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Max Ernst, 1946
Frederick Sommer, American, 1905–1999
Gelatin silver print
Collection of D.W. Mellor

Max Ernst, 1946 Frederick Sommer, American, 1905–1999 Gelatin silver print Collection of D.W. Mellor

Exhibition

Frederick Sommer Photographs

October 3, 2009–January 3, 2010

Over his long life Frederick Sommer (American, 1905–1999) crafted a body of art inflected by surrealist ideas and distinguished by his meticulous love for the art of photographic printing, his broad knowledge of art history, and a keen sense of how the parts of a picture come together to produce meaning. This exhibition surveys five decades of his photography, including disorienting compositions such as Arizona Landscape (1943), a horizonless image that only gradually resolves its components into a desolate desert scene, and equally bewildering subjects such as Max Ernst (1946), in which Sommer experimented with layered negatives, superimposing an image of a rock onto a portrait of the pioneering Dada and surrealist artist to create the illusion of a human morphing into rock. The first exhibition of Sommer's work in Philadelphia since 1968, Frederick Sommer Photographs presents some forty images spanning the artist's career, along with a small number of drawings and collages. Included is a rare suite of macabre yet poignant photographs the artist made in 1939 using chicken parts collected from his local butcher.


Main Building

Curators

Peter Barberie • The Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center
Julia Dolan • The Horace W. Goldsmith Curatorial Fellow in Photography

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