The room was crowded at 11 in the morning. That morning there was an article in the SF Chronicle about the Sothebys auction of works from Maggie Weston’s collection. Two days only, at Charles Campbell Gallery. On one wall was a group of Westons, an Oceano Dunes (blessedly matted to show the whole image this time), a very early work, one of his attic portraits from 1921, and a portrait of Tina Modatti. Second from the left was a Paul Strand work from the Gaspe Peninsula, an absolute modernist masterwork of light and dark triangles, and stunningly printed.
There is no replacement for seeing work in the flesh. Some of these images we’ve seen reproduced over and over (a Diane Arbus "Twins" hung in a corridor, opposite a nude Charis on the Oceano dunes by EW), but there are two things going on when the show is live. One is obvious: you can see the real tones in the print. You can get your nose up to the work (if the museum or gallery will let you—they were peculiarly uptight about people doing this to glassed work at LACMA) and see the details and the flaws. There’s nothing so refreshing as seeing where Ansel Adams missed spotting out a dust speck. The second aspect veers into the spiritual and woo woo: the work has presence. You can feel something from a real live work of art, an original painting or photograph, that is never going to happen in an offset reproduction. I have been overcome with goosebumps and been brought to tears more than once in art museums. I step back a foot, out of the zone of the painting, and the sensation goes away. I step back, and I’m wrought all over again.
Something of the sort happened to me with a group of early French primitive landscape photographs, also at auction. I’d never paid much attention to this body of work in reproduction, it never spoke to me. In this room, it was shouting out my name. Weird, evocative, moody, these works had resonance big time. Cuvelier couldn’t bring color to the work like his contemporaries, but he could bring a melancholy to the image like no one’s business.
Link to the Chronicle article here. They've got photos of some of the works I mentioned (but they cropped that Oceano Dunes shot!)
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