Five-Minute Museum

MC: It started around two and a half years ago. I’m an urban historian by training, but I had really gotten attached to the topic of how the financial crisis was impacting the built environment of American cities. I teach in Milwaukee, so the story is all around my office.

From a historical perspective, I was interested in trying to start at the moment of urban renewal in cities like Milwaukee, and then push it forward to try to create a narrative for the latter half of the 20th century — to historicize the idea of urban crisis. But just looking at what cities like Milwaukee were doing, I found it really inspiring. I found myself drawn to people who were interacting with the urban environment in ways that I didn’t expect — turning what one person would see as an abandoned building into, say, a working urban farm. It complicated the narrative [of urban abandonment] in ways that I found incredibly exciting, and even exhilarating. I wanted to document what I found in ways beyond the written word — and that’s when I reached out to David, whose photography I had admired for quite some time.

DS: I’m a Ph.D. student in sociology, and I also teach in Chicago. Michael and I are interested in similar issues, but I go about [my work] in a different way. Some of the straight sociological work that I’ve been doing has really focused on the built environment, how individuals pursue the built environment, and what kinds of actions are being taken, given a particular understanding of that environment. One component of that work is photographic: For the last several years, I’ve been spending a lot of time, particularly on the South Side and West Side of Chicago, looking at what’s been happening in the neighborhoods that have been most affected by industrialization, racial change and so on.

In the course of this work, I was bumping into some of the same kinds of things that Michael was finding and engaging. For example, I was finding these places where people had discovered abandoned buildings, figured out how to get hold of them, and then tried to use them for something really unusual or different. I was already engaged and beginning to do a little bit of documentation of that work when Michael got in touch with me, and we started talking about how to take these [local] ideas and think about them in a national framework.

At the Grohmann Museum in Milwaukee, we’re pulling this national idea back into a specific locality — examining all of the social factors that are at work, as well as the actions of people on the ground, and seeing how it’s all coming together in one particular place.

Which other cities will you be featuring in your work? Where else might you try to mount an exhibition?

DS: We’ve been involved in research in about 30 cities, at this point — from Albuquerque, N.M., to Providence, R.I. [In terms of mounting similar shows outside Milwaukee,] we’ve reached out to people in New Orleans, and we’ve also been talking to people in Chicago — both institutions and individuals. But one of the things that’s really exciting to us is the idea of actually working with the organizations [we've studied in each particular city]; that’s something that may take a little bit longer than doing a typical installation.

Michael told me in an email that he thinks Milwaukee is at the “cutting edge of a potential redefinition of [work and labor] in the 21st century.” Why do you think that is? Other cities — like Detroit — tend to get a lot of media play; is Milwaukee under-recognized in this sense, do you think?

MC: I think it is. That’s not to say that what’s happening in Detroit isn’t exciting, or shouldn’t be covered. But I think Milwaukee is particularly interesting when it comes to one of the topics often addressed in stories about Detroit and other cities: urban agriculture. Here in Milwaukee, we’ve had Growing Power since 1993; on the heels of the recession of the early ’90s, you have a man called Will Allen taking over a derelict property, and turning it into a viable urban farm that’s now been in existence for close to 20 years. You also have people like James Godsil at Sweet Water Organics, who have brought what Will Allen was doing to the next level in terms of technology (Sweet Water uses “aquaponics,” a system wherein plants and fish are raised symbiotically).

I think Sweet Water’s example is particularly useful for two reasons. It represents not only the reclamation of a building itself — they’re in an old Harneschfeger factory building on the south side of the city, and they definitely see the [cultural] value of keeping the building around — but also the idea of bringing productive work back to that building.

In the neighborhood around Sweet Water, there are a lot of old factory buildings — a lot of old tanneries being converted into lofts and living spaces. That’s OK, but what we really like about Sweet Water, and what they’re very adamant about, is that they want to make these spaces productive again. They see themselves as part of a narrative of production in the city of Milwaukee. They see themselves as being in touch with the [industrial past], but working in a way that speaks to the needs of the 21st century. For me, Sweet Water is a really nice symbol of why Milwaukee matters. It doesn’t cover over our history of industrialization, but it’s able to take what is positive from that era — a beautiful, functional building — and turn it into something new.

DS: I think one of the other things that’s really important about Milwaukee — and you can see it again in the Sweet Water example — is that the city itself has reached out and become engaged in thinking about how it can support many of these initiatives. This is something that we’re seeing other cities come around to, but I think Milwaukee is really in a position where it’s been more flexible — it’s been more outwardly supportive (financially and otherwise) to these institutions than other cities have been.

Do you think the revitalization of industrial space — the creation of workspaces, and therefore also work — is especially relevant in America today?

DS: I think there are a variety of ways in which these projects are important to people who aren’t directly involved in them. The first part has to do with the way that work has been transformed in the last 30 or 40 years, as more and more jobs have moved out to the suburbs, adding ring-like areas around cities. That’s really changed the way work patterns have played out in central cities. One of the main problems on the south and west sides of Chicago, and of course in many central cities in the U.S., is that the jobs that brought so many people to the cities just aren’t there anymore. And by taking these former industrial sites and transforming them into something else, these same focal points for productive work activity can help fill roles that have been increasingly absent.

MC: Right. To me it comes back to this idea of “reclamation,” which I think speaks directly to the current climate. Indeed, I can see the roots of the Occupy movement in some of the things we’ve been seeing around the country for the past two and a half years. The idea of reclaiming ideas of work, or spaces of work … In Miami, you have groups like Take Back the Land reclaiming housing — and they were doing this years before the Occupy movement started to consider occupying public space or foreclosed homes. We see art projects in cities across the country that are using foreclosed homes as their canvases, so to speak. For me, this is a potentially transformative moment. And what we hear people talk about who are doing this is the idea of returning urban space back to the people that it was meant to serve. For someone who studies the history of urban renewal, that’s incredibly exciting. So I’ve come to see a lot of this as a kind of corrective for many of the ways that policy impacted cities throughout the 20th century.

One thing we constantly heard from people [revitalizing urban spaces] around the country was, “I wish I knew of other people doing this,” or “I feel like I’m really alone in this.” So one of the things that excites me about this project is the idea of allowing these people first to know about each other, and then also to find some way of working with each other. [There are so many] Occupy people who know that something is wrong, but don’t know what to do with their energy; [we'd like to show them that] there are things already happening that would be a perfect fit for them.

Finally, [what I like about David's photography] is that, while there are pictures of derelict or abandoned properties, it doesn’t (for me) fall into the realm of “abandonment porn.” You don’t feel like a voyeur when you look at David’s pictures; you feel  empathetic — you feel like you want to connect with that landscape in a way that simply isn’t gawking at a damaged environment. And starting from that point, when David starts to bring in human subjects, it really does show how and why these faces matter.

“Working Legacies: The Death and (After) Life of Post-Industrial Milwaukee” is on display at the Milwaukee School of Engineering’s Grohmann Museum, in Milwaukee, Wis., through Feb. 6. Versions of the show may then travel on to other cities.

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Over the phone, curator Jordana Pomeroy spoke with me about the obstacles these female artists faced, and their strategies for coping — even thriving — in a time of profound social and political change.

This show spans a highly turbulent time in French history. Can you talk a little about what changed over the course of this period with regard to women’s place in the art world?

Well, lots of things changed. Marie Antoinette was particularly supportive of women artists, although the French monarchy had always been supportive of the arts in general. She had a large number of women in her court, and the economic climate was such that there was more money. People were feeling flush; Paris was the center of the art world, and there was generally more opportunity. There had always been women artists, but more opportunities for patronage and exhibiting arose.

This is the period of the Enlightenment, and perhaps that’s most important of all. The encyclopédistes started really giving serious consideration to the position and role of women in society; that’s where you start to see a real change in the social fabric — because women are in fact accorded roles, by men. There’s a kind of analysis of how society should function that hadn’t existed before.

And then, of course, you have a lot of change — change in government, in particular. The overthrowing of the monarchy obviously had a serious impact on French society. A figure like Joan of Arc, from centuries before, is being looked at as this great savior of the nation. She becomes a great female role model.

Obviously the art changes over time, but in general, how different is the subject matter that women dealt with from what men would have painted? Was it unusual for a woman to paint a portrait of a man, for instance?

No, that’s not at all unusual. In fact, I think — I haven’t gone through the exhibition looking for this, but I think it’s perhaps even 50/50 in the show. It could be even more men.

Men were likely patrons. A lot of the sitters in the paintings are of what I call the “artistic class” — the same social and professional class as the painters. So in that particular sense, it was egalitarian; there was a lot of sharing of ideas and collaboration. We have a picture of a very famous violin-maker, and a picture of a very famous diplomat (painted, in fact, by his companion). Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun painted a tremendous number of very important men. I think when it came to portraiture, they were pretty gender-blind.

You write in the introduction to the exhibition catalog that the fact that women painted so many self-portraits contributed to a newer, clearer conception of the “woman artist.” Is this the first time that this collective identity came across so strongly?

You know, we had a show of 16th- and 17th-century Italian women painters [at the museum] — and I think that went on equally then. This is not the very first time, at all.

It’s a very interesting question about identity, especially when you’re engaged in portraiture. You see these women tackling the same issues as the Italian Renaissance women: looking at themselves in the mirror, putting themselves in the guise of a famous mythological figure. They’re their own muses, but they’re also telling stories about themselves by putting themselves in these various roles.

For instance, we have a self-portrait of the artist Marie Geneviève Bouliar as Aspasia [slide 3]. It’s really quite a terrific painting; I think it speaks volumes about the show itself. It could be the emblem of the exhibition. It shows the painter, half nude, as Pericles’ consort. As [the companion of] a great Athenian leader, Aspasia was accused of either being very clever and rather manipulative, or incredibly brilliant, depending on which way you looked at things. That’s the way people have always looked at women: If you’re too clever, you’re manipulative and aggressive. There are great layers in this particular painting; you have the painter putting herself in that position because that’s how she was looked at by society.

What would you say was the greatest obstacle women painters had to deal with in this period? Lack of training? Or the failure to be accepted in established academies?

There was a confluence of obstacles, but I think the real obstacle was being a woman, and I mean that in every possible way. Right there and then, you were born with obstacles in your path. And yet I don’t think that these people, who came mostly from artistic families, sat around and bemoaned their fate as women, either. They were living their lives, which meant working in the studios of their fathers or their brothers-in-law, and actually gaining a career that way — starting to sell pictures. They had their own strategies, that’s for sure. And their main strategy was to go through the men who surrounded them for patronage opportunities.

On the other hand, you have somebody like Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, who pulls herself up by her own bootstraps very early on, and takes full credit for that. She makes connections — to the royalty [in particular]. There’s a way of seducing the system that many women recognized it was important to do.

The one thing they didn’t really have is access to the École des Beaux-Arts. If you were trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, that was like your seal of approval. If you weren’t, that didn’t mean you came out with a worse education — because you would apprentice yourself to a great painter, say David. But you didn’t have that old boys’ network. And you still have that today; there’s a similarity for women today who don’t have access to old boys’ networks.

I’d like to play devil’s advocate for a second, and ask whether you think the separation between men’s and women’s art in this period is artificial. Why not show these paintings in the context of a larger exhibition about male and female artists working at the time? Or does the format you’ve chosen simply serve to celebrate a tradition that hasn’t really received the attention it deserves?

That’s a very good question. This particular exhibition falls into two arenas that are important to our museum. One is plain old recovery: Here are some artists you’ve never heard of, and yet they form part of a very, very rich network — a thickly woven fabric, let’s say, of artistic life in Paris at a particular time. Perhaps most people have heard of Vigée-Lebrun, but there were many, many other artists out there working, and they’re not recognized. When you see them as a group, it’s really rather sobering — or enlightening, anyway.

A more interesting point is that so many of these artists were really quite successful, did create these sorts of networks, and managed to build very lucrative careers for themselves. How they got there is a matter of finding other ways to gain their education, finding people to work with, finding patrons, becoming well-known and sort of establishing a reputation for themselves. That’s the narrative that I draw out by putting these works in certain categories and certain scenes. And while for some exhibitions we’ve included male artists for context, I think the context really here is political. It’s not what the men were doing — it’s really more what politics was doing, how society was changing and how women made their way in this particular society at this particular time.

There is one specific area I should mention: history painting. Women did not engage in much history painting, ever. But I do have a few in this exhibition, as well as a few landscape paintings. History painting was really considered the top rung of the academic ladder, because it involved painting the figure, and it involved “serious” work — you know, this is about history.

There are always nuances; it’s never just black and white. It’s not like women only painted portraits and still lifes — although the majority of them did produce portraits and still lifes. Their main gig was portrait painting.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I should point out that part of the show is going to travel to Sweden, so it’ll have an afterlife. The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm is adding a component on 18th-century Swedish painters (women and men), because there was a lot of cultural interchange between the two countries in the 18th century. I think that’s really exciting. The show will have a slight metamorphosis, but that will just add to our understanding of this very rich period in the history of art, and how women artists played a large, large part in the evolution of art — and in some senses, I suppose, in politics itself — by becoming more visible.

“Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from the Louvre, Versailles, and Other French National Collections” will be on display at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., from Feb. 24 through July 29, 2012.

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In separate interviews, Seattle Art Museum curators Chiyo Ishikawa and Pam McClusky — experts in European and African and Oceanic Art, respectively — discussed Gauguin, his Polynesian voyages, and the value of integrated exhibitions such as this. Click through the slide show for a preview.

What is the idea behind this exhibition? What makes it different from other showings of Gauguin’s work?

Chiyo Ishikawa: No exhibition or study has taken on [Gauguin's Polynesian works] in a full-blown way, as this one does. The goal of the exhibition is to understand this particular aspect of his career more fully. Gauguin was always drawing from a whole range of traditions — but nevertheless, there is a significant role that the Polynesian material plays in his work, even before he goes [to Tahiti].

An essay in the exhibition catalog proposes that Gauguin actually saw Polynesian material for the first time earlier than we thought, around 1884-85, when he was living with his wife in Denmark. This was after he had lost his job; he was trying to make his living in another way. They ran out of money and moved to Denmark, where her family was from. One of the things he did there was visit the national museum, which is sort of a museum of natural history and ethnography. They had an exhibition of pan-primitive art that included material from New Zealand and from Polynesia; we know that he went [to see it]. And so that is probably the first time he saw [Polynesian material] before he had the specific idea in his mind to go to Tahiti. The idea was further solidified after Gauguin visited the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, which had an individual Tahitian pavilion, and numerous works of art from Polynesia, which he saw and then incorporated after he’d actually been in Tahiti.

Pam McClusky: In some regards, art museums and curators tend to be segregated by specialization — so that European painting specialists, like Chiyo, and African and Oceanic Art experts, like me, never intersect. But artists do intersect, and they have for centuries. And so this is a chance for us to look at it a bit more through the artist’s eyes. To be able to put Polynesian art out there in conjunction with Gauguin’s vision is new, and to present them equally is new … Other exhibitions may reference Gauguin’s interest in Polynesian art, but it’s treated as an art historical footnote rather than a really thorough experience. We’re delivering on the notion that it is very helpful to look through an artist’s eyes, and see how he or she can draw from things in ways that surprise you.

What did the idea of “the exotic” mean to Gauguin? Where did he get the idea of it that he had, and when he was in Polynesia, did it live up to his expectations? My understanding is that it didn’t — but he may have depicted it as if it did anyway.

CI: This is a very complicated question that’s at the heart of Gauguin studies. I’m not going to formulate an exact answer, but I will put some things out there.

One of the things I’ve come to realize as I’ve been working on this is that the period of stability that Gauguin had as he was working in the stock market and building a family and building a collection and starting to paint — that was about a 10-year period that was an anomaly in a life that was full of travel and searching. I think [traveling] was a fundamental part of his personality; he was taken to Peru when he was around 1 year old, and lived there for seven years (his maternal grandmother was Peruvian), and then at 17 he joined the merchant marine, and immediately after that he joined the navy. He had sailed all around the world; he was unusually well-traveled for anybody today, let alone someone from the mid- or late-19th century. I think that there was something in him that always knew that if he was dissatisfied with something here, there must be something else out there.

Gauguin’s family and friends always talked about him as an eternal optimist. I think that was part of what fueled him too: the idea that “this might not be working out, but over there, it’s going to be great.”

The first time Gauguin goes to Tahiti, I think it’s a fairly conventional romantic quest for the exotic — for a more pure kind of society. He went there with a government grant to document the customs and people of Tahiti, and so in some of his work from that first period, there is a kind of — I don’t want to say “journalistic” quality — but there is a kind of effort to communicate routines of daily life, or what a village looks like — that kind of thing. After a little while, he leaves that behind (it isn’t very natural to him anyway), and he goes back to his idea of dreaming in front of nature, and creating a synthesis that makes an interesting painting whose colors are maybe unnatural but feel right to him.

Then he goes back to Paris for two years, because he wants to regain his footing in the art world, and he has numerous disappointments. Not many people are buying his paintings; he gets good reviews, but it’s just not finding a market. Then he breaks his ankle, and he gets syphilis, and he’s estranged from his family, and all these other things … And so he goes back to Tahiti with a vengeance, vowing not to return. That’s interesting to me because then I think it’s less a quest for the exotic, and more just looking for a hospitable place that doesn’t have the baggage that his life in Europe does. However, after he’s been there for about six years, he is still questing, and ends up in the Marquesas Islands.

Was Gauguin sending work back to Europe the whole time he was away? Does he always keep on eye on the European art market?

CI: Yes, he does. … He definitely wants to be part of the artistic dialogue that is going on in France; he wants people to see his paintings. He’s writing to people about his work, and he’s very much keeping track of what’s going on in the art world — he knows that younger people are coming up and he doesn’t want to be usurped, which is why he goes back eventually. I mean, it’s the bane of his existence that he’s not making a living as an artist. It’s the constant refrain, once he becomes a full-time artist, is that he’s not appreciated enough. Unfortunately, that appreciation didn’t come until after his death.

Do you have one or two favorite items that are in the show?

PM: [One] favorite is the Maori house-post. It has a man standing, and his two hands are each three-fingered (that’s an indicator that he is an ancestor); he has red sealing wax in his eyes, and his body is tattooed in a very kind of signature way. It is so compelling. Part of what I think is invested in that work is the memory of having the Maori courier come [to the museum] and introduce us to this figure. He played four instruments, and told us about who this ancestor was — that he was a living presence, that we’re to talk to him every day — and we all had to shake this courier’s hand and touch noses with him, to sign our commitment to take care of his relative. The whole encounter with this courier reminded me that we’re cultural activists, but sometimes we get caught in the more corporate model of business-like demeanor. This was an eye-opener, reminding us that these things came from — and are still cared for by — indigenous cultures who have something to teach us about how attached you can be to artwork.

“Gauguin & Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise” will be on display at the Seattle Art Museum through April 29, 2012.

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Had you considered doing a swimming-pool themed photography exhibition before “Pacific Standard Time”?

I’d been thinking for a long time, actually — ever since graduate school — about trying to do an exhibition that investigated a theoretical concept: the notion that a place is both a real, topographic entity and an ideological construct … It’s just an idea I’ve been wanting to explore. When the opportunity came to apply for a grant to do an exhibition as part of this larger project looking at art in Southern California, I realized that it was the perfect opportunity to begin to explore that idea.

When I started thinking about it … I realized that in many ways, in the post-war period, Southern California was the ideal of what the American dream was going to look like. At the center of that was the swimming pool, and suburban expansion, and the concept of everybody living in this place that didn’t have the danger of nature, but had all the benefits of the natural landscape. A place that was away from the city, but at the same time felt domesticated. I started thinking about the pool as the central icon of that both real and imaginary place. And it grew from there.

What do swimming pools say about Southern California in particular (that they don’t say, for instance, abut other parts of the country, such as the Midwest or New England)?

Well, in the immediate postwar period of the ’40s, ’50s and even ’60s, there weren’t that many swimming pools elsewhere. Maybe in Florida, which had a similar kind of expansion at that time. But Southern California was growing very rapidly in terms of suburbia in that period, and that expansion included houses that incorporated swimming pools. I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s in Seattle, and I envied Southern California — because in Seattle, in the summer, we would drag out our above-ground swimming pools and set them up and pretend that we lived the same kind of life that I imagined people in Southern California lived all the time. Thinking about kids my age in the ’70s growing up with swimming pools in their backyard and having this kind of experience as the norm for their life — that was a very seductive sensibility. I don’t think that that was unusual, when you look at how much Hollywood promoted itself and Southern California as an ideal for the country. You pretty much see it everywhere.

Two themes that seem immediately apparent in many of these images are architecture — that is, the houses or buildings we often see beside the pools — and sex.

The exhibition is divided into thematic groups. It does start with California architecture and design, because swimming pools were at the center of the way that mid-century architects here in Southern California were thinking about modern architecture. The pool created a very porous experience between indoor living and outdoor entertaining. These were houses literally built for entertaining, and the movement from the inside to the outside was part of how Southern California architecture was developed … The pool really allowed for fluid movement between those spaces. So architecture and design is certainly at the beginning of the way that you would want to think about pools, in the period from 1945 to 1982 in general, in Southern California.

In addition, this is a period in which … culture was creating an image for the Hollywood celebrity that was built around the pool. You see all of these images of Hollywood celebrities — supposedly just casual, unscripted moments. [But] none of those photographs are meant to do anything except promote the persona of the celebrity. They give you this impression that what you’re seeing is the “real” celebrity, when in fact you’re seeing the carefully narrated Hollywood persona that that celebrity is based on.

[Another section of the show focuses on] suburbia, and how much the private, backyard pool (as opposed to the public pool) was at the center of suburban life. There were some public pools in suburbia, but the ideal was a private, protected space; especially in the ’50s, it had very much to do with this notion that we Americans had a private experience — as opposed to the communal experience of the Soviet countries. When you look at what people circulated in terms of photographs, and even what they said about their own experience, it almost always revolved around things that they were doing in the backyard. If they were lucky enough, it revolved around a pool in the backyard. And as you say, because of the very nature of the fact that, when you’re around a pool, you’re wearing a swimsuit, it becomes an opportunity for the body to be on display.

[The final section of the exhibition is a conceptual one.] I wanted this show to be not just about these social topics, but also about what was happening in photography during the period. 1945 is a high modernist moment in photography, and the earliest photograph in the show is by Ruth Bernhard, who emigrated from Germany to escape the Nazis. She went first to New York and then to Southern California, and her images represent all of the things that you would expect in a high modernist photograph: … even though it’s representative, there’s a very abstract organization of the forms and the shapes in the image, because it’s done through high contrasts of light and dark.

As you move through the period, you get photography really blurring the boundary between popular culture and high culture, because photographs circulate in commercial advertising; they circulate in journalistic reporting; they exist in lifestyle magazines as well as in professional trade journals … all of those things in addition to showing up as fine art in museums.

Then, in the 1980s — that’s when photography goes big; that’s when Cindy Sherman’s photographs go up on the wall large, and Barbara Kruger’s imagery goes up big, and David Hockney first takes his smaller Polaroid images and montages them together into something large enough that it can go up on the wall and challenge painting as the dominant mode in contemporary art practice. You see this shift from a very high modernist fine art practice to color photography that we recognize as a part of postmodern contemporary art. That really literally happens from 1945 to 1982, so it spans the dates of this show. The conceptual section really shows you how photography used the pool, not as a subject, but as an opportunity to explore all kinds of developments in photography as an aesthetic mode itself.

The exhibition features several works by David Hockney — and several that were inspired by him (or even actually incorporate him [slide 10]). Can you talk a little about his art and influence?

[The Hockney photo in your slide show,] “John St. Clair Swimming,” [slide 9] is actually very small. It’s typical of a series of images he took; he used photography in the way that other artists might use a sketch or a prefatory painting: as a way to think about his compositions. That image of John St. Clair swimming became source material for a later famous painting by Hockney that is actually set in Italy. But that particular image [was taken in California].

When I decided to do this exhibition, I knew it had to have Hockney, because if you say “the swimming pool in Southern California,” the first thing that comes to almost everybody’s mind is Hockney. It’s ironic, though — I don’t think most people know that he only painted 15 paintings of swimming pools. They loom so large, because they circulated so widely through reproductions and in the popular imagination that people think he must have painted dozens of them. But he only did 15.

“Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1982″ is on display at the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs, Calif., through May 27, 2012.

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Why did you decide to run this exhibition now?

[Early photography] is an area that I am particularly interested in. The MFA has a very nice and growing collection; it’s something we’ve been working on in recent years. It’s not the largest or most extensive collection of early photography, but it is choice, and becoming more choice all the time, so we thought it would be great to show the riches that we have in this area now. The exhibition is being displayed thematically: portraits, architectural views, landscapes, still lifes. There will be a number of iconic images and works by very celebrated early photographers.

You know, the invention of photography really changed the course of the history of art. The amazing thing is that these early photographers were working with very rudimentary equipment; these were very simple box cameras that were big and unwieldy , and homemade-seeming recipes and solutions that they made in their kitchens or in a workroom. They had to follow those recipes painstakingly to have any kind of result; they had to estimate the exposure time dependent on the amount of sunlight that day. On top of it all, when they were using the cameras, they would look at their image in the viewer — what we call the ground glass — and they would see it upside down and laterally reversed. So they had to reverse it in their heads.

Was the process these photographers used similar in any way at all to the process used by photographers today?

One of the great reasons why photographers make pictures is to see how [something looks] as a photograph. A photograph is a two-dimensional rendering of the three-dimensional world; it flattens what you see. We contemporary people, having known modernism, often see planes of tone in these early photographs that we’re not 100 percent sure the early photographers saw. But they must have been aware of them, because they seem to be so much part of many of the greatest early photographs — planes of tone, of light and dark; the creation of an image that’s not just about detail, but about tone, light and shadow.

Photography was invented at about the same time in France and England, where it was announced by two different people: Louis Daguerre (in Paris) and William Henry Fox Talbot. Daguerre was the first one to announce his discovery, in early January of 1839 — and then Talbot, having heard that Daguerre had invented something rather similar-sounding to what he himself had done, rushed to make his own announcement. The photographs in our show were mostly made with Talbot’s paper negative process; there’s only one daguerreotype. [Paper] was ultimately the one that succeeded more, in part because you could create multiple prints, so it had more usefulness — whereas daguerreotype was unique. With paper negatives, the prints were larger, so I’m sure that was also appealing. The daguerreotype basically became antiquated at some point, and the uses for paper photography multiplied. Our exhibition celebrates what people often call the golden age of early photography, which is the use of paper materials from the 1840s to the mid-1870s.

Were these photographers mainly wealthy people? Or people from all different levels of society?

Well, a lot of them were wealthy people who had the time and the resources to do things. The one daguerreotype we’re showing is by someone called Girault de Prangey. He was a wealthy architectural historian who heard about the daguerreotype process and almost immediately went to learn it — got himself taught the process, had a couple of cameras built, and took off for the Mediterranean to make some of the earliest pictures of the sites in that area. He made images that were surprising, because he framed them interestingly. He used the “close-up,” which was actually an unusual idea at the time. He would photograph only part of a building; our picture is sort of the top section of a church in Athens.

With industrialization came great advances in transportation — particularly train travel — and so a number of other well-to-do photographers started to travel to distant places and bring back images of the exotic sites in places like Egypt, Jerusalem and Syria. We have one picture by a photographer who got to Mexico.

Gradually, glass negatives started to replace paper negatives, because they offered even more detail, and allowed you to shorten your exposure time. But if they were going to go with glass, these traveling photographers had to carry sheets of glass that were the same size as their prints. Which is amazing — these are prints that are often 15 inches by 12 inches. They would bring sheets of glass that they had prepared; they would bring bottles of chemicals, too, because they had to treat the negatives before exposure, and then treat them again right after to secure the image. They had to bring a sort of makeshift darkroom — it’s incredible. We have one picture that was taken near the top of Mont Blanc, in the mid-1860s, by one of the Bisson frères — an image that he had to make while dealing with the elements, the cold and snow. He made two unsuccessful trips before he actually succeeded in getting images. The diligence itself is just remarkable; the passion of these people is amazing.

How many of these works were conceived, at the time of their creation, as “art”? How many were done more commercially — as portraits, for instance, or with the goal of simply depicting realistic scenes (i.e., photojournalism)?

Some of the greatest and most important photographers were artists, and brought an artistic vision to their work, so they were thinking of this as a tool for making expressive art. But the purposes for photography developed over time, portraiture being one of the most obvious (and we have a number of wonderful portraits in the exhibition). Then travel photography, like I was just mentioning, and the beginnings of photojournalism. There were also applications in the industrial context; for instance, we have a group of pictures made at the Sèvres porcelain manufactory [slide 11], because there were a group of artists involved in the making of the porcelain who were fascinated with photography. They realized they could make wonderful images that would promote the porcelains.

The exhibition focuses on work from England and France. What was going on in American photography at the time?

In America, the daguerreotype lasted for a longer period. It starts in America in the early 1840s, and there were several important daguerreotype studios. There was one very important one here in Boston, Southworth & Hawes, and we have an extensive collection of their work. Because Americans moved and traveled so much, and because the Civil War happened, there was a great need for portraits. So daguerreotypes and tintypes and ambrotypes — there was a big business in that, all the way until the 1860s. It just went in a slightly different direction, and then paper photography also started to take over here in the U.S. We’re focusing in this show just on the European photography, because it’s so cohesive as a body of material.

I think people will be particularly interested in the Lewis Carroll photograph [slide 1]. What’s the story behind it?

Well, first of all, that’s our newest acquisition, so we’re very proud of it. Lewis Carroll’s work has a market beyond the photography world, so these images are expensive.

Carroll was interested in photography, just like he was interested in his writing, and he made a number of photographs of little girls, including the real Alice. This particular picture shows the young girl who was really his favorite model; he photographed her the most. Her name was Alexandra Kitchin; her nickname was Xie [pronounced "Ex-ee"]. She apparently took an interest in his photo-making, and was patient; she would sit for these long exposures, and enjoyed the whole process. He used to say, “If you want to make a great photograph, you just have to put Xie in front of the camera.” She looks so sweet in this picture, reclining on that beautiful sofa with a book at her feet. It’s really quite beautiful.

Are there any other photos you’d like to single out as particularly special?

Yes. Another photo from the same section of the exhibition is the Nadar portrait of Jean Journet [slide 7]. Gaspard-Félix Tournachon Nadar was the best-known portrait photographer in France at that time. Whereas other photographers who had very active businesses in making portraits for customers might work with teams of assistants, Nadar would take hours for a single portrait. It wasn’t a quick one-off; he did it with great care. He photographed a lot of the most important people in arts and letters, and some friends. This particular picture is kind of unusual, because it’s of a very bohemian friend, Jean Journet, who was a street preacher. He had been painted by people like Courbet, and was beloved in the circle of artists at the time. Nadar’s picture makes him look like he’s in the garb of a Spanish baroque painting — and he’s looking up, like he’s receiving spiritual insight. It’s rather special.

We also have an early Hill & Adamson. [Octavius] Hill and [Robert] Adamson were a team of British photographers who learned Talbot’s process in the early 1840s, and made photographs of the fisher folk of Newhaven, and also of people around Edinburgh, where they lived. With their photos, there’s less emphasis on detail, and much more light and shadow; you can really tell that there was a painter involved — someone who was really thinking about the balance of light and shadow and the composition.

Actually, the Bisson Mont Blanc picture has a wonderful balance of light and shadow. It’s almost divided into quadrants of light and dark. Some of these pictures have a formalism — an abstract or formalist quality that seems almost modern to our eye.

The Gustave Le Gray seascape [slide 4] is special, too. Le Gray is one of the best known of these early photographers; this seascape in particular harks back to painting of the period. These early photographers had great difficulty recording the sky, because the sky was light and the clouds were moving and they had long exposure, so it would come out light in tone, or blotchy. They often painted out the sky so that it would appear just white in the background. But what Le Gray did was to sort of ingeniously piece in another negative of clouds, in a way that almost seemed deceptive. And this was a large print for his time — these pictures caused quite a stir, because they were so evocative and magisterial and amazing.

“Silver, Salt, and Sunlight: Early Photography in Britain and France” will be on display at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston from Feb. 7 through Aug. 19, 2012.

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Over the phone, curator Dr. Graham Boettcher outlined the history and uses of these petite, jewel-like paintings. The accompanying slide show highlights some particularly splendid examples from an altogether remarkable collection.

Can you give us a brief history of these so-called “lover’s eyes”?

According to lore, the story of lover’s eyes goes back to the end of the 18th century, when the prince of Wales — who later became George IV — became smitten with a twice-widowed Catholic woman named Maria Fitzherbert. He courted Maria Fitzherbert rather unsuccessfully at first; he kept trying to win her affection and profess his undying love to her, and she wasn’t really going to have any of that. Finally, he staged a kind of half-hearted suicide attempt (I think it was more of a cry for help than an earnest effort to take his own life) — and then she reluctantly agreed to marry him. But shortly thereafter — I think really the next day — she came to her senses and realized what exactly she had done by consenting to marry the prince of Wales, which of course was totally illegal according to the laws (first of all, the king had to consent to the marriage of the heir to the throne, and second, he would never have consented for the prince to marry a Catholic, let alone a twice-widowed Catholic six years his senior).

So Fitzherbert fled to the Continent, trying to escape George’s attention, but he didn’t give up. On Nov. 3, 1785, the prince wrote to Mrs. Fitzherbert with a second proposal of marriage. Instead of sending an engagement ring, as we might expect today, he sent her a picture of his own eye, set in a locket, painted by the miniaturist Richard Cosway, one of the celebrated artists of the day. At the time, they referred to these pieces as “eye miniatures”; today we call them “lover’s eyes,” but that wasn’t a period term — that’s a term coined by the New York-based jeweler Edith Weber, who’s handled a lot of these over the years.

Anyway, George sent a note with this eye miniature, and it said: “P.S. I send you a parcel, and I send you at the same time an eye. If you have not totally forgotten the whole countenance, I think the likeness will strike you.” It’s not known whether it was the letter or the eye that changed Mrs. Fitzherbert’s feelings precisely, but shortly after that, she returned to England and married the prince in a secret ceremony on Dec. 15, 1785. Soon, the fad for these eye miniatures began to catch on — so this episode is, according to legend, the genesis of the eye miniature.

There is some evidence to suggest that these had appeared in France a few years earlier, and that the Brits were only adopting a French invention; I think the jury’s still out. In any event, the love affair between the prince of Wales and Maria Fitzherbert popularized these objects and spawned a fad that lasted well into the 1830s — and even later, past Queen Victoria, who was known to have commissioned a number of these objects during her reign. There are even artists to this very day who are painting lover’s eyes. One is the great-great-grandson of the famous Philadelphia portraitist Thomas Sully; he’s sent me a picture of a miniature he’s working on. Rather than paint on elephant ivory, which of course wouldn’t be legal nowadays, he paints on mastodon ivory. He also points out that he usually has them commissioned by faithful spouses, not lovers or mistresses.

The original idea was that, by only showing an eye, these miniatures would effectively conceal the identity of the person who was shown, right? This way, the miniatures could be worn or exhibited publicly?

Exactly. Only someone with really intimate acquaintance — a lover, a spouse, a close family member — would recognize an individual’s eye, so they could be worn in a more open way. They didn’t have to be encased inside of a locket. There are rare instances in which we do know the identity of the subject, because of an iron-clad provenance or documentation, but typically we can only tell if there’s an inscription.

Some of the eyes in the Skier Collection have inscriptions that reveal the identity of the sitter, but still, oftentimes these will be fairly generic; it’ll just say the name of the individual — and if it’s a memorial piece, it might give the date they died and how old they were. Through genealogical research, we’ve been able to discover the identity of certain people, but some of the names are a little too generic; we’re only able to establish certain identity in a handful of cases — and I think that’s by design. That was really the intent of these things, to keep the identities secret.

How did the Skiers start collecting these objects?

Nan and David Skier started collecting “lover’s eyes” about 20 years ago — and I think you’ll love this detail: David Skier is a prominent opthamologist here in Birmingham. So he’s someone who deals with eyes all day long. They came across their first lover’s eye at an antique show in Boston, and were just utterly captivated by it. (The first eye that they saw was a really exquisitely rendered one: quite early, from 1790, with a blue enamel surrounding — often associated with eyes that were commissioned by and for the nobility. It’s also encrusted with diamonds and pearls.)

For 20 years, the Skiers have quietly built what is really thought by all who have been asked — all who would know — to be the largest collection of these materials in the world. Larger than any institutional collection, certainly. Larger than the collection of the Queen herself.

When the “Antiques Roadshow” came to Birmingham, one of the appraisers on the show, Barry Weber (to whom the catalog is dedicated — he passed away recently) approached the Skiers about doing an educational segment on lover’s eyes, and of course they were happy to share their collection; that was the first time the collection received any sort of notoriety.

And this is the first time this collection has been exhibited in a museum?

That’s correct. This is the largest exhibition of its kind. There are certainly a few museums here and in Britain that have small collections of lover’s eyes but display them with their permanent collection; I think Philadelphia has about 30 or so eyes, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a few in their collection, as do the Royal Collection and the Victoria & Albert in London. But this collection is three times larger than any institutional collection.

Because these things are tiny, I think a natural impulse on the part of exhibition designers would be to put them all in one case — but then you can take them all in in an instant, which doesn’t really do justice to the artistry that went into making these. Each one is so carefully rendered, and they all tell very different stories.

“Look of Love: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection” will be on view at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Ala., from Feb. 7 through June 10, 2012.

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