one can
not only reexamine his most celebrated photographs but also trace the
evolution of his thought and map his creative development in a very
complete way.
The researchers work helped to identify
several hundred previously unknown negatives by Evans in The Library of
Congress in Washington, which contains its own file of his work. The
exhibition and catalogue, which contains six essays presenting the artist,
his life and work (e.g. his relation with the American South and his
subway portraits), show over 175 of Evans' finest
photographs.
Walker Evans: Main Street, Saratoga Springs,
New York, 1931. Photograph: catalogue.
Walker Evans [Street Scene, New York],
1928. Photograph: catalogue.
Walker Evans was born in Saint Louis in 1903.
His father was an ambitious advertising executive. The family moved to a new
suburb north of Chicago. When Walker was twelve, his father took a job in
Toledo, Ohio, with the Willys (Jeep) Motorcar Company. It was a shocking
experience for Walker to live in a small town full of immigrants. His parents
divorced. His mother and sister moved to New York in 1919, his father stayed
in Ohio and moved in with the woman next door. Walker, 16, was sent to a
boarding school in northern Connecticut where expressed his rage by arguing
continually with his headmaster. Later, Yale refused him entrance and he
finally went to Williams College instead (1922/23). He was much into
contemporary literature (Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Hemingway). After his freshman
year, he dropped out of college. In 1923/24, living in New York, he began to
write.
In 1926, he sailed for Paris and stayed abroad
thirteen months where his accomplished his education in international
modernism and had gathered most of the tools he would need to become an
artist. He return to New York in May of 1927, together with his French books,
his literary aspirations and his handful of little photographs. He translated
Cocteau and Larbaud, worked in a Fifty-Seventh Street bookstore and made new
friends who made him discover modern
photographers.
In late 1928 or early 1929, Evans went to see
65-year old patriarch of American fine-art photography Alfred Stieglitz. The
master was not in, but his wife, Georgia O'Keeffe, had a look at his
photographs. Later, the two man not only did not like each other, but Evans
also rejected Stieglitz's sumptuous, highly subjective and aestheticising
photographs which he saw in 1929 at a MoMA-exhibition. Evans established his
own documentary style as a Stieglitz antipode. He refined his concept of his
subject and worked to make a seemingly simple, straightforward image appear
inevitable, large in its symbolism, and irreducibly right (Philippe de
Montebello).
Evans was influenced by the
French photographer Eugène Atget, whose work he got to now in 1929 thanks to
his friend Berenice Abbott. Walker was also impressed by another Frenchman, Henri
Cartier-Bresson, whose pictures he admired when they were first shown in New
York in 1933.
In the 1930s, Walker made famous photographs of the depression
era in the American South. Among them is a series of pictures of 1936 which he
shot when living - together with the writes James Agee - in the world of three
sharecropper families. The result of the experience was his classic book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
From 1945 until 1965, when he accepted a professorship at Yale University, Evans
worked as a
staff photographer for Fortune. He died in 1975.
The exhibition and catalogue not only show his
photographs from the American South, but also Evans' spare interiors, urban
juxtapositions, gatherings in small towns, roadside stands, city-dwellers caught
in moments of private isolations, etc. A major contribution to the history of American
photography, get
the catalogue from Amazon.com
or Amazon.co.uk.
For the museums' websites and other links: Links.
For
information on the art market check the world's leader Artprice.
