Carlotta Corpron lived her life in the American heartland, far from the bastions of culture in New York or Paris. But in the mid–20th century, she managed to cross paths with some of the most influential names in the avant-garde of the time, bringing the rigor and simplicity of the Bauhaus to small-town Texas. Alfred Stieglitz, whom she met in New York, offered her encouragement for her abstract prints. She worked as László Moholy-Nagy’s assistant for a time, and Hungarian photographer György Kepes became a kind of mentor.
But Carlotta Corpron never reached their international fame. Even among enthusiasts of 20th-century photography, she has remained obscure. Now, Corpron is having her moment, with a major new exhibition devoted to her life and work at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.
“Carlotta Corpron: Light Is a Plastic Medium,” on view through March 14, 2027, surveys the six bodies of work Corpron made while living and working in Texas from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. The exhibition centers on 48 prints by Corpron given to the museum by late collector Herbert Lust, as part of a broader series of photography gifts made between 2019 and 2023. Lust believed Corpron was a major talent in avant-garde photography and hoped that the museum might raise her profile.
Hirshhorn curator Betsy Johnson, who organized the exhibition, said she was unfamiliar with Corpron’s work before the gift. However, she was immediately captivated by the quality of her photographs, which use light as a tool to create daring abstract forms.
“We saw the work and immediately fell in love with it too,” Johnson said during a recent conversation. “It was incredibly strong, incredibly beautiful work. The vision is something you feel immediately.”
Corpron’s early life
Born in Blue Earth, Minnesota, in 1901, Corpron moved to India at four, where her father worked as a missionary surgeon. She later credited the loneliness of her Himalaya mountain boarding school there with strengthening her independence. In 1920, she returned to the United States, studying art education in Michigan, and earned a master’s degree at Columbia’s Teachers College in 1926. “From the early days, my mother encouraged me to think in terms of a career instead of marrying,” she later said. “I never married, and I never wanted to. I was liberated long before the women’s movement.”
She would take teaching positions in Michigan, Alabama, and Ohio. In 1933, while working in Cincinnati, she bought a Rolleiflex camera. She hoped to photograph plants and flowers as inspiration for her students’ textile design, but she quickly began using it as a medium in its own right. Her first series, “Nature Studies,” which she started in 1933, evinced her interest in light, with photographs of sunlight falling through Venetian blinds across flowers or clouds pictured through shadowy angles.
Corpron’s Bauhaus influences
In 1935, Corpron moved to Denton, Texas, to teach at what was then Texas State College for Women. She had taken a summer photography course in Los Angeles but found it stultifying, with assignments to photograph landmarks such as bridges and courthouses. In 1940, she took the Rolleiflex to the Denton fairgrounds at night and moved the camera while the shutter was open. The swooping lines of carnival lights became her “Light Drawings.”
In the summer of 1942, Moholy-Nagy was invited to teach a light workshop in Denton, and Corpron, who was inspired by his approaches, worked as his assistant, teaching students to make photograms and paper light modulators. Yet she felt that Moholy-Nagy didn’t see her as a truly experimental photographer. “He didn’t understand my need, my desperate need to work and to do something original in photography,” Corpron later recalled.
Two years later, György Kepes spent a year in Denton finishing his book Language of Vision. Corpron sought him out as a mentor, and he agreed to meet with her weekly, urging her to keep pushing her work “until I photographed light instead of paper.” In 1945, Corpron traveled to New York to show Stieglitz her portfolio, who said the work opened “a new world.” Stieglitz died the next year, but Georgia O’Keeffe returned the prints to Corpron with a note that read, “He would want you to go on.”
Sculpting with light
In the mid-1940s through 1950, Corpron reached the height of her productivity with her “Space Compositions” series of eggs, shells, and marbles against mirrored trays and curved reflectors that distorted their forms. She preferred the morning light, working before 7 a.m., or in a small darkroom lit by a single 40-watt bulb, exposing these arrangements for a minute or two. “I didn’t plan to do anything but let the light guide me,” she said of these works. “It was more or less an exploration into the unknown.”
Her “Fluid Light Designs” series took these experiments further. She bent and creased transparent plastic sheets so light scattered across them. As Johnson writes in her catalogue essay, with the camera steady she finally captured light’s movement directly on the negative. In a 1962 article, Corpron summed up her approach, writing, “Light is a plastic medium capable of creating abstract designs of extraordinary beauty and interest.”
The legacy of Carlotta Corpron
While Corpron offered powerful photographic force, her career was unfortunately short-lived. She met with recognition in her lifetime with a solo show at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1948. Her work also appeared in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Abstraction in Photography” exhibition in 1951.
However, even by the artist’s own account, most of her best work dates from 1945 to 1952. By 1955, she could no longer work in darkrooms due to illness. “She just doesn’t have the longevity," she said of her fall into obscurity. Her distance from the art world’s major centers quickened her fade to obscurity, though in 1975, she was included in a survey of women photographers at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, followed by a retrospective at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in 1980.
Still, the exhibition argues, Corpron’s influence endured through the work of her students, including photographers Ida Lansky and Barbara Maples, whose works are described as Texas Bauhaus. “Her students were her creative community,” said Johnson. She also sees Corpron’s work as speaking to ideas that other artists picked up 20 years later. “I think a lot about her work as prefiguring later Light and Space artists like James Turrell and Robert Irwin,” said Johnson.
Johnson hopes the exhibition, which is accompanied by a catalogue, will bring new attention to Corpron’s career.
“The power of following one’s vision and interests is really present in this show,” said Johnson. “In this day and age, her work offers an appreciation for curiosity, for where it can lead a person, how it can be a driving force and an organizing factor in a life.”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/XozaRSw
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