Milwaukee Art Museum to host "Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography"

Written by Bruce Mcphee Tuesday, 19 January 2010 23:13

Milwaukee, WI - Abstract Expressionism, film noir, Beat poetry, and the New Journalism are all widely recognized aftershocks of World War II, representing a broad aesthetic revolution that championed spontaneity and subjective interpretation as the guiding principles of creative practice. Postwar photographers in many ways set the rhythm and tenor of this new approach, not least because the hand-held camera was naturally suited to chance discoveries and impulsive gestures. On exhibition January 30–April 25, 2010 at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Significantly, it was the increased prominence of photography in American culture during and just prior to World War II that made it possible for the battlefield to be seen by—and made very real for—those on the home front.

Street Seen provides an in-depth look at six photographers active during the 1940s and 1950s whose work is grounded in a photographic sensibility derived from the visceral imagery of World War II. Lisette Model, Louis Faurer, Ted Croner, Saul Leiter, William Klein, and Robert Frank all share a talent for communicating the emotional resonance of everyday life in postwar America. Their graphically charged and emotionally engaging photographs evoke the excitement and unease that characterized the era, as popular culture, the arts, and everyday life underwent substantial, dramatic changes.

Many of these photographers also experimented with motion picture film. A select group of these short, non-narrative films will be on view in the galleries to create a dialogue with the approximately 100 photographs. In addition, to demonstrate the scope of the “psychological gesture” in American art during this period, paintings and drawings by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline will punctuate the installation. The proximity of the paintings and photographs will clarify the significance and breadth of the subjective, performative approach to art-making in the mid-twentieth century.

Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940-1959 is curated by Curator of Photographs Lisa Hostetler.

The Milwaukee Art Museum collects and preserves art, presenting it to the community as a vital source of inspiration and education. 20,000 works of art. 300,000+ visitors a year. 120 years of collecting art. From its roots in Milwaukee’s first art gallery in 1888, the Museum has grown today to be an icon for Milwaukee and a resource for the entire state.

Four floors of over forty galleries of art are rotated regularly with works from antiquity to the present in the Museum’s far-reaching collection. Included in the Collection are 15th– to 20th–century European and 17th– to 20th–century American paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, decorative arts, photographs, and folk and self-taught art. Among the best in the nation are the Museum’s holding of American decorative arts, German Expressionism, folk and Haitian art, and American art after 1960. The Museum also holds one of the largest collections of works by Wisconsin native Georgia O’Keeffe.  Visit : www.mam.org/