WORKSHOP

The Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera presents A Photographer, an Art Collector, and the Exciting Discovery of Color Reproductions: Alvin Langdon Coburn, Charles Freer, and the Autochrome in 1909, led by Anne McCauley, Visiting Scholar and David H. McAlpin Professor emerita at Princeton University.

On January 25, 1909, the New York art critic Charles Caffin approached Charles Freer with a proposal to have the celebrated photographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, come to Detroit to make color slides of about forty Whistlers in Freer’s collection for a planned lecture. What began as an experiment in the use of the new autochrome process, only marketed in 1907, ended up as a twelve-day marathon during which the two men–vastly different in age and wealth–shared an obsession with Asian art, the technical problems of producing accurate reproductions, and their shared belief in a ‘spiritual unity’ of Eastern and Western cultures, a concept rooted in early twentieth-century cross-cultural discourse. This talk will center on the surviving autochromes, as well as other photographs that Coburn produced on this occasion, and why their creation inspired such outpourings of mutual excitement and friendship. 

Visiting Scholar: Anne McCauley, David H. McAlpin Professor emerita at Princeton University, has published extensively on XIX and early XX century photography, including A. A. E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph; Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-71; The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz (co-authored); and Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle (co-curated and co-authored). In 2017 she was the curator and primary author of Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895-1925. She is currently writing a book on Alvin Langdon Coburn and the evolution during World War I of the  vortographs, often described as the ‘world’s first abstract photographs’.

Participants: The seminar is open to doctoral candidates, as well as to students currently enrolled in second-level academic diploma programs, master’s degree programs, and second-level master’s programs. Non-doctoral students may attend as auditors.

For information and registration: iartnet.ricerca@fadbrera.edu.it