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Today’s installment of Photo of the Week is for all you armchair leaf peepers out there. The Carter’s collection contains way too many gorgeous fall photographs to include in a blog post, thanks to our massive archive of nature photographs by Eliot Porter and numerous works by his stylistic followers. These fall landscapes can range from the idyllic to the downright psychedelic…and that’s the end of the spectrum we’re looking at today. The following three photographs are all by Robert Glenn Ketchum, a landscape photographer strongly influenced by Eliot Porter (and the subject of the Carter’s 2006 exhibition, Robert Glenn Ketchum and the Legacy of Eliot Porter).

Brewster Boogie Woogie, 27, 1979, Gift of Advocacy Arts Foundation, ©1979 Robert Glenn Ketchum

Sun Dance, 1989, Gift of Advocacy Arts Foundation, ©1989 Robert Glenn Ketchum

Predawn Glow, Elk Point, 1978, Gift of Dr. and Mrs. John Uphold, © 1988 Robert Glenn Ketchum

Photographer Roy DeCarava died this week at age 89. DeCarava, whose body of work included famous portraits of jazz greats and subtle images of life in Harlem, was awarded the National Medal of Arts and was the first African American artist to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Carter has four photographs by DeCarava in its collection, and you can see an extensive slide show of his works on the NYT Lens photography blog.

Obituaries:
New York Times
NPR (includes Fresh Air interview with DeCarava from 1996)
Time Magazine

Our Photo of the Week comes from the Carter’s Eliot Porter archive, which is 99.9% nature photography. Along with a handful of photos featuring urban scenes, the archive also contains this little gem from a trip Porter took to New York in 1979. And yes, I really wish I knew what was behind that wall!

Eliot Porter, New York City, November 1979, dye imbibition print
Bequest of the artist, ©1990 Amon Carter Museum

The Carter has loaned seven of its over three hundred works by Charles M. Russell to the artist’s first major retrospective exhibition since his death in 1926. The Masterworks of Charles M. Russell will be on view at the Denver Art Museum through January 10, 2010; from there it travels to the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. [Denver Post review of the exhibition here]

The Carter’s loan to the exhibition includes six paintings – The Silk Robe, The Buffalo Hunt [No. 39], The Medicine Man, In Without Knocking, A Tight Dally and a Loose Latigo, and Breaking Camp – and one sculpture, The Enemy’s Tracks.

Soon to come: photographs of delivery & installation of the Russell works in Denver!

Charles M. Russell, The Medicine Man, oil on canvas, 1908

Expanding Horizons: Painting and Landscape Photography of American and Canadian Landscape 1860-1918, an exhibition that includes two of the Carter’s photographs by Karl Struss and Frank Jay Haynes, has traveled to its second and final venue. The exhibition opens tomorrow at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where it will be on view through January 17.

With the happy outcome of yesterday’s newsmaking joyride, what better topic for Photo of the Week?

Here are three joyrides from the Carter’s photography collection…

Elliott Erwitt, Yale/New Haven, 1955, printed 1977, Gift of George Peterkin Jr., ©1955 Elliott Erwitt

Unknown artist, [Driving to Denver], gelatin silver print postcard, ca. 1910s

And one of my personal favorites:

Edward H. Mitchell, “The Joy Ride” at the California Alligator Farm, Los Angeles, California, halftone postcard with applied color, ca. 1910s

It’s Nobel Prize season again. Today’s installment of Photo of the Week draws on the Carter’s archive of photographer Clara Sipprell (1885-1975) who shot, among other things, portraits of famous diplomats and scientists. The following three photographs, all by Clara Sipprell, are portraits of Nobel Prize-winning scientists that I just happened to come across while doing some cataloging last week.

Professor Manne Siegbahn–Physics–Nobel Prize–Stockholm - 1938, gelatin silver print, 1938

Manne Siegbahn (1886-1978) was a Swedish scientist who won the 1924 Nobel Prize for Physics. Interestingly, his son won the Nobel for work in the same field - x-ray spectroscopy - in 1981.

Professor The Svedberg–Physical Chemistry–Nobel Prize–Uppsala, gelatin silver print, 1938

Theodor Svedberg (1884-1971) was also a Swedish scientist; he invented a high speed centrifuge and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1926.

Dr. Hideki Yukawa, Nobel Prize–Physics, gelatin silver print, ca. 1950s

Hideki Yukawa (1907-1981) was the first Japanese Nobel Prize laureate, who won the prize for his work with subatomic particles in 1949.

Irving Penn, one of the most famous American fashion and portrait photographers, has passed away at age 92 [NYT obituary]. His photograph of painter John Marin is on view through November 29 in the Carter’s exhibition Circle of Friends: Portraits of Artists.

The Carter is excited to have two paintings - Swimming by Thomas Eakins and Idle Hours by William Merritt Chase - included in the exhibition American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

A couple of weeks ago, registrar Lacey escorted these paintings to the Met and had the chance to
take some behind-the-scenes photos of their installation.

Swimming hanging in the Met’s galleries

Idle Hours being installed at the Met

Another exciting thing about this exhibition is that while the two of the Carter’s most important paintings are in New York, we are exhibiting two paintings loaned to us from the Met. This means that, until January 2010, you can see Thomas Eakins’s The Artist’s Wife and His Setter Dog and Mary Cassatt’s Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly right here in Fort Worth!

Here is a sneak peak of the Carter’s preparators Steve, Les, and Jim unpacking and installing the Met’s paintings in the Carter’s galleries earlier this week:

Thanks to Tyler Green for helping the Carter show off its new painting by Charles Sheeler, currently on view in our paintings and sculpture galleries!

Edited to add: you can also read more about the Carter’s new Sheeler painting over at the KERA Art & Seek blog.