WASHINGTON, DC.- The National Gallery of Art has recently acquired a photograph by Grit Kallin-Fischer (1897–1973)—an example of the pioneering contributions of women to the photographic innovation taking place in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Untitled (Freddo Bortoluzzi as Angel) (c. 1928–1930) is the first work by Kallin-Fischer to enter the collection and depicts her friend, the artist Alfredo "Freddo" Bortoluzzi (1905–1995), who went on to become a dancer and choreographer. The two met as students at the Bauhaus, an experimental art school in Dessau.
Kallin-Fischer was an established painter when she enrolled in the Bauhaus in 1926. She took courses with many noteworthy artists, including Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. She also worked in László Moholy-Nagy's metal workshop alongside Marianne Brandt. Kallin-Fischer and Bortoluzzi both participated in Oskar Schlemmer's radical theater workshop, which completely reimagined the discipline. Their friendship is documented in the portraits they later made of each other. Kallin-Fischer took several photographs of Bortoluzzi performing as an ethereal being. Wearing white makeup and dressed in a simple white sheath, he has a pair of wings that seem to sprout from his neck. A striking study of tonality, Kallin-Fischer's skill is revealed in her deft cropping of the picture. She has used the structure of a window to create a frame around her subject, an angel who looks down from above.
Acquisition: LaToya Ruby Frazier's "The Notion of Family" Series
LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. 1982) employs her photography to call attention to economic, environmental, and racial inequalities, from the clean water crisis in Flint, Michigan, to the closing of the major auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio. The National Gallery of Art has recently acquired seven prints from her landmark series The Notion of Family (2001–2014).
The first works by Frazier to the enter the collection, The Notion of Family depicts the artist and her family in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh in the Monongahela Valley. A small town with a majority-Black population, Braddock has been deeply affected by sustained environmental protection agency violations. In 2010 the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center closed Braddock's local hospital and moved it to a more affluent area. The destruction of the former hospital's buildings is movingly chronicled in Frazier's photographs as a devastating loss. In addition to panoramic views of Braddock's desolate streets and remaining industry at the nearby Edgar Thomson Steel Works, Frazier also focused on intimate moments of her family’s life. Describing her work as "a family album . . . for a family that didn't have an album," she has noted that they "lived on a shrinking street, in a shrinking community, next to a steel mill, a railroad, and a river that was polluted." Engaging her family as collaborators, she chronicled her relationship with her grandmother Ruby, who died of cancer, and her mother, who also suffers health problems caused by the area's pollution. These works are a vivid testament to the lived experience of Frazier and her family, juxtaposing their struggles with the beauty of the Monongahela Valley and its declining industrial infrastructure.
Acquisition: Rosalind Fox Solomon's Photographic Series "Portraits in the Time of AIDS"
For many decades, American artist Rosalind Fox Solomon (b. 1930) has recorded people and their interactions with one another and their environments. She has photographed around the world and is best known for her richly detailed, humanistic portraits of people struggling and surviving in the face of adversity, particularly her series Portraits in the Time of AIDS (1987–1988). The original set of 85 prints of these unflinching photographs depicting the daily lives of men, women, and children with the disease has recently been given to the National Gallery of Art by Annie and Paul Mahon. These works present a poignant and compassionate record of a fraught time, when fear, not facts, dominated the response to the epidemic.
Fox Solomon began to photograph at age 38, and it became her life's passion. As she has recalled, "I felt that photography was something that belonged to me, that nobody could take it away from me. I felt that I could say anything I wanted with it, and I didn't have to hold myself back. I could be totally honest. And that’s how I've always tried to be with it, right from the beginning." Fox Solomon studied with the legendary photographer Lisette Model, who challenged her students to boldly confront their subjects, recording the physical and emotional impact of modern life.
Fox Solomon's empathetic approach is articulated in Portraits in the Time of AIDS, one of her most celebrated bodies of work. Following earlier pictures made in a hospital in Chattanooga in the 1970s and portraits taken in nursing homes in Peru and Mexico in the 1980s, she felt an urgent need to portray those suffering during the AIDS crisis. As the illness ravaged the gay community in the late 1980s, Fox Solomon photographed not only its physical symptoms, but also the isolation and prejudice experienced by those touched by the virus. She also captured the love and care of family and friends, conveyed by a hug, a kiss, or a hand being held.
When she began the project, Fox Solomon attended weekly dinners for those with AIDS at Saint Peter's Church in the hope that she could persuade some attendees to be photographed. She remembers that there were many lively conversations and copious chatter about doctors and medications, but there "was little talk of death; the tone, the words were life." Soon she began photographing her new friends, not at the church, but in their homes and, somewhat later, in hospitals. Although on previous projects she had worked in silence, Fox Solomon describes these sessions as filled with touching interchanges between herself and her subjects. Most of the portraits are of gay men, but she also sought out women and children to document the widespread and devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic.
Fox Solomon's work has been shown in nearly 30 solo exhibitions and 100 group exhibitions and is in the collections of over 50 museums worldwide.
