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Getty Acquires Ansel Adams Museum Set from Vernon Family

March 5, 2012 by Marion Maneker

© 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

January 19, 2011 by Marion Maneker

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?

September 2, 2010 by Marion Maneker

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

August 27, 2010 by Marion Maneker

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

August 17, 2010 by Marion Maneker

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

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