24 June 09: Skyscrapers is grand

This photo of the PSFS Building was included in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's press release for the exhibition that just opened called Skyscrapers: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs of the Early Twentieth Century. . . . and I wondered why. As someone who's spent a great deal of time photographing, drawing, and studying skyscrapers in nine years of living in a city with a good many skyscrapers, I've developed my own set of criteria for what makes a good image of a skyscraper. It's not academically (or Art Institutionally) approved, it's just what I see and know and like and use. This one, made by Philadelphia photographer Lloyd Ullberg in 1933, is off balance, lacks the contrast that's nowadays as easy as sliding the points of a Photoshop histogram, and doesn't really tell anything about its subject. That's exactly what makes it work in this exhibition. Skyscrapers, which officially opened at the PMA on June 6th, is not a study of architecture, though it has some architectural drawings -- including one that transcends Ullberg's photo into an incredible work of art. "The PSFS Building", an etching by Earl Horter from 1932, exhibits the clean lines and crispness of the tower's celebrated modernism, a contemporary artwork of the tower George Howe and William Lescaze had completed that same year. Horter's labored work of art appears realistic; Ullberg's instant snapshot is shockingly abstract. Ullberg's selection is therefore no mistake. Curator John Vick chose the image from the PMA's permanent collection of prints, drawings and photographs, which is comprised of over 170,000 pieces. "The Horter image captures the moment of the building -- the style speaks very much of 1932," Vick says. "Ullberg's is a complete contrast, a much more conceptual image when photography was just beginning to be able to do this." If any one person can be traced back to as a forebear of photography as art, it might as well be Alfred Stieglitz. PMA's center of photography bears his name, and his portraits of a young Georgia O'Keeffe (who quickly became his lover, and later, wife) pushed the boundaries of accepted photography, its sensual nature helping to launch her own career. (Another interesting footnote: Ansel Adams, perhaps the most famous of all American photographers, made visits to O'Keeffe at the New Mexico ranch where she made her most recognized works of art.) Stieglitz moved with his family in 1881 to Germany at the formative age of 17 and immediately became obsessed with photography. When he returned to New York in 1891, art museums were for the most part still not collecting photography, and a lot of the photography competitions and exhibitions of the day were judged by established artists -- painters, lithographers and such. In the decade leading up to the turn of the century, he became the editor of American Amateur Photographer, the leading journal on the subject, he helped to form the Camera Club of New York and its own journal, Camera Notes, and he was laying the foundations for what would become the Photo-Secession, a group of artists dedicated to the advancement of photography (who borrowed their name from a show of prints called The Secessionists and which included Henri Toulous-Latrec and Edvard Munch). All the while, his hometown -- the epicenter of American art -- was his muse; his work rose with the rising city around him. New York at the turn of the century witnessed explosive growth of the maximization of usable space, the technologically assisted vertical growth of the city; Stieglitz' camera witnessed New York. "Old and New, New York", from 1911 (pictured at left), is one of three pieces by Stieglitz in Skyscrapers and exemplifies the early fascination with newfound building enormity, the construction of the Vanderbilt Hotel rising over its lowrise neighbors. Another mounting, "Looking North from An American Place", is a series of three photos from 1930 showing the construction progress of the New York Trust Company Building and Pierre Hotel. Alfred Stieglitz was doing in New York a century ago what this web site has done in the two thousand oughts. Several New York buildings of the day -- Flatiron, Woolworth, Singer, Chrysler, Empire State -- and a handful of Chicago ones -- Wrigley, Tribune -- are spectacular subjects here as art, as much as they are spectacular examples of modernity, architecture and engineering achievement. "I didn't want it to seem that this was a New York or Chicago-centric exhibition, but any show about early skyscrapers will naturally find common ground in these cities [as pioneers of the skyscraper]," Vick explains. He then points to "Shells of the Living", an aquatint from 1933 by Benton Spruance of a building we know as Philadelphia's own PNB Building. Depicting a chaotic, yet rhythmic urban scene, the print puts One South Broad in the background of fire escapes, exhausts, billowing smoke, and way down on the ground, a big truck, maybe a garbage truck. One of the most powerful, and playful, pieces in Skyscrapers is from neither New York nor Chicago nor Philadelphia. Thurman Rotan's "Horse and Skyscraper" shows San Antonio, Texas in a spaghetti western view of manifest destiny, a giant stone building rising over a horse at a pond in a meadow, a comical progress-over-nature. It's a noticeable silliness in an exhibition whose other parts portend fear from the stock market crash of 1929, twinkling fascination of the new nighttime skyline, and hope for the future out of the desolation of the Great Depression. And all of these come from the observation of skyscrapers. Buildings leapt and charged ahead; art kept pace. Stieglitz and his friends, photographer Paul Strand and painter John Marin, are among those exhibited in Skyscrapers. Berenice Abbott's Changing New York was one of the most influential early photography exhibitions, funded by Franklin Roosevelt's Federal Art Project, and is revisited with a number of her photos here as well. All told, there are 55 works in the show. Skyscrapers: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs of the Early Twentieth Century is in the Berman Gallery on the ground floor of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It's open now and runs through November 1st. It's curated by John Vick, the Margaret Mainwaring Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, a two year fellowship that concludes with an exhibition of the Fellow's choosing. Skyscrapers is Vick's exhibition. For more on the show, visit PMA's web site HERE. –B Love