May 15, 2008 - Sale 2146

Sale 2146 - Lot 323

Unsold
Estimate: $ 60,000 - $ 90,000
CUNNINGHAM, IMOGEN (1883-1976)
"Tower of Jewels." Silver print, 9 1/2x7 1/2 inches (24.1x19.1 cm.). 1925; printed 1930s
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Additional Details

Photofind (Howard Greenberg Gallery); to Alexandra R. Marshall in 1988.
With a letter of authenticity from the Imogen Cunningham Trust, signed by Rondal Partridge, stating that: "In the early 1930s, Imogen Cunningham began a file of photographs to sell, usually of plant materials. This 8x10 print of 'Magnolia Blossom,' 1925, which Imogen Cunningham called 'Tower of Jewels,' has remained in the file, unknown to us, until very recently."


Imogen! Imogen Cunningham Photographs 1910-1973, 72.
Imogen Cunningham: Flora, 12.
Imogen Cunningham 1883-1976, 201.


Cunningham began making botanical studies as early as the second decade of the twentieth century, partially from specimens she collected from her backyard. She had abandoned her early, figurative Pictorialist work and began using these studies to explore a more rigorous, objective, and modernist form of photography. With this highly personal shift in focus (Cunningham was educated in Germany and developed there an intense interest in their culture and aesthetics), this new, unembellished, "realistic" aesthetic was also part of a wider trend, evidenced on the West Coast by the formation of Group f/64. At once documentary and transcendent, lush and chiseled, Cunningham's tightly cropped and luminous study of the magnolia reveals her eye for delicate beauty as well as scientific precision. The flower's stamens and pistils are abstracted and extrapolated from their context that contrasts with Cunningham's emphasis on pure exploration of form and detail.


As if to enhance the play between the detailed and the monumental in this image, Cunningham named this photograph after the tiered tower called the Tower of Jewels at the 1915 San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition (where her work had also been shown). This photograph has long eclipsed its namesake and is now, along with its twin image of a wider magnolia blossom, is one of the most iconic of Cunningham's career.