Willem de Kooning, New York, NY
Arnold NewmanArtist: Arnold Newman
Date of image: 1959
Size: 5x7 inches (13x18 cm)
Format: silver gelatin
Features: archive print from Newman's Five Decades exhibition; frame included
Arnold Newman (1918–2006) spent nearly seven decades photographing the people who defined twentieth-century culture, producing images that remain among the most recognizable in the history of photography.
The works presented here offer a rare window into Newman's process. They come from a complete planning archive assembled for Five Decades, his landmark retrospective, which toured internationally from 1986 to 1993. The Japan leg, the final chapter of a seven-year journey, was organized by Pacific Press Service (PPS), the Tokyo agency instrumental in bringing major Western photographers to Japanese audiences. The show traveled to the Odakyu Museum in Tokyo in 1992 and the Keihan Gallery in Osaka in 1993.
These archive prints were working tools, used to plan the exhibition's sequencing and wall layout. As such, they reveal the curatorial and compositional thinking behind one of the most significant photographic retrospectives of the late twentieth century. Newman was famously exacting about how his work was presented, and that care shows in every decision this archive documents.
The works span nearly five decades of his career, from 1938 to 1986, and include some of his most celebrated portraits: Piet Mondrian, Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Willem de Kooning, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Francis Bacon, and Ansel Adams, among others.
See the Arnold Newman Collection
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