Posted on Sat, May. 29, 2010 10:15 PM
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closeThe Nelson strikes a pose with Edward Steichen photography exhibit
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Considering the popularity of shows such as “Project Runway” and the public’s insatiable appetite for celebrity news, it’s no wonder many art museums are trying to woo audiences with fashion and fame.
Right now, museums in Phoenix, Nashville, Tenn., and Louisville, Ky., all have shows on these topics, and in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently opened “American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity,” highlighting the newly established Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Met.
Kansas City joins the club with “Edward Steichen — In High Fashion: The Conde Nast Years 1923-1937,” a new ticketed exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
It’s a traveling show, featuring the influential photographer’s fashion work for Vogue and portraits of celebs for Vanity Fair. It was organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography in Minneapolis and the Musee de l’Elysee in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The Nelson decided to take it for its “mass appeal,” said Nelson associate photography curator April Watson, and also because it illuminates a lesser-known aspect of Steichen’s career.
Although Kansas City has a healthy appetite for nostalgia and history, it’s a gamble whether a broad public will shell out $8 each to see portraits of bygone film stars and fashions from the 1920s and ’30s.
The exhibit illustrates how Steichen revolutionized fashion photography by making it modern and became his era’s Annie Leibovitz for his striking portraits of prominent people.
Installed in the Bloch Building special exhibition galleries, the show features 156 black-and-white photographs, most drawn from publisher Conde Nast’s archives and measure about 7-by-9 inches before matting.
Confronted with dozens of page-size images, designer Amanda Zeitler jazzed things up by placing a huge blowup of Steichen’s 1932 portrait of Joan Crawford in a Schiaparelli dress at the show’s entrance, and by using an art deco palette of deep violet and sea foam green for the gallery walls.
Midway through, she created a lounge area with reading materials and an 11-minute film showing Steichen at work. The exhibit also includes vintage copies of Vogue and Vanity Fair displayed in glass cases.
Steichen was 44 and possessed of an international reputation as both a photographer and a painter when he signed on with Conde Nast in 1923. The decision was met with dismay by many of his fine art friends, including Alfred Stieglitz, with whom Steichen had worked on the prestigious journal Camera Work and other projects.
But for him, the timing was right. He was recently divorced, beset by alimony payments and deep in debt.
“Worse,” as William A. Ewing writes in the accompanying catalog, “he had come to the painful conclusion that his own painting was never going to achieve great depth.”
While others were troubled by his turn to commercial work, Steichen had no problem with it.
“If you took a good photograph,” he once said, “the art would take care of itself.”
Steichen brought an artist’s eye to the business of shooting fashion and celebrities and made a huge success of both.
Right off the bat, he dispensed with the fussy backdrops and atmospheric lighting favored by his Conde Nast predecessor, Baron Adolph de Meyer, in favor of a clean, sometimes stark, modernist aesthetic.
There’s a world of difference between an early shot of actress Doris Kenyon in a filmy dress against a background of flowery fabric, and a nearby image of the model called Dinarzade, wearing a bold striped dress by Poiret and posed against a simple backdrop of concentric rectangles.
The influence of cubism and art deco percolates through both the fashions and the staging of many of these shots.
In Steichen’s photograph of dancer and choreographer Tamaris, she appears draped shoulder to foot in a boldly patterned art deco scarf, in a setting of triangular panels painted with similar graphic motifs.
A shot of models in a mirrored stairway harks to artist Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 cubist sensation, “Nude Descending a Staircase.”
Steichen adds a surrealist touch to a pair of 1926 fashion shots, in which the models wear masks designed by Polish illustrator W.T. Benda.
Photographs of actresses wearing turbans echo the “Turbans Lead the Mode for Town” headline in a Vogue magazine displayed in a nearby case. During a recent press tour, Watson observed that the sleek, spherical appearance of the women’s turbaned heads resembles Brancusi’s sculptures.
Actresses, dancers, even princesses worked as models at the time, including Princess Youssoupoff, grand duchess of Russia. Her regal bearing made her a consummate model, although, as seen in Steichen’s photograph of her in an elegant black dress and turban, the mysterious expression on her face totally upstages the clothes.
Steichen’s favorite model was the statuesque Marion Morehouse, an actress who was married to the poet e.e. cummings. Watson calls her “the first supermodel.” In a photograph titled “In the Realm of the Negligee,” Morehouse and another model appear in lounging pajamas in the setting of Conde Nast’s Park Avenue apartment.
From a fashion standpoint, the crux of the exhibit is a group of images highlighting the accomplishments of the era’s leading designers: the bias cut of Vionnet, the flowing evening dresses with scooped backs by Coco Chanel and the hard-edged geometries of Elsa Schiaparelli.
Marking the end of corsets and bustles, the new unrestrictive garments allowed freedom of movement at the moment when women had finally gained the right to vote.
Steichen’s fashion photography, showing models on the beach and in yachts, posing with Cadillacs and Steuben glass, played to their fantasies of wealth and luxury. But it also helped establish an unattainable ideal of female beauty. As Ewing and co-writer Todd Brandow note in their introduction, Steichen’s images underwent extensive retouching, and “then as now, one could never be slim enough!”
It’s not all glamour. Images of Olympic stars Katherine Rawls and Agnes Geraghty celebrate a healthy, athletic notion of female beauty. Steichen’s photograph of Martha Graham performing “Primitive Mysteries” reeks of admiration for the diva of modern dance. She appears as a pyramidal specter in a flowing white garment that contrasts with her mask-like face and jet black hair.
The success of Steichen’s celebrity portraits turns on his ability to intensify and project a personality, from a smoldering Marlene Dietrich to a kittenish Joan Bennett perched on a drum.
Besides stage and film, Steichen captured many luminaries in the world of arts and letters. He photographed William Butler Yeats and Noel Coward, Colette and Dorothy Parker. He also created portraits of politicians and heads of state, including Herbert Hoover and Winston Churchill.
One of his most captivating portraits shows a young Amelia Earhart, hands clasped around her knees and looking slightly amused at the whole process of posing for a photograph.
Two of the show’s final images — portraits of Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson — are part of the Nelson’s Hallmark Photographic Collection.
Steichen is a “key figure” with strong importance to the Nelson’s collection, says Keith Davis, the museum’s curator of photography. “He discovered Harry Callahan, and the Hallmark collection began with Callahan.”
Steichen also “went through his files and handpicked the 19 or 20 pieces sold to Hallmark,” Davis said. They included the Garbo and Swanson portraits.
The permanent collection photography galleries feature several others from that purchase, as part of a display of Steichen’s non-fashion work.
•The show: “Edward Steichen — In High Fashion: The Conde Nast Years 1923-1937”
•Where: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 4525 Oak St.
•When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday and Friday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday; noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. The exhibit continues through July 25.
•How much: Tickets cost $8 for adults, $7 for seniors and $5 for students with ID. Free to members and children under 12. For tickets, call 816-751-1278 or visit www.nelson-atkins.org.
To reach Alice Thorson, call 816-234-4763 or send e-mail to athorson@kcstar.com.
Posted on Sat, May. 29, 2010 10:15 PM
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