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Lot Essay
One of the greatest pieces of American art from the 20th century, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, encompasses the grandeur, history, and promise-laden atmosphere of the American West. Laid under an expansive sky, the quickly fading afternoon sunlight falls onto the white pockets of snow on the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance, gleaming off the wooden crosses next to the church, all enveloped within the vastness of the American landscape.
Arguably Adams' most celebrated image, the present lot is an impressive, mural-size print, rare in this size and highlighting his technical skill as a master printer. Displaying a nuanced range of grey tonality in the clouds and the foreground brush while maintaining the overall striking contrast, this print is a culmination of Adams' perfected vision for the scene, forged by re-fixing the original negative and his precision in the darkroom on the print itself. This print was gifted by Adams to his assistant, Ted Orland, in the early 1970s, and later acquired by a private collection, where it has remained for the last forty years.
In 1963, Adams' first Eloquent Light exhibition was held at San Francisco's DeYoung Museum and was the largest solo exhibition for a photographer at the time. Curated by Nancy Newhall, the author of his biography of the same name, the retrospective highlighted Adams' achievements as a master craftsman over the first forty years of his career. The present lot was exhibited in a subsequent Eloquent Light exhibition at Rochester's George Eastman House in 1967, underscoring the importance of his technical and artistic innovations in American photography.
Arguably Adams' most celebrated image, the present lot is an impressive, mural-size print, rare in this size and highlighting his technical skill as a master printer. Displaying a nuanced range of grey tonality in the clouds and the foreground brush while maintaining the overall striking contrast, this print is a culmination of Adams' perfected vision for the scene, forged by re-fixing the original negative and his precision in the darkroom on the print itself. This print was gifted by Adams to his assistant, Ted Orland, in the early 1970s, and later acquired by a private collection, where it has remained for the last forty years.
In 1963, Adams' first Eloquent Light exhibition was held at San Francisco's DeYoung Museum and was the largest solo exhibition for a photographer at the time. Curated by Nancy Newhall, the author of his biography of the same name, the retrospective highlighted Adams' achievements as a master craftsman over the first forty years of his career. The present lot was exhibited in a subsequent Eloquent Light exhibition at Rochester's George Eastman House in 1967, underscoring the importance of his technical and artistic innovations in American photography.