Oliver Gagliani @Gitterman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 25 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung against white walls in the jagged single room gallery space. All of the works are vintage gelatin silver prints, made between 1953 and 1974. No size or edition information was provided on the checklist, although the prints looked to range from roughly 4x5 to 11x14 (or reverse). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: It's not often that I visit a gallery show and run into a photograph that I grew up with. But there on the wall at this survey of the work of Oliver Gagliani was the smoky familiarity of the watery mist rising up over the Grover Hot Springs that has hung pretty much wherever my parents have lived over the past few decades. Having grown up with a mother who was a photographer in the 1970s and who attended many of the week long workshops that were popular in those days, I was raised in houses that were full of prints bought, traded, or otherwise acquired from photographers she worked with or admired, and that Gagliani image was never far from view.

This exhibit traces a broad sweep of Gagliani's work across his two most productive decades, and seems born of that workshop era, where the varied influences of Ansel Adams and Minor White can be felt and observed in the prints on the wall. But just because we can trace some aesthetic and conceptual breadcrumbs back to earlier teachers and masters doesn't mean that Gagliani's work doesn't stand on its own. His synthesis and execution of those ideas was all his own, and the prints are executed with the kind of superlative craftsmanship we hardly see anymore.

Gagliani had a particular eye for tonal harmony, for the delicate balance of black and white in a image, regardless of whether his subject was a weathered door, some peeling wallpaper, or the way the light flared off worn barn siding at a certain time of the afternoon. His prints have the kind of range that is the mark of a master, the deep dark velvety blacks that don't lose their detail, flanked by brilliant whites and highlights that don't get washed out into nothingness. They are the kind of prints that quietly blow the mind of those that have toiled endless hours in a black and white darkroom. How did he get that tiny chevron pattern on the black tar paper to stay crisp without losing the detail in the white bed frame? Or how did he get the icicles and dripping white wash to come out of the darkness when framed next to the dilapidated white door? And how did he think to make a negative print of the broken glass in the diamond shaped window, so the edges would glow with reverse brightness? The technical prowess on display here is profound, and the show undoubtedly contains some of the best gelatin silver prints to be seen in New York this year.

Gagliani's compositions tend toward the up close found abstractions of Siskind, with a healthy dollop of the photographic spirituality of White. Glare off the sand at the shoreline, barbed wire near a falling down barn, paint spots on a random wall, they all provided Gagliani with an opportunity to turn the mundane into the lyrical. His images of window shingles, stained blinds, and angled door hinges are exercises in texture, but with a dose of reverential mystery. They are patient pictures, improved and enhanced by technical expertise that feels like ritual.

While the images in this show certainly feel drawn from a specific time and place in American photography, it's hard not to be enthralled by their tactile execution. For those black and white print junkies out there jonesing for a fix, this show is most definitely for you.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced between $3500 and $7500. Gagliani's work has very little history in the secondary markets, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Review: New Yorker (here)

 

Oliver Gagliani

Through August 9th

 

Gitterman Gallery

41 East 57th Street

Suite 1103

New York, NY 10022

Alma Lavenson @Gitterman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung against white walls in the jagged single room gallery space. All of the works are vintage gelatin silver prints, made between 1928 and 1943. No size or edition information was provided on the checklist; most appeared to be roughly 8x10 or reverse. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Except to aficionados of Bay Area Modernism or rabid f/64 fans, the photographs of Alma Lavenson are likely a complete unknown. Although she exhibited with Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and the rest of the f/64 group in the late 1920s and early 1930s, her work has generally been left in the long shadows of her better known colleagues, a singular image popping up now and again to remind us that other forgotten artists were struggling the same aesthetic problems that mark the careers of the recognized masters. Seen together in remarkable depth in this show, Lavenson's work is an almost a perfect case study in the transition from Pictorialism to Modernism, with strong, well-crafted examples to be seen in each phase of her artistic development.

 

The earliest images on display in this exhibit find Lavenson at the beginning of the end of Pictorialism, making photographs of the squiggly reflections in the water at Monterey Pier or an angled lineup of rowboats with soft focus lushness, albeit tightened up just a bit from the ethereal dreaminess that characterized much of the work from the period. What changes first is Lavenson's subject matter - romantic painterly scenes give way to industrial studies: ships, dams, cement factories and mechanical still lifes, seen with an eye for geometry but still executed in textured soft focus. Fast forward a year or two more and the patina of Pictorialism has begun to fade from her palette, being replaced by a keener eye for detail and sharpness. Floral studies, sail rigging, even snow blown against the trunk of an evergreen are now crisp and clear, shadows being used for stark angling rather than misty mood. By the end of the 1930s, Lavenson's work has moved even closer to that of Walker Evans and Wright Morris, with deserted shacks, door frames, and cannery buildings pared down to sparse formal patterns in unadorned tonal grey.

 

While Lavenson may have been overlooked by the larger sweep of photographic history, there are flashes of brilliance here that stand up well with comparable work by her peers and contemporaries. A collection of between the wars Modernism would do well to have a surprising Lavenson mixed in among the more famous names.

 

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced between $10000 and $45000, with most of the works under $25000 and one (the self portrait with camera) marked POR. Lavenson's work has only been intermittently available in the secondary markets over the past decade; prices have ranged from roughly $2000 to $60000.

 

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

 

Transit Hub:

• Review: New Yorker (here), Le Journal de la Photographie (here), New York Photo Review (here)

 

Alma Lavenson

Through June 1st

 

Gitterman Gallery

41 East 57th Street

Suite 1103
New York, NY 10022

Kenneth Josephson @Gitterman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 37 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung against white walls in the jagged single room gallery space. Nearly all of the works on view are vintage gelatin silver prints, made between 1959 and 2001. No specific size or edition information was available on the checklist, but most of the prints were no larger than 11x14. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Kenneth Josephson's second show at Gitterman Gallery goes beyond the photographer's best known work and digs into the lesser known corners of his long image making career. Aside from a few recognizable gems (the car silhouette in snow, the spots of light on  pedestrians, and a handful of conceptual photographs of photographs), the works on view will be unfamiliar to most. It's a smart edit, balancing Josephson's high contrast Chicago city abstractions with more nuanced experimentation with light in nature.

The earliest nature pictures Josephson made come from the late 1950s and use changing focus in multiple exposures to create ghostly glows and auras around trees in the forest. The ethereal light seems to emanate from the trees themselves, like highlights or wispy motion. These ideas quickly evolved into pictures within pictures of sawn tree trunks or rocks on the beach, and leaves arranged as interventions against brick walls and paper backgrounds. Fast forward a decade or two, and Josephson's interest in nature has moved back into the wild, toward the light that dapples the forest, picking out groups of plants that are spotlit against the enveloping darkness. He took this idea one step further a few years later by actually painting a selection of leaves bright white to make them stand out with more force, bringing a layer of rich conceptual thinking (a little like John Pfahl's altered landscapes) back into his approach. His later landscape compositions alternate between soft subtleties of light and texture in mixed greenery and the stark lines of billowing white birch trunks against dark evergreen backgrounds.

The few city scenes in this show offer more examples of Josephson's investigations of light, albeit with the rigid geometries and patterns of built forms as subject matter. A cropped upward view of the repetitions of stone windows becomes an array of gridded dots, while the traceries of a patchwork chain link fence stand like filaments against flat whiteness offset by lush (well printed) detail in the dark area underneath. Even a shopping cart can be the fodder for a light experiment, the metal frame becoming a pattern of interlocking white lines.

The value of this show comes in its ability to make us think more broadly about Josephson's talents. We already know the Chicago ID Josephson and the witty conceptual Josephson, and this show adds the nature Josephson but in a context that allows us to see the connections and common motifs that run through all three. It proves the nature pictures have been there all along, and that they are as complex and intellectually thoughtful as his more familiar work.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced between $3500 and $10000, with most of the works set either at $5000 or $6000. Josephson's work has been only intermittently available in the secondary markets in recent years, withs coming up for sale in any given year. Prices have ranged from $1000 to $12000, with a few higher priced lots going unsold.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Review: New Yorker (here)

 

Kenneth Josephson

Through March 16th

Gitterman Gallery
41 East 57th Street (new location)
New York, NY 10022

Roger Mayne @Gitterman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 34 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung in the main gallery space and the smaller front room on the ground floor. All of the prints are vintage gelatin silver prints made between 1951 and 1961. Physical dimensions range from roughly 7x6 to 18x23 or reverse, and the prints were not editioned. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Roger Mayne's photographs of children playing in the streets of working-class slums in 1950s postwar England are remarkably pared down and structured for what we call street photography. Using the linear geometries of the row houses and tenements as a controlling framework, his urban portraits and childhood vignettes play out with sparse, gritty clarity. Kids in proper school uniforms scramble around and improvise games, all with the dingy reality of the city as an ever present backdrop.
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While we Americans might see a certain commonality between Mayne's images and those of Helen Levitt's New York, I think this parallel is mostly superficial. Mayne's pictures capture a time and place far different than our own, even though kids everywhere want to climb on window sills, create makeshift sculpture out of cardboard boxes, and play soccer in the street. Of course there is joy in these pictures (wrestling, giggling, fighting with swords, blowing bubbles), but shadows, broken bricks, and decaying architecture loom in the background, exhaustion and empty poverty never very far from view. Many of Mayne's photographs capture this emotional back and forth: an optimistic billboard with a huge sparkling cruise ship flanked by a dirty weed strewn vacant lot, girls happily scrambling over a pock marked, bombed out wall, and Teddy boys posing in fancy suits and pompadour haircuts, trying to find some way to rebel against the whole stifling situation.
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Beyond the subject matter of these photographs, I was also struck by Mayne's use of scale in some of these prints. Very few photographers working in the 1950s were experimenting with print sizes nearing 20x24, and as a result, there is something strikingly unusual about the surprising bigness of a handful of these works. (Apparently, Mayne was interested in ensuring that his photographs would sit on equal footing with paintings from the St. Ives School.) Mayne was also often employing extremely high contrast (almost crossing into abstraction), with over bright windows set next to the deep black slash of a bridge girder, or patterns of smoke stacks and brick buildings placed against a featureless white sky. The combination of these two gives the images a heightened sense of darkness, often offset by the lightness of a game of hopscotch or sidewalk cricket.

Overall, I came away impressed with Mayne's ability to unobtrusively capture the fleeting moments of urban childhood, while at the same time infusing them with a heightened sense of heavy reserve. His pictures aren't just simple fun, but something more balanced and atmospheric.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced between $3500 and $9000, with most under $5000. Mayne's work has been intermittently available in the secondary markets in the past decade, with prices generally ranging between $1000 and $4000.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Review: New Yorker (here)

Roger Mayne
Through July 21st

Gitterman Gallery
170 East 75th Street
New York, NY 10021

Charles Traub, Object of My Creation @Gitterman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 29 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung in the main and front spaces on the ground floor. All of the prints on view are vintage gelatin silver prints from the period between 1967 and 1972. Dimensions were not available, but most are small square format, perhaps roughly 6x6; the nature studies in the front room are slightly larger, more like 10x12. A hardbound catalogue of the exhibition is available from the gallery for $25. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: It takes some courage for a successful photographer/teacher like Charles Traub to dig back into his storage boxes and unearth his work from college and graduate school for a new show. Rather than proof of a singular and original vision born fully formed, it shows Traub under the influence of his many esteemed teachers (Sinsabaugh, Meatyard, Siskind), working to synthesize their lessons (both visual and intellectual) into his own aesthetic vocabulary. The pictures show the evolution of an artist as a work-in-progress, rather than as a finished product.

Traub's early photographs find him examining the contrasts of doorways and windows, finding hidden geometries, textures and abstractions in the interplay of light and dark. Bright dots on a subway post echo overhead lighting, and the mesh of a chain link fence adds a criss-cross effect to a church courtyard. When outside, natural forms become small sculptural vignettes, and rocks and grass become silhouettes of black against white; images from a year or two later dive into dense thickets of underbrush, often using negative tonalities to unbalance the all-over compositions. In general, these early works are intimate, careful photographs, focused on form rather than narrative, produced with meticulous attention to the quality of the finished prints.

I think these kinds of pictures are emblematic of a certain time period in American photography, where updated but still formal Modernism was forced to come to terms with more inward looking subjective/spiritual work (think Minor White). Students from that time inevitably got doses of both schools of thought, and as a result, often evolved in wholly different or hybrid directions. This show is like opening a time capsule back to that specific point in the late 1960s/early 1970s, led by a guide who was himself in the midst of making sense of it all.

Collector's POV: All of the prints in this show are priced at either $3500 or $4000. Traub's work is not widely available in the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

While I enjoyed many images in this show, my favorite was Illinois, 1969; its on the top left of the middle installation shot. While the broken window is a classic subject, Traub's version has both the jagged edge and the smooth rectangular forms of adjacent areas of white (contrasted with deep black), next to an unexpected opening at the bottom, showing weeds in the snow; it's got much more going on compositionally than most dark/light exercises in silhouette and outline.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Review: New Yorker (here)

Charles Traub, Object of My Creation
Through April 23rd

Gitterman Gallery

170 East 75th Street

New York, NY 10021

Kenneth Josephson @Gitterman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 45 black and white images, framed in black and matted, and hung throughout the gallery (including the main and front spaces on the ground floor, the hallways and staircase, and the main space on the second floor). Most of the prints on view are vintage gelatin silver prints from the period between 1959 and 1976, although there are a few recent prints mixed in as well. Only a handful have specific edition sizes (ranging from 12 to 50). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Kenneth Josephson seems to be one of those photographers that for whatever reason never quite made it into broad mainstream of photography, and as a result, has been given a more subtle supporting role in this history of the medium. While his name is well known to photography insiders and he had a full retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago as recently as a decade ago, even his most recognizable work remains surprisingly affordable, seemingly overlooked or caught in an eddy pool off to the side of the market. This exhibit gathers together many of his most iconic vintage images from the 1960s and 1970s (along with some lesser known pictures that provide further background and depth to his work of that period) and makes a case for his continued relevance to the medium's contemporary incarnations.

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Starting with a few early prints from his master's thesis on multiple imagery at the ID in Chicago and continuing through a variety of projects and series (all with strong conceptual foundations), the show traces Josephson's consistent intellectual interest in the nature of photographic perception. His experiments with the contrasts of light and shadow on Chicago city streets are often richly dark, with spots of bright light dappled across the composition or used as highlights to catch moments of motion. His images within images use layers of pictures to construct witty trompe l'oeil optical illusions and puns - an outstretched arm holds an image of a boat just above an expanse of sea, merging the straight and the staged. His images of marks and evidence look for meaning in what has been inadvertently left behind - skid marks on an open road, depressions in the grass, scratches left on a wall by the movements of a shrub, or the outline of snow on the protected side of a car. His history of photography pictures bring clever humor to acknowledged masterpieces - an arm holds a ruler up to the Tetons, with a puzzling conceptual nod to O'Sullivan. And his archaeology pictures introduce an unexpected black and white measuring stick into his compositions, adding a layer of implied authenticity. Regardless of his subject, Josephson's works have a mind-stretching braininess, challenging the viewer to actively consider the process of seeing.

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While the arguments over truth in photography seem particularly active in our current digitally altered world, this body of work is a strong reminder that these questions are not new, and that conceptually minded photographers were playing with the puzzling realities of camera-driven perception long before it became so obvious and commonplace. These images remain fresh and original even decades later, a testament to the creativity and ingenuity Josephson has applied to pushing the edges of our visual vocabulary.
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Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced between $3000 and $12000, with most of the works set either at $5000 or $6000. Josephson's work has been only intermittently available in the secondary markets in recent years, with prices ranging from $1000 to $12000, with most between $3000 and $5000. The artist is also represented by Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago (here).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Review: New Yorker (here)
• Essay by AD Coleman (here)

Kenneth Josephson

Through April 17th

Gitterman Gallery

170 East 75th Street
New York, NY 10021

Ferenc Berko @Gitterman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 48 black and white images, framed primarily in black and matted (a few are framed in white), and hung in the main gallery, hallway and smaller side room on the first floor, and in the main gallery and hallway on the second floor. All of the works are gelatin silver prints, taken in the period between 1933 and 1951; most are vintage prints, with a handful of later prints mixed in. The images were taken in London, Paris, Budapest, various locations in India, Chicago and New York. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: As collectors of nudes, over the years, we have come across the work of Hungarian photographer Ferenc Berko from time to time and wondered whether one of his best images would make a good addition to our collection, without knowing much about his entire body of work or his history as an artist; for us, he has always seemed somewhat peripheral to the main action of his better known contemporaries. Having recently taken on the artist's estate, Gitterman Gallery has put together a well-edited survey show of Berko's surprisingly varied early work that makes a strong case for reconsidering the value of his artistic contributions.
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Chronologically, the show starts with Berko's early street scenes of London (where he was a student), reminiscent of the work of his friend and mentor E.O. Hoppé. The photographer then moved to Paris, where a series of nudes were done in collaboration with his wife. Unlike the pared down nudes of the West coast American photographers of the same period (Weston, Cunningham et al), Berko's nudes have a strong "European" feel to them (more similar to the concurrent nudes of Man Ray), many with avant-garde styling and dense wallpaper patterning. Also during this time, he makes a trip back to his native Hungary to make compelling portraits of Jews on the streets of Budapest.

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To avoid the increasing Nazi influence in Europe, Berko then moves across the globe to India to become a filmmaker. His photographs from the early 1940s combine a more humanist view of daily life in India with an undertone of modernist sensibility, evident in the architecture of his compositions. Berko's life and photography take another unexpected turn after the war, when his friend László Moholy-Nagy invites him to teach photography at the ID in Chicago. His work from this period shows the influence of the New Bauhaus and of the early ideas of Abstract Expressionism: pared down urban geometries of fire escapes and telephone wires (think Callahan), contrasty solarized nudes, and gestural graphical abstractions of paint chips and found objects (think Siskind).

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As a whole, I think the show successfully argues that Berko was not a derivative chameleon in these years, switching his stripes to copy the fashions of the art world, but often an active participant in the leading edge evolution of important artistic approaches over time. When his specific works are carefully matched to the time lines of other more prominent photographers, it becomes obvious that Berko was experimenting with similar ideas during similar years, not merely riding their coattails later. As such, while he will likely remain a secondary figure in the history books, many of the images on display here certainly stand up well with the best of his better known contemporaries.

Collector's POV: The images in this show are priced between $3500 and $7500. Berko's work has not found its way into the secondary markets much in the past several years; only a few lots have been sold, ranging in price between $1000 and $2000. As such, gallery retail is likely the only option for collectors interested in accessing his best work.

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In the past, we have found many of Berko's nudes a bit too obvious for us (perhaps even a bit cheesy in some cases), but seeing a well edited group of his pictures in person, I was convinced that we should reconsider some of these works once again. Berko's late 1940s abstracted Chicago images would also clearly fit well with other city scenes we own from that same period.

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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Obituary: NY Times, 2000 (here)
• Feature by Bill Jay (here)

Ferenc Berko

Through January 23rd

Gitterman Gallery
170 East 75th Street
New York, NY 10021

Book: Stanley Greenberg, Invisible New York

JTF (just the facts): Published in 1998 by Johns Hopkins University Press (here). Subtitled The Hidden Infrastructure of the City. 100 pages, with 53 black and white images. Includes essays by Thomas Garver and the artist, as well as detailed plate by plate discussions of the locations and their histories. The images were taken between 1990 and 1997. (Cover shot at right, via artist website.)

Comments/Context: I was first introduced to Stanley Greenberg's work in the back room of Tom Gitterman's gallery a year or two ago, where a couple of the prints were hanging near the office area. Since then, I've been meaning to buy this book, so I could dig a little deeper on the work and see a larger number of images from the series.

Greenberg's images chronicle the civic works and underworld utilities of New York, the often overlooked and hidden underbelly of non-places that keeps the city running. His subjects are bridge anchorings and construction shafts, electricity tunnels and water reservoirs, missile silos and rail yards, most of which have a throwback look of disrepair and decay. His compositions are full of intersecting found geometries (girders, trusses, turbines and the like) and long receding views down dimly lit, unpeopled, industrial tunnels. I think his densely packed interior scenes are the most successful.

To my eye, the work bears some relationship to both that of the Bechers and of Ray Mortenson. While Greenberg's images are far warmer and more human that the rigorous typologies of the Bechers, I think they both share a conceptual desire to respectfully document vanishing (and important) vernacular architectural forms. The connection to Mortenson (and in particular to his images of the South Bronx) comes of course in the focus on decay and abandonment; both photographers effectively use their images to point out what happens when buildings fall into disuse and decline. I also see some more tenuous connections to the 1920s industrial work of Albert Renger-Patzsch, especially in Greenberg's outdoor scenes.

All in, this is a solid book of unexpected photographs, well worth adding to your library.

Collector’s POV: Stanley Greenberg is represented in Gitterman Gallery in New York (here), Robert Klein Gallery in Boston (here), and Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque (here). Prints from this series are 28x36, in editions of 10. They are priced at $5000 each. No secondary market for Greenberg's work has developed as yet, so gallery retail is the only option at the moment. While these works would normally fit perfectly into our city/industrial genre, once again we are constrained by size; these prints are just too big to fit easily into our display space without some tricky maneuvering. While the larger size certainly makes the images more dramatic, we'd need to see them printed 11x14 or so to make them work for us.

Transit Hub:

• Artist website (here)
• BLDGBLOG review (here)
• At SLAC (here)

Josef Breitenbach @Gitterman

JTF (just the facts): 33 vintage images of various sizes, virtually all from the 1930s and 1940s, displayed throughout the two floors of the gallery. (See installation shot at right.) The exhibition is concurrent with the publication of a new book, Josef Breitenbach: Manifesto, by Nazraeli Press.

Comments/Context: Tom Gitterman is another contestant in the long distance race to build the next generation of dominant photography galleries. Carving out a durable niche in the market isn't easy, especially with a new gallery, but Tom has been at it now for a handful of years and things seem to be going well. Beyond being a genuinely nice guy, one of the things that separates Tom from many others is his eye for unusual, high quality work, and his willingness to try and match that work with collectors who have the same affinities. So instead of sticking to the well traveled roads of iconic photography, the key for him is to build up a large enough stable of collectors to absorb all the terrific, unexpected images he can dig up.

This show of the avant-garde work of Josef Breitenbach is a perfect example of the kind of risk taking that Tom has embarked on that would never even be considered by a larger gallery. Breitenbach is not exactly a household name, and yet the work is innovative, unusual, and in some cases, quite beautiful. The images in this show explore a wide variety of non-standard photographic techniques: toning, bleaching, solarization, photograms, multiple negatives and montage; this is not even close to straight photography. And while a few of them could be called surreal, they are warmer, more human, than most surrealist images, even when they are at their most speculative. At a time when there wasn't much color in photography, Breitenbach was experimenting with bleaching and toning to get acidic yellows, oranges, reds and browns, which he used to highlight and accent his otherwise traditional gelatin silver images. The image of Arabella, Portrait in Black and Red, c1935 (see image at right) shows how these overlays of color were used to build up work that was new, challenging, and lovely at the same time. This exhibit forces us to rethink where Breitenbach might belong, in the context of the great works by Man Ray, Brassai, and others of the same time period.

Collector's POV: Breitenbach's work doesn't really fit that well into the vision of our particular collection. There is one print of the Eiffel Tower from 1928 (see image at right) that would fit into our city genre, working well with existing Eiffel Tower images by Krull and Bing. In general, the work is priced between $6500 and $18000, and several images were already sold when I saw the show. While not every image is a winner, the show is clearly worth seeing to catch a glimpse of those handful of works where Breitenbach got his unique mix of colors and imagery just right.

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Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating system defined here)
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Josef Breitenbach

Through November 22nd

Gitterman Gallery

170 East 75th Street

New York, NY 10021