The Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera presents A Photographer, an Art Collector, and the Exciting Discovery of Color Reproductions: Alvin Langdon Coburn, Charles Freer, and the Autochrome in 1909, led by Anne McCauley, Visiting Scholar and David H. McAlpin Professor emerita at Princeton University.
On January 25, 1909, the New York art critic Charles Caffin approached Charles Freer with a proposal to have the celebrated photographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, come to Detroit to make color slides of about forty Whistlers in Freer’s collection for a planned lecture. What began as an experiment in the use of the new autochrome process, only marketed in 1907, ended up as a twelve-day marathon during which the two men–vastly different in age and wealth–shared an obsession with Asian art, the technical problems of producing accurate reproductions, and their shared belief in a ‘spiritual unity’ of Eastern and Western cultures, a concept rooted in early twentieth-century cross-cultural discourse. This talk will center on the surviving autochromes, as well as other photographs that Coburn produced on this occasion, and why their creation inspired such outpourings of mutual excitement and friendship.