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MFA Boston to Celebrate Robert Frank Centennial
14 August 2024
On the centennial of Robert Frank's birth, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, will exhibit the personal scrapbook he made for his first wife, titled_ Mary's Book_.
Mary's Book. Spread from 'Mary’s Book' (1949) by Robert Frank. Illustrated book with gelatin silver prints. Gift of the Howard Greenberg Gallery.
Created in 1949 for Mary Lockspeiser, the album consists of 74 small photographs with Frank's written inscriptions.He muses on the chairs and streets of Paris with messages interspersed for Mary.
This one-of-a-kind, handmade album represents a formative moment in Frank's career as he experimented with juxtaposed text and images. Robert Frank: Mary's Book also includes a selection of spreads from the scrapbook in the Museum's collection as well as photographs Frank took in Paris, on loan from the artist's foundation.
A publication based on the exhibition will be published early in 2025, written by Kristen Gresh, the MFA's Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs and Stuart Alexander, a Robert Frank scholar. This is the first time Mary's Book will be fully reproduced.
The exhibition opens Dec. 21 and closes on June 22, 2025.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Celebrates Robert Frank Centennial with New Exhibition and Publication
BOSTON -- This December, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, celebrates the centennial of photographer Robert Frank's birth with an exhibition featuring the personal scrapbook he made for his first wife, titled Mary's Book. Created in 1949 for Mary Lockspeiser, the album consists of 74 small photographs with Frank's written inscriptions. They reveal his appreciation for the poetic resonance of objects and spaces. Many of the photographs are devoid of people, although their presence is felt everywhere. He muses on the chairs and streets of Paris with messages interspersed for Mary. The book is a reflection on solitary contemplation that reads like a lyrical poem and compelling personal photographic sequence.
This one-of-a-kind, handmade album represents a formative moment in Frank's career as he experiments with text and image juxtaposition. Robert Frank: Mary's Book includes a selection of spreads from the scrapbook in the Museum's collection as well as photographs Frank took in Paris, on loan from the artist's foundation.
A publication based on the exhibition will be published in early 2025, written by Kristen Gresh, the MFA's Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs and Stuart Alexander, a Robert Frank scholar. This is the first time Mary's Book will be fully reproduced.
Celebrating a Photography Centennial at the MFA
Robert Frank: Mary's Book is also part of another centennial celebration at the MFA --100 years of collecting photography as fine art. In 1924, the Museum received a major gift of 27 photographs from the artist Alfred Stieglitz -- a landmark donation that made the MFA one of the first major American art museums to collect photographs as fine art, placing the institution at the forefront of photography collecting in the United States. Thanks to Georgia O'Keeffe, widow of Stieglitz, a second large gift of the photographer's work was made in 1950. This provided the Museum with what is widely recognized as a near perfect overview of the influential photographer's career.
To celebrate the centennial, a special installation of newly acquired large-scale photography will be on view through June 2025 (in two rotations) and a new publication will debut in the fall that presents the range of works that were not originally made for museum walls, but rather for documentation, the printed page, science, publicity, journalism and artists' references, as a way to feature the multiple narratives in the MFA's collection. In addition to Robert Frank: Mary's Book, the Museum is presenting the exhibition Barbara Bosworth: The Meadow (on view through Dec. 1).