Ansel Adams
YOSEMITE VALLEY FROM INSPIRATION POINT, WINTER, YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK
LOT SOLD.
118,750 USD
Details & Cataloguing
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Ansel Adams
1902-1984
YOSEMITE VALLEY FROM INSPIRATION POINT, WINTER, YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK
mural-sized, sepia toned, mounted to Homasote board, framed, circa 1940, probably printed in the 1950s
72 by 96 in. (182.9 by 243.8 cm.)
Read Condition Report
Read Condition Report
72 by 96 in. (182.9 by 243.8 cm.)
Provenance
Sotheby's New York, 6 October 1999, Sale 7348, Lot 154
Literature
Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall, The Pageant of History in Northern California (San Francisco, 1954), pl. 56 (variant)
Catalogue Note
During the 1930s and early 1940s, Adams made many photographs from Inspiration Point, culminating in his 1944 Clearing Winter Storm (see Lot 14). Several variants of this image exist. One was reproduced in Adams’s book Yosemite Valley in 1959, and another was used on a Hills Brothers coffee can in 1970.
Adams's first foray into making mural-sized photographs came in 1935, when he was asked by his employer at the time, the Yosemite Park & Curry Company, to undertake a series of murals of Yosemite for the San Diego Exposition of that year. He became an articulate spokesman for the form, writing articles such as 'Photo-Murals' for US Camera in November 1940, and including discussions of mural theory and practice in books such as his own The Print: Contact Printing and Enlarging of 1968. 'I was fascinated with the challenge of making a photographic print in grand scale,' Adams wrote in his autobiography. 'Many of my large-format Yosemite negatives took on a new resonance in mural-sized proportions' (Ansel Adams: An Autobiography, p. 187).
The present mammoth, mural-sized print was one of a series executed in the mid-1950s for the American Trust Company (later taken over by Wells Fargo Bank), for their offices on Montgomery Street between Washington and Clay Streets in San Francisco. These murals were printed in sections, by the Moulin Studios or General Graphics in San Francisco. The sections were so large that they were developed in mammoth trays, then mounted with wheat paste to Homasote board.
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