“Made for Magazines: Iconic 20th-Century Photographs”
Tazio Secchiaroli, Anthony Steel and Anita Ekberg on Via Veneto, Rome, 1958, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Carla and Lorenzo Borlenghi Collection of Italian Photographs, Museum purchase as a matching gift to donations of Ermy Borlenghi and Gordon Bonfield and Cathy and Giorgio Borlenghi. © Tazio Secchiaroli / David Secchiaroli
Louis Faurer, Family, Times Square, 1949–50, dye imbibition print, printed 1980, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Caldecott Chubb. © Estate of Louis Faurer
William Wegman, Fay Ray in Custom Boots, 1989, chromogenic print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Texas Monthly and the artist. © William Wegman
John Dyer, Selena, 1992, chromogenic print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Texas Monthly and the artist. © 1992 John Dyer All Rights Reserved
Anton Bruehl, Untitled, 1930s–40s, color carbro print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Anton and Karen Bruehl. © Estate of Anton Bruehl
George S. Zimbel, Marilyn Monroe and Billy Wilder, “The Seven Year Itch,” New York, 1954, gelatin silver print, printed 1993, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by Jonathan and Cynthia King. © George S. Zimbel
Herb Ritts, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Point Dume, 1987, gelatin silver print, ed. # 13/25, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Manfred Heiting Collection, Museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund. © Herb Ritts Foundation
Dan Winters, Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson, 1994, gelatin silver print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Texas Monthly and the artist. © Dan Winters
Exhibition Title
Made for Magazines: Iconic 20th-Century Photographs
Dates
February 9–May 4, 2014
Overview
Made for Magazines: Iconic 20th-Century Photographs celebrates the heyday of magazines through some 80 impactful photographs— including the immortal photograph from the set of “The Seven Year Itch,” Marilyn Monroe and Billy Wilder by George Zimbel (1954); Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent by Richard Avedon (1981); and the sailor kissing the nurse in VJ Day in Times Square, New York (1945) by Alfred Eisenstaedt.
Photographs have come a long way since the first halftone—a picture of Steinway Hall in Manhattan—was published in the New York Daily Graphic in 1873. Picture magazines reached an all-time high between 1920 and the 1980s and quickly grew in number and specialty. Made for Magazines presents the significant types of magazine photographs—news and human interest, celebrity, sports, fashion, architecture and advertising—while investigating the transition from print publications to the fluid network of online content. Though print media has been on the decline since the rise of the internet, the impact of these celebrated images made for magazines still resonates to this day.
The photography collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is exceptionally strong in images made for the printed page, and Made for Magazines is drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection. The exhibition explores this richly historic century through works by such renowned photographers as Edward Steichen, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Gordon Parks and Annie Leibovitz, which were originally published by magazines such as Life, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Texas Monthly. Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs, first published in newspapers and later in magazines, are also among the works on view.
Made for Magazines is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The curator is Anne Wilkes Tucker, the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography.
Location
Cameron Foundation Gallery
The Audrey Jones Beck Building
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
5601 Main Street, Houston, TX 77005
Media Contacts
Mary Haus, Whitney Radley and Vanessa Ramirez-Sparrow
MFAH Communications
VRamirez-Sparrow@mfah.org / 713.639.7554