Margaret De Patta
Photogram 39-21939

On view:

Geffen Galleries, floor 1

Black and white abstract photograph with a tilted dark rectangle, five sharp white light beams radiating from the right, and a soft glowing oval on a granular gray background

Artist or Maker: Margaret De Patta
United States, California, San Francisco and Napa, 1903-1964
Title: Photogram 39-2
Date Made: 1939
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: Image: 9 × 7 3/8 in. (22.86 × 18.73 cm) Primary support: 9 × 7 3/8 in. (22.86 × 18.73 cm) Secondary support: 18 × 14 in. (45.72 × 35.56 cm) Mat: 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.64 cm)
Credit Line: Gift of Leland Rice
Accession Number: M.2021.223.1
Classification: Photographs
Collecting Area: Photography
Curatorial Notes: Margaret De Patta made her reputation as a jewelry designer. She was born in San Francisco and began her art studies there. She encountered the European avant-garde while on scholarship at the Art Students League in New York (1926–29) and brought those ideas back to the Bay Area, where she apprenticed with Armin Hairenian at the Art Copper Shop and devoted herself to jewelry making. In the summer of 1939, De Patta had a formative meeting with László Moholy-Nagy in the Bay Area. She took courses with him at Mills College that year and at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Institute of Design) in 1941. Moholy’s emphasis on light and movement, translucency and dimensionality carried over from photography and film to De Patta’s materials, metal and quartz. In particular, Moholy advocated the technique of the photogram—a cameraless photograph made by arranging objects on a piece of sensitized paper and exposing them to light—as a primary exercise in form and composition. For De Patta, photograms also functioned as blueprints for jewelry designs. This signed and dated example is among the earliest she made, and she continued to employ the technique into the 1950s.

Britt Salvesen

2021/2024
Copyright: © Estate of Margaret De Patta

Margaret De Patta
Photogram 39-21939

On view:

Geffen Galleries, floor 1

Artist or Maker: Margaret De Patta
United States, California, San Francisco and Napa, 1903-1964
Title: Photogram 39-2
Date Made: 1939
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: Image: 9 × 7 3/8 in. (22.86 × 18.73 cm) Primary support: 9 × 7 3/8 in. (22.86 × 18.73 cm) Secondary support: 18 × 14 in. (45.72 × 35.56 cm) Mat: 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.64 cm)
Credit Line: Gift of Leland Rice
Accession Number: M.2021.223.1
Classification: Photographs
Collecting Area: Photography
Curatorial Notes: Margaret De Patta made her reputation as a jewelry designer. She was born in San Francisco and began her art studies there. She encountered the European avant-garde while on scholarship at the Art Students League in New York (1926–29) and brought those ideas back to the Bay Area, where she apprenticed with Armin Hairenian at the Art Copper Shop and devoted herself to jewelry making. In the summer of 1939, De Patta had a formative meeting with László Moholy-Nagy in the Bay Area. She took courses with him at Mills College that year and at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Institute of Design) in 1941. Moholy’s emphasis on light and movement, translucency and dimensionality carried over from photography and film to De Patta’s materials, metal and quartz. In particular, Moholy advocated the technique of the photogram—a cameraless photograph made by arranging objects on a piece of sensitized paper and exposing them to light—as a primary exercise in form and composition. For De Patta, photograms also functioned as blueprints for jewelry designs. This signed and dated example is among the earliest she made, and she continued to employ the technique into the 1950s.

Britt Salvesen

2021/2024