IVAM Donations
an exhibition
22 July – 12 Sept 2010

I was honored to be invited to Valencia to attend the opening of the exhibition “IVAM Donations” , a multi-art exhibition consisting of 21 years of donations organized and curated by Consuelo Ciscar Casaban, director of IVAM with Tomas Llorens, and Boye Llorens. Spread over three galleries in the museum were paintings, sculptures, photographs and new media.

Donor artists, collectors and heirs were invited for the opening, a rare opportunity to meet and commune with a cross section of a multinational arts community. In addition to the exhibition, a massive catalog has been published by IVAM. The exhibition will run until 12 Sept 2010.

On a personal level the invitation to Valencia gave me the opportunity to make some new photographs to add to my Valencia collection started in 2000, the year of my IVAM retrospective. Also the chance to spend time with Josep Monzo who curated that show and members of the IVAM staff who were involved in the project. We share good memories. Senora Casaban was everpresent and could easily be tagged as “the hostess with the mostess.” That in addition to her conceptual skills in putting this show on the wall. Her largesse was very much appreciated by the invitees.

Every invited artist had at least one work displayed and for me that meant “Girl Twirling 1956” on the wall. For the catalog they chose “George & Elaine- last day in Valencia 2001.

I will be showing some of the new work in the coming weeks on this site. Unfortunately I can’t share the extraordinary food and wine of the excellent Valencia restaurants.

george

On Tuesday May 18, 2010 at the Bonhams Photographs auction, they will offer two of my  Still Movies series :  Marilyn Monroe NYC 1954 [Lot 82]  & Nixon- Kennedy TV Debate 1960 [Lot 89].  Both works were photographed and printed by me and have been  exhibited in Montreal, Toronto, New York, Valencia, Madrid  and Tokyo.  The Nixon- Kennedy is in the collection of the  Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal  and private collectors, Lawrence K. Grossman, NYC and Jurg Shaub, Basle Switzerland. The Marilyns are in 8 museum collections. Both works are  included in the IVAM catalogue  George S. Zimbel 2000.

At the  same sale there is an extraordinary Edward Weston  “Pine, Lake Tenaya 1937″  Take a look and if you can afford to buy it you will  be very happy to have it on your wall.

george

These two prints, photographed  and printed by me will be offered at Yann Le Mouel auction in Paris on 3 May 2010.

1. ” Incident on Rue Roy, Montreal  1996 “  Lot # 133

2. “Black Boy  & Great Dane, Bronx  N.Y.  1964″   Lot # 197

One night , long ago as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard my father talking to my mother. (In the kitchen of course,)  He was saying how sad he was that I was not coming  into the business.  I was  about  17 and already had my sights set on university and then a career in photography…no store for me.
Once he  accepted  this, he was really supportive and I thank him for that.

Well, he would be happy now. As of last week I have a store.   Go  to my website, click on “Store”   and find four Marilyn images digitally  printed by my  young friend  Jose Cortes. He worked very hard to get the feel I have in my silver gelatin prints which are  sold at the galleries that represent me.

Take a look, see the price & order.

george

Boys on 93rd St. NYC 1949 [Print by gsz 1949]

At AIPAD, the mega photo event of art photography being held in NYC   this week, a panel of  photographers who were at the Photo  League in the 1940′s will be held on Sunday at noon. They include Vivian Cherry, Sonia Handelman Meyer, Arthur Leipzig, Rebecca Lepkoff, Jerry Liebling, Marvin E. Newman, Erika Stone,  Ida Wyman, and George Zimbel.  Moderators will be Catherine Evans, Chief Curator, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio and Mason Klein, Curator of Fine Arts, The Jewish Museum, New York. It will be a unique chance to get perspective on the social documentary photographers whose  work was a blessing to those people who wanted their story told and  deemed to be a threat by the U.S. government.  You come and decide…george

N&W RR 1961 Marshalling Yard                                           ©George S. Zimbel

Michael Dell, the founder of Dell computers announced that he and some colleagues have purchased the Magnum file of working prints..the entire collection. It will be housed temporarily at the  Ransom Center of the University of Texas in Austin…where all the work will be scanned front and back thereby creating an incredibly important visual archive of the 20th Century. This news made me think about a row of boxes on the top shelf of Pix Inc.’s former Park Ave. Office. They contained hundreds of prints of Erich Salomon , (1886- 1944) one of the first and most important documentary photographers of the 20th century. Where are those prints? I don’t know. No one will have to ask that question about the Magnum archive. Thank you Michael Dell.

Magnum and I seem to have crossed passed many times always in a collegial way. I knew Cornell Capa from the late 1940′s.
In  1961 Xerox Corp. decided to have a more documentary feel to their annual report and hired me to do the shoot. It worked very well and they were so enthralled with this approach that they decided to hire the entire Magnum crew for the following year! I was not too happy about that but was busy working on the Norfolk & Western project, so it was ok. Raliroads are more interesting than copy machines.

This is where the story get’s complex. Those of you who have read my bio know that my uncle, the architect B.Sumner Gruzen was a very big influence on my work. His son Jordan, now one of the principals in Gruzen Samton Architects has a son Alex who attended the Village Community School in a class taught by my friend  Sari Grossman who was the former picture editor of Argosy magazine. She  had decided to make a career in early childhood education. Too bad for the photographers and good for the children. Alex and his friend Christopher Gonzalez Aller were in her class. Sari remembers them as “little terrors.” Christopher is the son of Peggy Mahoney Gonzalez Aller of Madrid, a  longtime friend of my wife Elaine Sernovitz Zimbel. They both worked at the United Nations from 1953 – 1955.  Christopher is now an expert in Old Master Paintings and lives in Madrid. Alex is now Senior Vice President Consumer Products Group at Dell Computers in Austin Texas. And now you see why I am writing this and why I am sending Alex Gruzen a copy of my catalogue “George S. Zimbel, IVAM 2000″ to give to Michael Dell. He really values documentary photography. It’s like family

george

George’s View Feb 3, 2010

In  January 1955, I was in Paso Texas  working on a story about a young couple . He was in the army and they lived modestly off base. She was pregnant and in the post WWII world an army career semed secure and stable. I don’t know how I found them, but they were amenable to my tagging along and photographing their life. I was working for a revived SEE  Magazine under two excellent editors, Norman Lobsenz and Marvin Albert. The idea was to give LOOK some competition and LIFE a nudge with some excellent photographic essays. I was staying with my  friends, Ralph & Bronia Lowenstein. Ralph later became the dean of Journalsm at Florida State Univ.

Anyway, I  had difficulty concentrating on the shoot because I was thinking about Elaine Sernovitz, an amazing woman writer who was then working  at the United Nations.  Just before leaving  New York she told me not to bother calling her when I got back.  As she has learned subsequently, I don’t listen, and with Ralph’s permission made a long distance call to New York and asked her to marry me.  I was surprised and very happy when she said “yes.”

We decided to rendezvous in New Orleans and  have a simple ceremony. Visits to the families in Milwaukee and Boston would come later. To compress the following events, I drove my Volkswagon all the way across Texas, at a steady speed of 58mph (the maximum), picked up my watch at a hock shop in Corpus Christi and arrived in New Orleans where I stayed with my cousin Henry Freidman who was a  tourist guide in the  Old Quarter.

I had a message waiting for me from Lynn Marret, my agent in New York.  Marvin  and Norman had been fired, she had rushed over to their office with a bottle of  Scotch and managed to get a check cut for money owed. (The good old days!) Then, to modify the pain she told me that she had gotten me an assignment  to photograph Bourbon Street New Orleans, for a  high end startup men’s magazine that was going to compete with Esquire.

I called Elaine with the bad news/good news and I think she saw me wobbling on the marriage idea. I assured her that I wasn’t. When the money arrived from Lynn in New York, I bought  the wedding rings, and film for the Bourbon Street shoot. With  the help of my cousin Henry. ”Sure you can shoot the strippers; shoot whatever you want. I know everybody on the street.”  I shot for three days and developed the film in the bathroom of the motel where I had moved. Each morning I would  cut the negs and put them in a  proof printing  frame on my doorstep using POP (Printing out paper.) No developer necessary..they were like the red proofs you got from portrait studios in the 1950’s. I captioned, quickly got them out of the light and into and evelope and mailed them to New York. Shortly after the last batch arrived in New York, Lynn sent me a telegram saying the shoot was rejected and they were giving me a $100 kill fee.  What news!!– just before our wedding!

Years later  “Woman at the Bar “  was taken into the collection of MOMA and ICP.  Chelo was included in Bill Ewing’s book “The Body.” (Thames & Hudson 1994)  The entire essay was the subject of  my  book  “Bourbon Street New Orleans 1955 “  published by Les Editions du Passage, Montreal 2006. Of course that didn’t  help us  then.  Freelance people are survivors. We survived and after 55years have four children and  nine grandchildren.

Take a look:  http://www.georgezimbel.com/collection/bourbon_street/

george