“Masterpieces from the Howard Greenberg Collection,” photographs from the private collection of Howard Greenberg, owner of New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery, one of the most prestigious photography galleries in the world, are on exhibition at the Joods Historisch Museum / Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. Greenberg has been a leader in the modern photography market, establishing himself early on as one of the pillars of the New York photography scene for over three decades.
This extraordinary exhibition originated at the Musée de l’Elysée Photography Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland to critical acclaim. It was followed with great success at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris (jointly produced by both) and then traveled to the Hungarian House of Photography in the Mai Manó House in Budapest, bringing us up to the current show at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam until January 11, 2015.
From the original press release: “Howard Greenberg Collection focuses on the development of the modern history of photography as it grew and finally became recognized as its own genre in the fine arts. The exhibition traces the development of modernity with work from early in the 20th century by Edward Steichen and Edward Weston to the Czech photographers František Drtikol and Josef Sudek. The architecture and urban life of New York City provides the context for a number of images from 1910 to the 1970s by Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Bruce Davidson, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, William Klein, Saul Leiter, Helen Levitt, Weegee, and Garry Winogrand. An important section of the exhibition is dedicated to images that photographers Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange shot for the Farm Security Administration as witnesses to the Great Depression.”
I sat down with Greenberg last week in the gallery’s kitchen. He very generously shared a rare behind the scenes look into the making of these exhibitions and some of the extraordinary events surrounding his acquisition of certain photographs over the course of the last thirty years.
Elizabeth Avedon: How did your personal collection begin; were you aware you were creating a ‘collection’?
Howard Greenberg: I’m a collector by genetic make-up. I was one of those kids that collected everything in sight; stamps, coins, baseball cards, anything that I liked I collected. I was just always that way. When I decided in 1980 at 32 years old that I was going to try and have a photography gallery and sell photographs to make a living – that this was what I was going to do with the rest of my life – at the same time I used to say, “Besides I can’t afford to be a collector, but this is a way I can have a lot of great photographs around all the time.” The instinct was there from day one.
I had some photographs I traded with other photographers. I talk about the Karl Struss photograph as the icebreaker, a pictorial work from 1910 of New York, it was the first one that really meant I could actually go out and collect photographs as a gallerist, but you might say the real first photograph I collected was a picture by Jerry Uelsmann. When I took a workshop with Jerry in 1972, we traded. I gave him 2 boxes of cigars and he gave me a signed print of “Apocalypse II,” which at the time was one of my favorite photographs. That was the first photograph of any value or significance that I quote “collected.” So you can go back that far really. It was 15 years later when I bought the Karl Struss photograph, which is in the collection. That was the real break through. I already had probably a hundred prints at home by that time, but they were just odds and ends.
EA: You started out as a photographer after college. How has that influenced your outlook on photography or on the prints you’re looking for?
HG: It was entirely an integral part of it because I was a darkroom printer. In 1976, I was doing a project called The Photographic History of Woodstock. I had a $1,500.00 grant from the ‘America The Beautiful Fund’ upon the 1976 Bicentennial. While I was doing this show and the research for my newly beloved town of Woodstock, I was shown the photographs of Eva Watson Schutze. Eva Watson Schutze was in the Photo-Secession; she was published in Camera Work. She made these beautiful platinum prints typical of what people were doing in the Photo-Secession. I was blown away. I had never seen anything so thoroughly beautiful. I didn’t get over it. So what struck me was in the History of Photography there were materials available and prints made that were entirely different than anything I could do and more beautiful than just the standard silver print.
That was kind of a kick-start for me to investigate the History of Photography and Woodstock was a great place to do it. There had been lots of photographers, famous photographers, who either passed through or who were friends and neighbors of people living in Woodstock. Alfred Stieglitz had a first cousin in Woodstock. Russell Lee lived in Woodstock. Eventually I found 500 of his prints and Dorothea Lange’s prints with his first wife. So I could make great discoveries there really early on, even before these things had much value. I just kept diving deeper and deeper into photographic history. I loved vintage photography. I loved old photography and I learned a lot about it quickly because I was so passionate.
EA: When you are looking at a print now, what are you looking for when acquiring it?
HG: I can only describe it in one work – magic. Wonderful prints have a certain magic. Much of the time in my collection it’s the actual print itself, the unusual beauty of the print. But a lot of times it’s the uniqueness of the print; its format, its history, it’s life, so to speak. Another thing that’s really an integral part of my collection is the special nature of that print; and sometimes the special nature is not just the print quality, it’s the story of that print, and they all have stories.
EA: How did the opportunity to exhibit your collection in Europe originally come about?
HG: Sam Stourdzé is an old friend. He had just arrived in Lausanne as the new Director at Musée de l’Elysée. It was his first visit since he had gotten the job. He was a brilliant independent French curator ten or fifteen years ago and did shows on Dorothea Lange, Brassai and others. I worked with him several times on projects, including a book and a traveling show on Leon Levinstein whose archive I now own. He’s young, only like 41, but he started brilliantly independently curating exhibitions when he was in his mid-20’s. We had a long really successful history working together and becoming friends. So we’re chatting. He’s sitting here (in the kitchen of the Gallery) and I ask him, “What are you going to do? What are your plans?” He said, “It would be interesting to try and show some private collections.” I said, “Hey, Sam, I have a collection at home.” With all our history together he had no idea because I don’t talk about my photographs at home, it’s not something I think to talk about with people. He said, “Why don’t you send me a disk of what’s in your collection?” It took me a long time to get it all together but six months later I sent him a disk and he responded, “We love it. I’d love to show it.”
EA: How did the editing process work?
HG: He and Anne Lacoste, chief curator at Musée de l’Elysée, came from Switzerland up to my house in New York to make the final decision. Anne had just spent six or seven years as curator at the Getty. I had prepared for them by taking everything out of the frames and they spent two full days looking at everything. That got them really excited and they started going through the process of what they were going to show. I said to them, “This is your show, it’s not my show, so I’m not going to interfere with your editing process. You want my opinion, you want me to tell you stories that might help you decide on this or that, I’m available. But if I curate, edit or micromanage what you are doing it’s not going to work- so it’s yours.” And I stuck to that. I encouraged them on this one and that one and I may have said some things to change their minds about one or two, but essentially it was their choice.
They went more towards what their audience was going to love, the better-known pictures and the more famous photographers I had in the collection. Not the purely personal pictures, good but insignificant pictures about music or kids I collected when my children were young and because I’m a music freak. It’s mostly American and New York centric, but they spread it out as much as they could and showed a heavier balance of crowd pleasers than I might have shown.
EA: What was the experience like in Lausanne when you saw your collection exhibited for the very first time?
HG: My first experience was walking from the hotel to the museum. It was less than a mile walk and on the way there were big posters on bus stops and all over. They used the portrait of Nahui Olín by Edward Weston, the same one as on the cover of the book (Steidl, 2014). These posters were gigunda – very large – and they said “HOWARD GREENBERG COLLECTION.” That was my first impression. It was pretty overwhelming, like “Wow, this is amazing!”
So I walk into the building I’d been there before, and the first thing I saw that I liked was how the show ran through several rooms, each room and the sequencing was more or less the way I might do it. I wasn’t surprised because I have known Sam Stourdzé for many years primarily as a curator and I know Anne Lacoste and I felt that between them they understood the collection and they would do a good hanging and indeed they did.
If you want something critical, the one thing I’ll tell you is that – and this is really nobody’s fault because this would have taken a lot more money and a lot more time to do perfectly – but every picture in the show was matted into the edge of the picture, nothing was floated so you could see a mount if it was on a mount, so you could see the object quality, and I don’t do it that way. They also used the same frame on every picture. When you are hanging 130, 140 pictures it is understandable, a practical concern, but the net effect of all that was reducing each picture to just seeing the image and the print, but not seeing the entire personality of each image and each print. I realize that is something the public probably wouldn’t notice or think about, but for me it was something I had to accept. That was my only criticism and it wasn’t a severe one.
EA: You’ve now had four exhibitions of this collection. How did they differ or the experiences differ for you?
HG: Each venue was very much different from the next. My hopes and expectations for each one varied accordingly. I enjoyed the installation in Budapest but truth be told I didn’t expect much from it. I thought it would be nice for the local community to have it up there and see it. Even though Budapest is a beautiful city and a great place to go as a tourist, the show just wouldn’t have nearly as many visitors as it had in Paris, for instance.
In Paris, the Cartier-Bresson Foundation gallery is a difficult space. The venue is great, thousands of people go to see the shows there, but the space is difficult to hang an exhibition in and such was the case with my show. Agnès Sire, Director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, did a brilliant job organizing and grouping the show. The collection looked different in Paris than it looked in Lausanne, and than it looked in Budapest.
One thing about the Paris show, because its such a tight venue, the space is small, people were able to naturally get closer to the prints and to the images. I think the impact of each picture was probably greatest in Paris, even more so than Lausanne, where you saw them one at a time in a really well organized manner. I think as a viewer the impact may have been greater in Paris. Also there were fewer pictures. Even though there were pictures I would have loved seeing on the walls, sometimes less is more. You can stay with it more easily.
EA: Who made that choice in editing?
HG: Agnes did and then I came in and we further edited a little. We made some changes when I got to Paris before the opening.
EA: Did you change that in the further shows?
HG: Not until this most recent installation and it was only changed for some pictures. That’s because some of the photographs that had not been on display in Budapest were sent back to me. In comparison, Paris and Budapest were smaller venues, they hung about 100 or 110 photographs and I had sent over more than Lausanne originally hung, so there were 40 or 50 pictures not in frames ready to go to Amsterdam. Those were sent back to me here. When Bernadette van Woerkom, Curator of Photography at Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam came to New York to talk with me, I showed her those loose prints. She understood that the show could be bigger and better if she used some of these prints that she had seen here in New York. Those that we sent back for the show, she matted in the way that I preferred and she preferred which was, if they were mounted, to open it up to show the boards, to show the signature, just to give them a little more breathing room, to let the personality of the object show through. So there were some in the Amsterdam show that were done that way.
EA: I saw in your photographs of the exhibition in the Amsterdam show you had images divided by The New York School / Humanist Photography, or grouped by the photographer’s name as the wall title, which I thought was brilliant. Did you do that in each venue?
HG: No, not at all. The gallery in Amsterdam is quite a nice gallery, it’s not very large, but it’s nice the way it’s shaped, but it’s a gallery that they have to build a lot of interior walls to get a lot of pictures on. They kept the construction of the gallery as it was for the previous Roman Vishniac show and decided they could make it work for my show. In trying to organize the exhibition uniquely and their perception of what the show was, it seemed to make sense to make these groupings. The groupings were not necessarily by photographer or not necessarily by genre, but certain photographers made good groupings, so they kind of wove that in and out of the installation. It worked well and they were able to get about 150 prints up in a smaller venue than Lausanne.
EA: How many images do you think are in your personal collection all together, whether shown or not?
HG: I always thought there were about 300, although I hadn’t counted them. After Sam Stourdzé spent two days at my house and went through every single picture, he informed me there were closer to 500 pictures that he looked at. I was rather shocked; I still don’t quite believe it – so something close to 500.
EA: Have you added to your personal collection since exhibiting or put a halt on it?
HG: That’s a really good question. It was a real milestone. Truth be told is I have kind of put a halt on it. My collecting has never been a well thought out idea; it evolved organically. Now, since the show went up, my desire to continue at the pace I’ve been doing it for the last 10 or so years has really dwindled. This is a real pause moment: here’s what you’ve done; what does it mean; how do you feel about it; and what are you going to do going forward?
It’s given me pause and I haven’t had the desire to go out and add more pictures to the collection. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know if I’m done with it, or the next 20 pictures I fall in love with I take home or not.
I can’t say it’s been a total zero though. Since the show went up, I bought a couple of pictures I loved that really meant something to me. Another Saul Leiter, one of the pictures in the current “Saul Leiter” show. It’s a picture I really, really loved when I first saw it. I had it in my first show 20 years ago and I sold it to clients of mine that lived over by MoMA. I used to visit it from time to time because they remained friends and clients for several years. I just loved that piece and it was the only print of it.
When organizing Saul’s apartment recently, we found another almost identical twin to it. It’s a picture of a young boy looking out the window; there are kind of reflections of draperies and stuff. There are millions of pictures of people looking out windows, Leon Levinstein did so many great ones and other people did great ones. There’s something about that picture and the print. For me, it’s got this haunting quality and it’s very Saul in its sensitivity. I wasn’t even going to buy it but both Margit and Karen know how much that meant to me and they encouraged me. “No, you should have it. You should have it, you always wanted it.” But it took that much to get me to add it to the collection.
EA: What are the music photographs you’ve talked about collecting? Are they jazz musicians, what period of work?
HG: When I was a photographer, I had the great fortune in the mid 70’s to early 80’s to become the house photographer at The Joyous Lake, which was the music club in Woodstock. There were so many great people playing at The Lake. I was very interested personally in trying to make photographs of the musicians. I wasn’t aware of Roy DeCarava’s ‘The Sound I Saw,’ but that’s more or less the kind of photography I was doing. All kinds of people passed through there. Everyone. Blues, folk, rock bands, punk, jazz, everyone played at this place and it was a small club, the stage was just this high, so I had a good time photographing them. That’s one part of it. I grew up in Brooklyn with Doo-wop. I learned and I know a lot about ‘black’ music, for lack of a better description. It’s part of my life. So there’s certain jazz photographs I have; a couple of Eugene Smith’s Loft photographs in my collection. I have a Bob Willoughby, it’s a great picture of a saxophonist kind of leaning down in front of the stage with some ‘50’s teenagers around going, “Go man. Go!” I have a wonderful picture of Ray Charles in the Studio by Carole Reiff. Most of the images are sometimes published, but they’re not known.
I have spoken about it in my various talks at the show in Amsterdam. One picture in that show is a Russell Lee photograph taken in Louisiana in 1938. It’s an 11×14” warm-tone matte print, which is unusual. When I bought all of his work from his first wife, there was a special set of 60 prints in that format. He sent back his negatives from Louisiana and this printer who was a friend of Russell’s loved the work so much that he made these special prints to give him when he came back to Washington – and I wound up with all of them. The one I kept was of two guys, two black dudes in the back of some kind of a car. One of them is holding an accordion, he’s wearing sun glasses at night, and the guys hanging out with him they’re looking a little raunchy and a little stoned. You know what’s happening, but it’s about music. It’s just about music. I explain to people, if that guy wasn’t holding an instrument, it might have been a really cool picture, but I don’t think I would have wanted to keep it. I love that intersection of music and photography where it’s about the music.
EA: When you say that those set of prints were unique, do you mean because of the large print size for that time?
HG: You don’t often find FSA (Federally sponsored Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression in 1936) photographs that size on good paper. At various times in the gallery I’ve had exhibition prints the FSA would send out, sometimes they made larger prints and mounted on good paper, so it wasn’t totally rare, but you just didn’t see it very much.
EA: You’ve spoken in the past about also collecting sports images.
HG: I grew up playing sports, especially baseball. I would never think of myself as a sports photography collector. I don’t have many but I have a couple. This was also a conversation in Amsterdam.
I’ve had access to every Irving Penn photograph ever made and I love so many of them, but I never wound up with one for my collection. That’s partially because they were always available and I didn’t find that one special print. I mean I have a couple of Penn’s in my collection. But one day, Peter MacGill did a Penn show and his announcement came in the mail with this photograph I’d never seen before of an umpire in a baseball game. It’s just the umpire in some kind of a silly pose where his body, all in black, is silhouetted somewhat against the light of field. It’s just this great body-gesture pose that becomes calligraphic and somewhat abstract. I loved it and bought it. It’s a small silver print. I don’t think anybody would ever guess it’s by Irving Penn, but it’s the coolest photograph. It’s not that it was about baseball or the umpire, but again it was the convergence of sports with great photography.
I keep emphasizing the fact of my collection being so personal and one of the reasons I do it, and why this is important, hopefully it’s inspirational to other people to collect photographs, art that’s about their own lives, their own interests, their own experiences, because then it becomes meaningful. Just like my gallery is warm and inviting, the anti-white-box gallery, my idea of what people should buy is the same way. It’s not about what they see in a textbook or what they see on their friend’s walls, it really should be about themselves. I’ve gotten into that aspect of my collection as being educational, and hopefully inspirational. That it means something to people who ask the questions of themselves, “what should I buy and why?”
EA: For the 25th anniversary of the Howard Greenberg Gallery, you put together a beautiful book, “An American Gallery, Twenty-Five Years of Photography” (Lumiere Press, 2007). How did that book come about?
HG: I guess like most of us I wanted to do my 25th anniversary book, it seemed to be a milestone. I thought about it for a few years. I think the book actually came out on my 27th year. Because I represent a lot of people, a lot of estates, and I have a lot of friends, I didn’t want to do a book and a show about my gallery and offend anybody because I didn’t include them. And also I didn’t want to do a big tome with everything I’d done all these years because that would be unwieldy. So finally I had this notion that I would just exhibit and publish 25 pictures from my collection that really speak of what it’s all been about, the pictures that meant a lot to me personally. I flushed out that idea with Michael Torosian who owns Lumiere Press out of Toronto. I’d been collecting Michael’s books for years because they are completely handmade; they’re small, they’re precious, and they are perfect and full of love and incredible craftsmanship. Michael is brilliant and we worked well together on other projects before. He took it up as a challenge because he had never done a book with 25 reproductions in it. Usually he tips-in 6 or 8 plates, but this was going to be 25 plates. So he took it on as a challenge to expand what he was capable of doing.
He really made it happen. I’m such a procrastinator; months went by while he was waiting for me to write a page about each picture. I got two done; I was losing sleep about how long this was taking me. Finally Michael had the brilliant idea to invite me up to Toronto to sit in his kitchen, drink coffee and he would interview me. He taped my thoughts on each photograph and then transcribed what I said. I was blown away, not only did he get it right, it still sounded like my voice, but he cleaned it up beautifully! Then we had our book. It was really a wonderful process.
EA: How many of those 25 in the book are in the Amsterdam show?
HG: I think the majority of the pictures in that book are in the show.
By the way, one of the really wonderful things about the venue in Amsterdam was the curator Bernadette read the book on the plane going back after we met for our first talk. She thought it would be wonderful to have some of those pages reproduced in the exhibition with some of those photographs. Throughout the show on a low pedestal, you have the page about that photograph reproduced in Dutch and English. It added so much context to the show. I love that she did that.
Two other things she did. One was they had a vitrine that ran through the space with my gallery publications within. And the last thing they did was create a little room where you can sit and watch a video of a talk I once gave years ago about my collection. So during the show, as you walk around, you hear me talking about different pictures. It became a more personal experience; it was more about my collecting. The pictures are great, but it’s not the full measure of the experience. Giving those pictures context really gives them more meaning.
EA: Is there any image in your collection you are most proud of acquiring?
HG: I’m a little stuck on the word proud. It’s a good question, but I’m trying to understand where pride comes into it with any of the pictures. I don’t know if this answers your question, but there are pictures in the collection that have turned out to be wonderful surprises, pictures that I bought not knowing the full significance of them. I’ll give you one example. I don’t know if I’m proud of it, but I love the fact of it and have some pride about it.
I was able to buy a couple of small Cartier-Bresson prints from Joanna Steichen. They had been with lots of prints that were basically thrown in a box of things Steichen had laying around. Two of them were printed on a kind of wonderful early matte finish paper and one of them was more of a press print type paper. They were old and they were small. Two of the images I knew pretty well, one of them I didn’t know. I didn’t know I was going to keep it right away, but close to when I bought it there was one of them I said I have to hang onto it. Why? Because I love the image; two, because it’s a beautiful little print; and three because I never saw a print in this size that was such a beautiful finished print. I love small pictures, I love uniqueness, a lot of what I have is unique in one way or another, so I decided to hang onto it. It’s called, Madrid, Spain, 1933. They are maybe 3” x 5”, maybe even smaller than that.
One day, not that many years ago, I was having a show of Cartier-Bresson’s here in the small gallery, and I decided to bring in that and one or two other pictures from my collection to include in the show, just to make the show better even though they were not for sale – strongly NOT for sale. So I had this picture up and Martine Franck came in. Martine was a good friend; I represented her, and of course she was the wife of Cartier-Bresson.
Martine was looking at it. She talked about a couple of things and one was that the print which was definitely from his scrapbook. I told her the story about it and she said what probably happened was the prints fell out of the scrapbook, because they weren’t always pasted in so well, and Henri probably just gave them to Steichen or maybe they were left behind by accident, but that’s how Steichen wound up with them…. and they ended up in the exhibition at the Cartier-Bresson Foundation.
But that wasn’t the great surprise. The great surprise was when she said to me, “ I have to tell you, I think this was the first time he ever printed this negative.” She said she was going to check. And then she wrote me an email, which I have on the back of the frame of the print, that it was indeed the first print he ever made of that picture! How cool is that, right?
I have the first print of one of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s greatest pictures ever, and it’s a wonderful little print on beautiful paper, and went through the hands of Edward Steichen. How much more could you want?
EXHIBITION
Masterpieces from the Howard Greenberg Collection
Through January 11, 2015
Joods Historisch Museum/ Jewish Historical Museum
Amsterdam
http://www.howardgreenberg.com
http://www.joodscultureelkwartier.nl/en
http://www.jhm.nl/current/exhibitions/masterpieces-from-the-howard-greenberg-collection
