122
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CUNNINGHAM, IMOGEN (1883-1976)
“Scroll of an Amati Violin.” Silver print on warm-toned paper, 8
7
/
8
x7 inches (22.5x17.8 cm.), with
various notations relating to the reproduction of this image, in pencil, on verso. 1926
[18,000/22,000]
From Cunningham to the author David Prall; by descent to Prall’s sister, Margaret C. Prall, music faculty
at Mills College, Oakland; and then by purchase to a Private California Collector.
This print was used to illustrate David Prall’s important book Aesthetic Judgement (1929).The author’s
first edition copy, with his book plate, is offered here. Prall was a lecturer at Harvard, and in the 1930s
would become a mentor for Leonard Bernstein. (Robert Motherwell was also in that circle of artists and
writers influenced by the thinker.) At Harvard Prall challenged academic traditions by insisting on the
legitimacy of the every day, intuitive experience of a work of art, and on a multidisciplinary approach to
artistic production and interpretation.
This exquisite photograph by Imogen Cunningham of an Amati violin showcases the photographer’s
brilliant use of light, as well as her refined modernist compositional style. Printed on the warm paper
identified with her early work, this photograph depicts the violin’s slender neck and graceful scroll. At
the intersection of music, design, photography, and fine art, as well as the classical tradition and emerging
modernist sensibility, this photographic object forms a delicate meeting point of the senses.A musician’s
fingers rest lightly on the violin, but below this classical gracefulness, a table forms abstracted planes of
light and dark.The image ultimately transcends both its academic context and illustrative role to become
a dynamic, beautiful self-sustaining artwork.
At a time when photographs were dismissed as an art form, Prall decidedly places photography within
the context of other fine art mediums, including music, painting, and Medieval book arts. Prall addresses
this directly:“But if an artist employs a sufficiently subtle camera instead of paint and brushes, there is
no possible a priori reason why this tool, the function of which as a tool is representation, should not
some day be part of the technical paraphernalia of the fine arts.There is nothing intrinsically spiritual
in charcoal and paint-brushes, palettes and stretched canvases, red-lead and ochre and oil, to make them
superior to lenses and shutters and gelatin-coated films. And there is no reason in the nature of things
why subjects before a camera may not have expended upon them the whole power and skill of a great
artist, or why, for the preservation of his vision of them, a camera of sufficient delicacy and contrivance
might not be the best means” (198-99).
Amati violins, made from about 1538 to 1740, are today included in the same group of excellence as
Stradivarius instruments, and are widely considered to have standardized the form.
This photograph was also reproduced in Vintage Photographs by Women of the 20s and 30s (Houk
Gallery, 1988), 11.
