George Tice was a master at revealing interest and beauty in mundane aspects of the landscape and built environment.
Description
In 2014, Diana S. Tittle and her husband, Tom Hinson, who served the museum for 38 years in various curatorial capacities and concluded his career as its first curator of photography, offered the museum the opportunity to select works from their personal collection for donation over the ensuing years. This year the museum is receiving the final group of five works by four artists—individual prints by Margaret Bourke-White, William Clift, and Aaron Siskind, and a twelve-print portfolio by George Tice. While photographs by these artists are already owned by the museum, these additional works will enrich and broaden our holdings of their work. These images represent several different “straight” approaches to photography. Bourke-White, the poet of industrial Cleveland, juxtaposes a pale Terminal Tower rising in the distant mist with the dark, lacy geometry of a bridge’s ironwork in this 1927–29 view. The artist sent small-scale prints like this to her friends as holiday cards, evoking through composition the grandeur and spirit of this rising city. The museum currently owns two such intimate prints, one a different view of the Terminal Tower and the other a scene of the downtown skyline hovering in the distance over Lake Erie waves. William Clift, renowned for his architectural and landscape views, is represented by a pair of inspiring views: one of Mont St. Michel, a tidal island in France capped by a medieval abbey, and one of Shiprock, a barren, isolated peak rising 1,583 feet above the desert in New Mexico. Clift published a book of his views of these two sites, one mountain shaped by human endeavor and the other left as nature shaped it. Aaron Siskind turned fragments of city walls into vehicles for personal expression and artistic experimentation. Chicago 13 (1952) presents a set of geometric forms that are parallel to the picture plane. While rooted in function, they verge on abstraction. He plays with the range of scale, contrasting the small horizontal bricks with the larger vertical doorways. Capping the left side is an incongruous, decorative white arch which further emphasizes the quirky nature of Siskind’s composition. Like Bourke-White, Clift, and Siskind, George Tice was a master at revealing interest and beauty in mundane aspects of the landscape and built environment. He issued the Trees portfolio shortly after he teamed up with Lee Witkin to establish the Witkin Gallery in New York, one of the early art galleries devoted exclusively to photography. These 12 images showing trees are more portraits than landscapes: they evoke the individuality and majesty of each plant. These gifts from Diana Tittle add to the museum’s narrative of the story of art history with works by significant artists. They also reflect an important segment of the museum’s institutional history: they were selected and adored by the individual who was formative in shaping the CMA’s photography collection.
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