UpDate - Vol. 12, No. 30, Page 3
May 6, 1993
Kasebier exhibit; Gallery's photos in Philadelphia display through May 30

     Gertrude Kasebier (1852-1934) was a trailblazer in photography as an
art form from both aesthetic and technical points of view in the early 20th
century.
     Acknowledged as an outstanding artist whose work has withstood the
test of time, she is the subject of an exhibition, Gertrude Kasebier,
Photographer, organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1992 and
now showing at the Alfred Stieglitz Center Gallery of the Philadelphia
Museum of Art until May 30.
     The Philadelphia exhibition was assembled in honor of Women's History
Month in March.
     The current show includes three photographs by Kasebier from the
University Gallery's extensive holding of more than 175 works--the largest
collection of her works owned by a institution, according to Janet Lopez,
assistant curator at the gallery. Kasebier's works are much in demand for
loan to outside exhibitions, Lopez said.
     The photographs on display in Philadelphia are Yoked and Muzzled:
Marriage, showing two recumbent oxen, yoked together in the foreground and
a boy and girl in the background; Thanksgiving: Oceanside, a family
gathering at the table with children sitting at a smaller table in the
foreground; and an untitled photograph from a series of land and seascapes
of Newfoundland.
     The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph by Barbara L. Michaels,
guest curator, who carried out much of her research at the University of
Delaware.
     In 1979, William I. Homer, H. Rodney Sharp Professor and chairperson
of art history, with graduate art history students and in cooperation with
the Delaware Art Museum, arranged an exhibition of Kasebier's photographs.
Homer wrote the accompanying catalog for the show, which later was shown at
the Brooklyn Museum.
     In 1989, the University Gallery had an exhibition of 50 of her works,
organized by undergraduate curator apprentices, and entitled Gertrude
Kasebier: The Veiled Aperture. And in 1990, a Legacy and Light exhibition
featured Kasebier's works, including some on loan from the University, at
the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in conjunction with the Library Company of
Philadelphia.
     The major donor of Kasebier works to the University is her
great-grandson, Mason Turner Jr., a Wilmington attorney and a longtime
friend of Homer.
     Kasebier also had done a series of studies of the Ashcan School of
painters. The widow of John Sloan, one of the artists, donated studies of
her husband to the gallery.
     In addition, the Morris Library has a collection of biographical
memorabilia, family photographs and a portrait sketch of Kasebier by Edward
Steichen, another leading photographer of the day.
     Born in Iowa in 1852, Kasebier moved East with her mother and family
after her father's death. She was married to Eduard Kasebier in 1874, and
the couple had three children. She began taking amateur photographs of her
family.
     In 1889, the family moved to Brooklyn, where Kasebier studied
portraiture at Pratt Institute. It was after this that she discovered,
while accompanying a group of art students to France, that photography was
her calling. After apprenticeships with a German chemist to learn the
technical side of the craft and a New York photographer to learn the
business side, she opened her own successful portrait studio in New York in
1898.
     She met famous photographers, such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward
Steichen, and her work was exhibited in Stieglitz' gallery and in his
prestigious journal, Camera Work, in 1903 and 1905. She achieved commercial
and critical success with exhibits in the states and abroad.
     According to Lopez, Kasebier is known for her ability to convey the
personalities and character of her subjects in her photographs and for her
innovative technology in working with her negatives and prints. She often
manipulated the backgrounds of her portraits with brushwork and achieved
almost "opalescent" effects through her experiments with her photographic
and printing techniques, Lopez said.
     When she died in 1934, her obituary in The New York Times called her
"a pioneer of artistic photography" and a "leader in her profession...for
30  years."
                                        -Sue Swyers Moncure