| Myron
Kozman & Allen Porter
Light Experiments of the 1930s and 1940s
Myron
Kozman and Allen Porter attended Chicago's Institute of Design
ten years apart, Kozman studied under Kepes and Moholy-Nagy
in the late 1930s during the formative years of the New Bauhaus,
while Porter worked with Ferenc Berko in the late 1940s.
Although
they never worked together, the two artists were bound by
their unwavering commitment to the Bauhaus principles of experimentation
and innovation. Adams Fine Art is pleased to present two extraordinary
bodies of work that make their commitment tangible.
Myron
Kosman is represented here by a radically progressive series
of "chemical drawings" on photographic paper created
while working with Gyorgy Kepes in the famed "Light Workshop"
at the School of Design in 1938. Like Moholy-Nagy and Kepes,
Kozman was an abstract painter as well as a photographer.
Kozman's painterly brushing and dripping of chemicals onto
the light sensitive paper resulted in a merger of media unprecedented
in photographic history. The "automatic" quality
of his technique predates Pollock's mature works by ten years.
Three works from this series are featured in "Taken by
Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937-1971,
the definitive survey exhibition of ID photography organized
by the Art Institute of Chicago, and are also reproduced in
the show's accompanying book.
Allen
Porter entered the darkroom at the ID in the late 1940s with
a loose reel of moving picture film. He carefully composed
the film strips on top of photographic paper and allowed the
darkroom light to transform his three-dimensional film sculpture
into a two-dimensional light painting. His images reflect
his skills as a photographer, draftsman, sculptor and painter.
Working in the tradition of America's early abstract and non-objective
painters, Porter created formal compositions that comment
on both the inherent "objectless" nature of the
photogram and the potential of light as a painterly medium.
Both
bodies of work attest to the importance of "theme and
variation" within the Bauhaus canon. Moholy-Nagy taught
that only through the complete exploration of a visual concept
could truly profound results be discovered. These serial images,
produced by two of the ID's most gifted students, add credibility
to the Institute of Designs's reputation as the most influential
center of photographic study in the history of American art.
(Direct
excerpt from Robert Henry Adams Fine Art Gallery invitation)
RETURN
TO TOP |