SID GROSSMAN

The Driskel Gallery at the Schoolhouse Center for Art & Design in Provincetown, Massachusetts, is proud to present an exhibition of important vintage prints by Sid Grossman, the influential photographer, teacher and co-founder of the Photo League in New York City.

The Photo League’s mission was to illuminate social realities and, through photography, stimulate political change. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were Grossman’s friends , and at the Photo League, he sponsored exhibitions of work by Ben Shahn, Lewis Hine and Paul Strand among others. Grossman and his colleagues idolized the working class, and he glorified them in his famous Coney Island series from the forties--lusty blue-collar urbanites at America’s most famous beach. They prefigure the later great work of Diane Arbus and Bruce Davidson.

In 1949 Sid Grossman fled to Provincetown to escape the persecution of a McCarthy-era U. S. Attorney’s office. He felt abandoned by his New York friends. His career was destroyed and his confidence severely shaken. In Provincetown he studied painting with Hans Hoffman and began producing his most lyrical and psychological photographs. Even Grossman himself seemed surprised at his change of subject matter--birds in water, large wild gardens, children. Of one photograph in this exhibition, that of a young girl selling seashells, Jane Livingston, author of The New York School, writes, "...she stands motionless, subdued, vulnerable, behind a display of large white seashells...It is one of those rare remarkable photographs, an image that had never existed before, and that can never be imitated."

 

 

 

The Schoolhouse Center for Art and Design
494 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA 02657
(508) 487-4800
lcollins@schoolhousecenter.com
Contact: Larry Collins