American Bounty: New York Collectors Gift Fifty Works to Museum of Art
Smoking, Drinking and Drugged Out: America’s Other Side on view in Larry Clark’s Tulsa Photos

The list of people whose names are synonymous with the work they do is an admittedly short one.

Ansel Adams, Mount Williamson, The Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California (1945)

This is especially true of American art, itself an extremely young and developing field until the mid-20th century. Of the few examples: Annie Leibovitz and her portraits; Andy Warhol’s soup cans; Georgia O’Keeffe and her highly suggestive paintings; Jackson Pollock’s abstract splatterings; Walt Whitman’s free-verse works; Allen Ginsberg’s howling beat poetry.

But perhaps no artist is as inseparable from his art as Ansel Adams. There are few artists whose name and works approach Adams’ extraordinary level of popular recognition and artistic achievement: In a career that spanned more than five decades, Adams became one of America’s most beloved landscape photographers, helping revolutionize photography and establish it as a viable force in American art. In addition, Adams was one of the most ardent and respected environmentalists of his time, and his efforts as a photographer and as a member of the Sierra Club helped support and develop America’s National Park system.

Ansel Adams: Masterworks from the Collection of the Turtle Bay Exploration Park, an exhibition of prints hand-selected by the artist himself, comes to the Columbia Museum of Art on Friday; it is the first major exhibition in the museum’s year-long celebration of American art.

You’ve invariably seen his work, his black-and-white photographs of Yosemite National Park decorating dorm-room posters and bedecking postcards.

“When someone says ‘Ansel Adams,’” says Todd Herman, chief curator at the Columbia Museum of Art, “they think of nature photography.”

“Everybody does,” exhibition curator Robyn Peterson affirms with a laugh. “He’s very popular.”

There’s a reason for Ansel Adams’ popularity, and it’s his timeless, impeccably composed photographs.

“I think one of the reasons that he has such enduring popularity is that he celebrates something most Americans value very highly: the beauty of the country’s landscape,” Peterson says. “And the kinds of things that are most appealing to the general public typically aren’t black-and-white and are typically images of people, and none of those are true of Ansel Adams. So, it’s kind of interesting that he did wind up being so popular, because there’s something very elegant and sophisticated about his style.”

Not bad for someone who almost became a professional musician.
 

Ansel Adams, Orchard, Portola Valley, California (c. 1940)

Born in 1902 to a family that would be crippled by the Panic of 1907, Adams dedicated his youth to pursuing a career as a pianist and singer. It was a 1916 trip to Yosemite National Park — which would become one of his favorite subjects — that sparked his interest in photography. But it wasn’t until he married Virginia Best in 1928 — after, it should be noted, he produced Monolith, one of his most notable works — that Adams dedicated himself fully to photography.

“Photography was something he knew he was good at and that he loved to do,” Herman says. “But I think that, like many people, he wasn’t sure — especially at that time, as photography was still relatively young — what kind of future that held.”

Adams, though, was instrumental in developing photography as a legitimate art form.
Along with fellow California-based photographers such as Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and William Van Dyke, Adams formed Group f/64 — named for a very small aperture setting that gives great depth of field — which espoused pure, straight photography over pictorialism.

“Early photography tried to imitate painting,” Herman explains. “As far as ‘artistic photography’ goes, they largely saw that avenue as an imitation of what painting could do.
And largely they tried to imitate Impressionism. So you had these slightly out of focus images that were supposed to be ‘painterly,’ and what Ansel Adams and some other photographers did in the early part of the 20th century was move away from that and make photography its own art form by trying not to imitate another art form. And when he formed the f/64 group, that’s what they were about. They were about trying to move photography forward on its own terms.”

Indeed, it’s not an overstatement to say that photography — and American art in general — would be radically different without Adams’ influence.

Moreover, Herman says, America itself might be a different place, most especially the places his photographs helped establish as national parks.

“Roads were being laid and golf courses were being laid in these areas,” Herman says.
“They were starting to cut down a lot of it, so if he hadn’t taken those photographs in the way that he took them, the West might be a very different place.”

“He wasn’t just out there with a [Kodak] Brownie [box camera] snapping pictures of tree trunks,” he continues. “He was really creating pictures that were awe-inspiring.”

Laid out roughly in chronological order, Masterworks chiefly traces Adams’ development as a photographer.

“You see some of the changes he’s making,” Herman says, “some of the realizations he’s making about himself and about photography and about … the role of his photographs — how important they are not just as works of art, but the importance that they’re beginning to have on the formation of the American park system.”
 

Ansel Adams, Frozen Lake and Cliffs, The Sierra Nevada, Sequoia National Park, California (1932)

It’s fitting, then, that the Masterworks exhibition comes from a museum complex with a strong naturalist bent: the Turtle Bay Exploration Park in Redding, Calif. (via the Landau Traveling Exhibitions art company). Like the Davies Collection at the National Museum Wales that brought the Turner to Cezanne exhibition to the galleries earlier this year, Masterworks, too, exists because of a gift from a gracious benefactor.

The collection was donated to Turtle Bay by Fidel Realyvasquez, a cardiologist who was looking for a specific Ansel Adams photograph.

“[The photo] came available [to Realyvasquez],” says Peterson, who curated Masterworks during her tenure as Turtle Bay’s art curator and now serves as executive director of the Yellowstone Art Musem. “But it came available as part of the 50 items that Turtle Bay eventually acquired, and he had the opportunity to buy the whole collection.”

Given a good price, Realyvasquez purchased the collection.

“He took out the piece that he had wanted and donated the remainder to Turtle Bay,” Peterson says.

Masterworks also came to the attention of the Columbia Museum of Art at a serendipitous time, Herman says. The museum was planning a year-long dedication to American art and needed an anchor piece.

“It was important for us to get an anchor for this series of American exhibitions that has a wide appeal to the public in not only the imagery but in name recognition,” Herman says.
“We all know that Ansel Adams’ photographs are beautiful. And add on to that the fact that these are the ones that he himself selected as the best, it seemed like a natural fit — especially when we started to think about this whole concept of a year of American art.
When we saw this, we said, ‘What’s more American than Ansel Adams?’

“It was a pretty easy sell,” Herman jokes. “When you think about photography, it has to be Ansel Adams.”

It’s important to note that this is not just any exhibition of Ansel Adams’ photographs. Rather, Masterworks is a collection of gelatin silver prints that Adams selected himself as the most representative of his career. Indeed, these works — 47 framed photos plus one portrait of Adams by James Alinder — are Adams’ greatest, as ordained by the artist himself.

More than just the awe-inspiring landscapes for which he is revered, Masterworks encompasses Adams’ entire oeuvre, from nature and architectural studies to portraits. That Adams hand-selected the 70 images in the set — 47 of which will be on display at the Museum of Art — lends gravitas to the exhibition.

“I think there’s something to be said for a show like this where the artist makes the selection,” Herman says. “You could get 10 different photography curators in here and they would select 47 different photographs. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone has their own idea of what the best works are from a given artist. But this is the artist himself telling you.

“You know that certain [pieces] are going to be there,” Herman continues. “It’s those last few that were agonized over.”
 

James Alinder, Ansel Adams (1984)

Indeed, Masterworks features several of Adams’ greatest hits, if you will: Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, California, which captures a Sierra Nevada valley fresh after a snowstorm, is in the collection; so, too, is Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, perhaps Adams’ most famous photograph, an equally eerie and calming photo of a moonrise in a desolate part of New Mexico. (An original print of Moonrise once fetched $609,000 at a Sotheby’s New York auction.) Also included are Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California; Mount Williamson, The Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California; Winter Sunrise, The Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California; and Frozen Lake and Cliffs, The Sierra Nevada, Sequoia National Park, California.

But there are lesser-known photos in the collection as well, including a few portraits, most notably a striking one of friend and fellow photographer Alfred Stieglitz. (Herman notes that it’s one of the rare photos in which Stieglitz is smiling.) And there are also some photos Adams didn’t think would turn out so well.

“One of the great photographs [in the exhibition] is a grove of aspens [Aspens, Northern New Mexico], and that was brought to his attention by one of his assistants,” Herman says. “He wasn’t completely sold that it was going to be a great photograph. And it turned out to be, since it’s in the museum set, one of his greatest photographs. So he was open to this idea that there’s not this one single photographic eye that sees every photograph. Everybody sees different nuances; that’s just the nature of photography and art in general.”

And, say Herman and Peterson, that’s part of the draw.

“What’s so great about photography shows … is people relate to them because everyone has taken a photograph,” Herman says. “Not everyone has painted a painting, not everyone has sculpted a sculpture, so there always exists that distance when you visit those shows.
But everyone’s taken a photograph. So it’s easier for them to relate and pick up on how talented a photographer can be and is, because they’ve tried it and oftentimes failed.”

“Everyone thinks there’s no mystery to the process,” Peterson says. “In fact, there [are] a great deal of unknowable elements in creating something as good as Ansel Adams did. But because everyone has the experience of picking up cameras and taking shots, it seems much less mysterious.”

There’s also some mystery to the exhibition itself.

“There’s not a documentation of why [Adams] chose any particular [photograph],” Herman says. “So we’re left to guess, and that’s kind of the fun. You can look at it and say, ‘OK, I’m looking at this photograph and out of the thousands of photographs he took he chose this one as one of his 70. Why?’

“I’m sure he made some of these selections for personal reasons,” Herman adds. “They might technically not be the best photographs that he did, but he likes these and these mean something to him. And that has value.”

More than value, Adams’ name also has drawing power: Herman estimates that the opening for Masterworks will be “pushing close to the 1,000 range.” And while the museum might not set any attendance records, as it did during its run of Turner to Cezanne, it’s a good start for the centerpiece in the museum’s year of American art, which has already seen works from painter Cleve Gray and photographer Larry Clark (see sidebar) grace its galleries.

“It’s hard to compete with Impressionism as a draw,” Herman says, referring to Turner to Cezanne. “But Ansel Adams, everyone knows it’s beautiful, relatable and inspiring work. And to that end, it has tremendous drawing power.”

Like a translator, Peterson writes in an essay accompanying the museum set, Adams interprets the voice of nature in a way that is no longer truly understood. “It is not a puny, self-questioning voice,” she writes, “but a heart-swelling, noble voice that converts opinions about nature into truths. He takes something we know we should love and shows us its value in such a way as to erase all further doubt.”

It’s that veneration for the land that Peterson hopes viewers will carry away from the exhibition.

“One thing that people don’t always know about Adams was that he was a very ardent conservationist as well as a champion for photography,” Peterson says. “Just that reverence for the land is something I hope people take away from any art exhibition that uses the land as subject matter. It doesn’t have to be a specific place. You don’t have to necessarily specifically revere Yosemite — though I sure hope everybody does — but just to have the opportunity that Ansel’s work provides gives everybody a chance to take a fresh look at their own surroundings and find the real jewels there and really put their shoulders into preserving.”

For his part, Herman thinks attendees will come to realize that there’s more to Ansel Adams than they might have had in their college dorm room or on the postcard they’ve sent.

“In today’s society, iconic images tend to be reproduced so much that they tend to lose their significance,” he says. “And I think going back to the original work or the work in its original context — in this case, surrounded by the other photographs that he has chosen as the best of his output — will allow people to understand why these photographs are reproduced so much. It’s because of how significant he was and how uniformly beautiful his photographs can be.”

And though Adams himself once quipped that he was put in places “just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter,” Herman knows that Adams wasn’t simply providential.
“He didn’t just get lucky once or twice,” Herman says. “He was astounding in his abilities to capture American grandeur over and over again.” 


Let us know what you think: Email editor@free-times.com.