The University of Wyoming Art Museum Shows Eliot Porter's Photography

Written by Sidney Willard Friday, 16 September 2011 22:07

Laramie, WY.- The Univrsity of Wyoming Art Museum is pleased to present "The West of Eliot Porter: Images of Colorado, New Mexico and Utah" on view at the museum until December 22nd. Eliot Porter (American, 1901-1990) created a new way of viewing the world by introducing color to landscape photography, which today has become commonplace.  Porter began working in color in 1939, long before his fellow photographers accepted the medium. Trained as a chemical engineer and a medical doctor, Porter began his career in photography in the early 1930s by making black-and-white prints in his spare time while working as a bacteriologist and teaching at Harvard University. It was around this time that his brother, Fairfield Porter, a realist artist and art critic, introduced him to photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. Offering guidance, Stieglitz began to critique Porter’s black-and-white photographs and in 1938 exhibited Porter’s work in his New York gallery, An American Place.

The success of the exhibition prompted Porter to leave Harvard and pursue photography full-time. The year after his exhibition at Stieglitz’s gallery, Porter began working in color with Eastman Kodak’s new dye transfer process, a technique he would use the rest of his career. Porter taught himself the delicate, multi-step process for creating color photographs using Kodachrome, the color transparency film. For the next three decades Porter struggled against the perception that color photography was inappropriate for artists because it produced images that were too literal. He hoped that his color photographs would bring a new facet to the perception and representation of nature in photography. Porter used the color process to create highly expressive images by slightly increasing the brilliance, contrast or saturation in the film transparencies. He produced seven portfolios of nearly 8,000 prints using the complex dye transfer process from 1953 to 1984. Correspondingly, between 1951 and 1984 Porter photographed the region of the United States west of the 105th meridian, which runs north and south through Denver. The natural intensity of color combined with a sharp contrast between light and shadow allowed Porter to create a very wide variety of images that range from panoramic landscapes to close-ups of plant life and the textures of rock, sand and water surfaces – the latter of which verge on the abstract. As part of this series Porter photographed the Colorado River’s Glen Canyon in Utah in the early 1960s before it was flooded to create Lake Powell. Over a fifty-year career that includes work from Maine to China, Porter built a broad popular reputation based on thousands of richly hued prints and twenty-five books. His work energized environmentalists, drew accolades from museums, and created the foundations for today’s color nature photography. Porter died in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1990 and bequeathed his personal archive to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.  The UW Art Museum permanent collection contains 30 photographs by Porter, which were acquired before his death, with images of California, Idaho, Oregon, New Zealand, Africa and Antarctica – in addition to the photographs in this exhibition.

The University of Wyoming Art Museum is located in the dramatic Centennial Complex on the university campus in Laramie, Wyoming. The Centennial Complex, which also houses the American Heritage Center, was designed by internationally acclaimed architect Antoine Predock and is a public facility with spacious free parking for visitors. Museum exhibitions offer something for everyone and are displayed in an exciting gallery environment. Special programs, lectures, openings, workshops, classes and tours are held on a regular basis. The University of Wyoming Art Museum offers a year-round source of education and entertainment for the entire family. The Art Museum's permanent collection is comprised of over 8,000 objects, which includes European and American paintings, prints, sculpture and drawings as well as special collections of 18th and 19th century Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, 15th through 19th century Persian and Indian miniature paintings, 20th century Haitian art, 20th century Japanese netsuke, 20th century and contemporary photography, and Rapa Nui, African, and Native American artifacts. From 15th century Old Master prints to French Rococo, German Expressionism, Fauvism, Modernism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Contemporary Art, the collection of paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, photography, and arts of many cultures and periods, all relate to the development of American art, historically and in all forms. American art of the 19th and 20th centuries is one of the strongest areas of the Art Museum’s collections with a wide array of works including exceptional landscapes by George Inness and Albert Bierstadt, works by The Ten including Childe Hassam and John Henry Twachtman, and the artists associated with the development of American Modernism of the Stieglitz Circle. The Art Museum also has important holdings in American Regionalism and Social Realism with works by Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood and Reginald Marsh. Important illustrator artists are represented by large collections of prints by Winslow Homer, James Whistler, John Audubon and a substantial group of work by Thomas Moran.  Important works by Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Lee Krasner represent the shift of the art world in the twentieth century to New York and works by Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol augment the contributions of these artists. European art ranging from the 15th century to the present is represented in the Art Museum collections. Among the earliest works are the Old Masters with examples by German artists Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach and Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Flemish genre prints of the 16th and 17th century, works by such Baroque artists as Robert Nanteuil and Jacques Callot, and prints by Francisco Goya round out the early European collection.  The Art Museum’s holdings in French works from the 19th and 20th centuries are remarkably comprehensive with works by Paul Gauguin, Paul Signac, and Marc Chagall.  European modernists are represented by Auguste Rodin, Aristide Maillol, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso and include the Surrealists Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí. The Art Museum's photography collection includes examples ranging from the earliest photogravures of Edward S. Curtis and exploratory photographs of William Henry Jackson to the recent works of Richard Misrach, Mark Klett and Richard Barnes. Photo-Secession artist Alvin Langdon Coburn and other 20th century photographers in the collection include Berenice Abbott, Laura Gilpin, and Harold Edgerton. Both Ralston Crawford and Eliot Porter are well represented in the collection. As a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Photographic Legacy Program, in which collections of original Warhol photographs were distributed to 180 academic collections in the U.S., the Art Museum collection includes 150 Polaroid and gelatin silver prints taken by Andy Warhol over the course of his career. More recent works by artists such as Jun Kaneko, Chuck Forsman and Wanxin Zhang bring the Art Museum collections to the present day. Varying across a spectrum of media, the contemporary collections continue to develop with a broad range of artists from the late 20th and 21st centuries and provide original resource material for students and scholars to view and study in the future. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.uwyo.edu/artmuseum

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