W. Eugene Smith 1918-1978

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Description

W. Eugene Smith
'the walk to paradise garden'

matted, framed, 1946, printed no later than 1971, together with the original masonite exhibition mount credited by the photographer and with his '821 6th Avenue, N.Y., N. Y.' address in crayon, annotated 'No. 2 Overmt Grey' and 'Not Museum' (marked out in black crayon) in an unidentified hand in white pencil (2)

Provenance

Gift of the photographer to the current owner

Exhibited

Jewish Museum, New York, Let Truth Be the Prejudice, 2 February - 9 May 1971

Literature

William S. Johnson, W. Eugene Smith: Master of the Photographic Essay (Aperture, 1981), 21:001

Jim Hughes, Shadow and Substance, The Life and Work of An American Photographer, (New York, 1989), unpaginated

W. Eugene Smith: His Photographs and Notes (Aperture, 1969), unpaginated

Ben Maddow, Let Truth Be the Prejudice: W. Eugene Smith, His Life and Photographs (Aperture, 1986), p. 30

Gilles Mora and John T. Hill, Editors, W. Eugene Smith: Photographs, 1934-1975 (Paris and New York, 1998), p. 287

W. Eugene Smith: Rebel Photographer (The Tel Aviv Museum, 1987), cover and pl. 171

Edward Steichen, The Family of Man (The Museum of Modern Art, 1955), p. 192

David E. Scherman, Editor, Best of Life (Chicago, 1973), pp. 202-3

Catalogue Note

This image, arguably Smith's best-known, represents his return to photography following the devastating injuries he incurred during Japanese mortar fire on Okinawa, where he was covering the war for Life magazine in May 1945. During his painful convalescence at home in Tuckahoe, N. Y., in the spring of 1946, Smith would lie in bed and watch his children, Patrick and Juanita, playing in the back yard. They would often make their way to adjoining woods through a clearing. After much thought, and for the first time in nearly a year, Smith picked up his camera and struggled to make the paralyzed fingers of his left hand work.

This rare, oversized print of ‘The Walk to Paradise Garden,’ titled by Smith from a musical composition by Frederick Delius, was included in the photographer’s retrospective exhibition, Let Truth Be the Prejudice, at New York’s Jewish Museum in 1971. Magnum photographer and Smith’s friend, Cornell Capa, proposed to museum director Karl Katz that his Fund for Concerned Photography sponsor an exhibition of Smith’s work. Katz gave Capa full authority to deal with Smith, and Capa rightly decided that it would be best to allow the photographer to be his own curator. A Smith exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, proposed in 1962 by John Szarkowski, had finally stalled in 1969 due to Smith’s demand for total control.

Preparation for the exhibition involved months of searching for prints and negatives in the chaos of Smith’s loft, around-the-clock printing and spotting for six months, and a marathon mounting session two days prior to the exhibition. By the morning of the opening on February 2^nd, Smith and his dozen or so helpers had hung very few of the 542 photographs. Miraculously, by that evening, photographs were hung everywhere—near the ceilings, low on the walls—dramatically, by all accounts. It was the most ambitious one-man exhibition to date and was so popular that its run was extended five weeks, to May 9^th.

As of this writing, this is the largest print of this image to be offered at auction.