The Road to Victory, 1942
In 1942, Beaumont Newhall was called up to duty with the Army Air Corp, eventually to serve as an analyst of photographic aerial reconnaissance. He had been curator of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, since it's inception in 1940.It took a bitter fight, but Ansel Adams (vice-chair of the Department) and Newhall convinced the trustees that Nancy Newhall, Beaumont's wife, was the best choice as curator in his absence. Still, they wouldn't give her but an "Acting Curator" title and paid her half what her husband had earned.
Throughout the 3 years she served as curator, Nancy Newhall had to repeatedly defend against the closing of the department. Overall budget-cutting at the museum was one problem (alleviated for the Photography Department by several donations by David McAlpin) but the other problem was that Adams' and the Newhall's curatorial vision was at odds with the times. At the time, photography was seen as a democratic medium while as their philosophy argued for differentiating between photos on aesthetic grounds. This included important members of the museum's staff and Board of Trustees who saw the presentation of photography in more populist terms. Ironically, on account of the Newhall's attempts to define photography by the same criteria as the other arts, the museum was accused of snobbery.
The most outspoken critics outside the museum were Edward Steichen and Tom Maloney. (Maloney at the time was editor of Camera Craft magazine and the U.S. Camera books.) Steichen, who had a couple of powerful allies on the board, was asked to guest curate a couple of exhibitions of war-related photography which Nancy Newhall had no say in and wasn't consulted about. Steichen's view was that photography could be used for propagandistic purposes in the service of the war effort. As he has been quoted saying: "When I first became interested in photography...my idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself." (Sounds like a definition of art to me.)
The first of the shows was Road to Victory: A Procession of Photographs of the Nation at War which opened May 21, 1942 and closed after October 4, 1942. What follows is the June, 1942, issue of the Museum of Modern Art's Bulletin, describing the show. Note the credit for Steichen on the cover: "Directed by..." In Ansel Adams and the American Lanscape, Jonathan Spaulding notes that "Steichen, who had done frequent work for the studios, brought the visual impact of the big screen and the dream factory's penchant for sensationalism to the once staid gallery."
The text was written by Carl Sandburg, the poet (and Steichen's brother-in-law.) The show was designed by Herbert Bayer--former Bauhaus member who had become quite successful in the U.S. as a graphic designer--and was influenced, like the leading designers of Fascist Germany and Italy, by the design idiom El Lissitzky had created for Soviet exhibits. Steichen curated the photos. "Together," says Spaulding, "Bayer and Steichen devised a show of spectacular visual impact."
I'll let Spaulding describe the scene for us. (Sandburg's text is reproduced in the Bulletin.)
http://photemera.blogspot.jp/2009/03/road-to-victory-1942.html
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