- Magnolia Blossom, Tower of Jewels
Sheet: 13 15/16 × 10 7/8 in. (35.4 × 27.7 cm)
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Carefully composed and sharply focused, Imogen Cunningham’s photograph captures all the sensuous detail and patterned complexity of a magnolia blossom. Extolling the camera’s ability to capture the forms of the natural world with clarity and precision, Cunningham soon joined like-minded West Coast photographers, including Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, in forming Group f/64. The group’s members were united by their modernist conception of photography grounded in the medium’s inherent qualities, in sharp contrast to the previous generation’s softly focused Pictorialist work, which they viewed as sentimental and derivative of painting and earlier art forms.
ProvenanceEx-collection Rondal Partridge; [Edwyn Houk Gallery, Chicago]; purchased by Manfred Heiting; purchased by MFAH, 2002.
Exhibition History"Film und Foto", Deutscher Werkbund, Stuttgart, 1929; "Photographs from the Julian Levi Collection", The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 1976.
"American Vision: Photographers from the West, Selections from the Manfred Heiting Collection purchased by the Brown Foundation for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston from August 23-February 1, 2004.
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