Prints and Photographs
The Museum's holdings of 20th-century prints are especially strong with fine examples of German Expressionist graphics from the David and Eva Bradford Collection; a wide variety of post-World War II American printmakers including Leonard Baskin, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Robert Motherwell, and Robert Rauschenberg; and Pop Art silkscreens by Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana, Ed Ruscha, and Roy Lichtenstein. The contemporary print collection continues to grow with recent additions of works by Helen Frankenthaler, Judy Pfaff, Alison Saar, and Pat Steir and selections from the Vinalhaven Press. The Portland curator and art collector Bruce Brown has been an invaluable source for much of the contemporary print collection.
The photography collection surveys the history of the medium from early daguerreotypes and stereo views related to the history of Portland in the 19th century, to the rise of Pictorialism in Maine with images by Chansonetta Emmons, Alfred Brinkler, and F. Holland Day. In the 20th century, the documentary tradition in modern photography is well represented in the work of international photographers, such as Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger, the American street photographers Leon Levinstein and Garry Winogrand, and celebrity photographers Phillipe Halsman and Barbara Morgan. The work of contemporary Maine photographers, such as Melonie Bennett, Paul Caponigro, and Scott Peterman, rounds out the collection.
The Ernst Haas Collection
Bruce Brown Collection
Barbara Cash Collection
Bradford Collection of German Expressionist Graphics
The Ernst Haas Memorial Collection was formed in 1998 to celebrate the artistic legacy of the photographer Ernst Haas (1921-1986) and his long relationship with The Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport, Maine. Both the artist and The Workshops have had a lasting impact on the art of photography and the artistic life of Maine. The Collection consists of 100 works by outstanding living photographers who have worked with or been inspired by Haas, and/or have been connected with The Maine Photographic Workshops, where Haas taught for many summers, or Magnum Photos, of which Haas was a member until 1960. All of the photographers in the collection have graciously donated their work to the Portland Museum of Art as a tribute to Haas and The Workshops.
Artists represented in the collection include Sam Abell, John Paul Caponigro, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Tillman Crane, Judith Ellis Glickman, Barbara Goodbody, Mary Ellen Mark, Arnold Newman, Gilles Peress, John Sexton, and Joyce Tenneson, among others.
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Portland native Bruce Brown has been a strong presence in the Maine art scene for more than 20 years. A teacher at Freeport High School and curator of Maine Coast Artists in Rockport, he has educated many people about art and has also assembled a phenomenal collection of contemporary prints on a limited budget. The Bruce Brown Collection celebrates Brown's vision and represents a microcosm of printmaking over the past 30 years. The collection includes works of art by Georg Baselitz, Brett Bigbee, Louise Bourgeois, John Cage, Louisa Chase, Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Anne Harris, Charles Hewitt, Alison Hildreth, David Hockney, Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly, Wiliam Kentridge, Sol Lewitt, Elizabeth Murray, Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg, Karl Schrag, Kiki Smith, Neil Welliver, Mark Wethli, and Terry Winters, among others. Brown began acquiring prints in earnest in 1987, primarily collecting works from artists living in Maine. As he studied and learned more, however, he found this limiting, and he began to collect prints from all over the country and the world. One of the strengths of the Bruce Brown Collection is that it places the work of local and internationally-known artists in close proximity, to the detriment of neither. He seeks the best, the most innovative, and the most representative in contemporary printmaking, filtered through the lens of his unique sensibility.
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Established in memory of Barbara Cash (1930-1997), a graphic designer who lived in Sweden, Maine, this collection of over 50 works consists of private-press books and artists' books acquired through purchase and gift by the Portland Museum of Art since her death. Comprised primarily of books produced by Maine artists and crafts people, it includes works by Michael Alpert, Leonard Baskin, Barbara Cash, Crystal Cawley, Anne-Claude Cotty, Rebecca Goodale, Nancy Leavitt, Bessie Moulton, Jan Owen, Carlo Pittore, Walter Tisdale, and David Wolfe, among others. The selection of particular works highlights the collaborative nature of making artful books as expressed in the choice of text, design, typesetting, illustration, and binding in each volume.
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Psychologists by profession, David and Eva Bradford, have over the past 40 years amassed a significant collection of over 150 German Expressionist graphics. Beginning in 2002, they began donating works to the Museum, a gift that promises to significantly enhance our modernist collection. Among the works are major holdings by Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Käthe Kollwitz in a variety of print media including woodcuts, etchings, and lithographs. Selections from the collection rotate on view in the galleries and a fully illustrated catalogue of the collection is available through the Museum Store.
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