Classic Photographs
Classic Photographs
Margaret Bourke-White
Radio Loudspeakers for NBC Mural at Rockefeller Center
Lot Closed
October 5, 03:30 PM GMT
Estimate
5,000 - 7,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Margaret Bourke-White
1904 - 1971
Radio Loudspeakers for NBC Mural at Rockefeller Center
gelatin silver print, stamped and with annotations in pencil on the reverse, 1933
image: 13 ¼ by 9 ⅜ in. (33.7 by 23.8 cm.)
Vicki Goldberg, Bourke-White: A Retrospective (New York: International Center of Photography, 1988), p. 13
Stephen Bennett Phillips, Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927 - 1936 (Washington, D. C.: The Phillips Collection, 2003), p. 169
In late 1933 NBC commissioned Bourke-White to make a monumental photomural for the rotunda of its studios located at New York's Rockefeller Center. This image of speakers became one of the key visual components of the design.
The photographer's biographer Vicki Goldberg described the project: 'The subject was radio. [Bourke-White] simplified and magnified details to represent the vital power of the medium . . . In her mural, large, simple forms in bold patterns abruptly shifted to more complex patterns in different formats, like the odd disjunction when the dial turns from a violin solo to a lecture. The rhythm was fast, jazzy, bold, dissonant.' (Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography, p. 143)
Prints of this image are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1976.634.1); The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2002.693); The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (91.374); and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (81.2234).