Harry Callahan 1912-1999

From the photographer to Mary Jo Slick, one of the three original owners of the Chicago gallery 750 Studio

Private collection

Sotheby's New York, 3 October 2001, Sale 7702, Lot 282

750 Studio, Chicago, Harry Callahan: Exhibition of Photographs, 10 - 29 November 1947

Art Institute of Chicago, Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937-1971, 2 March - 12 May 2002, and thereafter to:

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 20 July - 20 October 2002

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, 7 December 2002 - 2 March 2003

David Travis and Elizabeth Siegel, eds., Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937-1971 (Chicago, 2002), pls. 105-107 (these prints)

Related studies reproduced in:

Friends of Photography, Untitled 36, Eleanor: Photographs by Harry Callahan, pp. 18 and 19

Sarah Greenough, Harry Callahan (Boston, 2001), pp. 76 and 77

Keith Davis, An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, first ed., p. 206, fig. 70

Keith Davis, An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, second ed., p. 268, pl. 269

This suite of photographs of the photographer’s wife, Eleanor, are among the very earliest Callahan photographs to have appeared at auction.  They were exhibited at Callahan’s first one-person show of photographs, held at the 750 Studio Gallery in Chicago in November, 1947.   As documented works from important Callahan exhibitions, they precede by many years the works from the El Mochuelo Gallery exhibition held in Santa Barbara in 1964.  When the present suite of Eleanor photographs was first sold in these rooms in October 2001 (Sale 7702, Lot 282), they established a world record auction price for Callahan, which, at the time of this writing, has not been surpassed. 

Harry Callahan joined the Chicago Institute of Design as a photography instructor in 1946.  He served as the head of the Institute’s department of photography from 1949 to 1961.  When his solo exhibition was held at the 750 Studio Gallery in 1947, it became not only Callahan’s first one-person show, but also the first exhibition of photographs by an Institute of Design faculty member.

The 750 Studio Gallery was opened in the spring of 1947 by two Institute of Design students, Merry Renk and Mary Jo Slick, along with their roommate, Olive Oliver.  In his Light and Vision: Photographs at the School of Design in Chicago, 1937 – 1952, Stephen Daiter has published a brief history of this pioneering Chicago gallery, which occupied the two front rooms of the apartment of Renk and her roommates at 750 North Dearborn Street.  From the time of its opening in the spring of 1947 until the gallery was sold in the fall of 1948, 750 Studio presented fifteen exhibitions, including not only Harry Callahan’s first one-person show of photographs, but also exhibitions of the work of other faculty members and students; Henry Miller’s paintings, books, and original manscripts; and a posthumous show of photograms, graphic works, and paintings by Moholy-Nagy.  As Daiter has pointed out, 750 Studio provided a valuable public venue for the work of Institute faculty and students alike (for more information, ibid., pp. 62-3). 

Mary Jo Slick and Merry Renk both studied photography with Callahan at the Institute, and were inspired by his belief in the artistic merits of black-and-white photography.  As Renk relates in an unpublished memoir of those years:

‘He [Callahan] agreed to have an exhibit at our gallery in November.  We designed a large card folded in half with the printed announcement on the inside on the right.  We mailed one thousand announcements with the edges closed with a round seal.

‘This was the first one-man exhibit for Harry Callahan.  He would not sign his name on the mounting board below his photos.  He signed his name on the backside of the mounting board on all his photos in our exhibit.

‘We sold fifteen prints.  Our gallery was successful.  His exhibition included several of his photo series—in which he took many shots and chose three or four prints to express his vision.  Included were a series of soda fountain chairs, of scenes of snowy Chicago, and a series of the draped torso of his wife, Eleanor.’

Sarah Greenough, in her volume Harry Callahan (Boston, 2001, p. 9), has pointed out that although critical attention for Callahan’s first show was scant, within six months his work had been brought to the attention of Edward Steichen at The Museum of Modern Art, who included Callahan in group exhibitions in April and July of 1948, and in a four-person exhibition from December 1948 to January 1949, with Bill Brandt, Lisette Model, and Ted Croner.

The suite of photographs offered here are from an extensive series of images of his wife Eleanor that Callahan produced between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s.  Callahan had met Eleanor Knapp on a blind date in 1933; in 1936, they married in Detroit, where they both worked for Chrysler.  Callahan’s Eleanor photographs range from straightforward portraits to highly manipulated images; she is photographed naked, clothed, in rooms, on streets, and in landscapes.  Although highly individual, the combined portraits of her project an archetypal woman.  As Keith Davis has eloquently written, ‘Callahan’s many images of his wife, Eleanor . . . conflate the intimate and the universal to create a mythic realm of fertility and nurture’ (An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, first ed., p. 205).

In 2002 and 2003, the present photographs were exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the most comprehensive show to date devoted to photographs produced by faculty and students of the Institute of Design, Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937 – 1971.