RECENT ACQUISITIONS
Kenna Works Enhance CMA Collection
Victoria Cooke, curator
On occasion, a prominent living artist
offers to donate examples of their own
work to the CMA collection. This helps
the Museum, which has limited acquisition
funds, to bring in works that would
otherwise be out of reach. Such was the
case this spring when English photographer
Michael Kenna offered the CMA 33
photographs from his series, Venezia.
Visitors were enthralled by these evocative
images when the entire series of 52
photographs were on view the summer of
2011. The gift came at a most opportune
moment, as the CMA is actively moving
to bolster its holdings in both photography
and contemporary art.
Michael Kenna is considered one of the
world’s leading contemporary landscape
photographers, and Venice is one of the
world’s most photographed cities. In taking
on this subject, Kenna willingly accepted
a challenge with great expectations and a
long artistic history.
The CMA owns several celebrated images
of the city, including Canaletto’s View of
the Molo and Francesco Guardi’s View of
Grand Canal with the Dogana. In these
paintings, Venice is a busy, metropolitan
city with fashionable ladies and gentlemen
promenading along the plazas and
gondolas traversing the famed waterways.
The artists who recorded those vistas have
made Venice familiar even to viewers who
have never personally made the journey.
This makes it challenging for any artist to
take a fresh approach to Venice and find
something new to say in their work.
Kenna succeeds in presenting us with
a different look at Venice—one that is
unpopulated, deserted and quiet, despite
the thousands who live there and the
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millions of tourists who seem to be
omnipresent. Sir Elton John, a long-time
collector of Kenna’s photographs, aptly
noted that his black and white images
are “Elegant. Serene. Meditative.” Kenna
made this traditional subject new again, at
times by photographing the unexpected.
He often worked at dawn or at night with
exposures up to ten hours long, and he
chose to elevate enigmatic scenes, such as
rubbish bins lit by streetlights and simple
docking poles, to romantic vistas. The
stone streets and historic buildings of
the city seem to rise from the misty fog,
gondolas slip by—seemingly unmanned—
past lonely docks, and his ghostly night
scenes capture a sleeping, peaceful city.
It is particularly significant when a
practicing artist chooses to donate work.
Whereas an art collector may find the
accompanying tax deduction beneficial,
an artist may claim a deduction solely for
the costs of the materials used to produce
that work. For the artist who makes such
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