Art Market Monitor

The Getty museum announced last week in Culture Monster another gift from an LA couple Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser that includes 52 photographs by Manuel Alvarez Bravo bringing the museum’s collection to 247 images:

The Getty said that since 2000, Greenberg and Steinhauser have donated a hundred photographs by Bravo, as well as 61 pictures by Graciela Iturbide, who served a 1960s apprenticeship as Bravo’s assistant. They also have given images by American photographers Eliot Porter, William Eggleston and Carrie Mae Weems to the Getty’s collection of more than 100,000 photographs.

The museum’s pursuit of Bravo’s work began bearing fruit in 1992, when it bought 53 prints from the 1930s and 1940s from an unidentified private collector. Later that year, Bravo became the first living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Getty. He died in 2002, at the age of 100. The gift announced Wednesday includes pictures dating from the 1920s to the 1970s. [...]

Bravo grew up in Mexico City amid the tumult and violence of Mexico’s revolutionary period. He first bought a camera in 1924; starting in 1930, he chronicled the works of Mexico’s great muralists, Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo. Rivera was among those who encouraged Bravo to go out in the countryside and towns and photograph scenes from everyday life, which became his hallmark  — although his work became celebrated for capturing qualities of the hidden and the surreal beneath the apparently ordinary surfaces of the visible world.

Donors Give Getty 52 Images by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mexico’s Leading Photographer (Culture Monster)

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