The Grand European Tour: 1st Destination - Art Basel

Saul LEITER, Cap, c.1960 3/10

Chromogenic print

First Time in Art Basel

Exhibiting for the first time at Art Basel, Howard Greenberg Gallery of New York City will present an important exhibition of iconic and captivating work by leading photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries. The wide-ranging selection will include photographs by Eugène Atget, Richard Avedon, Edward Burtynsky, František Drtikol, Bruce Davidson, William Klein, Saul Leiter, Arnold Newman, Edward Weston, and Edward Steichen, among others, at Art Basel in Switzerland, June 13-16, 2013. The Gallery has shown at Art Basel Miami Beach for more than eight years.

The premiere of a new photograph by Edward Burtynsky, an artist known for his documentation of humanity’s impact on the planet, will be one of the highlights of the exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery. The large-scale image depicting a gushing Chinese dam on the Yellow River in HenanProvince, will also be the cover image for a new book on Burtynsky’s series about water, to be published by Steidl this fall. In addition, Watermark, a feature documentary film will be released in September 2013. Coinciding with the book and the film will be an exhibition entitled WATER of Burtynsky’s photographs from 2007 to 2013 at Howard Greenberg Gallery from September 19 through November 2, 2013.

Among the 20th-century masterpieces of photography will be the work of the celebrated French photographer Eugène Atget, who brought a poetic and meditative tone to his landscapes. Saint-Cloud, a park with spectacular gardens in the Western suburbs of Paris, inspired him enormously, and several of his photographs taken there in the 1920s depict his transcendent vision.

Howard Greenberg Gallery is well known for its specialization in Czech photographers, who pushed the boundaries of the medium to modernity beginning in the 1920s and into the 1950s. Among them were František Drtikol and Josef Sudek, whose moody nudes will be on exhibition.

Arnold Newman photographed many famous artists in the 1940s and ‘50s, and a number of his portraits will be on view including those of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, Max Ernst, and Willem de Kooning. Of particular note will be an extraordinary oversized image of the legendary composer, pianist, and conductor Igor Stravinsky. The only one of its kind, the portrait was made for a museum exhibition in 1951, and is known as the photographer’s signature work.

An enchanting 1930 Edward Steichen portrait of Anna May Wong, the first Asian American actress to gain international recognition, will also be on view. A number of rare still-lifes by Steichen, Edward Weston, and Brett Weston show the masters’ remarkable ability to find exquisite beauty in simple objects.

A 1940 photographic collage by the American artist Herbert Bayer, who was the last surviving member of the Bauhaus, projects a quality of surrealism its integration of images of figurative sculpture with lines of perspective. Born in Austria, he was an influential graphic designer, painter, photographer, sculptor, and architect, whose work was represented in a number of important exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Photographs by William Klein, one of the leading photographers of the postwar era as well as an influential filmmaker, painter, and graphic artist, will be exhibited following a critically acclaimed exhibition this spring at the Gallery in New York. A long-time resident of Paris, William Klein began his career as a painter, first studying with Fernand Léger. On view will be his early black and white fashion photographs taken for Vogue in the 1960s, and his painted contacts — enamel painting on blown-up contact sheet outtakes from the 1960s through 1990.

Art Basel
June 13-16, 2013
Hall 2.0/Booth D4