Saint Louis, Missouri.- The Saint Louis Art Museum is pleased to present “The First Act: Staged Photography Before 1980”, on view at the museum from January 20th through April 29th. Apparent in the upcoming Focus on the Collection installation, the idea of staging pictures through scene setting, acting, and directing has been fundamental to the field of photography since its inception in 1839. “The First Act” provides a prehistory to the large-scale theatrical work in the concurrent feature exhibition, “An Orchestrated Vision: The Theater of Contemporary Photography”, which explores various elements of theatricality in photography from the last 20 years, and can be seen from February 19th through May 13th.
Photographers have visualized literary passages, constructed dreamlike imagery in darkrooms and studios, and drawn upon cinematic techniques in their pursuit of fabricating alternate realities. On view in “The First Act” will be twelve photographs spanning 120 years, including works by Julia Margaret Cameron, Clarence John Laughlin, Henry Peach Robinson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sandy Skoglund, Edward Steichen, and Cindy Sherman. “The Theater of Contemporary Photography” is a compelling survey of contemporary photographers, many presented in St. Louis for the first time. Seen together, the works reveal the remarkable potential of the photographic medium in contemporary artistic practice. On view will be over 40 works from an international group of artists which includes Thomas Struth, Carrie Mae Weems, and Gregory Crewdson. These photographers have focused on the elements of scene setting and directing to meticulously construct environments that are mesmerizing in their large scale, absorbing in their uncanny beauty, and haunting in their elusive meaning. They inventively exploit photography’s unique capacity to operate in the boundaries between fact and fiction. Each image is the product of the painstaking execution of the ambitious vision of the artist.
The Saint Louis Art Museum was founded in 1879, at the close of a decade that saw the establishment of art museums in great cities across the eastern half of the United States. This Museum’s comprehensive collections bear witness to the inspirational and educational goals to which its founder aspired and the moral and democratic imperatives he embraced. What began as a collection of assorted plaster casts, electrotype reproductions, and other examples of “good design” in various media rapidly gave way to a great and varied collection of original works of art spanning five millennia and six continents. Today the quality and breadth of the Museum’s collection secure for it a place among the very best institutions of its kind. The Saint Louis Art Museum is one of the nation’s leading comprehensive art museums with collections of artworks that include those of exceptional quality from virtually every culture and time period. Areas of notable depth include Oceanic art, pre-Columbian art, ancient Chinese bronzes, and European and American art of the late 19th and 20th centuries, with particular strength in 20th-century German art. The American art collection features masterworks of paintings and sculpture from Colonial portraiture through modernist and abstract art of the first half of the 20th century. The Museum’s American holdings reflect the nation’s longstanding fascination with landscape and include Hudson River School paintings by Jasper Cropsey, Thomas Cole, and John Frederick Kensett, as well as scenes of the Western frontier. The local landscape is well represented in the work of Missouri artists Henry Lewis, Charles Ferdinand Wimar, and George Caleb Bingham. The Election Series, illustrating three stages of the Missouri electoral process, is one of the highlights of the Museum’s paintings by Bingham. The collection also includes major works by the late nineteenth-century artists Winslow Homer, William Merritt Chase, and Bessie Potter Vonnoh as well as Impressionist compositions by Henry Ossawa Tanner, Childe Hassam, and John Henry Twachtman. Important twentieth-century work by Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Hart Benton, Marsden Hartley, and Philip Guston is also presented.
The Collection of European Art to 1800 includes exceptional examples of art made across the continent of Europe and the British isles from the seventh through the eighteenth centuries. The earliest pieces in the collection are a pair of toga pins made in Spain in the seventh century. Other examples from the medieval period include enamels and metalwork; architectural fragments; stone, wood and ivory sculpture; manuscript illuminations; and stained glass. The Museum’s medieval holdings are strongest in French and German Romanesque (c.1050–c.1200) and Gothic (c.1200–c.1500) art. Highlights include a French St. Christopher, a superb alabaster Madonna, an exquisite head of St. Roch, and a German gilded Christ of exceptional quality.The collection of paintings and sculpture comprises work made in Europe between 1300 and 1800. Highlights include a late Titian masterpiece (1570–76) left in his studio at his death; a marble Pan made in Michelangelo’s workshop in the 1530s; one of only 37 known works by the baroque master Bartolomeo Manfredi painted around 1615; a copper painting made in 1612 by Artemisia Gentileschi; an important Neo-Classical narrative painting by François-André Vincent exhibited in 1785; and a stunning portrait by Hans Holbein depicting the wife of King Henry VIII’s comptroller of 1527. The Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs houses more than 13,000 works of art on paper. There are approximately 8,500 prints, 3,000 photographs, and 1,500 drawings, watercolors, and collages from a wide range of periods and cultures. The department has particular strengths in art from Western Europe and the United States. It is internationally known for its German works on paper, and houses the largest public collection of Max Beckmann’s prints in the world. The print collection also has impressive holdings by Albrecht Dürer, Max Klinger, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Jacques Callot. The collection of drawings features significant works by George Caleb Bingham, Edgar Degas, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The photography collection is strong in 20th century American with large holdings of works by Edward Curtis, Paul Strand, Andreas Feininger, and Moneta Sleet Jr. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.slam.org