Souvenirs of a Dream

Three years in the making but just 17 days after terrorists attacked two major symbols of U.S. power and shook the country to its core, a photographic view of America’s historic aspirations made its debut here. “The Photograph and the American Dream 1840-1940,” an exhibition of 200 images from the vast holding of Stephen White, a Los Angeles collector, dealer and cultural historian, opened on schedule at the venerable Van Gogh Museum--but with a lot of unexpectedly heavy baggage.

“We are well aware that visitors will now see many of the photographs in a different light,” said a statement by White and Andreas Blhm, the museum’s head of exhibitions, posted near the entrance to the show. “Nonetheless, we have decided not to alter either the concept or the installation. The message of the exhibition remains unchanged.”

The image selected to promote the show isn’t as prominent as expected, however. The museum stopped production of a poster featuring a circa 1930 photograph of the top of New York’s Woolworth Building poking through a sea of white fluffy clouds. It seemed too painful a reminder of the city’s smoke-filled sky after the fall of the World Trade Center, Van Gogh Museum director John Leighton said in an interview at the opening reception. An invitation bearing the same picture was already in the mail. “Some people who received it asked, ‘How could you?’ but we couldn’t stop the mailing.”

As a component of the exhibition, the picture is only a tiny piece of a broad swath of history documented by well-known artists, forgotten commercial practitioners and anonymous photographers. There’s an 1869 shot of the Golden Spike Ceremony at Promontory Point, Utah, by A.J. Russell; a circa-1920 montage advertising a Marmion Motor Co. car, by Paul Outerbridge; and a 1934 view of a Steinway piano stringer at work, by Margaret Bourke-White. Among works by unidentified artists are an 1892 image of Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone call from New York to Chicago, and a circa-1900 shot of a baby cradled in an American flag. The subject is George B. Billings Rego, the first child born at an immigration processing center in Boston.

Punctuated by pictures of historic events, monuments and celebrities, the pictorial narrative also embraces images of many ordinary people, struggling to realize their dreams and encountering daunting obstacles. Photographs of tornadoes, murders, fires and mechanical breakdowns mingle with images of proud family groups, diligent students, community parades and high-rise construction.

“The last thing I wanted to do was an exhibition that was just propagandistic,” said White, who has collected photographs for more than 30 years. The exhibition was developed as “a pictorial mirror of our innovative spirit, our courage, our work ethic, our love of play, our land and our families--as well as a reflection of our greed, our prejudices and our disastrous missteps,” he said.

Blhm, curator of the exhibition, selected images that form a visual record of “how we lived through the bad days and good” during a century that marks both the first 100 years of photography and a period in which the American identity took shape, White said.

An exhibition of photographs about the American dream, gathered from a Los Angeles collection, is about the last thing most visitors would expect to see at the renowned Amsterdam museum dedicated to the work of the world’s most popular artist. But Leighton said the show fits the institution’s program perfectly.

“We have a broad mission as a museum of the 19th century. We like to go beyond Impressionism and look at things in new ways. That includes doing shows of art that Van Gogh himself would have hated,” he said, referring to the artist’s distaste for photography.

The museum wasn’t always so ecumenical. Located in the heart of Amsterdam’s museum district, the Van Gogh opened in 1973 in a building designed by Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld. It had a collection of 200 paintings, 580 drawings and four sketchbooks by Van Gogh, about 750 of his letters, and assorted works by his contemporaries collected by the artist and his brother, Theo, all of which were on permanent loan from the Van Gogh Foundation.

A few years ago, the museum launched an acquisition program that would build a framework for the core collection. But the biggest change occurred in 1999 with the opening of a new wing. Designed by Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa, the elliptical structure provides space for an ambitious program of traveling exhibitions, intended to put Van Gogh’s short career (from about 1881 to 1890) in a larger context.

The continuous display of Van Gogh’s work in the Rietveld building is “a permanent blockbuster that attracts an international audience,” Leighton said. Many of those visitors venture into the new wing as well, but the temporary exhibitions are largely presented for Dutch visitors, to encourage them to return to the museum, he said.

“The Photograph and the American Dream”--which will remain in Amsterdam until Jan. 6, then travel to the Patrimoine Photographique in Paris, March 28 to June 15, and to other venues yet to be scheduled--is only the latest in a varied lineup. So far it has included “Light! The Industrial Age, 1750-1900: Art & Science, Technology & Society,” organized with the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh; “Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1890,” a collaborative venture with the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., and the National Gallery in London; and “Paul Signac: Master of Pointillism,” done with the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A previous photography show, “F. Holland Day: Photographer of Symbolism,” was organized with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich and the Royal Photographic Society in Bath, England.

Although some of the exhibitions have direct relationships to Van Gogh’s life and work, others overlap his productive years while encompassing different artistic pursuits in a more expansive time frame. The current show from the White collection begins 40 years before Van Gogh’s decade of artistic activity and continues 50 years after his death.

“The Photograph and the American Dream” is installed in roughly chronological, book-like fashion, with an introduction of pictures of immigrants and their conveyances followed by six thematic sections. The first, “American Identities,” presents daguerreotype portraits of somber individuals and family groups, including the seminal image of the show, Jeremiah Gurney’s circa-1855 image of the seven-member Elisha Cleveland family.

“Everything about the photograph--the high price the family paid to have their likeness made, the clothes they wore, their mannerisms and expressions--speaks of a family who had achieved the American dream,” White said, recalling his first reaction to the picture. “When I bought that image, I also bought an idea that continued to shape and define itself over the next two or three years.”

White, who is a fixture in the international photography community, operated photography galleries in Los Angeles from 1975 to 1991 with his wife, Mus. During that period, he built an enormous collection of 19th and 20th century photographs, photographically illustrated volumes and books on pioneering technology. An exhibition drawn from that collection traveled throughout the United States and visited Copenhagen, Frankfurt and Paris in 1989 and 1990. A few months after the show ended its tour, he sold his collection of about 15,000 photographs and related items to the Photographic Center of the Tokyo Fuji Museum--and began buying more photographs.

The Cleveland family portrait and other photographs in the current show are part of his new collection, acquired during the last decade. It started with images of industry, both foreign and domestic, but White soon branched out in other directions, including early pictures of America. The exhibition reveals the range of his interests as it moves from the theme “All Men Are Created Equal” to “Men to Match My Mountains,” “Manufacturing the Dream,” “New Frontiers” and, finally, “The City Rises.”

White credits his association with the Van Gogh Museum to a chance introduction to Edwin Becker, a curator there, in a Brussels bookstore. Seizing the opportunity to promote his passion, White suggested that the museum do a photography show. Becker, in turn, asked what he had in mind. White hadn’t formulated his “American Dream” idea at the time, but he soon followed up with a proposal. In January 1999, when Leighton and Blhm visited Los Angeles for the opening of the exhibition “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Blhm checked out White’s collection.

Blhm said he didn’t expect much but “was blown away from the first moment” White began to show him the pictures and tell him the stories he had uncovered in his research. As they talked, Blhm became intrigued with the fact that photography is the medium through which most Europeans have come to know America. At first, the “otherness” of the images was compelling because it pointed out differences from Europeans, he said. But he soon realized that most of the photographs were made by Americans of European descent and that many of the images allowed Europeans to see themselves in different circumstances. In the end, Blhm said, he came to see the American dream as the European dream.

As plans for the show firmed up, the museum pulled out all the stops. It published a high-quality, fully illustrated catalog with essays by White and Blhm. Cynthia P. Schneider, former U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, persuaded former President Bill Clinton to write an introduction.

“I believe in the American Dream. I have lived it,” Clinton writes. But it’s “not just for Americans,” he continues. “The fundamental concepts underlying the American Dream--liberty, equal opportunity, equality under the law--should be extended throughout the world.” Perusing the pictures, he says they “chronicle some of the steps along the way” to achieving the dream and “show us that the journey was not always easy.”

The exhibition is a fundamentally democratic exercise that exemplifies a current trend to rewrite the history of photography, incorporating the work of journeymen and anonymous artists with that of acknowledged masters. An international colloquium at the Van Gogh Museum on the opening weekend presented various aspects of that point of view along with new readings of familiar images by well-known artists. Although not unprecedented, the exhibition is “one small contribution to the vernacularization of the history of photography,” said one of the lecturers, Australian critic and author Geoffrey Batchen, who teaches at the University of New Mexico.

The Dutch press generally pays attention to the museum’s temporary shows, but it reported on “The Photograph and the American Dream” with notable speed and enthusiasm in feature stories, reviews and interviews with White and Blhm. “The attack clearly focused the writers,” Blhm said. “All the articles refer to 11 September and what it means to the perception of the photographs.” While many writers pointed out certain images that are likely to be reinterpreted, a positive review in the glossy magazine De Groene Amsterdammer deemed the exhibition exciting because it reveals the “foundations of a society” that has long inspired “both hate and love.”

In many ways, the exhibition has fulfilled White’s own American dream. Having his collection displayed at the Van Gogh Museum with a catalog introduction by Clinton would have seemed extremely unlikely a few years ago.

And although the terrorist attacks probably gave the show new meaning and made it more poignant for many viewers, the disaster also brought a hopeful, underlying theme to the forefront, he said. “I think the exhibition offers some insight into who we are and how resilient we are. What we have just been through is not an end-all. We persevere. That’s the thing that makes this country so great. We do persevere.”