A Precise Vision: Photography from the Galka Scheyer Collection

A great admirer and collector of modern art, Emmy "Galka" Scheyer is best known and celebrated as the untiring champion of the Blue Four artists Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger and Alexei Jawlensky. A Presice Vision: Photography from the Galka Scheyer Collection  provides an opportunity to review her interests as a collector, specifically within the medium of photography.

Scheyer's photographic acquisitions centered on the work of three artist-photographers: Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976), Edward Weston (1886-1958), and Brett Weston (1911-1993). These three photographers shared a similar vision about their art: chance was ruled out, and they sought to capture precisely what they saw through their cameras. In photographing details of natural forms and landscapes, they created compositions of great naturalistic force and beauty. The lens, which acted like an enlarging device, called attention to patterns, textures and structures that might ordinarily go unnoticed.

All of the photographic works Scheyer collected by these artists were produced in the 1920s and are, for the most part, still life studies. Included in the show are some of the seminal pieces of their careers including Magnolia Blossom,  1925 by Imogen Cunningham, The Peppers  series, 1929-30 by Edward Weston, and Unitiled (Lily),  Brett Weston's first photograph.