William Wegman
Bathroom Rug

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Artist William Wegman American, born 1943

CultureAmerican

Titles

Bathroom Rug

Date1972, collaged 1975

PlaceUnited States

MediumGelatin silver print, collaged 1975

DimensionsImage: 7 9/16 × 7 1/2 in. (19.2 × 19.1 cm)
Sheet: 13 11/16 × 10 13/16 in. (34.8 × 27.5 cm)
Mount: 13 11/16 × 10 13/16 in. (34.8 × 27.5 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts

Object number78.17

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionBathroom Rug is a typical scenario from William Wegman's work of the early 1970s. The image shows the artist sweeping dust under the rug, which hilariously stretches up to help. Look carefully and you can see where the artist cut and pasted the image of the rug.

Indeed, patently staged, manipulated photographs like this one undercut the documentary function of photography. Wegman, together with Robert Cumming and other Los Angeles artists, specialized in such images and often invented absurd narratives to accompany them. Cumming commented: "People in the early 1970s, not yet being hip to this kind of artificiality, would accept a photograph as truth more readily than people do today. . . . Then, though, there was a veracity that was fairly unquestioned."

Provenance[Sonnabend Gallery, Inc., New York]; purchased by MFAH, 1978.
Exhibition HistoryExhibited: "Photo-collage," Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 25 August - 3 October 1982 (LN:82.34)

Exhibited "Evocative Presence: Twentieth Century Photographs in the Museum Collection", The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston February 27 - May 1, 1988

Exhibited "The Glass Canvas", December 12, 1996 through February 23, 1997, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Exhibited: "Contemporary Art and Photography: Spotlight on the Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston," MFAH, Upper Brown Pavilion, September 30, 2001 - February 3, 2002.

"Ruptures and Continuities: Photography Made after 1960 from the MFAH Collection," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Brown Foundation Galleries, February 21 - May 9, 2010.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

no apparent inscriptions

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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