Alma Lavenson - NOMEN: American Women Artists from 1945 to Today New York Monday, June 17, 2019 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Estate of Alma Lavenson
    Butterfield and Butterfield, San Francisco, May 23, 1994
    Acquired from the above auction by the present owner in 1994

  • Catalogue Essay

    Alma Lavenson
    Born 1897, San Francisco
    Died 1989, Piedmont, California
    1919 BA University of California, Berkeley

    Selected museum exhibitions:
    University of California, Berkeley (1999); Baltimore Museum of Art (1988); Oakland Museum (1979); California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside (1979); Center for Creative Photography, Tucson (1979); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1942, 1948, 1960); Brooklyn Museum (1933); M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco (1933)
    Selected public collections:
    Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; J. Paul Getty Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Yale University Art Gallery

    One of the leading California-based photographers of the mid-twentieth century, Alma Lavenson is best known for images that evoke the region’s history through architecture. Largely self-taught, she took up photography in 1919 and pursued it for the rest of her life. Transitioning from the Pictorialist style of her early work to a modernist approach, her work was included in the first exhibition of Group f/64 in 1932, alongside Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Imogen Cunningham. In Cannery Buildings, Monterey, California, 1939, she documented the industrial canneries of coastal California, capturing the forms of these utilitarian structures with a dramatic, raking light.

3

Cannery Buildings, Monterey, California

1939
signed in pencil on the mount; titled and dated on the reverse of the mount; titled in ink and dated in pencil on the “58 Wildwood Gardens, Piedmont, California” label affixed to the reverse of the mount
gelatin silver print
7 1/4 x 9 7/8 in. (18.4 x 25.1 cm.)

Estimate On Request

NOMEN: American Women Artists from 1945 to Today

New York Selling Exhibition 19 June - 3 August 2019