The Palm Springs Art Museum recently received three major photography gifts that have brought national attention to our growing collection. Some of the most stunning works from these gifts have been organized into this exhibition, which features compelling works from post-World War II American photography. The three collectors who have donated these significant photographs are Patricia and Patrick Kennedy, Jeanne and Dan Fauci, and Pamela and Joe Bonino.
The Kennedy gift included more than 500 individual works from some of the country’s most significant modernist photographers, including Henry Callahan, George Tice, Helen Levitt, and Milton Rogovin. Jeanne and Dan Fauci’s initial gift focuses on photographers who took the social conditions of modern life as their subject. Louis Faurer, teacher of Robert Frank, Todd Webb, Ira Nowinski, and Larry Fink all combine an artist’s unflinching eye for the details of everyday reality with a keen aesthetic sense of formal visual organization.
One of the museum’s most prized new acquisitions, a platinum palladium print of Irving Penn’s Big Nude (1976), comes through the generosity represented in the Bonino gift. It is a stunning portrait of the contours created by an ample, female body squeezed into an armchair and printed with such a high degree of contrast that the forms are visually flattened and the entire composition tips toward the surface of the image. Other images of women by Bill Brandt, Judy Dater, and Weegee are equally compelling visual investigations. This gift also includes a group of works by groundbreaking new topographics photographer Lewis Baltz that offers an ironic commentary on the modern built environment.
Reflecting their own interests, the collectors who have donated these works focused on different aspects of modernist photography. Together their contributions offer a compelling vision of American life in the post-World War II era.
This exhibition is organized from the museum’s permanent collection.
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