LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  PHOTOGRAPHS PART I  / 

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MARJORIE CONTENT (American, 1895-1984) NEW ENGLAND BARN WITH WINDOW REFLECTIONS signed

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:2,500.00 - 3,500.00 USD
MARJORIE CONTENT (American, 1895-1984) NEW ENGLAND BARN WITH WINDOW REFLECTIONS signed
MARJORIE CONTENT (American, 1895-1984) NEW ENGLAND BARN WITH WINDOW REFLECTIONS signed "Marjorie Content" in pencil on verso vintage gold-toned gelatin silver print 2 3/4 x 3 3/8 in. (7 x 8.6 cm) 1923 PROVENANCE Photofind Gallery, NEW YORK Private Collection, NEW YORK The lyricism and subtlety of this photograph are characteristics common to all of Content's works, regardless of subject matter. Content's genius has only emerged in the past 20 years and, in 1994, enough research had been compiled for Jill Quasha to produce a monograph about her work. Although influenced by her friend, Alfred Stieglitz, Content's work contains unique qualities - "calm, intimacy, delicacy, restraint, refinement, and simplicity. Moreover, Content's handling of her subjects seemed so much informed by simple, elemental emotions and responses - curiosity, wonder, love - that no matter how deeply her pictures were rooted in the style of their time, her lyrical voice and freshness of vision seemed undated, as if the work had been made today. The pictures were like small gems whose glow and perfect craftsmanship strike you long before you take stock of how, when, or in what style they were cut. Clearly here was an artist who had undeservedly slipped through the net of photographic history" (Quasha, "Introduction," MARJORIE CONTENT: PHOTOGRAPHS, New York, 1994, p. 9). Although many claim that Stieglitz was Content's teacher and mentor from the start, Quasha notes that it was probably Stieglitz's student Consuelo Kanaga who instructed her on darkroom techniques. Stieglitz had taught Kanaga the formula for gold-toning prints, which she, in turn, taught to Content. Gold-toning provides this small, exquisitely printed photograph its warm hue. Content captured the poetry of trees in the late fall, reflected so strongly in the windows of this New England barn. "She worked without esthetic program, fascinated by the inexhaustible mystery of the surfaces of things touched by ordinary light. Her rhetoric is that of the concrete, direct, and simple statement. Her best work seems almost artless in its avoidance of visual drama and effects, in its rigorous dependence upon the basic elements of light, line, surface, and composition" (Lifson and Eldridge, "Marjorie Content," MARJORIE CONTENT: PHOTOGRAPHS, New York, 1994, p. 21).
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