Museum of Fine Arts Boston
October 5, 2010
Gallery 335
Wing of the Americas, Third Level
Modernist Photography 1910-1950
Nothing like a tiny room full of stunning black-and-white photographs to jam the brakes on your parade through the Boston Museum of Fine Arts new Wing of the Americas. To walk unexpectedly into this gallery of gelatin silver prints is like driving straight into a gravel pit from the smooth surface of a superhighway.
You've been dazzled by the saturated colors and oversized canvases of abstract and representational 20th-century art in the surrounding galleries and whoosh, you’re surrounded by forty 8 x 10 inch black-and-white photographs. They practically beg you to stand close and peer inside. Combined they’d fit into one of the frames of a painting in the next gallery.
The 19th century French impressionists and the Cubist movement of the early 1900s had blown away the doors of what people considered traditional art. The American artists in this exhibit raucously raced through those open thresholds to show that the young medium of photography had a seat at the table.
Photographers in the first half of the century were pushing the technical boundaries of their cameras and the horizons of their imaginations to produce portraits, nudes, close-ups, and abstract compositions. Subject matter from the aesthetic to the mundane held interest for them – shapes of architectural, human and natural form, subtle social commentary and random compositions that capture the swing of America’s hips at the dawn of a new century.
Their palette ranged from lustrous blacks to Arctic whites with 1000 shades of gray in between.
The quartet of miniature prints by Karl Straus 1886-1983 has the feel of atmospheric 19th-century etchings, 20th century homage to the bygone century.
Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridge 1911 (R)
Morris Engel’s (1918–2005) crisp print titled “Comics New York City 1949” captures a lovely moment in time - the total innocence of a boy sitting on the curb, engrossed in the comic book held tightly in his hands. The comic book was a far more compelling way for kids to practice reading in every format from Classic Comic Books (Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, The Red Badge of Courage, Romeo and Juliet, for starters) to science fiction, mystery, westerns and yes, Archie and Veronica. I read them all…but I digress.
Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) was as adept with oil paint as he was with photographic paper. His oil painting, one of two color pieces in the exhibit, “Bleeder Stack River Rouge Ford Plant 1927,” (R) is paired with his photograph “Pulverizer Building 1927” showing his fascination with the geometric architecture and shapes of an emerging industrial America and is a subtle link to the American paintings in adjacent galleries.
Margaret Bourke White’s “The American Way of Life 1937” is a show-stopper. African-Americans in a 1937 breadline stand under a giant billboard proclaiming “World’s Highest Standard of Living… There’s no way like the American Way.” Who would have guessed this photo could strike such a visceral chord today.
No exhibit of 20th-century photography would be complete without compositions of the female form by Edward Weston (1886–1958) and Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976). Weston's nearly abstract shape of “Nude 1935” and Cunningham’s “Alta on the beach” are two classics. The pairings of photographs are often playful. Ansel Adams’s (1902-1984) composition of the soft petals of a rose juxtaposed with Edward Weston's nude are an unusual pair and totally congruous.
Gordon Parks (1912–2006), widely acclaimed for his fashion photography, had a keen eye for social commentary. His “Outside Liberty Theater 19th if the” is a stark reminder of urban segregation in not-so-long-ago mid-20th century America.
"Coffee Shop,Railway Station, Indianapolis, 1956", by Robert Frank (b 1926) captures the sense of personal isolation in urban America much the same way as Edward Hopper, whose work hangs in another gallery.
Much of the photography in this intimate space was created during the same period as the bigger than life abstract works in the galleries in the adjoining rooms by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, and realist paintings by Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, and George Bellows and dozens of others.
With that context, it makes total sense that the photographs in the “Modernist Photography 1910-1950” exhibit represent similar disparate artistic visions. Gallery 335 is a terrific point of entry to lay the groundwork for viewing the rest of the third level’s 20th century art through the mid-1970s.
Photographs taken by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. in Gallery 335
Berenice Abbott (1998-1991) Gasoline Station from the series Changing New York, 1935
Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) Sunbath,Alta on the beach, 1925-1930
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) Dorothy True, 1919
A Toy Story from Westport, MA
When owner Ira Hassenfeld walked into the design room at Hasbro Toys in Providence in the summer of 1963, the first thing he announced was, “I want you to make a doll for boys.” The second thing was, “And I don’t want to hear the word doll when you design it!”
For the next several months, the “D” word was not uttered. The toy was always referred as a soldier, or a fighting man. One of the three men on the Hasbro design team was Sam Speers. The combined skills of these men ended up creating the world’s first action figure for boys, with the decidedly undoll- like name of GI Joe.
A year after he graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Industrial Design, Speers built a cottage in Westport, MA. Speers and his wife Arlene divided their time between their home in North Attleboro and their small cottage in Masquesatch Meadows. It was an easy drive from Westport to Providence.
The next few months would be an ultimate test of Speers ingenuity. “We knew that we could make equipment and accessories for the figure since it had been done successfully five years earlier by another company with the Barbie Doll,” Speers said. They knew that a market existed because boys had always played with soldiers, mostly with inanimate cast iron or lead figures 4 inches high.
The first big question was how could Sam’s design team join together the hands, arms, legs of an 11 1/2 inch tall action figure. Nails wouldn’t stay put, screws could be taken apart, a spring could be flexed out of shape.
“You don’t leave your work back at the office. You’ve got problem you want to solve, you’re always looking for a way to solve it, “ Speers said. “One Saturday, I was wandering into Grundy’s Hardware for a homeowner repair when I saw what’s called a ring-threaded screw, it has concentric rings that can be forced into something but cannot be twisted out easily. Bingo. By Monday morning Norman Jacques and Walter Hansen, the other men on my team, were using them to fasten the fighting man’s limbs together.”
The biggest problem in designing this soldier was that his arms, legs, and body had to support whatever equipment he was to use. He had to be able to maintain a stable pose when standing, lying down or kneeling with a weapon or other equipment they were inventing for him.
“After reviewing everything I’d ever seen in my life. it came to mind that underwear utilized a cotton elastic braid which was very strong yet flexible and could be used to assume various poses. I didn’t find that in Westport but I knew in my head that it would hold the soldier together.”
For the next six months, Speers and his design team felt like they were in a creative war themselves, as they used their imaginations and design wiles to meet an unrelenting deadline. By February 1964, GI Joe, an action figure with 21 moving parts, stormed into the Toy Fair in New York City to a hero’s welcome. Dubbed "GI Joe" by the practical woman who was making his clothing for Hasbro, he became the first boy’s action figure in the world.
GI Joe’s activities weren’t limited to combat. “One of my jobs was to create new adventures for him," story lines that would keep his fans returning to the stores for new outfits and gear.
“The annual Book Fair at the Westport Friend’s Meeting was where I found them. I’d thumb through old, curled-up copies of National Geographic and find inspiration for dozens of GI Joe exploits,” Speers said, and rattled off examples like "The Secret of the Mummy's Tomb," "The Capture of the Pygmy Gorilla," "White Tiger Hunt," and "The Eight Ropes of Danger," based on a story about an octopus!
One of the highlights of Speers career happened right in Westport Harbor in the early 1970s. “One of the adventures that I thought would be sensational was a GI Joe deep sea diver with what they called then a hard helmet. That toy had weighted boots on so he’d go to the bottom and if you blew into a little tube it would put air into his helmet he came back to the surface. One of the thrills of my life was when my wife and I boated past Boat Beach and saw a little boy and his mother leaning over the side of a boat and dropping the deep sea GI Joe into the water. It was something I thought I'd never see.”
Speers might not have believed that this action figure would still be protecting the motherland in the 21st century but on July 4th, 2004, he attended a fortieth anniversary GI Joe convention at Walt Disney World. The Hasbro Company commemorated the anniversary by reproducing the entire 1964 product line for a new generation of collectors and players.
Who knows? By the end of the decade, GI Joe might be headed into Deep Space.
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