Visual Resources

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Exhibition as Archive: Beaumont Newhall,

Photography 1839–1937, and the Museum of
Modern Art

Christine Y. Hahn

To cite this article: Christine Y. Hahn (2002) Exhibition as Archive: Beaumont Newhall,
Photography�1839–1937, and the Museum of Modern Art, Visual Resources, 18:2, 145-152, DOI:
10.1080/01973760290011806

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01973760290011806

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Visual Resources, Vol. XVIII, pp. 145152 it Routledge
Ta*&Fca"'#,Grmp

Exhibition as Archive: Beaumont Newhall,

Photography 1839-1937, and the Museum
of Modem ~ r t '
Christine Y. Hahn

Critics have regarded Beaumont Newhall's tenure as the MoMA's curator of photography in the late
1930s as the first manifestation in the Photography Department of a larger problem at the MoMA as a
whole: the attempt to define by fiat a 'modernist aesthetic' in photography as it had in the other arts.
Newhall's first large-scale exhibition, however, belies this interp~tation.Photography: 1839-1937, used
a wide range of images and innovative display shategies to illustrate the entire domain of photography
(X-rays to movie stills) rather than define or promote a high art separate from the popular origins of the
medium. This inclusiveness, I argue, was based on the theories of Alois Riegl, a late nineteenth century
art theorist who eschewed value distinctions between so-called high and low art. By applying Riegl's the-
ories to this seminal exhibition, Newhall re-defined the role of the modem curator to that of an archivist:
one who gathers, but leaves the creation of meaning to the viewer.

Keywords: Newhall, Beaumont; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Photography; Exhibitions;
Museum display; Riegl, Alois

Several of the Museum of Modern Art's photographic exhibitions from the 1960s
onward have been criticized for presentational strategies that place the viewer
inside the proverbial empty white cube and emphasize individual artistic genius.
It is argued that the resulting effect of these display strategies is the predetermina-
tion of a limited photographic aesthetic meant to be appreciated by a select few - the
photography connoisseur or the intellectual elite. Within this type of critique, the
antecedents of these shortcomings of the current Department of Photograph were
seen to be already present in the MoMA's earliest photography exhibitions. Y
Yet analysis of the first major exhibition of photography, Photography 1839-1937
belies the above interpretation (Fig. 1). The exhibition's overwhelming success
was the direct impetus for the establishment of the MoMA's photography depart-
ment 3 years later, the first such department in the country. Photography, which

ISSN 0197-3762 print: ISSN 1477-2809 online (T? 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/01973760290011806
146/ VISUAL RESOURCES

Figure 1 Cover of the exltib~tioil catalog Photography 1839-1937, Introduction by Beaun~o~tf Newhall.
New York: The Museun~of Modern Art, 1937. Offset l~thograplr,prli~ted in black, pnge size: 101/4 x 811
(26 x 20.3cin). The Museum of Modern Art L~brary,The Museunz of Modern Art, New York. (Photograph O
2002, The Museun~of Moderi~Art, Nrui York).

opened in March 1937, was then a sensation both for its novelty and its sheer size.
Curated by Beaumont Newhall, the librarian of the MoMA, the show was the best
attended that year and received considerable attention by both the local and
national press. By opening day, for instance, the New York Titnes had already run
 Exhibition as Arckivell47

five separate mentions of the show and the New York Herald had devoted its lead
editorial to the show's opening. Photography was open at the MoMA for only a
month, standard for those times, but it continued to travel around the country for
another two years, allowing the public in virtually every metropolitan area in the
United States to view the exhibition."
This paper reconstructs MoMA's earliest photographic exhibition with an eye
towards re-evaluating its influence on the attitudes about photography and its dis-
play within the art museum. Analysis of the exhibition catalogue, the objects dis-
played, and the contemporary criticism of the show suggest the following: rather
than define a photographic aesthetic in a narrow, exclusionary sense, Newhall
sought to prevent the exhibition from creating a photographic aesthetic. The empha-
sis instead was placed on what the photography all shared, namely the technology,
refined over time, that was responsible for their production.
In the formation of these guiding principles, I argue that Newhall was strongly
influenced in the concepts and overall layout of the exhibition by the theories of
Alois Riegl, a nineteenth century art historian, and his ideas about non-hierarchical
values of art, i.e., aestheticism without judgement, as well as his theories of social
force driving the evolution of stylistic change. These ideas were both generally
influential in the 1930s, and cited as influences on his curatorial practice by
Newhall directly. Newhall's role as curator thus became to collect, preserve, and
display these manifestations of modern human production. By refusing to explicitly
promote an aesthetic with the photographs he chose to display, Newhall sought to
redefine his role as curator to encompass the work traditionally associated with the
archivist: collecting, preserving, and displaying visual artifacts, but leaving the aes-
thetic evaluation to the viewers.
The exhibition consisted of over 840 images displayed along with an assortment
of photographc equipment, occupying all four floors of the MoMA. Newhall
included all kinds of images rangng from the earliest daguerreotypes to X-ray
images. The photographs came from a variety of "high" and "low" sources, from
rare prints to widely reproduced magazine photographs, advertisements, and
movie stills. He exhibited photographs w h c h were signed and unsigned, scientific
photographs, photographs printed in newspapers, and taken from airplanes.
The catholicity of Newhall's exhibition surprised critics. Lewis Mumford's review
in The New Yorker describes his discomfiture:

. . .what is lacking in the present exhibition is a weighing and assessment of photography in terms of
pure aesthetic merit - such an evaluation as should distinguish a show in an art museum from one
that might be held, say, in the Museum of Science and Industry. In shifting this function of selection
onto the spectator, the Museum seems to me to be unfairly adding to his burden, and to be reducing
its proper sphere of i n f l ~ e n c e . ~

Mumford chides Newhall for his break with the traditional relationship between the
museum and the viewer: the art museum should be responsible for defining a med-
ium's aesthetic. By placing the onus on viewers to decide the merit of what appears
on the art museum's wall, Mumford seems to believe the aesthetic function of an art
museum is lost.
Newhall dearly disagreed with this view. Despite the large amount of material
already presented, Newhall indicates that even more could have been included,
and is careful to account for any elisions. He begins the exhibition catalogue with
148/ VlSUAL RESOURCES

a note that while he tried to include as many photographs as was feasible,omissions

were not based on aesthetic choices but mainly on the unavailability of the work or
lack of exhibition space.5 If Newhall is advancing an aesthetic here, it is an inclusive
one, where the role of an exhibition is to show as many types of photographs, or art
objects, as possible. Such an inclusive aesthetic would tend to flatten out the
incipient differences between so-called high art photography and objects made
for mass consumption. At this juncture, Newhall was not prepared, nor did
he desire to separate the aesthetics of a scientific photograph and a Weston
photograph - each contained an aesthetic component.
Because of Newhall's interest in imagery generated by a range of photographic
practices, the exhibition was organized around the technological developments of
the camera. By walking through the exhibition, viewers were meant to follow the
progress of photographic technology. This effect was created in a number of differ-
ent ways. The visitor entered the exhibition on the ground floor by first passing
through a life-sized camera obscura which projected the upside-down image of
the receptionist working nearby, and placed the viewer directly within the
mechanics of photo-making. As one critic wrote, "After that you emerged as one
who knew, as one prepared for whatever the exhbition might ~ n f o l d . "After
~ pass-
ing through this earliest camera, the viewer emerged into a dimly lit room contain-
ing daguerreotypes in recessed showcases (Fig. 2). The rest of the exhibition was
sorted by the means of production. For instance, there were sections for calotypes,

Figure 2 Installation view of the exhibition "Photography 1839-1937". The Museum of Modem Art, New York.
March 17 through April 18, 1937. (Photograph O 2002, The Museum of Modern Art, New York).
 Exhibition as Archive/ 149

collodion (wet plates), and dry plates; interspersed throughout were examples of
the technology, from box cameras to the latest camera model, used to produce
them. Photographers were placed alphabetically within each sequence. Newhall
found an understanding of technologcal progress to be fundamental to an under-
standing of the development of photography.
Analysis of the exhibition's catalogue and display strategies demonstrates that
this progression, which resulted in the admission of a broad spectrum of photo-
graphic images, was not meant to define a specific value or aesthetic for photogra-
phy. Instead, technological development is seen to evolve in relationship to the
society in which it is used. In this we see the strong influence of the theories of
Alois Riegl, the nineteenth-century art theorist whose thinking so greatly impressed
Newhall.
Newhall's discovery of the work of Riegl is described in his memoir as, "one of
the few times I've discovered an art historian who really affected creative artist^."^
Newhall learned of Riegl during his brief tenure at the Philadelphia Museum, prior
to returning to Harvard for an advanced degree. He recalls getting chastised for
these theories, but writes, "Although I got slapped down at Haward, [Riegl]
remained an inspiration to me. I hope what I learned from [him] is reflected in
my writingw8
Riegl argued that universal laws governed the development of art through
history. One of which is the notion of Kunstwollen, in which "we have a vast
number of works of art, mostly anonymous and undated, but offering us a faithful
image of the.. . spiritual conditions of the time."9 In other words, works of art,
regardless of who created them, embody or reveal the society in which they are
made through their external form. This is enacted from the very start of
Newhall's exhibition catalogue, in which Newhall, step by step, describes the devel-
opment of reproducible images through a societal lens. He writes,

The rise of the bourgeoisie at the end of the eighteenth century created a demand for more pictures.
Wood engraving was revived, and lithography was invented - two methods of reproducing pictures
in great quantities.'0

Newhall continues:

Up to this time portraiture had been limited to the aristocracy; the middle classes now demanded
their portraits at prices which they could afford. To answer this demand, new and cheaper ways
of making portraits were devised where the artist's skill was replaced by an ingenious machine. (p. 14)

Here Newhall equates the earliest replication device, lithography, with the social
and economic demand for new pictures. But the rise in the middle class and
their growing demand for affordable artworks were not the only impetus for the
rise of the reproducible image. Rather tongue-in-cheek, he argues that photography
developed from the untalented aristocrat's desire to improve his poor sketching
technique:

The development of photography was conditioned by another factor than the demand for cheap
portraits: the growth of amateur artists. The accomplished gentleman or gentlewoman of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century was expected to write poetry, play some musical instrument
and sketch. Unfortunately, not all aristocrats were talented, and consequently they welcomed any
150/ VISUAL RESOURCES
mechanical aid.. .probably at no other period were there so many amateur artists, their ineptitude
fostered the development of many kinds of reproductive devices. (p. 27)

Newhall thus states:

Photography was definitely created to compete with manual ways of making pictures. (p. 67)

Newhall expands this theme, attributing further technological developments to

socio-economic change. For instance, while discussing color photography, he writes:
Like so many discoveries it lay dormant until a need for it was felt; the wave of experimentation in all
photographic techniques which followed the Great War brought forth the application of this prin-
ciple as an esthetic [sic] control. (p. 68)

Technological innovation and camera use stemmed, therefore, first from the
demands of the aristocracy and the middle class, educated amateur, and the inter-
ested citizen. At each stage, the camera becomes easier to use and gains more and
more followers. By arranging the exhibition with this in mind, Newhall applies
another of Riegl's universal laws: ". . . the general development of a r t . . . constitutes
constitutes progress and nothing else but progress.""
Riegl did not recognize the hierarchies between high and low art. Every object
was worthy of aesthetic consideration. Christopher Wood writes:

Riegl took no interest in value. He recognized hierarchies among the images and artifacts of the past.
Any shaped object - even a scrap of paper - was subject to formal analysis.. . Riegl sought to disen-
gage art history from the art market, from collecting, from the public's appetite for masterpieces. But
it is important to see that he amved at this position not by repudiating art, but by imposing the idea
of art on ordinary objects.. . I 2

In this sense, Newhall saw photography as the medium which embodies Riegl's the-
ories. Newhall strove to not place a value judgment upon the photographs he exhi-
bits, and, in fact, goes to great lengths to convince his audience of this. Photography,
its presence everywhere in the modem world, used by the ordinary citizen, the
scientist, and the artist, represented for Newhall the ultimate reflection of modem
culture, and by extension, modern popular art.
In addition to his universal laws, Riegl outlines a set of laws which govern the
progress of artistic form over a specific period, or culture. Riegl argues that
within a culture or period, stylistic form will move between a set of oppositions;
for example, from internal to external unity, from the tactile to the optical gaze.'"
In a like manner, Newhall's layout of Photography: 1839-1937 posits the century of
photography exhibited as a specific cultured period. Photography's early years
are aligned with Riegl's notion of the tactile, with its soft focus and blurred
images. This then evolved towards the optical, with a series of rooms with contem-
porary, news, color, and scientific photography, finally ending with the most
modern of optical effects: moving pictures. The viewer moved through an evolution
of vision embodied by the strategies of display: from the stasis of early photography
the exhibition progresses toward the kinetic theatrics of modem photography and
cinema. A reviewer in the New York Herald beautifully captures in words the
visual experience of touring the exhibition:
Mounting from one floor to the next, one comes up through this short hundred years of achievement,
from the first fading but magic successes of Daguerre and Talbot and Bayard, to the marvels of the
 Exlzibition as Archive/ 151
natural-color photography of today. One sees the camera as the technically triumphant instrument of
exact depiction, as a sensitive medium of artistic record, as a device creating new imaginative worlds
out of its own limitations and possibilities, going on to exploit its deliberate distortions of light and
form for their own sake until finally even the camera itself disappears, leaving the abstract "shadow-
graphs" of Man Ray and others.
Simultaneously, one sees it reaching out to report the whole of experience, developing motion,
penetrating to the structure of the atom and of the giant star cluster. One sees it spreading in another
sense, first to books, then to current magazines and newspapers and advertisements and its own pic-
torial theaters until it makes the daily world of the modem man a pictorial world to a degree beyond
anything in human experience.. .I''

This review expresses so much of what Newhall desired to express through this
exhibition: the technological progress of photography, the movement of art and
society as forward progress, the multiplicity and complexity of forms in modern
life. The review continues, however:
. . .We see everything; or rather, we almost see everything. But not quite. What we see is the camera's
report of everything, and that is not quite the same. It expands our world to the limits of the heavens,
but in return it imprisons us within the limits of its own unreality, its flatness, its essential make-
believe. Promising us the universe, it leaves our souls studying a photographic plate, shut u p in a
"dark chamber" from which, without doubt, high values of depth, color and emotional content
have been excluded.

According to the reviewer, the photograph's inextricable dependence on its machin-

ery bars the photograph from transcending the physical world. The photograph,
bound to the mechanics of its making, is unable to surmount the confines of the
body and penetrate the soul, where the reviewer implies, true art resides. For
Newhall, however, society was the motor which drove photography's improvement
through technology, and thus, embodied the human dimension. The exhibition
expressed the powerful idea that photography, with its ease of use, its availability
of imagery, and its continual technical progress, brought the possibilities of art-
making and art-ownership back to the people. As Candida Finkel has rightly
argued, Newhall viewed photography as a medium which brought people closer
to their lived reality by helping people engage with and make sense of their world.15
In closing, I want to return to the Lewis Mumford quote cited at the beginning of
this paper. Mumford chastises Newhall for not acting in the role of the traditional
curator, one who edifies through selection. He accuses him of "shifting this function
of selection onto the spectator." For Newhall, however, the role of the modern cura-
tor was more akin to that of an archivist: one who gathers but leaves the selection
and creation of meaning to the viewers. Newhall envisioned the art museum as the
gathering place of visual objects which reflected the realities and circumstances
of modern living. Social change was the motor which drove photography's
improvement through technology; the museum was to be the reflection of this
changing world. The role of the curator, thus, is to actively display and exhibit
society's changing character. The art museum, in turn, becomes a living archive: a
representation of the world that exists, as diffuse a membrane as possible between
the outside world and the objects it produced, and not a curated canon for the pri-
vate delectation of connoisseurs.
In retrospect, Newhall's urge to archive the art of modern life makes his aesthetic
broader than the almost propagandizing aesthetic displayed at the MoMA under
Edward Steichen's direction during the 50s, and the formal "fine art" photographic
aesthetic of the 60s, 70s, and beyond. Certainly glimmers of the future exist in
152/ VISUAL RESOURCES

Newhall's exhibition, but at this moment in the 1930s, Newhall felt it was possible
to include both of the above aesthetics and others. In hindsight, the task Newhall set
out to accomplish, advancing photography without advancing an aesthetic was ulti-
mately impossible. To place something within an art museum does ultimately
involve judgement. As much as he wanted to deny it, Newhall was still making
decisions about what will go in and what stay out. In the end, Newhall was
forced to begn putting limits on what he chose to exhibit, and in doing so, began
defining an aesthetic for photography.

NOTES

1. This article is based on a paper produced for a graduate seminar at The University of Chicago in
1998 and delivered at the CAA annual meeting in February 2001. As this article was going to press, an
article by Douglas Nickels, "History of Photography: The State of Research" appeared in the Art
Bulletin, Vol. 8 (September 2001). It came out too late to be addressed here.
2. These criticism exist in various forms. Christopher Phillips, "On the Judgment Seat of
Photography", October 22 (1982), 27-63, articulates this view well.
3. In considerable hindsight, Newhall still thought the exhibition important. He writes, "People
often ask me what it is I feel I have achieved. It is always a difficult question for me, since although I
am a historian I do not think in these broad retrospective terms about my own life. However, looking
back, there was enormous enthusiasm about the 1937 exhibition.. . My 1937 exhibition and catalog,
and the founding of the Department of Photography, changed the way people viewed the medium. It
started people looking and collecting, and it started galleries exhibiting photographs.. .". Beaumont
Newhall, Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (New York: Bulfinch Press, 1993), 253. Russell Lynes
takes special note of it in his history of the MoMA, writing: 'The exhibition was a pivotal one. For the
first time in America photography was given the same full dignity in an art museum that had heretofore
been reserved for painting, sculpture, and prints." Russell Lynes, Good Old Modem (New York: Atheneum
Press, 1973, 157).
4. Lewis Mumford, 'The Art Galleries," The New Yorker, 3 April 1937, 40.
5. Newhall, 8.
6. Edward Alden Jewell, 'That Artist the Camera," New York Times, 21 March 1937.
7. Newhall, 38.
8. Newhall, 39.
9. Alois Riegl, Late Ronian Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider, 1985). See
Introduction.
10. Newhall, 13.
11. kegl, Introduction. Riegl's theories were influential to many others in the 1930s. For example,
Alexander Domer used Riegl's theories in his innovative display designs at the Hannover
Landesmuseum. Domer's work at the Hannover Landesmuseum was well known and admired by
those at the MoMA, visited by Alfred Barr and Philip Johnson in the late 1920s. Those familiar with
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and the "New Vision" photography will hear echoes of his influence on the organ-
ization of the exhibition. Indeed, Moholy-Nagy was friends with Newhall and both he and his book
Painting, Photography, Film, are mentioned in the exhibition catalogue. Likewise, these ideas find a corre-
spondence with Walter Benjamin's well-known essay published in 1936, "The Work of Art in the Age of
Reproduction", in Illuminntions, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hanna Arendt, (New York: Schocken Book, 1969).
See Christopher Wood, The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York:
Zone Books, 2000), for a good introduction to this period in art history.
12. Wood, 28.
13. For indepth treatment of kegl's writings, see Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois
Riegl's Theory of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).
14. New York Herald Tribune, Friday, 19 March 1937.
15. Candida Finkel, "Photography as Modem Art: The Influence of Nathan Lyons and John
Szarkowski on the Public's Acceptance of Photography as Fine Art," Exposure, Vol. I S 1 9 (198C-1981).