Abstraction, Porch Shadows, also known as Abstraction, Porch Shadows, Twin Lakes, Connecticut, is a black and white photograph taken by Paul Strand in 1916. It is one of the best known photographs of his early phase, and shows the influence of cubism and abstractionism. It is considered one of the first abstract photographs ever made. [1] [2]
Strand spent the Summer of 1916 at a cottage in Twin Lakes, Connecticut. Strand's interest and understanding of the cubist esthetics, "abstraction through fragmentation, multiple points of view, and a reduction of people and objects to basic geometry", according to The Art Institute of Chicago website, led him to transform everyday objects, like furniture and crockery, into works of abstract photographic art. In this case, Strand took aim to a round table located in a terrace porch. He abandoned the traditional photographic perspective, making the table look inclined, and his use of the light that enters the terrace windows makes for the shadows and the impressive geometrical forms of the picture, including the parallelograms and the large triangle of the right. [3] [4]
His colleague Alfred Stieglitz published a print of this photograph at his magazine Camera Work and praised it as "the direct expression of today."
There are prints of the photograph at several museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, in Houston, the Yale University Art Gallery, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. In 1936, he helped found the Photo League, a cooperative of photographers who banded together around a range of common social and creative causes. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa.
Precisionism was a modernist art movement that emerged in the United States after World War I. Influenced by Cubism, Purism, and Futurism, Precisionist artists reduced subjects to their essential geometric shapes, eliminated detail, and often used planes of light to create a sense of crisp focus and suggest the sleekness and sheen of machine forms. At the height of its popularity during the 1920s and early 1930s, Precisionism celebrated the new American landscape of skyscrapers, bridges, and factories in a form that has also been called "Cubist-Realism." The term "Precisionism" was first coined in the mid-1920s, possibly by Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr although according to Amy Dempsey the term "Precisionism" was coined by Charles Sheeler. Painters working in this style were also known as the "Immaculates", which was the more commonly used term at the time. The stiffness of both art-historical labels suggests the difficulties contemporary critics had in attempting to characterize these artists.
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Robert Natkin was an American abstract painter whose work is associated with abstract expressionism, color field painting, and Lyrical Abstraction.
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Bowls, also known as Abstraction, Bowls, is a black and white photograph taken by Paul Strand in 1916. The photograph has elements of cubism and abstractionism, and exemplifies his style at the time.
The White Fence, also known as The White Fence, Port Kent, New York, is a black and white photograph taken by American photographer Paul Strand, in 1916. The picture was published in the magazine Camera Work, in June 1917, whose editor was Alfred Stieglitz, where it was highly praised by him, specially for its "abstract qualities". It would be later published as part of Paul Strand: Portfolio Three (1976-1977).