Louise Lawler
Once there was a little boy and everything turned out alright. THE END

Artist Louise Lawler (American, born 1947)American, born 1947

CultureAmerican

Titles

Once there was a little boy and everything turned out alright. THE END

Date1985

MediumGelatin silver print

DimensionsImage: 15 5/8 × 23 1/8 in. (39.7 × 58.7 cm)
Sheet: 20 × 23 13/16 in. (50.8 × 60.5 cm)
Mat: 28 × 32 in. (71.1 × 81.3 cm)

Credit LineThe Allan Chasanoff Photographic Collection

Object number91.811

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Special Collections

Allan Chasanoff Photographic Collection

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionThroughout her career, Louise Lawler has made visible the often unseen or unconsidered ways that works of art are given meaning and value by their physical context and their place in the ecology of the art market as they move among galleries, collectors, auction houses, and museums. Placed above the fireplace, behind the television, below the mistletoe, or alongside an armchair, pictures are read variously by the viewer, just as they are when accompanied by explanatory labels in a museum or by price estimates at an auction. Lawler heightens our consciousness of art’s variable meaning by printing on the mat of her own picture a brief and enigmatic caption, a found text copied by her mother from the wall of a roadside café.
ProvenanceAllan Chasanoff, New York; given to MFAH, 1991.
Exhibition History"Tradition and the Unpredictable: The Allan Chasanoff Photographic Collection," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Upper Jones and Wiess Galleries; January 16-March 27, 1994.

“History of Photography I: Selections from the Museum's Collection,” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, November 1, 2014–February 22, 2015.

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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