STRAND PAUL (1890 1976) Grazing Horses New Mexico

Sale 2132 - Lot 365

Price Realized: $ 52,800

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000

STRAND, PAUL (1890-1976)
"Grazing Horses, New Mexico." Double-coated platinum print, 3 3/4x4 3/4 inches (9.5x12.0 cm.). 1930

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Additional Details

From an institutional collection; to a private collector.

Paul Strand: Retrospective Monograph (Aperture, 1971), 99

Enyeart, James: Land, Sky, and All That Is Within: Visionary Photographers in the Southwest (Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, 1998), front cover.

Strand used a 4x5-inch Graflex to make this negative on nitrate film. The following year, in 1931, he replaced the camera with a new 5x7 inch Graflex, which was his camera of choice for the rest of his life.

From the original negative Strand made contact prints on commercially manufactured platinum paper. Of these vintage prints, only two exist, one at the Getty Museum collection and the print offered here. The Getty print was purchased from Aperture in 1986 and was originally given by Strand to his wife Hazel. Subsequently, Strand made enlargements from the negative in the 1950''s and 1960''s and all are gelatin silver prints, whose approximate dimensions are 8x10 and 11x14 inches.

There are eight of these larger prints: four of them were in the Paul Strand Archive (three 8x10''s and one 11x14). The George Eastman House has one print, the High Museum has another, The Philadelphia Museum of Art has the print Strand made for his 1971 Retrospective, and Sarah W. Hoffman, Michael Hoffman''s daughter, has a print, which originally was a gift from Hazel Strand to Michael and later given to Sarah.

Paul Strand was introduced to photography at the Ethical Culture School by his first photography teacher, Lewis Hine. In 1907, Hine took members of the school''s camera club to Alfred Stieglitz''s Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, where they saw an exhibition of photographs by Edward Steichen, Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence H. White and Frederick H. Evans. From that moment on, Strand decided to pursue photography as a medium of self-expression. During the next seven years, he emulated the Pictorialist idiom. Soon after, he developed his own personal technique and style, which enlarged the emerging canon of American modernism.

Strand first traveled to New Mexico in the 1920s, returning for three consecutive summers in 1930, where he was part of a community of writers and artists. During this time his style further matured so that his pictures reflect a quiet elegance and strong sense of humanity. In New Mexico Strand made about 200 images, focusing on the sensuality and linear definition of the landscape. His work was influenced by artists, such as John Marin and Georgia O''Keeffe, who were were trying to establish an American voice distinct from Europe. According to Trudy Wilner Stack, "In the Southwest, with its Native and Hispanic cultures, its ancient ruins and its New World landscape, startlingly different from the Old, they found a place where they could speak in that new voice."

In this image Strand''s depiction of a seemingly endless landscape is rendered with grace and simplicity. The rough tufts of grass play off the cottony softness of the cumulus clouds. A rich tonal ground meets an overcast sky that also echoes the gradations of tonality of the wild horses. Here, Strand demonstrates the influences of his Pictorialist mentors and his position as a mature Modernist master.