Imogen Cunningham

warm-toned, signed and dated by the photographer in pencil in the margin, matted, 1927

Gift of the photographer to Pauline Cairns Raje, 1927

Inherited by the present owners, 1992

Other prints of this image:

Carol Roark, Paula Ann Stewart, and Mary Kennedy McCabe, Catalogue of the Amon Carter Museum Photography Collection (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1993), fig. 1417, p. 165

The Eye Club (Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, 2003, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 57

Variant croppings of this image:

Richard Lorenz, Imogen Cunningham: Ideas without End, A Life in Photographs (San Francisco, 1993), pl. 39, p. 104

Imogen Cunningham: Frontiers, Photographs 1906-1976 (Berkeley, 1978, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. H

Imogen! Imogen Cunningham Photographs 1910-1973 (University of Washington, Seattle, 1974), p. 77

Richard Lorenz, Imogen Cunningham: Flora (Boston, 1996), pl. 22

Richard Lorenz and Manfred Heiting, eds., Imogen Cunningham (Köln, 2001), p. 206

This warm-toned, early print, on very heavy matte-surface paper, is in generally very good to excellent condition. Cunningham printed this image with black borders, and slight age-appropriate silvering is visible in those. There are black areas at the lower and right margin edges of the print due to exposure during the printing of the image, which also exhibit age-appropriate silvering. There is wear at the edges of the print, and the top edge is unevenly trimmed. There are two small (less than ¼-inch) circular light gray areas in the leaves at the right side of the print. These are visible on both the front and back of the print, though one is in shadow on the front and is therefore less apparent. These may be due to a flaw in the developing process or due to a flaw in the paper itself.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

The photograph offered here, a large, early print of Imogen Cunningham's False Hellebore, is one of a handful of images responsible for the photographer's modern reputation, as it was in her lifetime.  Like her famous Tower of Jewels and the elegant, open Magnolia Blossom, the False Hellebore study reveals Cunningham's dual training in both the science and aesthetics of the camera.  The photograph's beautifully rendered textures and larger-than-life shapes testify to Cunningham's skill in translating the vibrant object before her lens onto photographic paper.  This revelatory aspect of her best botanical work brought Cunningham international fame in the 1929 Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart, where False Hellebore was among the works included. The print offered here, on matte-surface paper, signed and dated by the photographer in the margin, represents the earliest state of the image and is almost certainly the state of the image sent to Stuttgart for the Film und Foto show.

Cunningham began her photographic career as a turn-of-the-century Pictorialist.  Her soft-focus figure studies, however, concealed a rigorous training in science and the chemistry of photography.  After receiving her degree in chemistry at the University of Washington, she won a scholarship to Germany in 1909, where she trained at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden.  Her thesis there was an analysis of self-manufactured platinum papers.  Returning to Seattle, she opened her own studio, where she took portraits and posed tableaux in the Pictorialist vein.  As early as 1910, however, and continuing into that decade, she began to explore the natural world with her camera, and in this she was part of a larger trend.  By 1920, photographers in both the United States and in Europe were beginning to shift away from the artistic photography of the fin-de-siècle and move toward a more realistic, 'objective' vision.  In Germany, this vision was exemplified by the Neue Sachlichkeit and the work of Albert Renger-Patszch, whose articles on plant photography Cunningham is likely to have known.  Her successive simplification of flower forms in the early 1920s was her own breakthrough into modernism, and put her in the good company of such like-minded photographers as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.  Separately and together, they would re-examine their own philosophy of photography, a re-examination that would culminate in the unadorned aesthetic of Group f/64.        

In her series of magnificent plant photographs from the later 1920s—including her famous magnolia studies, as well as the leaves of a banana plant and the sensuous calla, among others—Cunningham achieved a mixture of precision and beauty that won her international fame.  In these studies, Cunningham elevates whole or parts of flowers to icon status, producing images that are almost hypnotic in their power.  Dramatically lit and monumentally composed, the plants in these photographs have a vitality that transcends the still frame. For her image of the false hellebore, a member of the lily family, Cunningham captured the plant at an exact moment of its growth. The false hellebore's leaves are spirally arranged, and Cunningham has focused on their pleated surfaces, still upright, just before the leaves begin to separate and fall as the plant matures.  As with her magnolias and banana plants, Cunningham would have watched and waited for the false hellebore to reach a precise stage of maturity for her photograph.            

Cunningham authority Susan Ehrens has pointed out that False Hellebore, also known by the title Glacial Lily, was included in early exhibitions of Cunningham's work, among them the International Salon of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1928; and solo exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum, October 1929; the University of Oregon, 1930; and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, 1931.  Edward Weston saw the show at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1928 and wrote enthusiastically to Cunningham, 'I went out to the museum today, primarily to land some work and see Stojana's exhibit, incidentally to see the "International Salon of Photography."  As usual, most of it was rubbish, although the Japanese had several fine things, but I had one thrill and it was your print—Glacial Lily—it stopped me at once, I did not note the signature until I had exclaimed to myself—"this is fine!"  It is the best thing in the show, Imogen . . .Thank you for giving me a rare pleasure' (quoted in Lorenz, Ideas Without End, p. 31).

It was Edward Weston who, when asked to choose American photographers for Stuttgart's Film und Foto exhibition of 1929, included Cunningham in his selection.  This major international exhibition of avant-garde photography was one of the most influential shows of its era, fostering many photographers' international reputations and defining progressive trends in photography for the next half century.  The ten submissions by Cunningham comprised a nude study, an industrial photograph, and eight iconic botanicals.  False Hellebore, almost certainly the image as cropped in the photograph offered here, was among those submissions, and was titled in that show 'Eislilie.' 

The most commonly reproduced photographs of False Hellebore in the Cunningham literature, e.g., Lorenz's Cunningham: Flora and Ideas Without End, as well Margery Mann's Imogen! and the recent Taschen anthology of Cunningham's work, show a larger cropping of the negative that has come to represent the traditionally accepted version of the picture.  As the present print and other early prints of the image demonstrate, however, it is almost certain that the tighter cropping of the negative, as seen in the print offered here, represents the earliest state of the image and was the cropping used by Cunningham for the prints submitted to her early exhibitions.  At the time of this writing, four other early prints, all of a similar size and with cropping identical to the image offered here, have been located: a print in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the gift of Albert Bender; a print in the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, originally a gift of Cunningham to Mary Ann Domilange; a print in the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; and a print in a private collection, reproduced in Fraenkel Gallery's The Eye Club, 2003.

The photograph offered here was originally a gift of Imogen Cunningham to Pauline Cairns Raje (1899 – 1986), a Mills College student who roomed with Cunningham and her husband, Roi Partridge, during her student years at Mills.  At the time, Roi Partridge was on the arts faculty at the College.  The photograph is thought to have been presented to Raje upon her graduation from Mills in 1927, which is the date of the present print.  Raje went on to become an instructor in applied arts at Mills in 1928, and then traveled in Europe with a Mills classmate, Dorothea Orr, from 1929 until 1933. Raje later moved to Los Angeles and taught in the Santa Paula public schools.  Roi Partridge did an etching of Raje in 1933, possibly in Croatian folk dress she brought from Europe; this etching is reproduced in Anthony White's The Graphic Art of Roi Partridge: A Catalogue Raisonné (Los Angeles, 1988).