Lot 81

VARIOUS PROPERTIES The Aaron Siskind works in lots 81-82 and 132-133, belonged to the painter, Anne Eisner Putnam (1911-1967). Eisner was an award-winning artist, trained in the tradition of the realist revival in the American Scene movement of the 1930s. She exhibited her work regularly throughout her life in numerous venues and moved through a number of styles. From 1941-45 she summered on Martha's Vineyard. During those years, Siskind photographed her as well as a series of her paintings; they remained friends over the years. In 1946, Eisner left New York to live in the former Belgian Congo (DRC) for nine years. She wrote a book, Madami, about her years in DRC and an article for The National Geographic, returning for good to New York in 1958 where she continued to paint and exhibit. Siskind kept in touch with her by sending photographs as Christmas cards. Eisner was also photographed by Walker Evans in 1955.

AARON SISKIND (1903-1991)

Gloucester 1H

Details

AARON SISKIND (1903-1991)
Gloucester 1H
Gelatin silver print. 1944/1956. Signed Aaron, dated and annotated Xmas, 1956 Greetings! in ink on the reverse of the flush-mount.
6 7/8 x 4¾in. (17.5 x 12.1cm.)

Literature

See: Chiarenza, Aaron Siskind: Pleasures and Terrors, p. 117.

Lot Essay

This image is one of the most familiar of Aaron Siskind's Gloucester series and he is often quoted as finding his first proof print of the image a "revelation". Although Gloucester 1H was just one of a series of "glove" images Siskind produced in the 1940s as symbols of isolation or alienation, this was a far more substantial composition, an assimilation of Siskind's compositional and technical experiments to date. With its ambiguous spatial structure, brooding tonalities and glove's "eerie anthropmorphism" (Chiarenza, op. cit., p. 58), the photograph also provokes a complex emotional response in the viewer.

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