Marion morehouse color images

This is a sublime exhibition, teaming with fabulous frocks and beautiful, classical, evanescent photographs. The exhibition was in my top nine magnificent Melbourne exhibitions that featured on Art Blart last year. Elegant, sophisticated and oozing quality, this exhibition has been a sure fire winner for the NGV. This review will concentrate on the photographs by Edward Steichen.

See my previous posting on the exhibition including installation photographs. Edward Steichen was a painter and champion of art photography who initially worked in the soft focus, Pictorialist style prevalent at the beginning of the 20th century. He was an artist who worked closely with Alfred Stieglitz on the influential quarterly art journal Camera Work , designing the cover and the Art Nouveau-style typeface especially for the internationally focused publication.

Marion morehouse color images: Marion Morehouse Wearing A Mackintosh Jacket

Stieglitz, and by extension Camera Work, lived to promote photography as an art form and to challenge the norms of how art may be defined. The positive responses he received at the gallery encouraged Stieglitz to broaden the scope of Camera Work as well, although he decided against any name change for the journal. Virtually no other gallery in the United States was showing modern art works with such abstract and dynamic content at this time.

The journal closed due to a downturn in interest in Pictorial photography, a lack of subscribers, cultural changes and the economic effects of the First World War, which saw both the costs and even the availability of the paper on which it was printed become challenging. Strand shunned the soft focus and symbolic content of the Pictorialists and instead strived to create a new vision that found beauty in the clear lines and forms of ordinary objects.