EVANSTOM, IL.- The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University has received a major gift from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation: 201 black-and-white photographs by the artist team Shunk-Kender and photographer Harry Shunk, documenting some of the most transformative moments in postwar art. This is the largest single gift of vintage photographic prints ever received by the museum and significantly strengthens The Block’s collection in performance, conceptual experimentation, and twentieth-century documentation.

“These photographs offer extraordinary opportunities for teaching at Northwestern,” says Lisa Corrin, The Block’s Ellen Philips Katz Executive Director. “They illuminate how artists in Europe and the US were experimenting with performance, movement, and new artistic forms—exactly the kinds of questions our students explore in art history, performance studies, studio art, dance, history, and beyond. We are deeply grateful to the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation for entrusting The Block with this remarkable material. Their generosity ensures that generations of students will learn from these works, engage with them, and build new scholarship from their study.”

The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation first reached out to The Block in late 2024 with an unexpected proposal: a donation of up to 100 photographs from the extensive Shunk-Kender archive. When Academic Curator Corinne Granof visited the Foundation in New York this past spring, the scope and significance of the gift expanded.

“The Foundation generously gave us free rein to select works that we felt would be most relevant to the museum and University collections,” Granof recalls. They shared hundreds of PDFs, some containing a few photographs and others containing hundreds—nearly 20,000 images in total. With input from faculty in several departments, Granof and her colleagues reviewed each set with an eye toward strengthening Northwestern’s teaching and research.

The Foundation’s relationship to the Shunk-Kender archive stretches back almost two decades. After the death of photographer Harry Shunk in 2006, the contents of his home—including thousands of prints, contact sheets, and negatives—were processed by the state and offered for sale. The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation purchased the material to rescue and preserve the archive, and in 2014, distributed a substantial portion to a consortium of major institutions: the Getty Research Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and the National Gallery of Art. The remaining photographs are now being placed with civic and university museums across the country.

As part of this national initiative, The Block Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago were selected as paired regional institutions. The Foundation encouraged both museums to offer access to one another’s holdings, increasing the pool of Shunk-Kender works available for study and exhibition.

Who Were Shunk-Kender?

Harry Shunk (German, 1924–2006) and János Kender (Hungarian, 1938–2009) met in Paris in the late 1950s. In 1958, they began working as partners, formally crediting their photographs to the shared identity “Shunk-Kender.” They were at the center of the avant-garde artistic scenes in Paris and later New York, producing portraits, photographing exhibitions and gallery openings, and documenting happenings, performances, and ephemeral works from the late 1950s into the 1970s.

They became close to many of the artists they photographed, including Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude. They visited studios, documented events on the street and in galleries, and worked intensively from their own studio. Their archive captures a particular moment in the 20th century when artists were experimenting with the liberation of the body and when artworks were taking new forms through performance, installation, and conceptual practices.

One of their best-known works is the 1960 photomontage Leap into the Void, which shows what appears to be artist Yves Klein leaping from the second story of a building onto the street. The final image was produced by combining several negatives developed in the darkroom, part of a total package that included the artist’s stunt, the manipulated photograph, and a newspaper-style publication that was distributed across Paris. The historic photomontage and preparatory images are among the works coming to The Block as part of the acquisition.

“While we picture so many of these legendary events through these photographs, we are not always aware of who made the image or what artistic labor went into creating it,” Granof notes.