Art Museum acquires trove of photographs by Paul Strand

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has acquired more than 3,000 photographic images by the pioneering modernist Paul Strand, catapulting the museum into the front ranks of worldwide photography meccas, and creating the greatest single repository of Strand's work anywhere.

The acquisition, made through gifts and a purchase agreement with the New York-based Aperture Foundation, is expected to be announced Thursday.

"It's a landmark in terms of our holdings of photography," said Timothy Rub, museum director. "It makes the Philadelphia Museum of Art the go-to place for the study of Strand."

The Strand works will add "richness, depth, and texture to our collection of modern photography to an extent that no other acquisition has," Rub said. "That has to do with Strand's greatness."

Strand was born in 1890 in New York, studied with Lewis Hine, worked with Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Charles Sheeler, and other giants of early modernist photography, and died in France in 1976. He was a committed socialist, which for a time was reflected in his work, and led him to leave the United States for Europe in 1951 in disgust with what he viewed as growing American anticommunist hysteria.

There are three parts to the acquisition. First, the museum has received 1,422 images from the Paul Strand Archive at Aperture, thanks to funding from philanthropists Lynne and Harold Honickman, Marjorie and Jeffrey Honickman, and H.F. "Gerry" and Marguerite Lenfest; an additional 566 master prints made from Strand's negatives by the artist Richard Benson came by the same route.

Simultaneously, the museum has entered into an agreement with Aperture to purchase an additional 1,276 photographs.

Museum officials declined to disclose the cost of the acquisition, citing museum policy, but it is believed that the price extended well into seven figures, if not higher.

An excited Lynne Honickman said she and her husband, both deeply interested in photography, believed the Strand body of work should be held together.

"We both feel it needs to be in a place where it is well cared for and studied," she said. The possibility that Strand's work might ultimately wind up in different institutions was "bloodcurdling," she added.

"Paul Strand was one of the first great modernists," she said. "The body of his work is not only together, but it has been maintained fastidiously. It's in exquisite condition."

Juan Garcia de Oteyza, Aperture's former executive director who shepherded the Strand images through the latter stages of the six or seven years of negotiations with the museum, noted that Aperture was "not really a collecting institution" and lacked exhibition space to display the images.

"It really doesn't make sense for Aperture to hold on to the work," he said. "We're really very, very pleased. This is much better than if we placed works in many museums."

The Art Museum has had a long association with Aperture, as well as with Strand's creative work, thanks to the efforts of Michael Hoffman, the museum's longtime adjunct curator of photography and Aperture director.

Hoffman, who died in 2001, knew Strand well, formed the photographer's archive, and organized the museum's landmark 1971 Strand retrospective, the first anywhere since 1945. In 1972, the artist gave the museum one of his most important early platinum prints, City Hall Park, New York (1915), along with six other works, and the museum purchased 10 other prints. These acquisitions were followed by purchases in 1974 and by gifts from Strand's widow, Hazel, in 1977 and 1978.

In 1980, the artist's estate gave the museum the entire contents of his retrospective exhibition - 497 prints, including a group of seven of his early exhibition platinum prints, among them the iconic images Wall Street (1915), Man in a Derby (1916), and Telegraph Poles, Texas (1915).

With the new acquisition, the museum is now custodian of about 4,000 Strand images. All of the newly acquired images are at the museum and are being studied in preparation for a major Strand exhibition scheduled for 2014, museum officials said.

Peter Barberie, museum curator of photography, described the acquisition as a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Strand, he said, "helped define the vocabulary of 20th-century photography and what it would be about."

Within the museum's holdings, Barberie said, were works covering every aspect of Strand's career across seven decades - from his early soft-focus images, through harder, socially significant street portraits, and on into abstraction and studies of landscape and place.

The sweep of the Strand holdings, he said, includes prints from the majority of his negatives, including most known variants and croppings of individual images. The museum is now also able to keep together prints made from a single negative using different processes, at different times, and with different papers.

"Between our publishing [program], our study room, and our exhibitions, I think they're going to have a great life here," Barberie said.