Encouraged by Ansel Adams to pursue color photography, Marie Cosindas developed an unique style and perspective that could only have emerged through the use of color film. Her masterful still lifes and studio portraits draw attention to the artist's interest and background in painting and textile design, and reveal her marked attention to visual detail.
Cosindas was one of the first photographers to experiment with Polacolor film, and her work served to futher develop and advance this technology. Working with 4 x 5, 8 x 10, 20 x 24 and even 40 x 80 inch Polacolor film, Cosindas varied exposure and development conditions to achieve the desired tonality and saturation for her images.
Cosindas had a one-woman exhibition of her color work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966 curated by John Szarkowski, who credited the artist's portraits in his introduction to William Eggleston's Guide as one of the few "conspicuous successes" in color photography before 1976. Cosindas had a solo exhibition of her color work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1966, and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967.
Her best known and frequently reproduced image from 1966 of two sailors in Key West is an early example of Cosindas’s classically posed and carefully styled portraits of celebrities, cultural icons and the demimonde. In the 1960s-80s, Consindas created her series The Grande Dames of Couture and The Dandies, as well as photographed a cast of artists, writers, actors and musicians in a manner that is often compared to the painter John Singer Sargent. Cosindas was recognized for her reverential, flattering, and smartly directed portraits that brought out her sitters’ style and éclat. As with her studio arrangements of flowers, borrowed treasures and objets-d’art, Cosindas’s portraits have a camp quality in her reverence for Old World kitsch and the richly layered set dressings and backgrounds ...
ncouraged by Ansel Adams to pursue color photography, Marie Cosindas developed an unique style and perspective that could only have emerged through the use of color film. Her masterful still lifes and studio portraits draw attention to the artist's interest and background in painting and textile design, and reveal her marked attention to visual detail.
Cosindas was one of the first photographers to experiment with Polacolor film, and her work served to futher develop and advance this technology. Working with 4 x 5, 8 x 10, 20 x 24 and even 40 x 80 inch Polacolor film, Cosindas varied exposure and development conditions to achieve the desired tonality and saturation for her images.
Cosindas had a one-woman exhibition of her color work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966 curated by John Szarkowski, who credi...
Almost fifty years after her first museum exhibition, Bruce Silverstein Gallery is honored to present Arrangements by Marie Cosindas, featuring thirty-five of the artist’s photographs from the 1960s-80s. In addition to images that have never been exhibited, this show includes works from the historic Museum of Modern Art exhibition of her color photographs in 1966.
Arrangements is Cosindas' term for her richly layered assemblages created primarily in her Boston studio, and in later years, around the world, from found or borrowed objects—fabrics, flowers, figurines, jewelry, perfume bottles, tarot cards and other such treasures which came to define her signature style. Often pyramidal in structure, the artist's baroque compositions are filled with an old world style of excess delightfully borderi...