Photographs by ‘Lost Generation’ Artist Berenice Abbott at Gallery

An opening reception for Berenice Abbott: Photography will be held at the Handwerker Gallery from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 9. The exhibit of Abbott’s portraits and her images of New York City in the 1930s will run through December 10. Both the reception and the exhibit are free and open to the public.

A member of what Gertrude Stein labeled "the lost generation" — American expatriates who came of age during World War I — Berenice Abbott traveled to Paris in the 1920s to study painting and sculpture. While in France she learned photography as an assistant to Man Ray and later opened her own studio. Abbott gained a reputation as an insightful portraitist, photographing artists and intellectuals who were part of Europe’s cultural elite. Her images of Jean Cocteau, James Joyce (left), and Edna St. Vincent Millay, among others, were sold to many French publications.

Returning to New York in 1929, Abbott was struck by changes in the city. New thousand-foot towers crowded the narrow streets of Manhattan’s financial district and fanned out from Grand Central Terminal in midtown. "The new things that had cropped up in eight years, the sights of the city, the human gesture here sent me mad with joy, and I decided to come back to America for good," she wrote.

At first independently and then with the support of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration and the Museum of the City of New York, Abbott set out to make a documentary interpretation of New York City. Photographing skyscrapers and elevated trains, street peddlers and storefronts, she mapped the city from Wall Street and the South Street districts to Harlem and the outer boroughs. Between 1935 and 1938 Abbott produced in excess of one thousand negatives for the projects she would later call Changing New York. The final series included 305 photographs and was supported by historical data compiled by Abbott’s staff of researchers. Ninety-seven images were published by E. P. Dutton and Company in Changing New York, a guidebook for visitors to the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

The photographs being shown in the Handwerker exhibit are part of the permanent collection of the David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University.

For more information call the gallery at 274-3018 or contact Jelena Stojanovic, gallery director and assistant professor of art history, at 274-3548.