''Jeu de paume'' () is a ball-and-court game that originated in France. It was an indoor precursor of tennis played without racquets, though these were eventually introduced. It is a former Olympic sport, and has the oldest ongoing annual world championship in sport, first established over 250 years ago. Originally spelled ''jeu de paulme'', it is sometimes called ''courte paume'' or "real tennis".

History

In the earliest versions of the game, the players hit the ball with their hands, as in palla, volleyball, or certain varieties of pelota. ''Jeu de paume'', or ''jeu de paulme'' as it was formerly spelled, literally means "palm game". In time, gloves replaced bare hands. Even when paddle-like bats, and finally racquets, became standard equipment for the game by the late 1600s, the name did not change. It became known as "tennis" in English ''(see History of tennis)'', and later "real tennis" after the derived game of lawn tennis became the more widely known sport.

The term is used in France today to denote the game of tennis on a court in which the ancient or modern game might be played. The indoor version is sometimes called ''jeu de courte paume'' or just ''courte paume'' ("short palm") to distinguish it from the outdoor version, ''longue paume'' ("long palm"), played on a field of variable length.

Jeu de paume at the 1908 Summer Olympics was a medal event; American Jay Gould II won the Gold medal.

Since 1740, jeu de paume has been the subject of an amateur world championship, held each year in September. It is the oldest active trophy in international sport.

Derived sports

Hand

Basque pelota

Fistball

Frisian handball

Longue paume

Pallone

Valencian pilota

Various other forms of handball may be related to one degree or another; this is generally difficult to ascertain with certainty, and some, like the Mesoamerican ballgame are clearly unrelated.

Racquet

Court tennis

Lawn tennis (what is usually meant by the term "tennis" today)

Various other racquet games (squash, badminton, etc. may be related to one degree or another.

Cultural references

The Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, a museum of contemporary art, is housed in a former court on the north side of the Tuileries park in the centre of Paris.

The painter Jacques-Louis David's famous sketch, ''le Serment du jeu de paume'' ('the Tennis Court Oath') now hangs in the court of the Palace of Versailles. It depicts a seminal moment of the French Revolution, when, on 20 June 1789, deputies of the Estates-General met at the court and vowed that they would not disband before the proclamation of a formal Constitution for France.

''Le Jeu de Paume'' is a moral ode published in 1791 by André Chénier

Socialite Charles Smithson (Jeremy Irons) is seen playing jeu de paume when he returns to London in the acclaimed 1981 film The French Lieutenant's Woman.

References

External links

Historical Picture: A Jeu de Paume Before a Country Palace

Oratory Real Tennis Club

Jeu de Paume History

Official site of the French Jeu de Paume Comité

Category:Ball games Category:Real tennis Category:Former Olympic sports Category:Sports originating in France

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Lisette Model (born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern, November 10, 1901 – March 30, 1983) was an Austrian-born American photographer.

Lisette Model was born Elise Felic Amelie Stern in Vienna, Austria. Her father was an Italian/Austrian doctor of Jewish descent attached to the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Army and, later, to the International Red Cross; her mother was French and Roman Catholic, and Model was baptised into her mother's faith. Two years after her birth, her parents changed their family name to ''Seybert''. According to interview testimony from her older brother, she was sexually molested by her father, though the full extent of his abuse remains unclear.

She was primarily educated by a series of private tutors, achieving fluency in three languages. At age 19, she began studying music with composer Arnold Schönberg, and was familiar to members of his circle. "If ever in my life I had one teacher and one great influence, it was Schönberg," she said.

Model left Vienna for Paris after her father's death in 1924 to study voice with Polish soprano Marya Freund. It was during this period that she met her future husband, the French-Jewish painter Evsa Model. In 1933 she gave up music and recommitted herself to studying visual art, at first taking up painting as a student of Andre Lhote (whose other students included Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Hoyningen-Huene). She also took up photography, taking basic instruction in darkroom techniques from her younger sister Olga Seybert (herself a life-long professional photographer), although Parisian portrait photographer Rogi Andre was the person Model credited with providing her primary instruction in camera techniques.

Visiting her mother in Nice in 1934 (she and Olga had emigrated from Vienna several years prior), Model took her camera out on the Promenade des Anglais and made a series of portraits which are among her most widely reproduced and exhibited images. These close-cropped, often clandestine portraits of the local privileged class already bore what would become her signature style: close-up, unsentimental and unretouched expositions of vanity, insecurity and loneliness.

She married Evsa Model in 1937 and the following year they emigrated to join her husband's sister in Manhattan. There she supported herself as a photographer, having work published regularly in Harper's Bazaar by editors Carmel Snow and Alexey Brodovitch. Model eventually became a member of the New York 'Photo League,' which would host her first dedicated showing.

In 1951, Model was invited to teach at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where her longtime friend Berenice Abbott was also teaching photography. Model's best known pupil was Diane Arbus, who studied under her in 1957, and Arbus owed much of her early technique to Model's example. Model continued to teach until her death in New York City in 1983.

The Estate of Lisette Model is represented by Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York, NY.

Chronology

1940 "Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Esthetics" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

1941 "Lisette Model" - Photo League, New York, NY

1943 "Action Photography" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, "Photographs by Lisette Model" - Art Institute of Chicago

1944 "New Yorkers" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, "Art in Progress" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

1946 "The Museum Collection of Photography" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

1948 "A Survey of Today's Photography" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, "Fifty Photographs by Fifty Photographers" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

1949 "Leading Photographers: Lisette Model" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

1951 "Twelve Photographers" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

1953 "Contemporary American Photography" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

1954 "Great Photographers" - Limelight Gallery, New York, NY

1955 "The Family of Man" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

1957 "70 Photographers Look at New York" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

1958 "Photographs from the Museum Collection" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

1960 "A Bid for Space" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

1963 "A Bid for Space" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

1965 Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship, "Invitational Exhibition, 10 American Photographers" - University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

1967 "Photography in the 20th Century" - National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada

1969 "The Camera and the Human Facade" - Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

1970 "The People Yes" - Floating Foundation of Photography, New York, NY

1972 "Brodovitch and His Influence" - Philadelphia College of Art, Philadelphia, PA

1973 "Threads and No Threads" - Floating Foundation of Photography, New York, NY

1974 "American Masters" - Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

1975 "Women of Photography: An Historical Survey" - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA

1976 "The Photographer and the Artist" - Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, NY, "Lisette Model Photographs" - Sander Gallery, Washington D.C.

1977 "New York: the City and Its People" - A and A Gallery, Yale, New Haven, CN, "Appearances" - Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY, "Three-Woman Show: Diane Arbus, Lisette Model, Rosalind Solomon" - Galerie Zabriskie, Paris, France, "Photographs from the Collection of the Center for Creative Photography" - Center for Creative Photography, Carmel, CA, "Photographs from the Collection #1: America" - Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA

1978 "New Standpoints: Photography 1940-1955" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, "Photographic Crossroads: The Photo League" - National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada, "The Quality of Presence" - Lunn Gallery, Washington D.C., "How Photography Clicked" - Floating Foundation of Photography, New York, NY

1979 Monograph published by Aperture, "Lisette Model: Photographs" - Vision Gallery, Boston, MA, "August Sander, Lisette Model" - Port Washington Public Library, Port Washtington, NY

1980 Watari Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, Photographers Gallery, South Yarra, Australia, Ikona Gallery, Venice, Italy, "The Magical Eye: Definitions of Photography" - National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada

"Lisette Model" - Galerie Fiolet, Amsterdam, Netherlands

1981, PPS Gallery, Hamburg, Germany, "Carl Siembab: A Photographic Patron" - Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, "Photography of the Fifties: An American Perspective" - Center for Creative Photography, Carmel, CA, "Lisette Model" - Galerie Viviane Esders, Paris, France, "Lisette Model: A Retrospective" - New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA

1982 "Lisette Model" - Berner-Photo Galerie, Bern, Switzerland, "Lisette Model, A Retrospective" - Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany

1983 Dies March 30 in New York. "Weegee, Lisette Model, Diane Arbus" - Comfort Gallery, Haverford, PA, "Lisette Model: A Celebration of Genius" - Parsons Exhibition Center, New York, NY, "Lisette Model" - Sander Gallery, New York, NY

1984 "Lisette Model/Evsa Model" - Ikona Gallery, Venice, Italy, "Lisette Model" - Jane Corkin Gallery, Toronto, Canada

1985 "The New York School Photographs: Part One" - Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., "The New York School Photographs: Part Two" - Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., "Masters of the Street II" - Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA

1987 "Vintage Women" - Photocollect, New York, NY

1988 "Lisette Model: Vintage Photographs" - Germans Van Eck Gallery, New York, NY

1989 "Noted Women Photographers of the 20s and 30s" - Jan Kesner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, "New York: Photography between the Wars" - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

1990 "Lisette Model" - National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada

1991 "Lisette Model" - International Center of Photography, New York, NY

1992 "Lisette Model: Photograhien, 1933-1983" - Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

1997 "Lisette Model: Selections from the Collection of the International Center of Photography" - Paine Webber Art Gallery, New York, NY

2000 "Lisette Model" - Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria

2001 "Lisette Model" - Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich, Switzerland

2002 "Lisette Model" - Baudoin Lebon Gallery, Paris, France, "Lisette Model" - L'Espace 14-16 Verneuil, Paris, France

2003 "Lisette Model" - Maurice Keitelman, Paris, France"A Clear Vision: Photographic Works from the F. C. Gundlach Collection" - International House of Photography, Hamburg, Germany

2006 "The Streets of New York: American Photographs from the Collection, 1938-1958" - National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

2007 "Lisette Model and Her Successors" - Aperture Gallery, New York, NY

2010 "Lisette Model" - The Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France

Collections

Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD

Albertina, Vienna, Austria

The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ

Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH

George Eastman House, Rochester, NY

Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI

Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

The Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA

The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia

The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada

de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara, CA

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.

Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence KS

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Publications

"Lisette Model" by Berenice Abbott published 2007 by Aperture Foundation

"Lisette Model" by Ann Thomas, published by the National Gallery of Canada to accompany an exhibition of Model's work which travelled the United States, Canada, and Germany during 1990–1992.

References

Category:American photographers Category:Women photographers Category:Austrian people of French descent Category:Austrian people of Italian descent Category:American people of Austrian descent Category:American people of Austrian-Jewish descent Category:People from Vienna Category:1901 births Category:1983 deaths

cs:Lisette Modelová de:Lisette Model fr:Lisette Model ja:リゼット・モデル pl:Lisette Model ro:Lisette Model ru:Модел, Лизетта

Robert Frank (born November 9, 1924), born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photobook titled ''The Americans'', was influential, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American society. Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with compositing and manipulating photographs.

Background and early photography career

Frank was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Switzerland. His mother, Rosa, was Swiss, but his father, Hermann, had become stateless after World War I and had to apply for the Swiss citizenship of Frank and his older brother, Manfred. Though Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland during World War II, the threat of Nazism nonetheless affected his understanding of oppression. He turned to photography, in part as a means to escape the confines of his business-oriented family and home, and trained under a few photographers and graphic designers before he created his first hand-made book of photographs, ''40 Fotos'', in 1946. Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured a job in New York City as a fashion photographer for ''Harper's Bazaar''. He soon left to travel in South America and Europe. He created another hand-made book of photographs that he shot in Peru, and returned to the U.S. in 1950. That year was momentous for Frank, who, after meeting Edward Steichen, participated in the group show ''51 American Photographers'' at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); he also married fellow artist Mary Frank née Mary Lockspeiser, with whom he had two children, Andrea and Pablo.

Though he was initially optimistic about United States society and culture, Frank's perspective quickly changed as he confronted the fast pace of American life and what he saw as an overemphasis on money. He now saw America as an often bleak and lonely place, a perspective that became evident in his later photography. Frank's own dissatisfaction with the control that editors exercised over his work also undoubtedly colored his experience. He continued to travel, moving his family briefly to Paris. In 1953, he returned to New York and continued to work as a freelance photojournalist for magazines including ''McCall's'', ''Vogue'', and ''Fortune''.

''The Americans''

With the aid of his major artistic influence, the photographer Walker Evans, Frank secured a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1955 to travel across the United States and photograph all strata of its society. Cities he visited included Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan; Savannah, Georgia; Miami Beach and St. Petersburg, Florida; New Orleans, Louisiana; Houston, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Reno, Nevada; Salt Lake City, Utah; Butte, Montana; and Chicago, Illinois. He took his family along with him for part of his series of road trips over the next two years, during which time he took 28,000 shots. Only 83 of those were finally selected by him for publication in ''The Americans''. Frank's journey was not without incident. While driving through Arkansas, he was arbitrarily thrown in jail after being stopped by the police; elsewhere in the South, he was told by a sheriff that he had "an hour to leave town."

Shortly after returning to New York in 1957, Frank met Beat writer Jack Kerouac on the sidewalk outside a party and showed him the photographs from his travels. Kerouac immediately told Frank "Sure I can write something about these pictures," and he contributed the introduction to the U.S. edition of ''The Americans''. Frank also became lifelong friends with Allen Ginsberg, and was one of the main visual artists to document the Beat subculture, which felt an affinity with Frank's interest in documenting the tensions between the optimism of the 1950s and the realities of class and racial differences. The irony that Frank found in the gloss of American culture and wealth over this tension gave his photographs a clear contrast to those of most contemporary American photojournalists, as did his use of unusual focus, low lighting and cropping that deviated from accepted photographic techniques.

This divergence from contemporary photographic standards gave Frank difficulty at first in securing an American publisher. ''Les Américains'' was first published in 1958 by Robert Delpire in Paris, and finally in 1959 in the United States by Grove Press, where it initially received substantial criticism. ''Popular Photography'', for one, derided his images as "meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness." Though sales were also poor at first, the fact that the introduction was by the popular Kerouac helped it reach a larger audience. Over time and through its inspiration of later artists, ''The Americans'' became a seminal work in American photography and art history, and is the work with which Frank is most clearly identified. In 1961, Frank received his first individual show, entitled ''Robert Frank: Photographer'', at the Art Institute of Chicago. He also showed at MoMA in New York in 1962.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of ''The Americans'', a new edition was released worldwide on May 30, 2008. Robert Frank discussed with his publisher, Gerhard Steidl, the idea of producing a new edition using modern scanning and the finest tritone printing. The starting point was to bring original prints from New York to Göttingen, Germany, where Steidl is based. In July 2007, Frank visited Göttingen. A new format for the book was worked out and new typography selected. A new cover was designed and Frank chose the book cloth, foil embossing and the endpaper. Most significantly, as he has done for every edition of ''The Americans'', Frank changed the cropping of many of the photographs, usually cropping less. Two images were changed completely from the original 1958 and 1959 editions. A celebratory exhibit of ''The Americans'' was displayed in 2009 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The second section of the four-section, 2009, SFMOMA exhibition displays Frank’s original application to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial (which funded the primary work on the ''Americans'' project), along with vintage contact sheets, letters to photographer Walker Evans and author Jack Kerouac, and two early manuscript versions of Kerouac’s introduction to the book. Also exhibited are three collages (made from more than 115 original rough work prints) that were assembled under Frank’s supervision in 2007 and 2008, revealing his intended themes as well as his first rounds of image selection.

Films

By the time ''The Americans'' was published in the United States, however, Frank had moved away from photography to concentrate on filmmaking. Among his films was the 1959 ''Pull My Daisy,'' which was written and narrated by Kerouac and starred Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and others from the Beat circle. The Beats emphasized spontaneity, and the film conveyed the quality of having been thrown together or even improvised. ''Pull My Daisy'' was accordingly praised for years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Frank's co-director, Alfred Leslie, revealed in a November 28, 1968 article in the ''Village Voice'' that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him and Frank, who shot the film with professional lighting.

In 1960, Frank was staying in Pop artist George Segal's basement while filming ''Sin of Jesus'' with a grant from Walter K. Gutman. Isaac Babel's story was transformed to center on a woman working on a chicken farm in New Jersey. It was originally supposed to be filmed in six weeks in and around New Brunswick, but Frank ended up shooting for six months.

His 1972 documentary of the Rolling Stones, ''Cocksucker Blues'', is arguably his best known film. The film shows the Stones while on their '72 tour, engaging in heavy drug use and group sex. Perhaps more disturbing to the Stones when they saw the finished product, however, was the degree to which Frank faithfully captured the loneliness and despair of life on the road. Mick Jagger reportedly told Frank, "It's a fucking good film, Robert, but if it shows in America we'll never be allowed in the country again." The Stones sued to prevent the film's release, and it was disputed whether Frank as the artist or the Stones as those who hired the artist actually owned the copyright. A court order resolved this with Solomonic wisdom by restricting the film to being shown no more than five times per year and only in the presence of Frank. Frank's photography also appeared on the cover of the Rolling Stones' album ''Exile on Main St.''.

Other films by Robert Frank include ''Me and My Brother (film)'', "Sin of Jesus", "Keep Busy", and ''Candy Mountain'' which he co-directed with Rudy Wurlitzer.

Return to still images

thumb|right|200px|''Flamingo'', exhibition catalog for Frank's 1996 Hasselblad Award showThough Frank continued to be interested in film and video, he returned to still images in the 1970s, publishing his second photographic book, ''The Lines of My Hand'', in 1972. This work has been described as a "visual autobiography", and consists largely of personal photographs. However, he largely gave up "straight" photography to instead create narratives out of constructed images and collages, incorporating words and multiple frames of images that were directly scratched and distorted on the negatives. None of this later work has achieved an impact comparable to that of ''The Americans.'' As some critics have pointed out, this is perhaps because Frank began playing with constructed images more than a decade after Robert Rauschenberg introduced his silkscreen composites—in contrast to ''The Americans'', Frank's later images simply were not beyond the pale of accepted technique and practice by that time.

Frank and Mary separated in 1969. He remarried, to sculptor June Leaf, and in 1971, moved to the community of Mabou, Nova Scotia in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia in Canada. In 1974, tragedy struck when his daughter, Andrea, was killed in a plane crash in Tikal, Guatemala. Also around this time, his son, Pablo, was first hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia. Much of Frank's subsequent work has dealt with the impact of the loss of both his daughter and subsequently his son, who died in an Allentown, Pennsylvania hospital in 1994. In 1995, he founded the Andrea Frank Foundation, which provides grants to artists.

Since his move to Nova Scotia, Canada, Frank has divided his time between his home there in a former fisherman's shack on the coast, and his Bleecker Street loft in New York. He has acquired a reputation for being a recluse (particularly since the death of Andrea), declining most interviews and public appearances. He has continued to accept eclectic assignments, however, such as photographing the 1984 Democratic National Convention, and directing music videos for artists such as New Order ("Run"), and Patti Smith ("Summer Cannibals"). Frank continues to produce both films and still images, and has helped organize several retrospectives of his art. In 1994, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC presented the most comprehensive retrospective of Frank's work to date, entitled ''Moving Out''. Frank was awarded the prestigious Hasselblad Award for photography in 1996. His 1997 award exhibition at the Hasselblad Center in Goteborg, Sweden was entitled ''Flamingo'', as was the accompanying published catalog.

Quotes

"When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice." Robert Frank, ''Life'' (26 November 1951), p. 21

"Quality doesn't mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. That's not quality, that's a kind of quality. The pictures of Robert Frank might strike someone as being sloppy - the tone range isn't right and things like that - but they're far superior to the pictures of Ansel Adams with regard to quality, because the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. But the quality of Robert Frank is a quality that has something to do with what he's doing, what his mind is. It's not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. It's got to do with intention." (Elliott Erwitt)

References

:4. Philip Gefter, ''Snapshots From The American Road'', The New York Times, Dec. 14, 2008

Further reading

Alexander, Stuart. – Robert Frank: A Bibliography, Filmography, and Exhibition Chronology 1946-1985. ISSN 0739-4845 LOC#: 86-071793

Frank, Robert. – Robert Frank: Storylines (Turtleback) ISBN 3-86521-041-4

Frank, Robert. – Twenty-four Photographs. In: Corina Caduff and Reto Sorg (Ed.): Nationalliteraturen heute – ein Fantom? Tradition und Imagination des Schweizerischen als Problem. Programmheft zur Internationalen Tagung vom 18. bis 21. Juni 2003 im Schauspielhaus Zürich. Mit Originalbeiträgen von Robert Frank und Michail Schischkin. Thun: Report 2003 [Switzerland]. ISBN 3-907591-30-5

Green, Jonathan. – American Photography: A Critical History (Abrams). ISBN 0-8109-1814-5 Chapter 5, "The Americans: Politics and Alienation"

Janis, Eugenia Parry and Wendy MacNeil, eds. – Photography Within the Humanities, Addison House Publishers, Danbury, NH, 1977. ISBN 0-89169-013-1, see pp. 52–65 for the transcript of a talk and interview with Robert Frank, conducted at Wellesley College on 14 April 1975

Leo, Vince. – Robert Frank: From Compromise to Collaboration. ("Parkett" Issue 42 1994 Pg 8-23)

Nericcio, William Anthony. – Cinematography, Photography, and Literature: The Aesthetic Triptych of Robert Frank (MOPA, San Diego, 2000) An online essay on ''Pull My Daisy'' with illustrations and film-clip

Papageorge, Tod. – Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence, New Haven, CT, Yale University Art Gallery, 1981. ISBN 0-89467-015-8

Sandeen, Eric. – Picturing An Exhibition. ISBN 0-8263-1558-5, see chapter 5: "Edward Steichen, Robert Frank, and American Modernism"

Tucker, Anne and Philip Brookman, eds. – New York to Nova Scotia ISBN 3-86521-013-9 Hardcover: ISBN 0-8212-1623-6

Gefter, Philip. - Photography After Frank (Aperture, 2009): ISBN 978-1-59711-095-2

Bibliographies

Frank Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)

External links

Robert Frank’s Masterpiece: “The Americans” at 50

Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans", National Gallery of Art

Elson Lecture 2009: Robert Frank, National Gallery of Art

"Seeing Beauty in Our Shadows Robert Frank's 'The Americans,' unpopular when first published, has shaped the way America looks at itself," The Wall Street Journal, September 19-20, 2009

Reading the Modern Photography Book: Changing Perceptions, National Gallery of Art

Rare Robert Frank available online.

Tod Papageorge on Walker Evans and Robert Frank

Tate Modern: Robert Frank

''Frank Films''

Essay

'Robert Frank: Dissecting The American Image' by Jno Cook

Illustrated book review of The Americans

Category:American photographers Category:American film directors Category:American expatriates in Canada Category:Swiss emigrants to the United States Category:American people of Swiss-Jewish descent Category:Swiss Jews Category:Guggenheim Fellows Category:People from Inverness County, Nova Scotia Category:People from New York Category:Photography in Britain Category:1924 births Category:Living people Category:Street photographers

cs:Robert Frank da:Robert Frank de:Robert Frank es:Robert Frank fr:Robert Frank (photographe) it:Robert Frank he:רוברט פרנק nl:Robert Frank ja:ロバート・フランク pl:Robert Frank ru:Франк, Роберт fi:Robert Frank

Coordinates	38°37′38″N90°11′52″N
bgcolour	#6495ED
name	Roman Opałka
birth date	August 27, 1931
birth place	Hocquincourt, Somme, France
death date	August 06, 2011
death place	Chieti
nationality	French, Polish
field	Painting Contemporary Art
awards	2009 Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters, Paris 2009 Gold Medal of the Cultural Merit « Gloria Artis », Warsaw 1996 Special Prize of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland 1993 Kaiserring, Goslar, Poland 1991 National Prize of Painting, Paris
website	http://opalka1965.com }}

Roman Opałka (August 27, 1931 – August 6, 2011) was a French-born Polish painter.

Opałka was born on August 27, 1931, in Abbeville-Saint-Lucien, France, to Polish parents. The family returned to Poland in 1946 and Opałka studied lithography at a graphics school before enrolling in the School of Art and Design in Lodz. He later earned a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He moved back to France in 1977. Opałka lived in Teille, near Le Mans, and Venice. He died at age 79 after falling ill while on holiday in Italy. He was admitted to a hospital near Rome and died there a few days later, on August 6, 2011, three weeks before his 80th birthday. The final digit he painted was an 8.

Work

In 1965, in his studio in Warsaw, Opałka began painting a process of counting – from one to infinity. Starting in the top left-hand corner of the canvas and finishing in the bottom right-hand corner, the tiny numbers were painted in horizontal rows. Each new canvas, which the artist called a 'detail', took up counting where the last left off. Each 'detail' is the same size (196 x 135 cm), the dimension of his studio door in Warsaw. All details have the same title, "1965 / 1 – ∞"; the concept had no end, and the artist pledged his life to its execution: 'All my work is a single thing, the description from number one to infinity. A single thing, a single life.' Typically he would paint around 400 figures a day. Brush and paint never varied. His figures were roughly a centimetre tall, most made with two deliberate strokes of the brush, and allowed to fade away as his paint ran out.

Over the years there were changes to the ritual. In Opałka's first details he painted white numbers onto a black background. In 1968 he changed to a grey background 'because it's not a symbolic colour, nor an emotional one', and in 1972 he decided he would gradually lighten this grey background by adding 1 per cent more white to the ground with each passing detail. He expected to be painting virtually in white on white by the time he reached 7 777 777: 'My objective is to get up to the white on white and still be alive.' As of July 2004, he had reached 5.5 million. Adopting this rigorously serialized approach, Opałka aligned himself with many other artists of the time who explored making art through systems and mathematics, like Daniel Buren, On Kawara, and Hanne Darboven. He was represented in Paris and New York by Yvon Lambert.

In 1968 Opałka introduced a tape recorder, speaking each number into the microphone as he painted it, and also began taking passport-style photographs of himself standing before the canvas after each day's work, a ritual bookkeeping of time passing. The process was endless, but measured against its goal – infinity – it is as naught: 'the problem is that we are, and are about not to be'.

In 2007 Opałka participated at the symposium "Personal Structures Time-Space-Existence" a project initiated by the artist Rene Rietmeyer.

Exhibitions

Opałka participated in many of the art world’s most important international exhibitions, including Documenta in Kassel, Germany, in 1977; the Sao Paolo Bienal in 1987; and the Venice Biennale, in 1995 and 2003. He was represented in Paris and New York by Yvon Lambert, and, for many years, at John Weber in New York.

Collections

Opałka's works can be found in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and New York’s Museum of Modern Art among others.

Recognition

Opałka won the celebrated Grand Prize of the 7th International Biennial of Arts and Graphics of Cracow in 1969, the C. K. Norwid Art Critics Award in 1970, Franceʼs National Painting Prize in 1991 and Germanyʼs Kaiser Prize in 1993. He was named Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and of Letters) in France.

References

External links

opalka1965.com – Roman Opalka official website

Works Information

Roman Opalka on the-artists.org

Netart project dedicated to Roman Opalka

LVRH Blog archive

Roman Opalka bio, selected works and exhibitions at Praz-Delavallade Gallery

Roman Opalka Chateau de Fraisse France

Category:1931 births Category:2011 deaths Category:Polish painters Category:French painters Category:Infinity Category:French people of Polish descent Category:People from Oise

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Coordinates	38°37′38″N90°11′52″N
Name	Alec Soth
Birth date	1969
Birth place	Minneapolis, Minnesota
Occupation	Photography
Nationality	American }}

Alec Soth (born 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an American photographer notable for "large-scale American projects" featuring the midwestern United States. His photography has a cinematic feel with elements of folklore that hint at a story behind the image. ''New York Times'' art critic Hilarie M. Sheets wrote that he has made a "photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers" and photographs "loners and dreamers". His work tends to focus on the "off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America" according to ''The Guardian'' art critic Hannah Booth. His work has been compared to photographers such as Walker Evans and Stephen Shore.

Early life

Soth studied at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. He was reported to be "painfully shy" in his youth.

Career

Soth liked the work of Diane Arbus. He traveled around the Mississippi River and made a self-printed book entitled ''Sleeping by the Mississippi'' which included both landscapes and portraits. Curators for the 2004 Whitney Biennial put him in their show, and one of his photographs entitled "Charles", of a man in a flight suit on his roof holding two model airplanes, was used in their poster.

When he photographs people, Soth feels nervous at times. He said: "My own awkwardness comforts people, I think. It’s part of the exchange." When he was on the road, he'd have notes describing types of pictures he wanted taped to the steering wheel of his car. One list was: "beards, birdwatchers, mushroom hunters, men’s retreats, after the rain, figures from behind, suitcases, tall people (especially skinny), targets, tents, treehouses and tree lines. With people, he'll ask their permission to photograph them, and often wait for them to get comfortable; he sometimes uses an 8x10 camera. He tries to find a "narrative arc and true storytelling" and pictures in which each picture will lead to the next one.

Soth received fellowships from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations and was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. His photographs are in major public and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Walker Art Center. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

His first book, ''Sleeping by the Mississippi'', was published in 2004. His second book, ''Niagara'', was published in 2006. One of his photos is of a woman in a bridal gown sitting outside what appears to be a motel; he describes having made an arrangement with a particular wedding chapel in Niagara Falls which let him take pictures of couples getting married, by photographing them after their weddings.

Soth made several more photographic books including ''Last Days of W'', a book about a country "exhausted by George W. Bush's presidency".

Soth has photographed for ''The New York Times Magazine'', ''Fortune'' and ''Newsweek''.

Soth Created, with Lester B. Morrison, Broken Manual over four years (2006-2010) an underground instruction manual for those looking to escape their lives. Soth investigates the places in which people retreat to escape civilization. Soth photographs monks, survivalists, hermits and runaways.

Soth concurrently produced the photo book ''From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America'' an overview of Soth’s photography from the early 1990s to the present.

Soth founded the publishing house Little Brown Mushroom in 2010.

In 2010, Soth flew to the United Kingdom but was denied a work visa, but was allowed into the country with the understanding that if he was "caught taking photographs" he could be put in prison for two years. So he handed the camera to his young daughter who took pictures in Brighton.

In 2004, Soth became a nominee of the Magnum Photos agency and in 2008 he became a full member. He has expressed an interest in photographing "hermits, Scarlett Johansson, happy people, the Amazon, unusually tall people, Welsh countryside." He lives with his wife and children in Minneapolis.

Gallery exhibitions

Galerie Friedrich Loock, Berlin Germany; "Alec Soth: Broken Moments" (June 10 - July 23, 2011)

Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN. USA) "Alec Soth: From here to there" (September 12 – January 2, 2011)

High Museum of art (Atlanta, Ga. USA) "Alec Soth: Black line of woods" (August 8 - Jan 3, 2010)

Weinstein Gallery (Minneapolis, MN, USA), "Alec Soth: Niagara" (April 7 - June 10, 2006)

Wohnmaschine (Berlin, Germany), "Alec Soth - Niagara" (March 24 - April 29, 2006)

Gagosian Gallery (New York, New York, USA), "Alec Soth 'Niagara'" (January 21 - February 25, 2006)

Gagosian Gallery (New York, New York, USA), "Roger Ballen, Alec Soth and Vera Lutter" (June 4 - July 29, 2005)

Stephen Wirtz Gallery (San Francisco, CA, USA), "Alec Soth 'Sleeping by the Mississippi'" (June 2 - July 24, 2004)

Yossi Milo Gallery (New York, New York, USA), "Alec Soth 'Sleeping by the Mississippi'" (March 12 - April 24, 2004)

Collections

Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, Buffalo, N.Y.

Art Institute of Chicago

Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisc.

Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami, Fla.

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

References

Selected bibliography

Engberg Siri,"FROM HERE TO THERE: ALEC SOTH'S AMERICA",Walker Art Center,2010. ISBN 9780935640960

External links

Alec Soth's Official Website

Alec Soth's Blog

New Yorker Review of Niagara Exhibit

Museum of Contemporary Photography Exhibit

Village Voice Review

Photographs by Alec Soth

Citypages Feature Article about Alec Soth

Alec Soth on re-title.com

Alec Soth on Nofound

Illustrated Bibliography: Alec Soth

Category:1969 births Category:Living people Category:American photographers Category:Magnum photographers Category:Artists from Minnesota Category:People from Minneapolis, Minnesota

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