Current Events - updated March 29, 2009
 

Here we try to keep up on happenings related to
Frederick Sommer (b. September 7, 1905 – d. January 23, 1999). Auction offerings and results we are informed of, exhibits and more if possible. Additional information is posted as it becomes available.

Click for info about the development of a catalogue raisonne


Current & Upcoming exhibits (sorted by closing date) –

RISD Museum of Art
"Presence through Process"
From RISD's announcement, "'The desire to depict the perceptual and physical experience of the human body, rather than merely its appearance, can serve as a catalyst for photographic experimentation.  This exhibit presents works by Emmet Gowin, Vik Muniz, Frederick Sommer, Lesley Dill, and other artists exploring the poetics and politics of the human figure. Featured is a cross-section of photographic processes from the latter half of the 20th century, from camera manipulation to more direct registers of presence."
January 15 - June 20, 2010


Metropolitan Museum of Art
Surface Tension: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection September 15, 2009 – June 13, 2010
A paint on cellophane by Sommer is included


The Exhibition Archive has a running list of past and recent shows.

While the BSG exhibition closed, there were a number of reviews of the show, so the links are being left up for a time. 
Bruce Silverstein Gallery
"Frederick Sommer:
Drawing, Photography, Painting, Collage"
Art News April 2010 review
Fugitive Vision review
New Yorker review 'Chelsea' towards bottom.
"FREDERICK SOMMER...this sprawling, museum-quality survey shows how closely his photography, drawing, painting, and collage work were linked..."
Brooklyn Rail review
DLK Blog review 3 stars (highest) "...first can't miss show of 2010, as it take what we know about one of the masters of the medium and explodes it outward..."
   A 6mb download of the catalog can be found
by clicking PDF here

SMOCA The February 19, 2009, Gallery talk with Claire Carter, Naomi Lyons and Jeremy Cox during the "Callahan, Siskind, Sommer" exhibition SMOCA, available here ~1 hour .wav

Likewise, wall texts and jpeg illustrations from the recent  Sommer School : Art, Education and Frederick Sommer held at Prescott College can be download  here

Other Items:
Recent Blog post with considerate observations
The Compass Rose by Curtis Faville, July 6, 2009

Recent post to the Special Insights Gallery:
Sommer at Sun Valley Idaho 1976

ESSAY by Ian Walker 'As if one's eyelids had been cut away' Frederick Sommer's Arizona Landscapes' is now available on the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (JSA), Vol.2, No.2 (2008) online JSA.  Registration required, Free.

Duke University Libraries posted the Barbaralee Diamonstein interviews from Visions and Images on YouTube...
the Frederick Sommer interview here

David Levi-Strauss has written an article on Frederick Sommer in a recent issue of Aperture (Fall 2006) that is worth reading.


Book Info -
Callahan, Siskind, Sommer - At the Crossroads of American Photography by Britt Salvesen and Keith F. Davis (2009)
                     : Radius Press Book description :
This is a great look at the three artists in parallel along with excellent essays from Keith and Britt - Jeremy Cox


The Art of Frederick Sommer: Photography, Drawing, Collage


This book is widely available with several reviews since the release in May 2005.  Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London (ISBN 0-300-10783-8), for the Frederick & Frances Sommer Foundation.

Winter, 2006 of Photo-Eye Magazine includes an article covering Sommer's publications. Be sure to scroll down to 'old and rare' for another page.

Independent Publishers chose The Art of Frederick Sommer as winner of the Fine Art category in the national competition of books published in 2005 (announced May 2006).

Press release (May 2006) for the ARLIS Wittenborn Memorial Book Awards where the The Art of Frederick Sommer was one of six books recognized for excellence in art publications at the 34th annual conference held this year in Banff, Alberta, Canada.

Golden Light Award Book of the Year 2005,  from the
Maine Photographic Workshops.


MUSIC -



The music from Consent to Gravity
as composed by Christopher Eastburn
is now available on CD from Chris's listing at CD Baby.





To elaborate on the connection, C.E. - "In thinking about writing vocal music for ANY project, a primary question is "What are the words?"   Very fortunately Frederick Sommer left a treasure trove of those, in his writings, poems and lectures.  These contain wonderfully rich lines such as "Ideas and thoughts collide and sort themselves out in these fruitful collisions",  "The Art of Vermeer must have been there on the morning of creation", "Ideas and art are the possibility of an answer tomorrow."  

So how does a text become a song?  In approaching a set of words composers or songwriters often consider the images, meaning and feelings contained within the texts.  Words or passages such as "collide", or "Vermeer", or "morning of creation" can trigger musical ideas or possibilities.   The speech rhythms  of a text also come in to play.  You speak it aloud and listen to the rhythms and inflections.  They can indicate a feeling of meter and melodic shape.   Your concepts and intuitions may start to meld.  What you are doing musically can become consciously and subconsciously interwoven with the feeling of the text.  You may feel in the end that you wrote very little and just listened carefully for the music already there- in this case, the music sounding in Frederick Sommer's brilliant texts." 

'Recent' Auction Results - auction results includes buyer's premium

Currently noted on eBay that sellers are listing -

Recent Online (eBay) auction results -

Upcoming Art Auctions -