MURALS BY AMERICAN PAINTERS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS
Lincoln Kirstein and Julien Levy [essays]
Lincoln Kirstein and Julien Levy [essays]: MURALS BY AMERICAN PAINTERS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS. New York: Museum of Modern Art, May 1932. First Edition [2,000 copies]. Slim quarto. Printed wrappers. [62] pp. 61 black and white illustrations. The first Museum of Modern Art exhibition to include photography. An Ex-Art Museum Library copy with expected, yet minimal stamps and marks early and late. Ink check marks next to the majority of the images and a few curatorial inked notes throughout. Offsetting to several leaves, but a nice reference copy of this scarce catalog.
7.5 x 10 softcover book with 62 pages and 61 black and white photo reproductions. Published on the occasion of the 16th exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art from May 3 - May 31, 1932. Lincoln Kirstein contributed an essay on Mural painting and Julien Levy wrote about Photo Murals. An important early MoMA exhibition catalog that includes a number of experimental photographic murals utilizing photomontage techniques.
Commenting on the mural show, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Director of the Museum, said; "This exhibition marks an important innovation in the program of the Museum of Modern Art. So far as I know, no museum has ever attempted to assemble such a comprehensive group of large mural paintings and photo-murals so that the public may have a chance to make comparisons."
Includes short biographies and details of painted mural work by Jane Berlandia, Edward Biberman, George Biddle, Henry Billings, Louis Bouchéglenn Coleman, James Edward Davis, Stuart Davis, Philip Evergood, Ernest Fiene, Stefan Hirsch, Morris Kantor, Benjamin Kopman, Thomas Lafarge, Monty Lewis, William Littlefield, Reginald Marsh, Kimon Nicolaides, Georgia O’Keefe, Henry Varnum Poor, Philip Reisman, Ben Shahn, Byron Thomas, Franklin Watkins, and Thomas M. Wood. Also includes short biographies of muralists Maurice Becker, Mordi Gassner, Yun Gee, Hugo Gellert, Bertram Goodman, William Gropper, Karl Knaths, Edward Laning, Jan Matulka, and Maurice Sterne.
Includes short biographies and Photo Mural work by Berenice Abbott, Maurice Bratter, Hendrick V. Duryea & Robert E. Locher, Arthur Gerlach, George Platt Lynes, William M. Ritasse, Thurman Rotan [B. Waco, Texas], Charles Sheeler, Stella Simon, Edward Steichen, and Luke H. Swank. Also includes short biographies of Photo Muralists Emma Little & Joella Levy.
“Murals by forty-six American painters and photographers will be shown in the exhibition which will open the new quarters of the Museum of Modern Art at 11 West 53rd Street. The mural exhibition and the Museum's new home will open to the public on Wednesday, May 4. The large gallery comprising the entire second floor and the gallery on the first floor of the five-story residence into which the Museum has just moved, will be devoted to the murals.
“The exhibition, which has been in preparation for several months, has attracted advance comment throughout the country because of the increasing interest in mural decoration. It comes at a time when there is widespread discussion of the problem of who is to do the murals of the nation's great buildings. The artists whose work will be shown are all American born, or hold United States citizenship papers. Many of them are young painters who have never had a chance to express their ideas in wall decoration, although their work has shown their interest in composing decorations on a large scale.
“Each artist will be represented by a small three-panel sketch, above which will be hung a panel, four by seven feet, which will be an enlargement of any one of the three sections of the sketch. Oil on canvas, tempera on wood panels fresco, ceramic tile, and pastel on celluloid welded between glass, are among the mediums chosen by the artists. . . Over sixty artists were invited to exhibit, and thirty-two have submitted canvasses and fourteen have experimented with photo-murals. The artists exhibiting are contemporary painters of every inclination, thus ensuring the representative character of the exhibition.” [Museum of Modern Art press release, August 23, 1932]
In its early decades the Museum of Modern Art played a significant role in establishing photography as a modern art form. At the same time MoMA was integrating photography into innovative installation designs, blurring distinctions between photographs as art objects and as communications media.
MoMA curators understood photography to be both an avant-garde art form and a powerful medium of persuasion. Thus, the Museum promoted photography as an art form and also used it to illustrate, explain, and promulgate modernism.
For this early exhibition the Museum installed large-scale murals, including photomontages by Berenice Abbott and Maurice Bratter. The imagery and billboard scale evokes a utilitarian exhibition drawn from her book Changing New York. In his triptych Three Newspaper Services, Bratter used commercial-style imagery to illustrate “Sports,” “Financ[e],” and “Advertising.”