MUST 3-2

‘New Acquisitions: Photography’ At Bruce Museum March 3 w/2 cuts

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GREENWICH, CONN. — The Bruce Museum was recently given more than 100 photographs by leading Twentieth Century photographers. Approximately 30 selections from these gifts are on view at the museum in the exhibition, “New Acquisitions: Photography from the Bruce Museum Collection” March 3–May 27.

The exhibit includes fine examples of soft-focus pictorialism, Twentieth Century modernism, photojournalism, Italian street photography of the 1940s and 1950s, and contemporary mixed media.

The Bruce Museum’s photography collection is growing more rapidly than any other at the Bruce. The museum’s fine arts photography collection was created in 2002; since that time more than 750 Nineteenth and Twentieth Century photographs have been donated.

Of special note, among these gifts are two of the most famous images of the Twentieth Century. The first is the iconic shot of General Douglas MacArthur landing in the Philippines at Lingayen Gulf on the island of Luzon, January 9, 1945. The second is a later print of the 1945 Japanese surrender on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay with General Yoshijiro Umezu signing the surrender document while General MacArthur looks on. Both are by the LIFE photojournalist Carl Mydans and were part of a gift of eight of his photographs given by his estate to the museum.

Another important gift this year is the donation of 24 vintage photographs by Mike Disfarmer (1884–1959), a selection of which will be featured in the exhibition. Disfarmer has recently became a darling of the photography world — arguably its most talked about and highly sought-after photographer this year — due to the two-year historical reclamation project that resulted in the discovery of more than 3,000 of his vintage prints when none had been known before.

Disfarmer’s work consists largely of portraits of the middle and working class taken in Heber, Ark., where he has a studio. A true American eccentric, Disfarmer captured the faces of the American heartland in defining a time in history when the Great Depression yielded to World War II.

Also in the show will be vintage photographs by San Francisco photographer William Dassonville (1879–1957), an active member of the Arts and Crafts movement who hobnobbed with naturalist John Muir. While Dassonville created a body of fine photographs in the pictoralist tradition, he was, a craftsman and self-taught chemist. He developed and marketed his own line of photographic printing papers called Charcoal Black, prized by the most demanding of photographers.

Ansel Adams, who printed the photographs for his book Taos Pueblo on Dassonville’s paper, later lamented that he never again “found a paper that had the particular qualities of Dassonville’s Charcoal Black.”

Garry Winogrand, one of the masters of Twentieth Century photography, is another featured photographer. Winogrand more or less invented and defined the genre known as street photography. He developed his characteristic style of candid 35mm snapshots using available light in the early 1960s, and throughout the following decades, his seemingly casual photographs would capture striking moments of anonymous people in public spaces.

The exhibition will also show works by Thomas Barrow, a contemporary photographer who uses a broad range of media. The gift includes his “House on Fire” series of large-scale 24-by-20-inch color Polaroid prints, as well as spray painted photograms and other mixed-media works.

The museum is at 1 Museum Drive. For information, www.brucemuseum.org or 203-869-0376.