Capa in Color

"The French Camel Corps, the Meharists, practicing maneuvers in the desert, Tunisia" Robert Capa (1943)

Photographer Robert Capa is renowned for his black and white images of war, which helped to define photojournalism. Yet few people know that starting in 1941 this master of black and white routinely shot in colour. Most of those photos were never published, being passed over for black and white images by the leading magazines of the day. Now for the first time “Capa in Color,” a new exhibit at the International Center of Photography (ICP), showcases some of these images in all their glorious colour.

In 1938 while on assignment in China to cover the Sino-Japanese war, Capa wrote to a friend at Pix, his New York Agency, requesting 12 rolls of the fairly new colour film, Kodachrome, and instructions because "I have an idea for Life." Only four of those images survived but Capa continued to experiment with colour film.

He pressed magazines to publish his colour images and encouraged other photographers to shoot in colour. In a letter to Magnum stockholders from 1952 (Capa founded the agency in 1947), he wrote that magazines needed colour images and counselled that, "We have to shoot far more color also far more color stories on any subject. This again should not be indiscriminate but on subjects which demand color."

Some fellow Magnum photographers followed suit (one member, Henri Cartier-Bresson, famously disliked shooting in colour) but black and white was cheaper and faster to process, and easier for publishers to edit. As the years passed, black and white film became associated with photojournalism, and Capa's colour work was ignored.

"U.S. pilots prepare Bad Penny for a raid over Saint-Nazaire, in Occupied France, England" Robert Capa (1942)

"Damaged plane hosed down with chemicals after landing on belly following a raid over Occupied France, England" Robert Capa (1941)

Walking into the ICP the other morning and seeing the walls covered with bright, colourful images was like rediscovering Capa all over again. The exhibit is broken up by subject starting with World War II and moving on to the USSR (which he visited with John Steinbeck), Hungary, Israel, the Alps, celebrity friends, the Jet Set (Deauville and Biarritz), Paris, Rome, Norway, Generation X, film locations, and Indochina.

Capa shot in colour at the beginning of World War II but pretty much abandoned it for black and white until after the war was over; the time constraints and conditions under which he worked made shooting in black and white easier. Yet the colour images from the war bring a different feel to the events; the airmen look so contemporary and "real" while certain details are much more vivid in colour like the chemical foam on a plane.

"Ernest Hemingway and his son Gregory, Sun Valley, Idaho" Robert Capa (1941)

"Pablo Picasso playing in the water with his son Claude, Vallauris, France" Robert Capa (1948)

While Capa may have been the ultimate war photographer, he also had time away from the dangers of combat, photographing his celebrity friends, fashion shoots, and the wealthy at play at the top resorts in Europe.

In 1941, Capa spent time with Ernest Hemingway at his home in Sun Valley, Ohio. The images show Papa with two of his sons, Patrick and Gregory, and his wife at the time, Martha Gelhorn, hunting, having a picnic, spending time together. The shot of Hemingway with his youngest, Gregory, is even more touching in colour.

The 1948 images of Pablo Picasso with his family in the South of France are particularly charming as we see Picasso relaxed and having fun. One of the images from that shoot, of Picasso holding an umbrella over the head of his partner, Françoise Gilot, would become famous but in black and white; both Look and Illustrated were "disappointed" with the Picasso colour images, which seems crazy looking at them now.

"Ava Gardner on the set of The Barefoot Contessa, Tivoli, Italy" Robert Capa (1954)

"Gen X girl, Colette Laurent, at the Chantilly racetrack, France" Robert Capa (1952)

Other celebrities are seen on film sets: Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre on the set of Beat the Devil (1953), Ingrid Bergman filming Viaggio in Italia (1953), and a beyond beautiful Ava Gardner applying her lipstick for The Barefoot Contessa (1954). While they are nice to look at, images of a Lapp family in Norway are just as interesting.

One section is devoted to photos from a Magnum project about post-World War II youth, for which Capa coined the term "Generation X." In 1953, Holiday published the three-part series that featured 24 young people from 14 countries on five continents who were photographed by various Magnum photographers and asked to answer a detailed questionnaire. The only colour images printed in the magazine were those shot by Capa including the French girl Colette Laurent of whom it was said, "Her life is superficial, artificial on the surface and holds none of the good things except the material ones." 

"Skiers and the Matterhorn, Zermatt, Switzerland" Robert Capa (1949-50)

"Skier sunbathing in front of the Matterhorn, Zermatt, Switzerland" Robert Capa (1950)

Some of the best though are Capa’s images taken on the ski slopes of Europe. These brilliant shots pop off the walls, the women looking as fashionable as any woman today. There is a wonderful brightness and detail to the snow with none of the flatness that one so often finds. In a January, 1952 article in Holiday, Capa let readers in on his secret, advising them that when shooting snow to "shoot against the light." 

The final group of images in the exhibit I must admit, I avoided. Taken in Indochina (Vietnam), these were the last photographs taken by Capa while covering the French Indochina War as a late minute replacement for a Life photographer. It was there that he stepped on a landmine on May 25, 1954, and died shortly after. He was carrying two cameras with him at the time; one loaded with black and white film, the other with colour.

 "Spectators at the Longchamp Racecourse, Paris" Robert Capa (ca. 1952)

In addition to Capa's photos, there are images of the man himself: a case contains a few images of Capa including the only known colour image of him, skis over his shoulder, the familiar cigarette dangling from his mouth. There are also letters he wrote on display. In one to his brother, Cornell Capa, dated August 1, 1941, he complains about the colour being off in some of his prints and notes, "I am a great photographer!" In another letter written from London to his brother and mother dated June 4, 1942, he writes that he's glad to be back at work and comments that Scotch is "hard to get" and promises "I will not gamble too much." And in multiply letters to family and colleagues, he mentions money, often how much they should ask for his work. 

The ICP houses 4,200 Capa colour transparencies (35mm, 120, 3x4, and 4x5)  in their collection. Using digital technology, the museum was able to restore the faded Ektachrome images while the Kodachrome ones turned out to have retained almost all of their brilliant colour, needing little work save for the ones that had been incorrectly processed in England in 1941-42. The resulting beautiful prints look like they were shot yesterday.

"Capa in Color" is at the ICP through May 4, 2014. I plan on going many more times. For more information, visit here.

Meet the Steins

Left to right: Leo Stein, Allan Stein, Gertrude Stein, Theresa Ehrman, Sarah Stein, and Michael Stein. Photo: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The other day I visited 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris. I didn't really. But it felt like I did when I went to the Met to see “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde.” Chronicling the art collecting of the Stein siblings—Leo, Gertrude, Michael and his wife Sarah—the exhibit explores how their patronage of avant-garde painters, particularly Picasso and Matisse, and their famed Saturday salons introduced scores of people to these artists for the first time and had a major impact on modern art.

Although associated with Paris, the Steins were Americans from Oakland, California. They were well-off but not rich; their income was derived from real estate and streetcar investments their father had made. After dropping out of Harvard, Leo moved to Paris in 1903. Gertrude followed that fall while Michael along with his wife, Sarah, and their son, Allan, arrived the following year.

"Woman With a Hat" Henri Matisse (1905)

In 1904 when Michael informed his brother and sister that they each had received $1,600 from the family business, Leo and Gertrude decided to pool their money and buy art, purchasing small works by Cézanne, Gauguin, and Renoir. Unable to afford the masters, Leo decided to focus on new artists. The following year he purchased two works by a little known Spanish painter named Pablo Picasso. A few months later, he paid $100 ($100!) for “Woman with a Hat” by another unknown artist named Henri Matisse (Leo referred to the painting as “the nastiest smear of paint”).

Michael and Sarah, who began collecting as well, were introduced to Matisse, and they became good friends and staunch supporters of the artist with Sarah even taking lessons from him. Soon the walls of Michael and Sarah’s flat at 58 rue Madame were filled with the artist’s work, probably the greatest collection of Matisse at the time.

As the siblings continued to buy, news of their collecting spread and the Steins found themselves inundated with requests to view the paintings. So Leo and Gertrude, who shared a flat and atelier at 27 rue de Fleurus, and Michael and Sarah, began to host Saturday salons, opening their homes to anyone with a reference. For many of the visitors who flocked to these gatherings, it was the only place where they could view these bold new works of art. Some visitors came just to criticize while others were inspired by what they saw. 

"The Bay of Nice" Henri Matisse (1916)

In 1913 Leo moved to his own flat, dividing the collection between him and Gertrude (Leo took the Renoirs, Gertrude the Picassos). Along with her companion, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude would continue to live at rue de Fleurus for the next 25 years. There she held court, giving her opinion on various topics. By the 1920s, with Gertrude focused on her writing, more writers began calling, including Ernest Hemingway (Gertrude acted as mentor to the young writer and is often credited with coining the phrase “the Lost Generation”). Yet her collection was still a draw for her visitors, and Gertrude continued to add to it, including works by Picasso until the artist who she had been an early champion of became too expensive for her.

Two hundred paintings, drawings, and other items once owned by the Stein siblings are on display in the exhibit, which is divided into sections highlighting each sibling’s contribution. The rue de Fleurus atelier is even replicated. In a space the same size as the atelier (460 square feet), various photographs that were taken over the years to document the collection are projected onto the walls, allowing one to see how the space changed as paintings were added and taken away. This was one of my favourite parts of the exhibit; I stood there for quite a while, imagining what it must have been like to be in that room and wishing once again that I could have a Midnight in Paris moment.

"Gertrude Stein" Pablo Picasso (1905-1906)

I must confess I have never been a big Gertrude Stein fan. Much of her writing is over hyped and her larger-than-life ego hard to take at times. Yet there are some things I do like—her libretto for the opera Four Saints in Three Acts (which is included at the end of the exhibit), the story that she was hurt that Matisse never asked her to sit for him (I like to believe this was one case where her ego wasn’t involved), her later mentoring of young writers, and her Saturday salons, which allowed such brilliant minds to come together. And I do like Picasso's portrait of her. With signs of the cubism that was to come, there is a melding of the traditional with the new in the painting that is so fitting of Gertrude.

While I was most familiar with Gertrude, I found myself drawn to the sections on Michael and Sarah because I knew so little about them. Michael is often overshadowed by Gertrude and Leo; he was known as the sensible Stein (he made sure the family’s business interests were taken care of as well as his siblings). Yet Michael and Sarah’s impact on modern art is just as important as Leo and Gertrude’s. As early as 1906, on a trip to San Francisco to check out damages to their properties from the Great Earthquake, the couple brought some works of Matisse back with them, the first time he was seen outside of Europe (people were reportedly shocked). And when the couple returned to California for good in 1935, their collection became the basis for Matisse's first solo show on the West Coast, influencing a new generation of artists.

By the end of the 1930s Gertrude and Alice had left 27 rue de Fleurus (the lease hadn't been renewed by the landlord), Leo was living in Italy, Sarah was in California, and Michael was dead. Much of their collections had been broken up or sold. This exhibit brings it all back together.

“The Steins Collect” is at the Met through June 3, 2012. For more information, visit their website here.

The Frick Collection

"Diana the Huntress" Jean-Antoine Houdon (1776-1795)

Sunday morning I headed over to what may be my favourite museum in the city, the Frick Collection. Housed in the former residence of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, the museum is small with an amazing collection including the “Comtesse d’Haussonville” by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, which I’ve written about before. 

This month the museum debuted a new gallery that showcases Meissen porcelain and some sculptures. Created by enclosing a portico with panels of glass, the new gallery is a wonderful addition to the museum, giving visitors a view of the garden and Fifth Avenue. Used to viewing art in windowless rooms it was a welcome change to look at pieces in natural light and all the glass made the space feel much larger than it is. Porcelain isn’t particularly my thing but the “Diana the Huntress” sculpture by Jean-Antoine Houdon, which stands proudly at the end of the gallery, looking out toward the light, is beautiful and lovely to see close up.

“Still Life in Front of a Window at Saint Raphaël” Pablo Picasso (1919) 

While there I also joined the queue for the exhibit “Picasso’s Drawings, 1890-1921: Reinventing Tradition.”  Beginning with examples from when Picasso was a boy, the more than 50 drawings give visitors the opportunity to witness the artist excel at classical drawing and then take off to expand and develop his style. And after seeing past Picasso exhibits that seemed to cram in as many works and those by related artists as possible, it was refreshing to see a small, carefully curated collection of his drawings that you could take in without getting overwhelmed.

I enjoyed the exhibit—I particularly liked the colourful “Still Life in Front of a Window at Saint Raphaël” (1919) and “Head and Shoulders of a Woman” (1907)—but I have a horrible confession to make. I’m tired of Picasso exhibits. I do enjoy his work but it seems every time I turn around someone is having a Picasso exhibit (this is the third I’ve written about this year) and I wish everyone would give it a rest for a while and show some other artists. Nothing against Pablo, let’s just spread the wealth so to speak. With that said, I have no doubt that I will probably buy a ticket for the next Picasso exhibit that comes to town.

The Picasso exhibit runs through January 8, 2012. To find out about the exhibit and the Frick visit their website here.

The photo of "Diana the Huntress" by Michael Bodycomb.

L'amour Fou

"Marie-Thérèse Walter" Pablo Picasso (1937)

They met outside a Métro Station in Paris in 1927. She was 17 and on her way to buy a shirt with a Peter Pan collar. He was 45 and married. “I’m Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together” was his pick-up line. It worked. A few days later Marie-Thérèse Walter went to visit Pablo Picasso at his studio and they began an affair that would last for the next ten years. The result was a child, Maya, and some of the most sensual and important work of Picasso’s career.

Now more than 80 images of Picasso's great muse are on view in “Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour Fou” at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. It isn't the greatest Picasso exhibit I've ever seen but it is quite interesting.

Marie-Thérèse was striking looking—tall with natural blonde hair, a Roman nose, and athletic build. In the exhibit, a series of black and white photos, run together like a flip book, show her dressed in black beret, white shirt, black leather jacket, and white gloves—a fashion plate of late 1920s Paris. In others she appears on the beach, bronzed and posed with a ball. No wonder Picasso wanted to paint her.

 "Marie-Thérèse Coiffee d'un Beret" Pablo Picasso (1927)

Even as Picasso's depictions of Marie-Thérèse evolve from straight forward renderings into grotesque distortions—face split in two, body twisted like a sea creature, nose turned into a phallus—there is still a beauty to them, something that is not always found in Picasso’s other portraits of women. 

Picasso once said that Marie-Thérèse saved his life and indeed one cannot deny the importance she had on his work. It was after their affair began that Picasso began to leave Classicism behind and explore Surrealism and other forms, resulting in his great masterpiece “Guernica” (in which Marie-Thérèse shows up three times).

In the end, I think that perhaps one of my favourite pieces was a simple pencil sketch at the beginning of the exhibit which shows Marie-Thérèse wearing her customary black beret (berets and other headpieces pop up repeatedly in the paintings). There is no contorted body, no overt sexual symbolism, just the clear gaze of a young woman whose life was going to be changed forever.

“Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour Fou” is at the Gagosian Gallery through June 25.