LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  PHOTOGRAPHS PART I  / 

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PAUL STRAND (American, 1890-1976) CHURCH DOORS, NEW ENGLAND signed

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:70,000.00 - 90,000.00 USD
PAUL STRAND (American, 1890-1976) CHURCH DOORS, NEW ENGLAND signed
PAUL STRAND (American, 1890-1976) CHURCH DOORS, NEW ENGLAND signed "Paul Strand" in pencil on verso "Master" inscribed in pencil on verso vintage gelatin silver print mounted on board 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. (24.1 x 19.1 cm) 1946 PROVENANCE Estate of Paul Strand to a Private Collector LITERATURE Paul Strand and Nancy Newhall, TIME IN NEW ENGLAND, New York, 1950, p. 63 (illustrated) Paul Strand and Nancy Newhall, TIME IN NEW ENGLAND, Millerton, New York, second edition, 1980, p. 79 (illustrated) In 1945, Strand and Nancy Newhall organized the artist's retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first major exhibition of its kind devoted to a photographer. While planning the show, Newhall and Strand discussed the idea that they collaborate on a book about New England. The initial idea grew out of Strand's unsuccessful 1943 Guggenheim Fellowship proposal to photograph the region in order to record "the essential character of those American traditions we are fighting to preserve" (Quoted in John Rohrbach, "Time in New England: Creating a Usable Past," in Maren Stange, ed., PAUL STRAND: ESSAYS ON HIS LIFE AND WORK, New York, 1990, pp. 161). Newhall was struck by the powerful sense of place contained in so many of Strand's images and suggested that they work together. Encouraged by a contract and advance from a publisher, Strand photographed various sites in the region while Newhall collected writings by New Englanders past and present. The result of their efforts was TIME IN NEW ENGLAND, published in 1950, which contained an image of the present work. Strand later described the experience as "a major turning point in my whole development" (Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, PAUL STRAND: SIXTY YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHS, New York: Aperture, Inc., 1976, p. 30). Avoiding the conventional pairing of captions with illustrations, Newhall and Strand intended for text and image to function in poetic juxtaposition to each other. "In Time in New England there is a new relationship between picture and text," Strand explained. "We began very consciously and deliberately with a chronological sequence of text limited to people who had written about New England and most of whom, not all, were New Englanders. The subject of the book is three hundred years of writing about life in New England accompanied by photographs which were made to fulfill the spirit and feeling of the writing" (Quoted in ibid., p. 163). Perfectly calibrated to the book's concept, the present work captures both the historical depth and timeless modernity of New England's cultural traditions. Here Strand presents a deceptively simple, frontal image of a church entrance. Painted white, surmounting bare wooden stairs, and embellished with only a single iron fixture, these austere doors evoke the moral rectitude of the region's Puritan settlers. Yet Strand hardly indulges in sentimental nostalgia. Much like the paintings of his friend, Charles Sheeler, this sophisticated image traces an aesthetic lineage from the colonial past to the contemporary present.
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