LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  PHOTOGRAPHS PART I  / 

22

EDWARD STEICHEN (American, 1879-1973) DIXIE RAY artist's stamp on verso Condé Nast Publications...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:50,000.00 - 70,000.00 USD
EDWARD STEICHEN (American, 1879-1973) DIXIE RAY artist's stamp on verso Condé Nast Publications...
EDWARD STEICHEN (American, 1879-1973) DIXIE RAY artist's stamp on verso Condé Nast Publications Inc. copyright stamp on verso stamp in red ink on verso with informational inscriptions: "DATE OF SITTING: 11/13/35" and "ISSUE USED: Jan. 1, 1936" "Vogue 238" inscribed in pencil on verso various other notations on verso vintage gelatin silver print 9 1/4 x 6 1/8 in. (23.5 x 15.6 cm) November 13, 1935 PROVENANCE Private Collection In 1923, Edward Steichen signed a lucrative contract as the chief photographer for Condé Nast Publications. He also began to accept commissions from various advertising agencies to market products to female consumers. In the early 1930s, most of Steichen's advertising photographs portrayed famous high-society women in testimonials for Jergen's Lotion, Pond's Cold Cream, and other products. Fashionably dressed in elegant surroundings, these women projected images of refined taste and propriety. In 1935, however, Steichen daringly tested the accepted boundaries of commercial photography with a series of female nudes designed to sell linens and soap. The present work features the model, Dixie Ray, who appeared nude in advertisements for both Woodbury Soap and Cannon Towels. The latter campaign employed prominent rear-views of the female figure. Awash in sepia tones, these prints were contrasted against colorful insets of folded towels and bold advertising copy, and thus distinguished themselves as fine art. As Patricia Johnston has explained, "The polished fine art appeal of Steichen's Cannon work stands in marked opposition to both previous uses of the nude in advertising and Steichen's own previous advertising work, which had emphasized narrative and class. Steichen's graceful nude studies echo images more likely found in art museums and in Steichen's own early pictorialist photographs than images on the pages of mass magazines. The images were printed in sepia tones, which softened the more obviously 'photographic' black-and-white, yielding a look that was simultaneously more 'artistic' and more 'naturalistic.' The sepia tones reinforced the image of the woman's body as representation (that is, as 'art') and lessened the contrast between the body and the accompanying small, brightly colored photographs and illustrations of towels in the advertisements. It also tacitly affirmed that Steichen's photographs were fine art, suppressing leftover doubts from the nineteenth-century debate on photography as art, or, in this case, commercial photography as art" (Patricia Johnston, REAL FANTASIES: EDWARD STEICHEN'S ADVERTISING PHOTOGRAPHY, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997, p. 205). Indeed, the pose of the present work strongly recalls one of Steichen's most famous early photographs, THE LITTLE ROUND MIRROR, 1901 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Having abandoned the mysterious haze of pictorialist photography, Steichen now dramatized the female figure with crisp, Modernist contrasts of light and shadow. One notes how Dixie Ray's upper torso and raised arms are brightly illuminated against darkness. Steichen masterfully inverts this contrast at the bottom of the print, where the model's dark buttocks and thighs emphasize the lighter half of the background.
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