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John Beasley Greene Burial Mound, Algeria 1856 |
They hung the Naumans, five screenprints from the 1970 suite Studies for Holograms in which the artist manipulates his lips into grotesque images, in their dining room until the protests of a close relative brought them down. Their 13 prints by Richard Hamilton included images that became icons of a decade: Swingeing London 67, based on a press photo of Mick Jagger and art dealer Robert Fraser’s arrest for drug possession, and Kent State, a screenprint of a student slain at a campus protest by a member of the National Guard, made using a photograph of a TV screen and issued in an edition of 1,000. Prints like these, Harry says, brought “an early rumour of photography” to their collection.
Interestingly enough, it was their first encounter with photo-based art in New York, in 1985, that brought them to photography. Ann’s interest was piqued by an exhibition of the British artist-photographer Craigie Horsfield, which Harry remembers as “dry, impersonal exteriors of UK institutional environments, such as hospitals and universities, rendered in quite dark tonalities.” Ann was intrigued by what history might lie behind it, while Harry had “an intuitive sense that there was something there [in the medium] that was amazing.” He says, “We were ready for something fresh and new, adventure, exploration. There was a pull, a gravitational thing, I guess. I was amazed that the deeper in we got, the more intrigued we were. We were encountering so much complexity and diversity.”
When the Malcolmsons decided to change focus, they “made a clean sweep” and divested themselves of their first collection. Their first photography purchase was The Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz, a 1907 photogravure considered to be this early modernist’s signature image, in which he moved from the mists and symbols of pictorialism to a more reality-based style. They bought the Stieglitz from Toronto dealer Jane Corkin, who had a significant influence on their early collecting. “Jane gave us access to Kertész,” says Harry, and to other photographers like Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. The collection now contains five Kertész photographs, which includes 1929’s Street Work, a striking composition that shows a labourer silhouetted against deep, indistinct background space defined by two large pipes set on a diagonal. It is an unusual image for Kertész, and it is arrestingly beautiful.
The Malcolmson collection is not a comprehensive or textbook reiteration of photography’s history. “It’s our history,” Harry says. The collection is characterized by its concentration on periods of intense creativity, experimentation and innovation, which include the 1850s and 1860s, the 1920s and 1930s, and the present digital era. Much of its personal character and lively visual chemistry derives from its combination of exceptional, iconic-image prints by important photographers—like Édouard Baldus, Gustave Le Gray, Eugène Atget and Paul Strand—and photographs that are completely unexpected because of their process and subject, or because of the circumstances under which they were made. The latter includes a blue-toned bromide print of a paper cut-out chorus line by the Czech Frantisek Drtikol from 1930, as well as the barely there human face captured the same year via a radio broadcast from the Eiffel Tower, one of the earliest experiments in the development of television in France. The latter was an acquisition in which, Harry says, “I was following in Ann’s footsteps.”
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Edward Weston White Radish 1931 |
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