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Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon, Vivian Richardson and her granddaughter, Heidi Zacher, Deadwood, South Dakota, August 6, 1982, 1982 © The Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Avedon, Vivian Richardson and her granddaughter, Heidi Zacher, Deadwood, South Dakota, August 6, 1982, 1982

© The Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Avedon, Janis Joplin, musician, Port Arthur, Texas, August 28, 1969, 1969 © The Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Avedon, Janis Joplin, musician, Port Arthur, Texas, August 28, 1969, 1969

© The Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Avedon, Audrey Hepburn and Art Buchwald, with Simone D’Aillencourt, Frederick Eberstadt, Barbara Mullen, and Dr. Reginald Kerman, evening dresses by Balmain, Dior, and Patou, Maxim’s, Paris, August 1959, 1959 © The Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Avedon, Audrey Hepburn and Art Buchwald, with Simone D’Aillencourt, Frederick Eberstadt, Barbara Mullen, and Dr. Reginald Kerman, evening dresses by Balmain, Dior, and Patou, Maxim’s, Paris, August 1959, 1959

© The Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Avedon, Ezra Pound, poet, at the home of William Carlos Williams, Rutherford, New Jersey, June 30, 1958, 1958 © The Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Avedon, Ezra Pound, poet, at the home of William Carlos Williams, Rutherford, New Jersey, June 30, 1958, 1958

© The Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Avedon, Marian Anderson, contralto, New York, June 30, 1955, 1955 © The Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Avedon, Marian Anderson, contralto, New York, June 30, 1955, 1955

© The Richard Avedon Foundation

About

My photographs don’t go below the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.
—Richard Avedon

During a career that spanned nearly sixty years, Richard Avedon’s reportage, portraiture, and fashion work dissolved the lines between photographic genres and covered an enormous breadth of subjects. By capturing American ideals of fashion, portraiture, and beauty in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, he helped cement photography’s status as a legitimate contemporary art form. While the portraiture of his peers tends to focus on composed and isolated moments, Avedon’s stark lighting draws the viewer to the power of the subject’s expression, which often suggests concealed layers to their personalities.

Born in 1923 in New York City, Avedon was interested in photography from an early age: he joined the Young Men’s Hebrew Association camera club when he was twelve years old. In 1942, during World War II, he served as Photographer’s Mate Second Class in the US Merchant Marine, and shortly thereafter he began working professionally, producing images for Harper’s Bazaar after having studied with the magazine’s art director Alexey Brodovitch.

Beginning in 1944 Avedon transformed the art of photography through his indelible contributions to leading fashion and contemporary magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Life, Look, and other popular magazines. He photographed pop icons and models, musicians and writers, soldiers and political activists, as well as members of his family. Fascinated by photography’s power to suggest personality, Avedon’s images register poses, hairstyles, and clothing as vital elements of an image by bending the rules of photographic composition, both in the street and in the studio, to a particular stylistic and narrative purpose.

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Fairs, Events & Announcements

Gagosian’s booth at Paris Photo 2023. Artwork, left to right: © Man Ray 2015 Trust/ADAGP, Paris 2023; ©️ Estate of Jan Groover; © Kwame Brathwaite; © Jeff Wall; © 2023 June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation; © Tyler Mitchell. Photo: Thomas Lannes

Art Fair

Paris Photo 2023
Still Life Stilled

November 9–12, 2023, booth b10
Grand Palais Ephémère, Paris
www.parisphoto.com

Gagosian is pleased to participate in Paris Photo 2023 at the Grand Palais Éphémère. Still Life Stilled is a catalytic presentation, organized by Joshua Chuang, of historical and contemporary works that explore photography’s unique capacity to both invest inanimate tableaux with substance and find meaning in suspending the theater of life.

Gagosian’s booth at Paris Photo 2023. Artwork, left to right: © Man Ray 2015 Trust/ADAGP, Paris 2023; ©️ Estate of Jan Groover; © Kwame Brathwaite; © Jeff Wall; © 2023 June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation; © Tyler Mitchell. Photo: Thomas Lannes

Installation view, Avedon 100, Gagosian, 522 West 21st Street, New York, May 4–July 7, 2023. Artwork © The Richard Avedon Foundation. Photo: Rob McKeever

Award

The Lucie Awards 2023
“Avedon 100” and Antwaun Sargent

Avedon 100, a recent exhibition at Gagosian, New York, organized in commemoration of the centenary of Richard Avedon’s birth, has won the Lucie Awards Gallery Exhibition of the Year for 2023. The landmark exhibition featured photographs selected by more than 150 cultural figures who elaborated on the impact of the photographer’s work today.

Gagosian director Antwaun Sargent received the Lucie Awards Spotlight/Visionary Award. He is the author of The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (Aperture) and curator of an accompanying exhibition of the same name, which is currently traveling. In 2023, he organized exhibitions by Derrick Adams, Cy Gavin, Rick Lowe, and Honor Titus at the gallery, among other accomplishments.

Installation view, Avedon 100, Gagosian, 522 West 21st Street, New York, May 4–July 7, 2023. Artwork © The Richard Avedon Foundation. Photo: Rob McKeever

Richard Avedon, Ten Exhibition Prints from In the American West, 1979–84, installation view, Art Basel Unlimited 2023 © The Richard Avedon Foundation. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano

Art Fair

Art Basel Unlimited 2023
Richard Avedon

June 12–18, 2023, Hall 1, booth U52
Messe Basel
artbasel.com

Art Basel Unlimited 2023 features ten exhibition prints from Richard Avedon’s photographic series In the American West (1979–84). To produce In the American West, Avedon spent five years traveling through twenty-one western states, photographing more than a thousand people. Using natural light and a white backdrop, he emphasized his sitters’ poses and expressions, picturing ordinary people with striking immediacy. These ten oversize prints were selected by the artist to hang in the windows of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, for the inaugural exhibition of the series in 1985.

Launched in 2000, Unlimited is an exhibition platform for exciting large-scale projects that transcend the limits of the standard booth.

Richard Avedon, Ten Exhibition Prints from In the American West, 1979–84, installation view, Art Basel Unlimited 2023 © The Richard Avedon Foundation. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano

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Museum Exhibitions

Installation view, ICP at 50: From the Collection, 1845–2019, International Center of Photography, New York, January 24–May 6, 2024. Artwork, left to right: © Nan Goldin, © Zanele Muholi, © Deana Lawson. Photo: Jeenah Moon, courtesy International Center of Photography

On View

ICP at 50
From the Collection, 1845–2019

Through May 6, 2024
International Center of Photography, New York
www.icp.org

ICP at 50 is a thematic exploration of the many processes that comprise the history of the photographic medium, drawn from the International Center of Photography’s holdings. The institution was established in 1974 and the exhibition offers insight into the breadth and depth of its collection which spans from the nineteenth century to the present day. Work by Richard Avedon, Nan Goldin, Deana Lawson, and Andy Warhol is included.

Installation view, ICP at 50: From the Collection, 1845–2019, International Center of Photography, New York, January 24–May 6, 2024. Artwork, left to right: © Nan Goldin, © Zanele Muholi, © Deana Lawson. Photo: Jeenah Moon, courtesy International Center of Photography

Richard Avedon, Outtake from Andy Warhol and members of The Factory, October 9, 1969, 1969 © The Richard Avedon Foundation

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Richard Avedon
Murals

January 19–October 1, 2023
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
www.metmuseum.org

In 1969, Richard Avedon started making portraits with a new camera and a new sense of scale. Trading his handheld Rolleiflex for a larger, tripod-mounted device, he reinvented his studio dynamic. Facing down groups of the era’s preeminent artists, activists, and politicians, he made huge photomural portraits, befitting the subjects’ outsized cultural influence. On the centennial of the photographer’s birth, this exhibition brings together three of these monumental works, some as wide as thirty-five feet. For Avedon, the murals expanded the artistic possibilities of photography, radically reorienting viewers and subjects in a subsuming, larger-than-life view.

Richard Avedon, Outtake from Andy Warhol and members of The Factory, October 9, 1969, 1969 © The Richard Avedon Foundation

Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Big Bertha, 2015 © Nathaniel Mary Quinn

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X
A Decade of Collecting, 2012–2022

January 27–May 26, 2023
Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
sheldonartmuseum.org

X: A Decade of Collecting, 2012–2022 is a survey of artworks acquired for the Sheldon Museum of Art’s collection over the past decade. The chosen works demonstrate the breadth of collecting efforts and are a modest representation of the approximately 1,875 pieces that have entered the museum’s holdings since 2012. The exhibition seeks to present a snapshot of how the collection continues to evolve. Work by Richard Avedon, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Andy Warhol, and Stanley Whitney is included.

Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Big Bertha, 2015 © Nathaniel Mary Quinn

Sally Mann, Emmett, Jessie and Virginia, 1989 © Sally Mann

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Presence
The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder

September 30, 2022–January 15, 2023
Portland Museum of Art, Maine
www.portlandmuseum.org

Presence aims to capture the full spectrum of the human experience, from the anonymous to the celebrity and from the everyday to era-defining events such as the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and the civil rights movement. With approximately 140 photographs by seventy artists, the exhibition is drawn entirely from the collection of Judy Glickman Lauder. Work by Richard Avedon and Sally Mann is included.

Sally Mann, Emmett, Jessie and Virginia, 1989 © Sally Mann

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Press

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