Inventaire # HO20520-E19007-010

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, USA
Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Barnaby Haran, Homeless Houses: Classifying Walker Evans’s Photographs of Victorian Architecture, 2010, pages 191, 192 and 193

An introduction to this sale by Stephen Bulger can be viewed here.

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Walker Evans is an icon of modern photography. This photograph is a later print of an image that was taken between 1931-1933, commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein and Jack Wheelright. Scholar Barnaby Haran explains that during this period, Kirstein was the editor of the modernism forum “Hound and Horn” and was the lynchpin of the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art. In partnership with Wheelwright, he planned to hold a survey exhibition of Victorian architecture. Wheelright was working on producing a book on New England and New York State buildings dating from the Civil War to the turn of the century. The initiative was born out of a desire to document an era of architecture that was in a state of degradation and would not survive. Kirstein noted, “In his series of American Federal and Victorian architecture… he [Evans] is providing illustrations for a monumental history of the American art of building in its most imaginative and impermanent state. These wooden houses disintegrate almost, between snaps of the lens. Many shown in these photographs no longer stand.”

As neither the book or exhibition came to fruition, the legacy of the project was Evans’s extensive photographic work, which was pared down to a concise and impactful series of 39 photographs for a 1933 MoMA show of Victorian architecture, assembled by Kirstein. This show is considered an important embryonic moment for Evans, who later became renowned for a photographic practice which documented the stresses and fissures of American society, most famously through his work with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) between 1935-1938. Haran notes, “the Victorian houses indicated an architectural mindscape and functioned as both metonymic and synecdochic portraits of a damaged nation.” Five years later, in 1938 Evans went on to hold another exhibition at the MoMa, Walker Evans: American Photographs, which was the first exhibition in the museum devoted to the work of a single photographer.

This work was printed circa 1965. The full sheet size is 8 x 10 inches.

Please note: this work is unframed.

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