Ansel Adams

The Collection of Stuart Schneck

Sotheby's New York, 1 November 1989, Sale 5921, Lot 327

This mural-sized print was made for the Smithsonian Institution's traveling exhibition 'This Is the American Earth,' which originated in 1955 at the LeConte Memorial Lodge, Yosemite Valley. 

This mural, which comes originally from the collection of Stuart Schneck, was, as is typical of Adams's murals, unsigned.  Upon Schneck's request, Adams signed this print in the late 1970s or early 1980s.  The remainder of the Stuart Schneck Collection of Nature Photographs is housed at the Bancroft Library. 

Organized on behalf of the Sierra Club and held at the LeConte Memorial Lodge in Yosemite, Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall's collaborative 1955 exhibition, This Is The American Earth, was an unprecedented international success, attracting record-numbers of visitors to the Lodge and aiding the Club's funding. 

The exhibited photographs included many by Adams as well as by Edward and Brett Weston, Eliot Porter, and Minor White, among others.  The photographs, printed for the exhibition to Adams's specifications, and accompanying free-verse text written by Newhall, were mounted on panels and hung according to deliberate sequence, with visitor's instructions for how to proceed through the exhibition.  After traveling to Stanford University and Boston Museum of Fine Arts, with the assistance of the Smithsonian Institution, the exhibition continued to The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the California Academy of Science, San Francisco, among other venues, as well to international institutions arranged by the United States Information Service.

Following the success of the exhibition, This Is The American Earth was published in 1960 as the first of the Sierra Club's 20 oversized exhibit format books.  The book included a revised selection of 84 photographs by 32 photographers, including, among others, Margaret Bourke-White, William Garnett, Pirkle Jones, and Adams's longtime friend and mentor, Cedric Wright.