Midcentury experimental photography from North Texas on display
By Megan • Jan 29th, 2008 • Category: News for Creatives (archives)Charles Dee Mitchell reports for Quick:
“Ten years ago, Burt Finger, the owner of Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery, received a phone call from a woman who invited him over to see her mother’s photographs. Art dealers often receive such calls, and the prospects are not often very promising. But when Mr. Finger arrived at the woman’s home, he found the walls filled with remarkable abstract photographs taken mostly in the 1950s.They were the work of Ida Lansky, and the research Mr. Finger and his gallery did with Ms. Lansky’s archive has resulted in the exhibition “Texas Bauhaus,” which is currently at the Dallas gallery after its first showing in 2006 at the El Paso Museum of Art.
In the early ’50s, Ms. Lansky was working on a degree in library science at Texas Woman’s University in Denton when she took Carlotta Corpron’s photography workshops and got hooked. Ms. Corpron, who had her own retrospective exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum in 1981, was devoted to the theories of the Bauhaus, the radical German art school that promoted a union of art, design and architecture.
“Texas Bauhaus” includes work by Ms. Corpron, Ms. Lansky and Barbara Maples, another participant in Ms. Corpron’s workshops. Walking through the exhibition, you see a clear line of influence as each of the three women brings her own sensibility to processes developed in Germany in the ’20s.”
Megan is a creative producer at Wise Elephant.
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