Alvin Langdon Coburn
December 13, 2014–February 8, 2015
Press conference: December 12, noon
FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE
Bárbara De Braganza Exhibition Hall
Bárbara de Braganza, 13
28004 Madrid
Spain
www.exposicionesmapfrearte.com
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FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE presents a retrospective of the work of Alvin Langdon Coburn (Boston, 1882–Wales, 1966), a pioneer of modern and abstract photography. The show, which is the most complete panoramic overview of Coburn’s work in the last 15 years, will be held from December 13, 2014 to February 8, 2015 at the FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE exhibition hall (Barbara de Braganza, 13).
A Pictorialist, a Symbolist and an innovator, Coburn was one of the leading photographers of the first half of the 20th century. Notably influenced by Alfred Stieglitz and Fred Holland Day, two of the most important names in photography of his generation, Coburn can be located at the intersection between late 19th-century Symbolism and a photographic aesthetic associated with the early 20th-century avant-garde movements.
His involvement in the Photo-Secession group in 1902 and the British Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, hardly a year later, helped him forge solid links with the contemporary European and American artistic worlds. However, unlike the other members in these groups, who specialized in more traditional Pictorialist genres, such as portraits, nudes and landscapes, Coburn’s subject matter differed from that of these groups and he focused on depicting industrial and urban landscapes, producing futuristic images that anticipate by a decade the compositions and viewpoints characteristic of New Objectivity.
Moreover, his technical mastery, particularly over the gum-bichromate process, platinum printing and photogravure, among others, enabled him to endow an uniqueness to each of his photos and select the process most appropriate for the desired effect.
Despite his central role in the genesis of avant-garde photography and his prolific yet relatively short career, Coburn remains one of the lesser-known artists of his time. This is principally due to the fact that from 1920 onwards, after he was obliged to leave London during World War I, Coburn embarked on a new life and increasingly focused on mysticism. Deliberately moving away from the world of photography, he made art, music and religion his only interests, although never totally abandoned the practice of photography.
This exhibition includes 180 photographs, the majority of which are vintage prints. They testify to Coburn’s determined and consistent creative progress, spanning from his portraits of the cultural and artistic elite of his time to his urban and industrial landscape photographs taken from unconventional perspectives, or his extraordinary natural landscapes of the Grand Canyon and Yosemite. The exhibition concludes with his daring vortographic experiments of cubist shapes, undoubtedly one of his main contributions to the avant-garde movement of his time.
The exhibition is possible thanks to the generous contributions by the George Eastman House in Rochester (USA) and the National Media Museum in Bradford (UK), which possess the most important holdings of the artist’s work. In addition, the exhibition includes images loaned from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York, and from 31 Studio, London, as well as from an important private collection in New York. As a result, this is the first occasion on which Coburn’s most important photographs from a range of different collections have been brought together.
