Richard Avedon 1923-2004

flush-mounted to linen, signed and numbered '4/12' by the photographer in pencil and with his copyright and 'Richard Avedon Portraits' Metropolitan Museum of Art stamps on the reverse, matted, framed, a Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco label on the reverse, 1947, printed in 2002, no. 4 in an edition of 12 in this size format

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Acquired by Margaret W. Weston from the above, 2003

Other prints of this image:

Richard Avedon and Truman Capote, Observations (New York, 1959), pp. 72-73

Richard Avedon Portraits (New York, 2002, in conjunction with the exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art), unpaginated, frontispiece

Richard Avedon, An Autobiography (New York, 1993), unpaginated

Richard Avedon: Evidence, 1944-1994 (New York, 1994, in conjunction with the exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art), p. 71  

The photograph offered here is a recent print of one of Avedon's very early negatives.  While different in many ways from the fashion photography for which he is better-known, this portrait shows stylistic elements that would become hallmarks of Avedon's later work.  The image is printed in such a manner that the intensity of the white areas washes out much of the other details, producing a similar effect to the white background he would use in his later portraits.

In 2003, The Metropolitan Museum of Art organized the exhibition, Richard Avedon Portraits.  This exhibition showcased an extensive series of portraits chosen by curator Maria Morris Hambourg, with the help of Avedon, which she believed to be the 'finest existing prints of his most penetrating images' (Richard Avedon Portraits, unpaginated).  Of this image, Hambourg writes:

'From a landscape as barren and elemental as a Beckett stage set (''A country road. A tree'') Avedon created a bleached-out no-man's-land...[A boy] is smiling wildly, ready to race into the future.  And there, hovering behind him like a mushroom cloud, is the past in the form of a single, strange tree--a reminder of the horror that split the century into a before and after, a symbol of destruction, but also of regeneration.

'By tacit agreement, Avedon's included, this picture--a kind of projected self-portrait--has come to stand for the artist's youthful self, for it fixes a moment of propulsive glee mutually mirrored in photographer and subject' (ibid., unpaginated).

The present print was made in 2002 on the occasion of the exhibition, Richard Avedon Portraits, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This photograph was printed in 2002 from the original 1947 negative in the collections of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. The artist donated the negative and all related rights to the Smithsonian in 1966