Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

Getty Acquires Ansel Adams Museum Set from Vernon Family

by

© 2012 The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

The Getty issued a press release today covering the gift of a Ansel Adams’s 25 photograph Museum Set by Carol Vernon and her husband Robert Turbin in memory of Marjorie and Leonard Vernon.

In 1979, near the end of his seven decade career, Adams began to produce what he called “The Museum Set,” a project initiated with the help of Maggi Weston of Weston Gallery in Carmel, California. From over 2,500 of his negatives, Adams selected 75 images, which included photographs from as early as 1923 to as late as 1968. Collectors could purchase a “complete” set of 75 prints, or they could select their own set of 25 that Adams himself would print for purchase.

“The Museum Set” was purchased from Adams by Vernon’s parents, with the understanding that they would one day be donated to a museum. Having been in the same hands since their initial purchase, the photographs are in pristine condition, and greatly enhance the Getty’s existing collection of 40 photographs by Adams.

A large number of the prints feature two locations—Yosemite (nine prints) and the Sierra Nevadas (three prints). The collection also contains two prints from Alaska, three from Northern California, including an image of the “Golden Gate” in San Francisco Bay taken in 1932 before the bridge was constructed, and three from the Southwest, including Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941), which once held the record for the highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction. Although the majority of the prints are landscapes, the set does include two portraits—Georgia O’Keeffe and Orville Cox at the Canyon de Chelly National Monument (1937), and a close up of the face of Jose Clemente Orozco, taken in New York City in 1933.

The Other Lost Ansel Adams Photos

by

The Los Angeles Times homes in on another set of lost Ansel Adams photos that have re-surfaced. These have air-tight documentation:

The 13 pictures by Adams — on display through Friday at the Palos Verdes Library’s Peninsula Centerbuilding — come from 1941, when Chadwick, now a private day school but then a boarding school, hired him to produce its fifth-anniversary promotional catalog, and 1942, when Adams returned to shoot a tennis exhibition at the hilltop campus featuring the great Jack Kramer.Continue Reading

Final Word on Norsigian Negs?

by

Support for the Norsigian negatives being the work of Ansel Adams is rapidly waning this week. The Bay Citizen reported that one of Norsigian’s team of experts has backed off his claims of authenticity. He now says he made a mistake and the Los Angeles Times reports that Norsigian has disclaimer on the prints he is selling via the web:

Robert C. Moeller III, a former curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and one of the experts hired by Rick Norsigian, a California man, to evaluate his find, said that after further review he had decided that at least some of the images Mr. Norsigian purchased were taken by an unheralded photographer, Earl Brooks.

“I made a mistake,” said Mr. Moeller, a former curator of European decorative arts and sculpture at the Boston museum, who was part of the team that in July announced the discovery of what it called Adams’s “lost negatives.” […] “The lowest level of quality of Ansel Adams is well above the lowest level of Norsigian’s images,” Mr. Moeller said. So why did he issue such a definitive statement that Adams was the photographer? “Maybe I kind of wanted them to be Ansel Adams,” he said.Continue Reading

Ansel Adams End Game Ends

by

Rick Norsigian’s campaign to have his trove of negatives recognized as the work of Ansel Adams has finally fizzled. This week the Adams estate sued to prevent Norsigian’s partners from using the photographer’s name and a planned documentary produced by Norsigian’s lawyer has been canceled. Momentum is definitely running against Norsigian and his team. One key misstep appears to have been trumpeting the $200 million figure that has alienated many who were sympathetic to the idea that these negatives were by Ansel Adams.

The Los Angeles Times’s David Ng has the lawsuit covered:

On Monday, the Ansel Adams Publishing Trust sued Norsigian to stop him and the consulting firm PRS Media Partners from using Adams’ name, likeness and trademark to sell prints not authorized by the Trust, according to an Associated Press report. The suit, which was filed in federal court in San Francisco, alleges trademark infringement and other claims. A lawyer for Norsigian told the AP that the suit is without merit and designed to harass his client.

The New York Times picks up the AP’s story on the canceled documentary. Arnold Peter is Norsigian’s lawyer and he had arranged a screening of the documentary at Cal State, Fresno:Continue Reading

Adams Appraiser Has a Past

by

We almost forgot to mention the final piece of evidence to discredit the Norsigian negatives is the Bay Area Citizen‘s report on Friday that the appraiser who claimed the putative Ansel Adams works were worth $200 million is a felon:

court records reveal that Mr. Streets, who set the value for the negatives and is handling the related sales, is a convicted felon with a criminal record for petty theft and fraud in Louisiana and Kentucky. Though he says on his Web site, davidstreetsbeverlyhills.com, that he has 25 years of fine-art appraisal experience, two of Mr. Streets’s former employers say his true talent is in the embellishment of his credentials. Continue Reading

Overblown Claims Hamper Adams Authentication

by

Mike Boehm digs further on the Norsigian negatives and discovers that the embattled owner was encouraged to give the trove to an academic institution so the work could be authenticated free from the profit motive that led one appraiser to claim the trove was worth a small fortune:

Instead, Norsigian went on trying to authenticate the pictures on his own. Eventually he assembled his own team of paid experts — all virtual unknowns in the photography world. Despite their lack of cachet, the report and appraisal Norsigian issued last month made headlines all over the world, because it concluded not only that the 65 glass-plate negatives of Yosemite and coastal California had been taken by Adams in the 1920s and early 1930s but also that they were worth at least $200 million.

Norsigian’s top authenticators, art consultant Robert C. Moeller III and photographer Patrick Alt, respectively described that sum this week as “puzzling” and a “bunch of crap.”Continue Reading

Continuing Saga of "Lost" Ansel Adams Negatives

by

Mike Boehm keeps the story of the Norsigian trove of negatives rolling along with the latest speculation that the images were shot by Earl Brooks, at least that’s what Adams’s former assistants, John Sexton among them, think. But final proof lies in comparing the Norsigian negatives to the known Adams negatives:

In an interview last week, Sexton told The Times that conclusive proof could well lie in the negatives themselves. Because all 44,000 Ansel Adams negatives are archived at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, a physical comparison should be made between Norsigian’s negatives and identically sized glass negatives from the archive — with particular attention to clear spots along the negatives’ borders that invariably were caused by the wooden holders and metal clips used to slot the glass plates into old-time cameras.Continue Reading

Disputed Adams Negs Come to Life

by

NPR’s All Things Considered wraps up the current state of the Ansel Adams controversy in this report and talks to the photographer who has been hired to print from the negatives:

“First of all let me be very clear, I’m agnostic as to who took the photographs. All I’m doing is printing them,” says photographer Jesse Kalisher who was commissioned to make the prints from Norsigian’s negatives. Kalisher’s work is in some major galleries, including Smithsonian museums and the Louvre. Kalisher is kind of the man in the middle; he says he’s already gotten some angry e-mails from Ansel Adams fans.

“They were titled things like, ‘Shame on you,'” he says. They “took me to the woodshed in typically rude terms.”

Kalisher is quick to admit that what he produces will not be Ansel Adams prints. Adams was a master in the darkroom. His art was as much the printing process as taking the picture. Still, Kalisher is thrilled to be working with these images.

“Regardless who created the negatives, they deserve to be preserved for history — and they certainly cry out to be printed,” he says.

[audio:http://www.artmarketmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Ansel-Adams-Negatives-Round-Up.mp3|titles=Ansel Adams Negatives Round Up]

Ansel Adams or Not? The Answer’s Worth Millions (NPR)

Alternative Adams Theories

by

The fun is just beginning with the Ansel Adams trove. CNN finds some alternate theories of who might have taken the images in the trove of negatives. Miriam Walton has an identical print of one of the “discovered” images and says it was taken by her “Uncle Earl:”

  • “I’m looking at the picture that’s hanging on my wall and I knew that Ansel Adams didn’t take them,” Miriam Walton said. “I knew my Uncle Earl took them.” Her uncle was Earl Brooks, an amateur photographer who lived in the Fresno, California, area in the 1920s, the decade experts said the photos were taken. The image that made Walton sit up was of Jeffrey Pine, a much-photographed tree on top of Sentinel Dome at Yosemite, California. Continue Reading

    • Copyright Complicates Adams Trove

    by

    The Los Angeles Times’s Mike Boehm does excellent work moving the Ansel Adams story forward. He interviewed a copyright lawyer who points out that unpublished work is does not fall out of copyright until 70 years after the creator’s death. For Adams, that would be  2054 and mean Norsigian and his partners would have to turn over profits from sales of the previously unpublished Adams images to the estate:

    But in order to make a claim on Norsigian’s earnings from the prints, or to stop their sale, Iser said, Adams’ estate would have to first agree with Norsigian that the 17 pictures he has published so far, out of a cache of 65, are authentic works by Ansel Adams.

    We posed the question to William Turnage, Adams’ former business manager who is managing trustee of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust that administers the copyright for the photographer’s work.Continue Reading

    twitterfacebooksoundcloud
    Privacy Policy
    Terms & Conditions
    Advertise on Art Market Monitor