Treasures of American Modern Photography: The Gilbert Collection

Fujifilm Square

Finished

Artists

Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, Harry Callahan, Imogen Cunningham, Aaron Siskind et al.

Picking up from last year’s exhibition of works by Ansel Adams, Treasures of American Modern Photography: The Gilbert Collection will show prized original prints held in the collection of The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. One of the starting points of modern photographic expression is the “straight photography” championed by Alfred Stieglitz in the early twentieth century. Moving away from pictorialism, straight photography pursued photography as a unique art form by using the immediacy of the camera lens. Initially centered on the Photo-Secession movement, straight photography is still regarded today as one of the major influences of photographic expression as it continues to evolve. Subsequently, Group f.64, an association of photographers formed by Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams in the United States in 1932, sought to master the aesthetics of straight photography in print. In the 1940s and 1950s, the next generation of photographers developed American photography into a unique form of expression, rich in spirituality, evoking nature, space, and human activity. With the cooperation of The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, this exhibition brings together a selection of photographs from the museum’s Gilbert Collection, showing around seventy accomplished works by ten leading masters of American modern photography including Alfred Stieglitz (the father of modern photography), Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Harry Callahan. One of the world’s leading collection of photographs, the Gilbert Collection was assembled by the Chicago couple Arnold and Temmie Gilbert over a period of twenty years. In 1986, Kyocera Corporation purchased 1050 specially selected items from the huge collection and donated them to The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, where they form the core of the first large-scale collection of its kind in Japan. The rich set of photographs by the masters of modern photography of the 1930s to the 1950s is the most important feature of the Gilbert Collection. Another outstanding feature is the inclusion of a substantial number of works by the photographers of the New Bauhaus (Chicago’s Institute of Design) making the Gilbert Collection truly valuable in terms of both content and quality. The numerous masterpieces in the Gilbert Collection convey firsthand the history and expression of American modern photography. We hope that these original prints- representing the culmination of the vocation of these virtuoso photographers- will provide an opportunity to see the origins of modern photographic expression in a new light and to reexamine the essence of photographic expression, the true nature of photography, as well as its potential for the future.

Venue: Fujifilm Square

Schedule

Nov 9 (Fri) 2018-Nov 28 (Wed) 2018