Frederick Sommer

mounted, signed, titled, and dated (twice) by the photographer in pencil on the reverse, matted, 1943, printed later

Turner/Krull Gallery, Los Angeles

Collection of Robert Richardson, acquired from the above, 1992

Sotheby's New York, 28 April 2004, Sale 7987, Lot 150

Acquired by the present owner from the above

Other prints of this image:

Benjamin Peret, 'La Pensée Est Une et Indivisible,' V V V, Number 4, February 1944, p. 54

James Thrall Soby, Yves Tanguy (The Museum of Modern Art, 1955), p. 20

John Weiss, ed., Venus, Jupiter and Mars: The Photographs of Frederick Sommer (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1980, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 10

John Weiss, ed., Exhibition Checklist, A Supplement to Venus, Jupiter & Mars: The Photographs of Frederick Sommer (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1980, in conjunction with the exhibition), fig. 12

Sommer: Images (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, 1984), pl. 15

Keith F. Davis, The Art of Frederick Sommer: Photography, Drawing, Collage (Prescott and New Haven, 2005), p. 43

Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, L'Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington, D. C.: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1985, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 233

Keith F. Davis, An American Century of Photographs from Dry-Plate to Digital (The Hallmark Photographic Collection, 1999), p. 320

El Surrealismo Entre Viejo Y Nuevo Mundo (Madrid: Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, 1989, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 280

This luminous photograph, mounted on cream-colored board, is in generally excellent condition.
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Frederick Sommer's Arizona Landscape is an image with significant publication history within the photographer's career, and within the literature of Surrealism.  It was one of two Sommer landscape photographs reproduced in the fourth and final issue of the important wartime Surrealist journal VVV, accompanying an article by Benjamin Peret entitled 'Le Pensée est Une et Indivisible.'  Within VVV, Sommer's two photographs appeared as full-bleed illustrations on facing pages, with only the journal's gutter separating them; together, the two images, both horizonless studies of the Arizona desert, seem to blend into one impossible landscape.  The photographs are simultaneously exquisitely detailed and essentially abstract—as such they are fully consonant with the aesthetics of Surrealism.  The VVV reproductions were the first appearance of Sommer's work in print. 

VVV was published In New York City from 1942 to 1944.  Edited by the American artist David Hare, along with European expatriates André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst, VVV served as the primary print venue for Surrealist art during this turbulent period.  The two photographs by Sommer included in VVV No. 4, as well as four of his 'glue-color' drawings, were selected for publication by Ernst, a friend of Sommer and a frequent visitor to his home in Prescott, Arizona. 

The image was also reproduced in James Thrall Soby's Yves Tanguy, the catalogue for the 1955 exhibition of Tanguy's work at The Museum of Modern Art.  Sommer had met Tanguy, through Ernst, in Arizona in 1951.  In the introductory text for The Museum of Modern Art's catalogue of Tanguy's work, Soby speculates that the visit may have had an impact on Tanguy's painting.  Referencing the photograph offered here, Soby writes,

'In the right foreground of section of [Tanguy's] Rose of the Four Winds there occurs, perhaps for the first time, that breathless congestion of boulders, pebbles or bones which will reach its brilliant climax in Multiplication of the Arcs.  Could it be possible that Tanguy had stored away somewhere in memory the rocky landscape with giant cacti in Arizona, as recorded by a photographer-friend, Frederick Sommer?'