Harry Callahan - Photographs from the Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago New York Wednesday, October 1, 2014 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Gift of Louise Lutz, 1963

  • Literature

    Szarkowski, Callahan, p. 78

  • Catalogue Essay

    In 1946, Callahan moved with his wife Eleanor to Chicago, after being appointed by László Moholy-Nagy (who sadly died that fall) to teach photography at the Institute of Design (ID). Moholy-Nagy and Ansel Adams formed the dueling impulses for Callahan’s work, which achieved a personal yet widely influential synthesis of European experimentation and plainspoken American grandeur. As a teacher at the ID from 1946 until 1961, Callahan mentored other budding photographers through example. He wandered the street and parks of Chicago alone, or with his students, taking photographs almost every day and developing the negatives at night. He made his own prints and never cropped his images. Simply titled Chicago, 1946, Lot 89 was taken and printed at the very beginning of the seventeen years Callahan spent there. Reduced to a flat plane of windswept sand and seemingly lacking a subject, Chicago is a bold postwar image that exemplifies at the start Callahan’s long-term goals: “I think nearly every artist continually wants to reach the edge of nothingness – the point where you can’t go any further.”

    Dearborn Street, Chicago, 1948 (Lot 88) – a stunning image of a building façade transformed into an allover pattern of black and white rectangles - was chosen to illustrate the 1951 announcement for the opening of a gallery devoted to photography at the Art Institute. The inaugural exhibition, Creative and Penetrating Photographs by Harry Callahan, was also the photographer’s first solo exhibition in a museum.

87

Dearborn Street, Chicago

1948
Gelatin silver print, printed no later than 1963.
7 1/4 x 9 1/4 in. (18.4 x 23.5 cm)
'The Art Institute of Chicago' collection label affixed to the reverse of the mat.

Estimate
$4,000 - 6,000 

Sold for $8,750

Contact Specialist
Vanessa Kramer Hallett
Worldwide Head, Photographs
vhallett@phillips.com

Caroline Deck
Head of Sale
cdeck@phillips.com

General Enquiries:
+1 212 940 1245

Photographs from the Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago

New York Auction 1 October