Christies, New York, stages an auction of Modernist Photographs from The Hyman Collection.
Important vintage works by Ilse Bing, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Lewis Hine, Andre Kertesz, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, August Sander, Aaron Siskind, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Weston.
In the catalogue essay Philippe Garner writes:
The fine prints presented in these pages are the fruit of a London collector’s fascination with the modernism of early and mid-twentieth century photography. Underscoring this is an appreciation of photography’s due place alongside other media, as a key part of the primary visual language of the art of the last century. In some instances we note photographers expressing the zeitgeist in ways analogous to those emerging in the traditional plastic arts; in other cases the photographs present stimulating imagery that provides a point of departure for artists in other media.
The collector is James Hyman. His passion for collecting photography was provoked above all by his appreciation of the aesthetic quality of these works but also by the broader lines of enquiry he was pursuing as an art historian. Hyman graduated with a doctorate from the Courtauld Institute, London and has worked as a lecturer, broadcaster, writer and curator. Since 2002 Hyman has also run his own art gallery, specialising in twentieth century British painting. He works closely with a number of artists and estates and publishes catalogues that contribute valuable scholarship to the field.
In his prize nominated book The Battle for Realism : Figurative Art in Britain during the Cold War 1945-1960, published in 2001 by Yale University Press in conjunction with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Hyman discusses issues and challenges that are every bit as relevant to photography as they are to painting. Exploring the relationship between concepts of modernism and realism, he proposes that the greatest achievements in figurative art are generally perceived as those that engage with Modernism to develop their subject matter as metaphor and transcend mere representation. Similarly, the photographs in Hyman’s collection share rigorously modernist preoccupations with line (Kertesz, Siskind), with striking contrasts of black and white (Callahan, Weston), and with flattened planes (Moholy). [run on ie. same para] Yet as camera-based images, however stylised or conceptual, each must, by definition, take its subject or motif from the tangible world.
As Hyman’s tightly edited photographs effectively demonstrate , great photographers take the medium beyond straightforward illustration and have used their chosen subject-matter as symbols (Meatyard), as metaphors (Stieglitz), as the vehicle for lyrical celebration (Weston, Strand) or for the suggestion of philosophical concepts (Frank).
For Hyman the starting point is the beauty of each photographic object, but these images also perfectly define the sense of a common territory, a shared enterprise of investigation within the artistic avant-garde, irrespective of medium. It seemed irresistible to underscore this theme by drawing attention within the catalogue to a variety of loosely or specifically related art works. The connections are close and very evident, for instance, between the painted Constructivist compositions of Malevitch and the transmutation by Moholy-Nagy of a street scene captured from above into a dynamic graphic composition. Moholy-Nagy was in fact a highly influential exemplar of the cross-discipline visual artist who challenged the limitations of conventional categorisation within the arts. Callahan’s minimalist image of telegraph lines against a bleached sky are as pure an expression of an idea as are Fontana’a slashed canvases. One did not influence the other, but the parallel is evident. Expressive line, structure and pattern are recurrent within Hyman’s pictures. The proposed comparisons with works by artists such as de Kooning, Picasso, Twombly and Riley enhance our appreciation of Hyman’s collection of important Modernist photographs.
Hyman’s curiosity is now leading him in a quite different direction. He is turning the page on his collection of twentieth century works to pursue a more recent passion for the very earliest years of photography, particularly the salt prints and paper negatives of the early British and French pioneers. And here he is not looking for images that anticipate Modernism. Rather, he is drawn, to photographs that distil an artistic heritage and that once more enter into a dialogue with the wider visual concerns of the day. In focusing on the earliest days of photography, Hyman is once more combining his acute aesthetic sensibility with the critical rigor that so effectively connects the remarkable images in the present catalogue.