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Modern and contemporary art curator Ian Alteveer contemplates the good and the bad associations of smoke.
My name is Ian Alteveer and I work here in the department of nineteenth-century, modern and contemporary art.
Smoke connotes so many different changing and fluid meanings. At once
it's terrible, it's really bad for you, but it also has such meaning
in terms of progress, of that movement, of that evanescence of the quickness of history.
I'm a little obsessed with smoke at the moment, being an ex-smoker who has tried many times to quit
unsuccessfully and if my mother's hearing this right now I apologize 'cause she would absolutely be appalled, and so in thinking through my own process I've been looking for smoke.
And smoke is such a leitmotif that represents industrial progress and
new modernity, symbolized by factories and everything they make. But then the other side of the coin with that of course is
pollution and darkness and new directions that are unclear, and so the fog, the steam, the smoke that train engines make, that factories make, represents both sides of this. And photographs abound of
just the shapes of those buildings. Images that were actually commissioned by magazines and by companies to show progress. This one for example showing just this diagonally thrusting smokestack with that wonderful white plume pouring out almost as if you were looking down the end of a cigarette and seeing the smoke coming off of it.
I'm also struck by images of smoking and glamour. It's hard to look at now because we know how terrible it is, yet it's also sometimes so hard to separate the badness of smoking from how
amazing some of the images of it are. In an early twentieth-century photograph of the act of a man smoking, lighting his cigarette, putting it up to his mouth, it's recorded on the surface of the photograph. The sweep of his arm, the action towards the mouth, which you know reminds me what is smoking but a kind of sexy thing that draws your, that draws yours and someone else's attention to your mouth.
Smoking as an embodiment of a kind of libertine lifestyle is something that comes up in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting. And of course the Dutch--I should know, my father is Dutch--are great
great moralizers about many things. To see a young gentleman disporting himself with his friends in a tavern scene was a certain symbol. And there's
so many images where smoke comes in front of a visage, and we have trouble seeing through it. And that in particular goes for an amazing manuscript illumination. You see a dark wizard
unleashing a cloud upon the Iranian army to confuse them. The wizard, whose name is Bazur, is a man from the East and embodies all of the sort of mystery that has been associated through time with the so-called Orient.
I was struck by something someone told me recently, that smoke is an offering of sorts. That it drifts from the ground towards heaven.
Smoke is able to symbolize both something absolutely immaterial, but also sometimes has such body. It takes forms. It creates shapes in pictures
that it doesn't in real life.
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Works of art in order of appearanceLast Updated: June 22, 2015. Not all works of art in the Museum's collection may be on view on a particular day. For the most accurate location information, please check this page on the day of your visit. |
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[Motion Study of Smoke Vortices Caused by Electric Fan] 1934 Harold Edgerton (American) Gelatin silver print Gift of The Harold and Esther Edgerton Family Foundation, 1997 (1997.62.18) © Harold and Esther Edgerton Foundation, courtesy of Palm Press, Inc. More information: The Collection Online Not on view
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Newsies at Skeeter Branch, St. Louis, Missouri, 11:00 am, May 9, 1910 May 9, 1910 Lewis W. Hine (American) Gelatin silver print Gift of Phyllis D. Massar, 1970 (1970.727.1) More information: The Collection Online Not on view
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Dead End II 1936 Ilse Bing (German) Gelatin silver print Bequest of Ilse Bing Wolff, 1998 (2003.151.12) © Estate of Ilse Bing, Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery More information: The Collection Online Not on view
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Der Fleck auf dem Spiegel, den der Atemhauch schafft 1977 Dieter Appelt (German) Gelatin silver print Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1993 (1993.482) © Dieter Appelt More information: The Collection Online Not on view
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Mein Liebesbangen! (My Heartache!) ca. 1910 Unknown Artist (German) Gelatin silver print Funds from various donors, 2010 (2010.293) More information: The Collection Online Not on view
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Courbevoie: Factories by Moonlight 1882–83 Georges Seurat (French) Conté crayon Gift of Alexander and Grégoire Tarnopol, 1976 (1976.243) More information: The Collection Online Not on view
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Factory Smoke 1877–79 Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (French) Black ink printed on laid paper (monotype) The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1982 (1982.1025) More information: The Collection Online Not on view
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The Hand of Man 1902, printed 1920s Alfred Stieglitz (American) Gelatin silver print Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005 (2005.100.459) More information: The Collection Online Not on view
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[Smoke Stack] 1920s–30s William Rittase (American) Gelatin silver print Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 (1987.1100.201) More information: The Collection Online Not on view
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The Smoker—The Match—The Cigarette 1911 Anton Giulio Bragaglia (Italian) Gelatin silver print Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005 (2005.100.247) More information: The Collection Online Not on view
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The Smokers probably ca. 1636 Adriaen Brouwer (Flemish) Oil on wood The Friedsam Collection, Bequest of Michael Friedsam, 1931 (32.100.21) More information: The Collection Online Not on view
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Shahnama (The Book of Kings) ca. 1430–40 Abu'l Qasim Firdausi India Ink, colors, and gold on paper The Grinnell Collection, Bequest of William Milne Grinnell, 1920 (20.120.248) More information: The Collection Online Not on view
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[Smoke] From the Series "My Ghost" 1999 Adam Fuss (English) Gelatin silver print Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2000 (2000.330) © Adam Fuss More information: The Collection Online Not on view
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