A fantasy entertained at every museum is to discover in its midst a collection that nobody knew existed.
That fantasy has become reality at the Museum of Science and Industry.
Sixty-five years after the MSI was one of the first public institutions in America to acquire works by professional and amateur photographers, more than 700 images have emerged from storage. None was displayed at the museum since 1960; the majority had not been seen by staff in half a century.
“The interesting thing,” says associate curator Mark Hayward, who in the course of an inventory slowly came across the photographs, “is that they were to be part of a kind of museum within the museum, planned (in the early 1930s) before the building was completed. A 5,000-square-foot permanent exhibit was to include motion pictures, projectors, cameras, prints — everything.
“The idea was that photography was a scientific medium, and we would show all aspects of it. Fine art was just one of those aspects. Yet we ended up with a really incredible fine art collection. A lot of the pieces were by artists who were in the Pictorialist movement and fell out of favor; only now are they being re-evaluated. But there are some big-name modernists, too, like Edward Steichen and Dorothea Lange.”
Hayward say it’s unclear what happened to the project. “When the museum’s west wing was inaugurated in 1937 — the museum opened in stages — the exhibit was not there,” he says. “And we only have one article as evidence that any of the photographs were shown by us.”
The museum does have, however, letters from its director, O.T. Kreusser, to George H. High, chairman of the International Photographic Salon organized for the Century of Progress. As a member of the Chicago Camera Club, High had many connections with photographers beyond the city. Correspondence from 1932 and 1933 shows Kreusser seeking contributions through High for the proposed collection.
Of the 735 photographs shown at the Century of Progress, the museum acquired 309, solely by the photographers’ donation. This was how the collection grew, as there were no funds for purchase. First Kreusser, then the museum’s physics curator, A.A. MacMahon, solicited prints from annual shows sponsored by camera clubs and other organizations.
The Agfa Salon, held in Chicago, yielded several prints by Max Thorek, a world-famous surgeon who also was one of the most widely exhibited photographers of the period. Thorek, who also collected photos, adhered to the soft-focus turn-of-the century style known as Pictorialism, defending it ardently against the more radical achievements of modernism.
The photographs in Thorek’s collection were mainly by Pictorialists such as the Frenchman Pierre Dubreuil and the American Anne Brigman who worked in elaborate processes to give their pictures the “artistic” look of lithographs or paintings. Most of the masterpieces at the museum were among the 143 prints given by Thorek, though his connection to the photography project — and the circumstances of his gift — remains a mystery.
“In the 1930s there was pretty much one game in town, the Art Institute,” says Hayward, “and I can only assume that when it came to collecting photographs, it wasn’t interested. Beginning in 1929, the institute hosted several photographic salons, showing them annually but not acquiring photographs concurrently.
“We have some pictures of the moon from Palomar Observatory. They hung in a salon. So those exhibitions were not just Pictorialist. They were all over the place. That’s what made them interesting. Pictorialism was maybe 50 to 60 percent, but there were also documentary photographs and a lot of other things, many of which came to us.”
The last acquisition came in 1940, the year the museum hired Lennox Lohr, manager of the Century of Progress, as director. He adopted a less academic approach to the museum, bringing in popular attractions such as Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle. One of his first acts was to fire all the curators. With no one left to continue the collection, it went into storage. About 750 pieces had been acquired in six years of extraordinary activity.
Thorek died in 1960, and the museum mounted a show from his collection. Other prints from the holdings, such as a documentary series on the construction of Boulder Dam by Ben Glaha, bear notations that indicate other exhibitions. But no substantiating documents have yet been found.
“Imagination to Image,” an exhibition of 70 of those photographs, will open at the museum on April 9. Contrasting Pictorialist and Modernist photographs, the show will be the first artistic exploration of this remarkable collection since it was formed.
