Vivian Maier Tribute, Part II

“LIFE IN THE QUICK”

There is a register of simple beauty and jubilation in many of the photographs of Vivian Maier—a woman’s head flung back in all-consuming laughter [1];

two gentlemen in bow ties head towards a light flirtation with a pretty lady near a cigar stand;

two older twin ladies turn away from one another with identical hands raised in a sort of double-personal declaration;

rows of daisies and rows of ladies with their hats.

We sense her gentle ironies and tensions—the young man on the motorcycle stalled as an aged lady swings her walker forward to make her way across an intersection.

Yet a thread of disconcerting complexity tempered with aesthetic magnificence runs through most of her work—the mother with the cigarette menacingly close to the boy’s crying face.

There’s a film noir quality to her heady juxtaposition of light and shadow, as in the two figures mysteriously pressed behind Venetian blinds,

or the glorious shots of rather monstrous, “confrontational” Chicago buildings.

As a body of work, we encounter “life in the quick”[2] in Chicago’s 1950s and 1960s; ladies with their stoles and ornate hats, heels and corsaged collie,

Midnight Cowboy decorates the movie placard, “men must change or die” spray-painted on a mailbox,

the uncanny juxtaposition of human sentiment and environmental decay—the laughing woman tragically foregrounding a demolition scene,

tensions between the encroaching city and the old ways of life—the hints of the primitive natural kingdom—vagabonds with their rubbish and grins, a man hovers near timber-like, rotted heap of materials,

a child pokes at a fire on the city street.

There is a sense of primitive wildness in the edges of human activity that we perhaps don’t see so blatantly anymore in the city proper.

One senses a strange spiritual energy in her work at times—a mother clasps her coat against an ominous prairie wind as she pushes a stroller filled with hay, while the displaced child walks seriously alongside, and two mysterious black spheres drift in the sky.

Top-notch portraiture of descendents clinging to one of the ancients.

STRANGERS TO MAIER, NEVERTHELESS HER ARTISTIC “ACCOMPLICES” ON THE STREET

Maier’s photographs are masterful, poetic, and feel already like classics; it’s as if a seminal book, for half a century lost, has returned to its proper place on the shelf alongside its rightful companions. It seems Maier’s work has been in a private conversation all these years with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s visual symphonies of movement:

Brassai’s seductive wedding of light and dark:

The slack and grave expressions in many of Walker Evans’ subway portraits:

Robert Frank’s alienated Americans,

Garry Winogrand’s sharp, glorious energies:

And William Eggleston’s foreboding sense of the ordinary:

Maier seemed to absorb the ethos of the so-called “Chicago School”[3], perhaps magically influenced by the masterful works of Barbara Crane:

and Ray Metzker.

She imbibed the spirit of the Institute of Design without actually attending the school, perhaps because shadows and light were democratically available for all to witness; in the words of Westerbeck:

“The flatness of the prairie to the west is just a mirror image of the flatness of the lake to the east; between the two, the city is perfectly cross-ventilated with light of an incomparable clarity and forcefulness, which is what the street photography of the Chicago School is really documenting.”[4]

* * * *

Please visit our blog site again soon; next week, I will feature an interview with John Maloof, the marvelous excavator of this Maier treasure trove!

The staff at MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. seeks to fully understand the arts in their particular cultural contexts and to analyze relationships between various artistic mediums and genres; in this way we can broaden our expertise as art appraisers. We are located just steps from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center; please do give us a ring to set up an appointment for an evaluation of your most prized works of art.

Researched and written by Jessica Savitz

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.

Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM

307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308

Chicago, IL 60601

(312) 814-8510

Foot notes/Works Cited:

Meyerowitz, Joel and Westerbeck, Colin. Bystanders: A History of Street Photography. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1994.

Scott, Clive. Street Photography from Atget to Cartier-Bresson. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007, 3.

John Maloof, from his blog: http://www.vivianmaier.blogspot.com/

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[1] All images of Maier’s work from John Maloof’s blog, http://www.vivianmaier.blogspot.com/

[2] Scott, Clive. Street Photography from Atget to Cartier-Bresson. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007, 3.

[3] Meyerowitz, Joel and Westerbeck, Colin. Bystanders: A History of Street Photography. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1994, 365.

[4] Ibid 372.

Milne Ramsey: From Realism to Impressionism, Lobsters to Landscapes...

Milne Ramsey was an American artist who surrounded himself with master teachers and other well known artists. Many of these people revolted against French academic art and its strict rules. He was able to learn from these experiences to develop his own style and technique. Ramsey's still life paintings were primarily done in a very realistic manner, while confronting Impressionism with his landscapes. These different styles showed that Ramsey approached his art with experiments rather than guidelines. The very subjects of still life’s and landscapes taught as being the least important genres from academia. Ramsey defied these academic rules by focusing on these two genres.

Milne Ramsey inherited most of his artistic fame with his wonderful still life paintings. The realistic depiction of the various objects showed his deep understanding of textures and color. His strong use of light made the objects look three dimensional and added depth through the work to give it more realistic qualities. Ramsey's still life paintings contain both organic and man made objects. “Still Life with Lobster” shows how Ramsey would approach these various textures. The lobster shell's organic texture paired with the smoothness of the white cloth and the ridges from the stem of the glass, all show how these different textural objects can be placed together to form a perfect composition.

While Ramsey’s still life paintings focus namely on Realism, his landscape depictions exude impressionistic qualities. Ramsey used thick impasto brushstrokes for texture and light, giving his works a sense of movement. Ramsey’s landscapes were often times very small in size which made them feel very intimate. The small figures incorporated into many of his landscapes furthered this intimacy in his landscapes. At MIR Appraisal Services, Inc., we have been fortunate enough to have researched and appraised several of Milne Ramsey's works.

As a plein-air artist, Ramsey’s use of light in his paintings was very important to convey mood. He was able to capture warmth and a sense of peace with his loose brushstrokes and dark earthy color palette. On the contrast, Ramsey conveyed an energetic fun with his vibrant still life depictions. While Milne Ramsey may have been known for his still life paintings, his landscapes were just as significant in forming his career.

To understand why Ramsey painted the way that he did, we must look at his life and education. During his early years, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. There he was a member of the sketch club and elected president in 1874. During his time in the sketch club there is little doubt he knew Thomas Eakins, the great realist painter. The sketch club is the oldest artists club in America, and Eakins and Ramsey were members during the same time. There is strong belief that Ramsey used this time to study Eakins. They were also both students of Leon Bonnat, who was a well known French teacher of the arts. Ramsey spent a significant portion of his life living in France and studying the arts. Bonnat was a realist painter who taught his students to revolt against academic art and its teachings of idealism. Bonnat used these criticisms to teach numerous artists like Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Georges Braque. Like these artists, Milne Ramsey didn’t just stop at Realism; he grew as an artist by incorporating different styles in his artwork, further enhancing his place in history.

Written and researched by Robert Snell

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.
Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM
307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308
Chicago, IL 60601
Phone: (312) 814-8510

Works Cited:

http://www.sketchclub.org/PSC_ArchColl.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_art

http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/biography.aspx?searchtype=BIO&artist=22046

Vivian Maier Tribute, Part I

Street photographers, near‐mystics or mystical scientists, encounter large bodies of data on the busy life of the street and quickly divine the gems, recording the evocative patterns, harmonies, dissonance and stark bones of plot that emerge; quoting Robert Adams, “The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace.”1

This month of May at MIR, we pay homage to a sterling street photographer from the mid‐century—Vivian Maier, whose brilliant works we recently evaluated.

THE PERSONAL LIFE OF VIVIAN MAIER
Born in 1926 in New York, Vivian Maier moved to France in her early youth, returning to New York in 1951. She later moved to Chicago where she lived for the next five decades, earning money as a nanny in the northern suburbs of Chicago. Details of her private life are as mysterious as tightly wound, spooled film negatives.

The outward signs of her proclivity for art were, of course, her Rolleiflex camera, most always on a strap about her neck, her self‐proclaimed title as a “film critic,” and her eccentric dress—men’s shoes and jackets and big hats. Children for whom she served as a nanny remembered her as having, in the words of John Maloof, “a peculiar personality… she would bring home a dead snake to show them, or convince the milkman to drive them all to school in his delivery truck. They loved her.”2 Indeed, these grown children later rescued Maier from homelessness and
poverty in her advanced years, buying her an apartment and supporting her until her death in 2009.

JOHN MALOOF’S DISCOVERY
These scant details of her personal life and, most importantly, the evidence of her enormous breadth of masterful photographic work, indelibly tie Vivian Maier to John Maloof, who first came upon Maier’s impressive oeuvre. Maloof purchased a box of Maier’s negatives from an auction house, later acquiring several boxes of her materials from many fellow auction attendees. His Vivian Maier collection constitutes 100,000 negatives, roughly 1500 undeveloped rolls of film, and some of her rather poetic documentaries captured in moving film. Although Maloof contacted the auction house to find Maier, he was advised not to seek her out because of her fragile state of health; when he later attempted to find online information concerning Maier, he found she had passed away just days before.

Besides locating and speaking with a few of the grown children for whom she used to nanny, he has visited with some folks at Central Camera, where she purchased her film. They remembered her as a “’keep your distance from me’ type of person’” who was “also outspoken. She loved foreign films and didn’t care much for American films.”3 The nature of her character develops incrementally, like an image birthed in a darkroom—the common motifs center about her love for the cinema and her devoted photographic practice, although she kept her images strictly private.

VIVIAN MAIER’S CUMULATIVE, INEXAUSTABLE CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ
What an honor to witness the organic unfolding of Maier’s prolific body of work through John Maloof, rather than what could have been a stylized portrayal in a slick, overwrought exhibition catalogue—the works brought to the public’s attention in Maloof’s spirit of discovery, and posted on his blog (http://www.vivianmaier.blogspot.com/) as he develops the rolls, allow us all to witness the unfolding of a personality—we sense the complex emotional and philosophical temperatures of this photographer. (Isn’t it wondrous to reflect upon the fact that John Maloof has been in the process of developing some 20‐30,000 Maier negatives from the ‘60s and ‘70s?)4


Freed from the traditional formalized structure of selected works in a museum exhibition (Maloof deems a huge body of work— approximately 1 of every 10 photographs—excellently fit to post)5, we sense the larger stylistic scope of her works. Under the broad umbrella of “street photography,” we find Maier personally standing with her Rolleiflex camera—her pathos, wit, boldness, and love affair with strict black and white rainbows of the mid‐century all exposed for us.


OUR DEVOTION TO THE OUEVRE OF VIVIAN MAIER
It is exciting to anticipate the cultural resonance of Maier’s recently discovered works. Certainly we at MIR feel that it is an immense honor to serve as advocates for the works of Vivian Maier, and we look forward to serving as aids in preserving this important body of work for posterity.

Please visit our blog site again soon! Next week, I will showcase more images of Maier’s striking photographs along with commentary—also in the works: an interview with John Maloof, the marvelous excavator of this Maier treasure trove!

The staff at MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. seeks to fully understand the arts in their particular cultural contexts and to analyze relationships between various artistic mediums and genres; in this way we can broaden our expertise as art appraisers.

We are located just steps from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center; please do give us a ring to set up an appointment for a verbal evaluation of your most prized works of art.

Researched and written by Jessica Savitz

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.
Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM
307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308
Chicago, IL 60601
(312) 814‐8510

Foot notes/Works cited:
1 Szarkowski, John. William Eggleston’s Guide, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1976, 7.
2 John Maloof, from his blog: http://www.vivianmaier.blogspot.com/
3 Ibid
4 John Maloof, from his blog: http://www.vivianmaier.blogspot.com/
5 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/little-miss-big-shotfifties-
america-exposed-ndash-by-a-french-nanny-1811040.html