Berenice Abbott

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Berenice Abbott, portrait by Hank O'Neal (1979)
Blossom Restaurant, photographed by Berenice Abbott (1935)

Berenice Abbott (born July 17, 1898 in Springfield , Ohio , † December 9, 1991 in Monson , Maine ; actually Bernice Alice Abbott ) was an American photographer . She was best known for her black and white photography of New York street life and architecture .

Life

After studying journalism at Ohio State University, Abbott studied sculpture from 1921 at the Paris Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Antoine Bourdelle . In 1923 she went to Berlin for a short time to study at the State Art School , and returned to Paris in the same year. On the advice of the surrealist Man Ray , whose assistant she was from 1923 to 1925, she began to take photographs. She quickly became known through portraits of famous artists and writers of the 1920s such as James Joyce , Jean Cocteau , Marie Laurencin , Coco Chanel and Djuna Barnes . In 1925 she discovered Eugène Atget's photography and took his photos of Paris as a model for her later New York work. Atget died in 1927 and Abbott bought his estate to make his work known to a wider audience. In 1968 she sold Atget's paintings to the Museum of Modern Art . With financial support from the patron Peggy Guggenheim , Abbott opened her own studio in Paris in 1926.

In 1929 she returned to the USA, where she initially worked as a freelance photo reporter . She began documenting New York City in 1929 and published some of her work in the illustrated books Changing New York from 1939 and Greenwich Village today and yesterday from 1949. Her work provides a historical chronicle of many of the buildings and areas in the city that have been destroyed today. From 1934 to 1958 she was a lecturer in photography at the New School for Social Research in New York. From 1940 to 1960 she turned to scientific photography and documented physical phenomena. In 1958, some of these photographs appeared in a school physics textbook. Abbott moved to Maine in 1965 following the death of her longtime partner, art critic Elizabeth McCausland. In 1983 she became an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Her life's work has been honored several times through exhibitions and retrospectives, including one at the Museum of Modern Art.

Exhibitions

  • 1926: Solo exhibition at the Au Sacre du Printemps gallery , Paris
  • 1928: Premier Salon Independent de la Photographie in Paris
  • 1939: Art in Our Time at the Museum of Modern Art , New York
  • 1970–1971: Solo exhibition Berenice Abbott: Photographs from December 10, 1970 to March 10, 1971 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
  • 1977: 150 years of photography documenta 6 , Kassel
  • 1982: Solo exhibition Berenice Abbott: the 20ʼs and the 30ʼs at the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution , in Washington, DC
  • 1982–1983: Atelier Man Ray: Berenice Abbott, Jacques-Andre Boiffard, Bill Brandt, Lee Miller in the Center Georges Pompidou , Paris
  • 1990–1991: Solo exhibition Berenice Abbott photographer: a modern vision at the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo
  • 2010–2011: Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
  • 2016: Berenice Abbott - Photographs in the Martin-Gropius-Bau , Berlin.

literature

By and about Berenice Abbott
  • Berenice Abbott: The world of Atget. Horizon, New York NY 1964.
  • Lisette model . Preface by Berenice Abbott. Aperture, Millerton NY 1979, ISBN 0-89381-050-9 ( An Aperture Monograph ).
  • Bonnie Yochelson: Berenice Abbott - Changing New York. Photographs from the 1930s. The full WPA project. Schirmer / Mosel, Munich et al. 1997, ISBN 3-88814-882-0 .
  • Berenice Abbott. Könemann, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-89508-612-6 .
biography

Web links

Commons : Berenice Abbott  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b c Boris Friedewald : Berenice (Bernice) Abbot. In: Boris Friedewald: Masters of Light: Great Women Photographers from Two Centuries. Prestel, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-7913-4673-1 , p. 8.
  2. ^ Members: Berenice Abbott. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 1, 2019 .
  3. ^ A b History of photography: Berenice Abbott . fotoflock.com. August 29, 2011. Retrieved December 1, 2011.
  4. ^ Art in our time; an exhibition to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art and the opening of its new building, held at the time of the New York World's Fair , Museum of Modern Art, 1939.
  5. MoMA press archive (PDF; 4.1 MB) moma.org. Retrieved December 1, 2011.
  6. ^ Catalog for documenta 6: Volume 2, page 66: Photography / Film / Video, 1977 ISBN 3-920453-00-X .
  7. ^ Berenice Abbott, the 20's and the 30's: a traveling exhibition organized by the International Center of Photography with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sondra and Charles Gilman, Jr. Foundation , Berenice Abbott (et al.), Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1982.
  8. ^ Atelier Man Ray - Berenice Abbott, Jacques- Andre Boiffard, Bill Brandt, Lee Miller. 1920-1935 . Exhibition catalog of the Center Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1982.
  9. ^ Berenice Abbott Photographer: A Modern Vision , Berenice Abbott (et al.), Tokyo Metropolitan / New York Public Library, 1990.
  10. Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography , College Art Association, 2011.
  11. http://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/de/aktuell/festivals/gropiusbau/programm_mgb/mgb16_abbott/ausstellung_abbott/ausstellung_berenice_abbott_144280.php