A snapshot album dated 1912 records the idyllic summer vacation of painter and exhibition organizer Walt Kuhn (1877–1949) and his family in Nova Scotia, Canada. Photographs in the album are arranged in various combinations of people, places, and events. Casual family portraits, baby pictures, and picnic scenes mingle with snapshots of Nova Scotia lighthouses and well-known island locations such as Woods Harbour. Some images are annotated, giving clues to an overall narrative of relaxed family time in an unfamiliar natural setting. One snapshot of Kuhn at work at an outdoor easel is captioned “Study in Triangles,” suggesting a lighthearted take on the artistic elements of the photo and on the form of the painting in progress. For Kuhn, one of four artists who in 1911 founded the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, an advocacy group supporting modern American artists, the summer of 1912 must have been a respite from the previous months of planning the new artist organization. Kuhn was soon to embark on several months of European travel in pursuit of works for an enormous upcoming show of contemporary art, the International Exhibition of Modern Art. Kuhn and his associates, Arthur B. Davies and Walter Pach in particular, had a big ambition: to expose New Yorkers—artists and nonartists alike—to the most avant-garde art to be found in Europe. The exhibition, which was on view from February 17 to March 15, 1913, and has become known as the Armory Show, was the first international exhibition of modern art in the United States.
— 1912 —
Walt Kuhn, family photograph album including “Study in Triangles”
Walt Kuhn, Kuhn Family Papers and Armory Show Records, 1859 – 1978
Written on the back of this snapshot is “Coytesville Bolero, Albrig’s Pavillion, Fort Lee, N.J.” Imagine a summer-afternoon reunion of three old friends enjoying the fresh air at an amusement park, some homegrown music, and some energetic dancing. At the turn of the last century, the northern New Jersey towns of Fort Lee, Coytesville, and Ridgefield could all boast art colonies with a mix of artists, illustrators, and musicians. Pop Hart (1868–1933), dancing the imaginative bolero and playing bones, Walt Kuhn, playing the guitar, and Gus Mager (1878–1956), playing the banjo, had previously lived in Fort Lee, each individually and sometimes together. Perhaps it was cartoonist Mager, who lived in nearby Newark, who got them together for a day on the Coytesville boardwalk. Or perhaps Pop Hart (his real name was George Overbury) was the organizer, taking a day off from working on set designs for Fort Lee’s fledgling movie industry. Likely, Kuhn, famous as one of the organizers of the Armory Show, was the guest of honor.
— ca. 1915 —
Pop Hart, Walt Kuhn, and Gus Mager
Walt Kuhn, Kuhn Family Papers and Armory Show Records, 1859 – 1978
Now collected at the Archives of American Art, the papers of Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) are a testament to the many aspects of his life. He was variously an architect, draftsman, carpenter, unskilled laborer, painter, illustrator, printmaker, commercial artist, designer, writer, professional lecturer, dairy farmer, and political activist. Kent was also an avid traveler. He was particularly fond of expeditions to the Arctic, where he often stayed for long periods of time to paint, write, and become, even briefly, one of the locals. The Alaska snapshot is a souvenir of his 1918–19 trip with his ten-year-old son, Rocky. His letters home (later published in the book Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska) present a more thoughtful series of recollections. Further dramatic adventures are described in his 1930 memoir, N by E, a description of a summer 1929 voyage with his then-wife Frances, which included the adventure of a shipwreck on the rocks of Greenland.
— ca. 1930 —
Rockwell Kent and Frances Kent in Greenland
Rockwell Kent Papers, ca. 1840 – 1993
— ca. 1930 —
Rockwell Kent (bottom right) and others dressed for a costume party
Rockwell Kent Papers, ca. 1840 – 1993
Social, engaging, and extroverted, Prentiss Taylor (1907–91) was a lithographer, painter, and teacher. He studied painting with Charles W. Hawthorne at his Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts, but his talents were mostly realized as a printmaker. By the mid-1920s, the time period covered by Taylor’s snapshot albums, the “oldest and most picturesque hamlet on the New England Coast” (as Provincetown was described by Hawthorne’s school brochure) had become a magnet for young artists, writers, and musicians, some coming for the summer season, others moving to the Cape permanently. This group of high-spirited bohemians with a newfound sense of artistic, political, and sexual freedom included writers and musicians as well as visual artists. Taylor’s snapshots show a joyous jumble of young students enjoying summer, participating in amateur theatrics, sketching in the dunes, and dancing on the beach. A snapshot of Taylor himself lounging at the beach is at the head of a page captioned “All August + all Provincetown 1924.”
— aug. 1924 —
Prentiss Taylor, photograph album of friends and family in Provincetown, Massachusetts
Prentiss Taylor Papers, 1885 – 1991
Reginald Marsh (1898–1954) was a painter, illustrator, and print-maker best known for his scenes of vaudeville halls, nightclubs, burlesque shows, and New York City streets. After his divorce from sculptor Betty Burroughs in 1933, he married painter Felicia Meyer (1912–78), the daughter of painter Herbert Meyer, in 1934. This picture has all the ingredients of a treasured family snapshot: a sunny afternoon, a roadside picnic, a happy couple. As with most photos, the details of its why and where are lost to us. We might guess that the picnickers were on the journey between New York City and the Marshes’ home in Vermont, and that the couple, all smiles, knew the person who held the camera.
British author E. M. Forster (1879–1970) was nearly seventy and a celebrity when this charming snapshot was made. His novels, among them A Room with a View (1908) and A Passage to India (1924), examine class and cultural difference and hypocrisy in the early years of the twentieth century; they were avidly read on both sides of the Atlantic. This photo, saved in the Papers of George Tooker (1920–2011), was most likely made during a 1947 gathering at the summer house of Jared and Margaret French in Provincetown, Massachusetts. We don’t know if Tooker, then a twenty-seven-year-old aspiring painter, took the photo or was there when the picture was made or if his lover at the time, artist Paul Cadmus, brought it back as a souvenir. It was a complicated vacation household: Cadmus was also Jared French’s lover while the latter was married to Margaret. If Tooker was present, he was part of an ongoing summer-long party that might at any time include other artists, poets, and writers, such as dance critic and cultural impresario Lincoln Kirstein, who within a few years became Tooker’s most important champion.
Art student and fashion correspondent Bettina Bedwell (1889–1947) and painter and printmaker Abraham Rattner (1893–1978) met in the early 1920s in Paris, where they were part of the post–World War I culture of expatriate writers and poets. They married in 1924, returning to New York in 1939.
Among the hundreds of travel and family snapshots in the Rattner Papers are these, documenting a cross-country road trip from California to New York City, which Rattner and Bedwell made in 1947 with their friends Arnaud d’Usseau (1916–90), a playwright and Hollywood film writer, and his wife, Suzie. Their black-and-white and color photos depict friends and family they visited and scenes along the road, often taken from the car. Many of the snapshots were left as strips of images and later pasted into albums; as such, they seem to mimic a travel movie. Rattner annotated the images with a running commentary of where and when they were made, creating a unique document of post–World War II America. These photos also mark a happy adventure that preceded a tragic loss: shortly after arriving in New York, Bedwell died suddenly of a kidney infection, sending Rattner into a spiral of grief and depression.
— nov. 20, 1946 —
Abraham Rattner, Bettina Bedwell, Arnaud d’Usseau, and Suzie d’Usseau
Abraham Rattner and Esther Gentle Papers, 1891 – 1986
— ca. 1937 —
Bettina Bedwell in the Tuileries Garden, Paris
Abraham Rattner and Esther Gentle Papers, 1891 – 1986
— 1947 —
Abraham Rattner and Bettina Bedwell, photograph album of cross-country road trip
Abraham Rattner and Esther Gentle Papers, 1891 – 1986
On October 25, 1945, Jackson Pollock (1912–56) and Lee Krasner (1908–84) married and moved from New York City to the country. Art patroness and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim loaned the couple the money to purchase a small piece of property overlooking Accabonac Creek in Springs, a village near East Hampton, Long Island. At first, both Krasner and Pollock created studios in the house: Krasner in the back parlor and Pollock in an unheated bedroom. The next summer Pollock moved his studio to the barn. There he developed his mature style, pouring and dripping paint onto large canvases. Krasner was a fierce advocate for Pollock’s art. She kept him at work and enticed a circle of critics and curators to gather around them both in the city and in the country. After Pollock’s death in August 1956, Krasner kept the Springs house and eventually moved her studio into the barn.
These summertime snapshots reveal intimate and relaxed moments in their passionate, sometimes tempestuous, often competitive relationship: Krasner and Pollock at the beach in East Hampton, alone or in the company of friends such as Clement Greenberg (1909–94) and Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011), or at summer-afternoon gatherings in the backyard or studio.
— ca. 1946 —
Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock
Photograph by Ronald Stein (1930 – 2000)
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, ca. 1905 – 84
— 1946 —
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner with Krasner’s family
Front row: Lee’s niece Muriel Stein with Pollock and Krasner’s dog, Gyp, and nephew Ronald Stein.
Back row: Pollock, Krasner, Krasner’s mother, Anna Krassner; sister, Ruth Stein; and Ruth’s husband, William Stein
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, ca. 1905 – 84
Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock
Photograph by Wilfrid Zogbaum (1915 – 65)
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, ca. 1905 – 84
— ca. 1945 —
Jackson Pollock on the beach with a dog
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, ca. 1905 – 84
— 1948 —
Lee Krasner in the kitchen, Springs, New York
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, ca. 1905 – 84
— jul. 1952 —
Jackson Pollock, Clement Greenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and an unidentified child at the beach in East Hampton, New York
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, ca. 1905 – 84
— ca. 1950 —
Jackson Pollock posing with animal bones in Springs, New York
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, ca. 1905 – 84
— 1952 —
Jackson Pollock outside his studio in Springs, New York, with his painting Number 9, 1952: Black, White, Tan
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, ca. 1905 – 84
— 1955 —
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner at the beach in East Hampton, New York
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, ca. 1905 – 84
— ca. 1955 —
Jackson Pollock in the studio with his dogs Ahab and Gyp
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, ca. 1905 – 84
By the time these artists shared a weekend at the country house of Oliver Jennings in the Snedens Landing neighborhood of Palisades, New York (on the other side of the Hudson just north of New York City), George Tooker had already established his reputation as one of the most important artists of his generation. It looks like quite a costume party and presents a surprising side of an artist who was in that period known for haunting images that exemplified twentieth-century anxiety and alienation. This snapshot comes from the papers of William Christopher (1924–73), who would remain Tooker’s lifelong partner until Christopher’s death.
— ca. 1951 —
George Tooker, Daniel Maloney, and William Christopher
William Christopher Papers, 1946 – 72
A native of California, painter and photographer Harry Bowden (1907–65) studied art in Los Angeles and New York. Although he continued to show his paintings in New York galleries, following World War II Sausalito became his permanent home. He also began to concentrate on photography. An admirer of Edward Weston, about whom he made an unfinished film called Wildcat Hill Revisited, Bowden remains best known for photographs of sensual female nudes in landscape settings.
— aug. 1953 —
Harry Bowden on Stinson Beach, California, with his wife, Lois, taking a photo with a camera he made
Harry Bowden Papers, 1922 – 72
Snapshots are often made on impulse by an alert person who is quick to react to an unforgettable event. An image may be as interesting for the scene as for the subject, even if the subject is a well-known artist, such as painter, printmaker, and photographer Ben Shahn (1898–1969). This snapshot of Shahn looking at postcards in a display case of an Italian museum allows us to share the experience of an artist contemplating art. The view of Shahn, taken from behind, is a picture not of him but of what he sees. The slice of sleeve at the edge of the casually composed snapshot suggests that Shahn is not alone; for a moment, we are there, too, perhaps considering the nature of looking itself.
More than any of the young painters who followed in the footsteps of the mid-twentieth-century New York abstract expressionists, Fairfield Porter (1907–75) stood apart for his quiet, even dreamlike landscapes and portraits. Many of the portraits were of friends and family. The landscapes were often backyard gardens or vacation spots well known to the Porter family and friends. This snapshot of summer relaxation could almost be one of his paintings. Taken at Great Spruce Head Island, Maine, a summer place his family had owned since the early twentieth century, the image shows Porter ready to swim or just drying off, standing with his dog Bruno.
