Episode 31: A Conversation with Leland Rice, Part II
A few months ago, I spoke at length with Leland Rice about his history as a curator and educator. The first part of my conversation can be found here. His full c.v. has a listing of all of the great exhibitions and lectures he organized.
This portion of my conversation with Leland Rice covers two major exhibitions that he worked on, as well as the connections, or “linkages” that have existed in his life.
Exhibition brochure for ‘Photo Eye of the 20s,’ organized by Beaumont Newhall. It opened at MoMA in 1970 and traveled later to the west coast, where Leland saw it. This exhibition exposed him to the biggest names in photography and impacted his life in a very meaningful way.
First, we discussed Herbert Bayer. Together with Betty Gold, he put together herbert bayer: photographic works for Arco Center for Visual Art in Los Angeles in 1977. It was the first comprehensive view of Bayer’s photographs and featured almost 70 works from 1925-1937. The exhibition catalogue had an introduction by Leland Rice and an essay by Beaumont Newhall.
This is the press release for when the show traveled to New York. It was on view at MoMA from October 31, 1977-January 29, 1978. A checklist can be found here.
From 1921 to 1923 the Austrian-born Bayer attended the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, having already worked as a commercial artist and graphic designer in Linz and Darmstadt. He left the Bauhaus in 1928 to work in a variety of capacities in Berlin, most notably as a co-designer with Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy of the 1930 Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) exhibition in Paris, and as artistic director of both the Dorland advertising agency in Berlin and Vogue Magazine in Paris.
During this fruitful period in Berlin, Bayer began what would ultimately prove to be his life’s most important photo-based works: photomontages and photocollages. His process was complex and varied. In some instances, he photographed still-life assemblages of objects in his studio to make his fotoplastiken (‘photo sculptures’). For his photomontages, he utilized found imagery and his own photographs, meticulously assembling the numerous visual pieces into a unified composition.
Below is just a sampling of great publications on Bayer. These publications show just how multi-talented and prolific Bayer was.
Left to right:
Gwen Chanzit, From Bauhaus to Aspen: Herbert Bayer and Modernist Design in America (Denver, 2005)
Patrick Rössler, Herbert Bayer, Graphic Designer: From the Bauhaus to Berlin, 1921–1938 (New York, 2023)
Leland Rice, Herbert Bayer: Photographic Works (Aspen, 1977) - Published alongside the exhibition at Arco Center for Visual Art, 19 April - 28 May, 1977. The cover image, In Search of Times Past, sold at Sotheby’s for $162,500 at Sotheby’s on July 14, 2020!
Douglas Walla, Herbert Bayer: The Bauhaus Legacy (New York, 2003)
Herbert Bayer. Painter, Designer, Architect (New York, 1967) - the first monograph on Herbert Bayer.
Arthur A. Cohen, Herbert Bayer: The Complete Work (Cambridge, 1984)
Golden Aspen Days flyer, 1951
[Aspen Historical Society Collection]
Golden Aspen Days flyer, 1951
Attendees of the Aspen Conference, 1951
Front row left to right (lying down): Will Connell, Wayne Miller
Middle row, left to right: Milly Kaeser, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Walter Paepcke, Berenice Abbott, Frederick Sommer, Nancy Newhall, Beaumont Newhall;
Back row, left to right: Herbert Bayer, Eliot Porter, Joella Bayer, Aline Porter, Marion Frances Vanderbilt, Minor White, Constance Steele, John Morris, Ferenc Berko, Laura Gilpin, Fritz Kaeser, Paul Vanderbilt.
[Photograph by Robert C. Bishop: Aspen Conference, Jerome Hotel, Aspen, 1951. © Robert C. Bishop Photography LLC 2021.]
In1980, Leland curated Frederick Sommer at Seventy-Five, A Retrospective. A catalogue was published on the occasion of a traveling exhibition organized at California State University, Long Beach to commemorate the artist's 75th birthday. In a career that spanned seven decades, Frederick Sommer created paintings, drawings, and collages, wrote music, poetry, and created a highly influential body of work in photography and would inspire generations of photographers.
Frederick Sommer (1905 - 1999)
'Paracelsus'
gelatin silver print, mounted, signed, titled, and dated in pencil on the reverse, 1959
image: 13 ⅜ by 10 ½ in. (33.97 by 26.67cm.)
SOLD at Sotheby’s, 13 April 2022, $27,720
Here is the full introduction Leland wrote for the Frederick Sommer at Seventy Five catalogue.
Frederick Sommer at Seventy-Five brings together a collection of images from the past forty years which reveals the artist's private sources of inspiration as "linkages" to the universe we all share. Through his vision and perception, a hidden world is made visible. Upon confronting these images we find ourselves caught up in a compelling moment of recognition, forced to recall our collective past. He stretches the limits of our consciousness and takes us to the edges of believability through images sometimes drenched with primordial meaning, sometimes drained of life. Henry Holmes Smith pinpoints a number of continuing currents which shape Sommer's photographic philosophy:
In a world of disturbing images, the general body of photography is bland, dealing complacently with nature and treating our perceptions as insights. Strange, private worlds rarely slip past our guard from this quarter... Sommer has elected to show us some things we may have overlooked ... Without affectation, that is, directly, Sommer charges an ironic or absurd artifact with the force of an ancient idea that lies deeply hidden and nearly forgotten in everybody.
Central to Sommer's methodology is the reiteration of ideas through words and pictures. He approaches these components, words and pictures, as existing mutually bonded, and refers to them as linguistic and pictorial logic. He views art as "man's oldest repository of visual structure and language as the vessel that holds pictorial logic." The structure of language and the structure of visual images are isomorphic. Everything is connected, and forms and patterns of behavior in one set of occurrences have an equivalency in another.
This exhibition focuses on the unique contribution of the artist by presenting selections from his earliest efforts to the present in the three major graphic media he has explored: drawings, photographs, and musical scores.
Sommer's lifelong preoccupation has been art, and it is "the thing that is most familiar to him." His artistic character began to form quite naturally during his childhood. He recounts from this period:
Art and music were simply things that belonged in life like anything else, like the facts of having to earn a living were a part of it.
His parents had lived for many years in the Mediterranean area where there was an intuitive acceptance of natural phenomena. After the family moved to Brazil, where he was continually surrounded by nature's "remarkable specimens," Sommer indicates that he developed "a certain lusciousness of feeling." His father, a landscape architect, introduced him to architecture, the design discipline which would provide him with principles he would employ, as an adult, in painting, drawing, and eventually photography.
In 1935, shortly after settling in Arizona, he packed a case of drawings and traveled to New York where he sought out Alfred Stieglitz. Even though Stieglitz was many years his senior, the two had much in common. Sommer's practical knowledge of architecture and his thorough study of the Italian Renaissance, coupled with Stieglitz' awareness of European intellectual life and currents in modern art, acted to provide them with a fertile atmosphere for the sharing of ideas. Stieglitz' leadership and accomplishments in photography were not lost on Sommer, but it was the exposure to the work and ideas of the artists shown at Stieglitz' gallery, An American Place, which consumed his interest and fueled his growing need for contact with modern artists (i.e., Arthur Dove, John Marin and Georgia O'Keeffe).
This was essentially the reason I was aware of Stieglitz. I could see that he was someone who was not interested in just a certain aspect of something he was dealing with. But he was interested in total awareness... And conviction. Absolute conviction. This man never spoke of things he hadn't done.
That "lusciousness of feeling" Sommer had experienced as a boy in Brazil returned once again when he saw, for the first time in 1936, the photographs of Edward Weston. Although he had been inspired by the work of Paul Strand, Sommer had never before perceived such a strong feeling for the cohesion and eloquence of the print's surface as he did in Weston's work. The "decisive and sensuous use of the tone scale" on Weston's photographic surface amazed him and he recognized that it would have "an impact new to art." This realization helped to focus the young photographer's attention on how the final image composed of the subject's grays and blacks and light and shadow could most effectively be deposited on the sensitized surface, which continues today to be a primary consideration in his work:
It is with sensitized surfaces, rather than with photography itself that I am concerned. The sensitized surface has an honesty, an inevitableness; it just can't do anything else. It shows you what some process showed to it...And the sensitized surface in this case is really the great denominator, not the fact that you used the camera.
His introduction to Weston's work intensified Sommer's awareness of the need to use the most precise tools possible, and in late 1938 he bought an eight by ten inch view camera which he would use to produce the majority of his photographic images. He had learned from the study of architecture that a layout acted as a "map" delineating the structure which would materialize from the positioning of objects, and that the visibility provided by the large format camera allowed comparable planning of the photographic image.
In 1940 Sommer traveled again to New York where he met another pioneering image maker, Charles Sheeler. Although Sheeler was equally accomplished in both painting and photography, he had gained his major reputation in the former. Sommer was most impressed with the sense of economy in his imagery. "What I noticed was the great economy and the rigor and precision of the way they were done and yet, I feel, they were very lyrical." Finally, Stieglitz, Weston, and Sheeler—foremost among America's modern artists — prompted his observation that:
...these people were everything America was not. I remember in 1925, as I look back, the mood of America as a whole was quite wonderful, sleeping a certain way but very active in its sleep. There were some very outstanding people... But as time went on, and things began to change rather fast, then people like Stieglitz, Weston, and Sheeler became more and more outstanding because they were sticking to their thing...They were all very simple in their own way. Stieglitz had a simplicity in terms of his complexity and Weston lived what people called a very primitive life, could live on a few vegetables and do it elegantly and Sheeler was in a different position because he was in New York and in a sense was working for a market. And, yet, the way in which his house, which was very beautifully furnished with Shaker furniture, the way everything was arranged was very simple and direct. So here were these people who were amazingly similar.
When the world was young images were strong.
Sommer may well have observed that the lives of the three artists whom he so admired stood in relief against the background of an unique and vital period in the development of American art. Every era in the history of human culture develops its own concepts of space (time and distance). These spatial concepts tend to dominate life and are altered only when new discoveries, materials or constructions force updating.
The development of art movements in the twentieth century can be viewed in this context. New concepts place demands on long-held spatial dictums and directly affect their application. Because the invention of photography proved valuable for visually articulating space, the application of this descriptive recorder coupled with the inquisitive vision of Frederick Sommer has produced a series of evocative and significant photographs.
The earliest photographs in this exhibition have a distinct objectivity and an outright matter-of-factness. Images of chicken embryos, coyote carcasses or the sun-dried and bleached hide of a horse, are indeed disquieting. But these pictures are not just filled with the "poetry of decay." They burst forth as powerfully endowed with the conjunction of captured moments of life transformed by the absolutely "right" instrument of revealment, the camera. Sommer exercised a quality of vision in recording this environment that extends far beyond the immediate reality of the camera's stare. At the time he embarked upon this body of work he was just beginning to grasp the means to achieve the most effective spatial distribution of the objects across the flat picture plane. "Our fundamental empathy is to the structure that content reveals." Content, therefore, is intended to reveal structure, and structure to act as a map, indicating ways to look at a picture. In the 1939 images of chicken parts Sommer risked being overwhelmed by the material to such an extent that his organization of the space in the photographs lacked a degree of structural cohesiveness. The later images from this same body of work, Horse, 1945 (cat. no. 7) and Coyotes, 1945 (cat. no. 8), display a structural complexity which creates a tension between the severe immediacy of the object photographed and the subterranean rendering of the subject matter. Parts of the carcass of the horse appear smashed into the earth while the camera lens depicts, with foreground emphasis, the frontal pair of legs as astonishingly fully shaped, outlined effectively by deep, black shadow. The use of a short lens in combination with a close-up vantage point accounts for much of the image's impact; but it is the way the subject grabs and clutches at the surface of the photographic print that so abruptly imprints this image on our memory. The fact that these images were made from the late thirties through the mid-forties, places them in a critical social framework. Sommer has wondered how people could make an issue of the horror of his work when the world was involved in the most barbarous conflict ever known:
... how could anybody think that anything I could do with a camera could in any way annoy anybody's finer feelings, when they were giving consent to warfare on a scale unprecedented? I can't answer it... Those things exist and you might say this was homage to existence as it is.
Sommer has come to view the photograph not as a "moment of truth, but as truth before the fact." He believes that when photographing you are faced with accepting or rejecting a complex set of circumstances which challenges your ability to fully understand why you take the photograph in the first place. He therefore feels there is no reason to take the photograph except for the margin of the unstated because:
You hope to be able to come back to it—re-graze over it—and find a wider statement. You do it for the degree of accommodation that is not completed within it. Things don't fit together and thereby cancel each other out.
We cultivate our ability to perceive an image which we find unsettling by taking time to view it again. Through focusing on it with another set of senses a greater understanding can materialize unencumbered by convenient conclusions. Sommer's attitude is that photography provides us the opportunity to view the world and imagine it at the same time.
Life is the longest 45 minutes close to nature. Some speak of a return to nature, I wonder where they could have been.
In discussing the landscape photographs, it is critical to note the precise acceptance of nature, and of the objectivity of the field of vision as subject matter. Landscape as subject for the camera stands aside and "exists for itself" despite ongoing attempts, throughout the history of art, to make images about it. In the Arizona landscape Sommer saw no possibility for a rendering in the tradition of classical landscapes associated with certain predictable moods and mannerisms. This harsh terrain seemed to have "no atmosphere that would amount to anything, it was practically a lunar landscape."
For years I looked at the Arizona landscape and it seemed almost a hopeless task... There wasn't anything worth featuring, nothing worth making a to-do about. It was just like a situation where everybody was in trouble. All those plants were dry and dead and dying. And, if they weren't, you could take them as a whole, in their totality. This took a little time. So I set up the camera along the desert rocks, I set up twice and I looked at it and I said, 'Yes, that's the way it should be.' And I said,'This is crazy, it doesn't make any sense.' ... It took three times of setting up before I photographed the thing... What was the difference between the top of the picture and the bottom of it? It was all the same. But there was a difference. The only thing is that it was more subtle.
... there's a great deal going on. Maybe this helped me to realize that I was also looking at details. These were enormous areas, but still there were details...There's nothing happening in the sky and I decided, 'No skies for me.' Finally, there was no foreground, there was no middle distance, there was nothing. And, there was very little distinction between the plants and the rocks. Even the rocks were struggling.
The problems Sommer enumerates were resolved when the artist looked to nature itself to suggest its own order.
The world of art and the world of science are interested in evidence and verification. They do not live off hearsay. You never see artists really. You see only art, if you see anything. Nature respects only evidence. I think this takes us to the very nature of photography. Perhaps the most peculiar and most distinguishing characteristic is that you can never photograph a thing. What you're essentially photographing is how it related to a great many other things. So it seems like photography was environmental long before the word got to be a fetish. And it can't be anything else.
These desert landscapes fit uncomfortably, if at all, within accepted conventions of landscape photography for, although they are packed with abundant descriptive power equivalent to the images of the earlier 19th century expeditionary photographers, they are not harnessed to factual depiction for analytical study of the topography of the area. Nor are they like the idyllic photographs associated with the work of an Ansel Adams that celebrate the splendor of the western terrain. Rather, Sommer's landscapes deal with the "bare bones" look of the desert, its surprises, the irregularities of foliage growth, the fecundity of natural geometric forms. We tend to take the landscape itself for granted but in this work the images of it are as consciously constructed as a building. When these photographs were made few artists had intervened to shape our perception of such topography. So, it remained for Sommer to expressively present it as a horizonless scene, packed edge-to-edge with an overall, decentralized distribution of detail. It is significant to note that these landscape images predate both the skein paintings of Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey's white writing pieces. Coincidence, once again, dictated the occurrence of overlapping concerns and, Sommer notes:
What is the importance of Duchamp, if not to tell us that the things that go on in painting can be done without painting.
It is the time you spend setting up and considering the scene that is the art of photographing; it's really of very small consequence whether you press the button or not.
Sommer pursued photography because it allowed him to explore the same problems which he recognized as components of drawing and painting. Initially, it was the complete objectivity of the camera that occupied him—taking photographs of nature as it was. His art developed further when he began to work with "found objects" which he assembled into configurations for the camera:
I know that photography has a way of handling some things well and I make more of these available then I could find in nature. If I could find them in nature, I would photograph them. I make them because through photography I have a knowledge of things that can't be found.
In the assembling of the collages, Sommer feels the range of complex relationships is substantially increased, not only by the veracity of the camera's image but by the manner in which the medium shapes the look of things. Because the photograph represents a potentially "bigger package" accommodating more of our feelings, our desires, opening up more territory to think about, he believes it is the optimum medium through which to make visible these relationships. He sometimes studies the collected piles of weathered discards, billboard scraps, or dismembered children's toys for years. He does not confine himself to the single fragment but waits until he observes a number of interrelating forms which can be joined together, often keeping a variety of items out on a table for months at a time. When a combination does manifest itself most of the objects are not pasted together but rather just laid out and photographed, allowing him to re-use certain items again in other combinations. The titles that Sommer gives to the photographs of collages are, at times, like small, metaphorical poems which evocatively enlarge the themes. The subtle relationships of titles to imagery reveal his playful wit. In coining them he creates, from a linguistic standpoint, new conjunctions of old words. Such titles as All Children are Ambassadors, The Thief Greater than his Loot, and The Circumnavigation of the Blood are rich in invention and often offer further opportunities to "read" the images.
Sommer's images were reproduced in Aperture in 1956, 1957,1960, and 1961. In 1962 Aperture published a comprehensive collection of thirty photographs dating from 1939 to 1962 which was sequenced with an accompanying text of poetic meditation by the artist. Minor White, the editor and founding force behind the publication, believed that a photograph could be "read," and therefore shared the poet's belief that, "words could make one see more clearly." In a recent article discussing the impact of Aperture on photography in the 1950's, Jonathan Green noted:
The most fitting photograph to be "read" was a visual koan; a photograph that provided almost no information, that asked more than it answered, an enigma that forced the viewer to exhaust and abandon the analytic intellect in favor of intuition and direct experience... It remained for Frederick Sommer to contribute those photographs that were the most eminently open to scrutiny.
In addition to the reproductions of Sommer's images, there were often comments by students affiliated with White or by photography educators. White himself wrote in a 1956 issue:
Frederick Sommer makes no concessions to the casual observer in his photographs. He packs every bit of picture space with significance of one kind or another. Consequently, a superficial glance at his pictures reveals about as much as a locked trunk of its contents.
Sommer's photographs do not, by his own admission, approach the metaphysical or subconscious borders of Surrealism. He believes it more useful to consider the idea of super reality as a condition where "certain realities co-exist." Therefore, he believes the person who understands a number of realities views the world from a superior vantage point. A constructive observation indeed, as a close look at Surrealism reveals that the most influential art of that genre was often created by those artists who kept their distance from the core of the movement. Picasso's work was admired by the Surrealists and he was unquestionably influenced by the movement which he disdained to join. Likewise, the American artist Joseph Cornell existed at the periphery of Surrealism early in his career. Sommer too kept his distance, although he embraced certain Surrealist concepts. He was already studying the possibilities of the automatic and the accidental in his work when he first met Max Ernst. Undoubtedly, the inspiration of the collective spirit of Surrealism combined with his association with Ernst, influenced the direction of his work at that time.
Beyond Surrealism Sommer does feel that fantasy and the imaginary world are too quickly disregarded in photography:
In photography we try to think of a certain reality existing and we think that this is the norm. And so if any fantasy or imaginary domain encroaches on photography, we begin to think of it as being a little something different or unexpected. But, as a matter of fact, I really think that photography is made for that particular domain, more than it is for the transcribing of reality.
Of all the disciplines, photography has the longest leggato in terms of tone.
In the mid 50s Sommer's investigations turned to images which did not require the use of a camera. Cameraless images, commonly termed photograms, had been pioneered by Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray in the 1920s, but few American photographers had shown an interest in them. Continuing his devotion to drawing, Sommer developed a method of working with paint on cellophane, making the paint so tacky he could control its application. The images are wholly abstract, although some of the earliest ones suggest figurative interpretations. Paracelsus 1959 (cat. no. 28), depicts a sculpture-like torso with a remarkable distribution of photographic tones and textures which give the image a burnished, refined look. It is a tour-de-force example of the photographic medium at its most elegant perfection, and the print performance by Sommer is superb. The interaction of the light in and around what looks to be a surgically opened human body solidifies the surfaces of the abstract subject as though it were dressed in a thin suit of armor. This image is not about extremities, it pulls us inside as if it were intended as an x-ray of mankind for all to inspect. The activity and sense of motion of the form lead us in and out of the fatness and leanness of the applied paint. The irregularity of the edges outlined against the deep black background (the transparent and unpainted area) establishes the visual framework. The image is as hallucinatory and fantastic as any of the artist's photographed assemblages, and it defies its existence as photograph as much as it captures the total essence of the photographic medium.
He was later to explore the application of smoke on grease coated cellophane and smoke on glass. Taking these synthetic negatives into the darkroom, he then exposes them in the enlarger in the conventional way. Sommer feels that, "if all goes well, the definition is magnificent; there are no grain problems because soot can out perform silver images any day."
As an artist who has painted, drawn, and created musical scores, in addition to photographing, Sommer is continually investigating new ways to broaden the range of possibilities in his work. Always exercising meticulous care he selects light sensitive materials or fine textured drawing papers with attention to the ways certain shapes and forms can be deposited on their surfaces.
I've tried not to give up painting, not to give up drawing, not to give up making musical scores. I've tried to figure out a way in which all of these things could be a stage to becoming a photograph.
Still motivated by the intense curiosity of a young man, Frederick Sommer continues today to create complex images, held by exquisite surfaces. His explorations may go beyond our ability to immediately apprehend them, for as Sommer notes:
You have to learn to take chances, you have to learn to appreciate juxtapositions, a set of things, a constellation of things in a way that you just happen to meet. You have to be flexible enough to see the possibilities.
Leland Rice
