[Violin]

Resisting every cliche in the classical repertoire, this commercial still life turns convention on its side. Stella Simon downplays her subject’s signature hourglass, obscures its F-holes, and avoids allusions to its use—no sheets of music or stiff-collared players interrupt this violin’s solo. Simon plays it expertly, bouncing light off the instrument’s burnished body to compose a spare study in shadow and line.


Around the time that she made this work, Simon was studying in Berlin, among avant-garde peers then edging photography into abstraction. Along with their influence, the photograph engages the applied formalism of Clarence H. White’s New York school, where Simon first trained for the advertising field. “Make an angular still life!” a typical assignment exhorted, encouraging students to craft camera exposures as carefully as any painter. Here, Simon fulfills the brief: curiously suspended in the constructed space of the studio, her instrument sings.