brought

Peter C. Bunnell 83, dies; brought academic rigor to history of photography

Robert G. Mull 7 months ago

It is a measure of Mr. Bunnell’s success that today photography is unquestionably accepted as both a fine art and a discipline worthy of historical scholarship. Things were different in the late 1950s, when he entered college: He had to struggle to find professors, let alone programs, that took the subject seriously.

“There were lots of schools where you could learn to take pictures,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1972. “But despite a growing awareness of still photography’s importance, there was no program anywhere to study its aesthetics and history.”

At Yale University, he was the first student in the art history department to work on a dissertation about photography. When he moved from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to Princeton, in 1972, he assumed the country’s first endowed chair in the history of photography.

By the time he retired, in

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Peter C. Bunnell, 83, Dies; Brought Academic Rigor to History of Photography

Robert G. Mull 7 months ago

Peter C. Bunnell, who over a 35-year career at the Museum of Modern Art and Princeton University transformed the history of photography from a side interest among professional photographers to a rigorous academic discipline, died on Sept. 20 at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 83.

Malcolm Daniel, an executor of his estate who studied under Professor Bunnell and is now a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, said the cause was melanoma.

It is a measure of Professor Bunnell’s success that today photography is unquestionably accepted as both a fine art and a discipline worthy of historical scholarship. Things were different in the late 1950s, when he entered college: He had to struggle to find professors, let alone programs, that took the subject seriously.

“There were lots of schools where you could learn to take pictures,” he said in an interview with The New York Times

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Gianfranco Gorgoni brought land art to the world

Robert G. Mull 11 months ago

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists like Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson were doing strange things in the desert. Digging ditches, building spirals of rocks, riding motorcycles in wide circles—they were among a group of contemporary artists using the vastness of the American West to explore a relatively new genre that would come to be known as land art.

An Italian photographer named Gianfranco Gorgoni was there, too. His photographs of these large-scale and hard-to-reach artworks would end up standing in for the pieces themselves, spreading around the world and bringing attention to the dusty artists turning the land into their canvas.

[Image: courtesy Monacelli]

A new exhibition now open at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno brings Gorgoni’s work and his role in growing the land art movement out of the shadows. Gianfranco Gorgoni: Land Art Photographs, features more than 50 photos of major land

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==Dior brought Amoako Boafo’s paintings to life for summer 2021

Robert G. Mull 1 year ago

Photography Jackie NIckerson. Images courtesy of Dior

In the long history of the relationship between the worlds of fashion and fine art, a story that often goes overlooked is that of Monsieur Christian Dior. You, of course, know him for the eponymous Maison he founded in 1947, now one the proudest names in fashion and culture at large. A lesser-known fact about the seminal couturier, however, is that long before his career in fashion, he enjoyed a reputation as one of Paris’ most eminent art dealers in the early 1930s. Together with his business partner Pierre Colle, he even presented Alberto Giacometti’s first Paris solo show, and, in June 1931, debuted Salvador Dalí’s masterpiece The Persistence of Memory (that’s right, the one with the melting clocks).

It’s a history that is often overshadowed by the legacy of the monolithic Maison he built, but one person who committed

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