id: 165140 accession number: 2007.142 share license status: Copyrighted url: https://clevelandart.org/art/2007.142 updated: 2021-08-26 09:02:29.535000 Ladder of Ladders, 1931. Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002). Gelatin silver print; image: 24.4 x 18.3 cm (9 5/8 x 7 3/16 in.); mounted: 30 x 23 cm (11 13/16 x 9 1/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund 2007.142 © Colette Urbajtel/ Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C title: Ladder of Ladders title in original language: series: series in original language: creation date: 1931 creation date earliest: 1931 creation date latest: 1931 current location: creditline: John L. Severance Fund copyright: © Colette Urbajtel/ Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, S.C --- culture: Mexico, 20th century technique: gelatin silver print department: Photography collection: PH - Mexican type: Photograph find spot: catalogue raisonne: --- CREATORS * Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) - artist Manuel Alvarez Bravo Mexican, 1902-2002 Born in Mexico City, Manuel Alvarez Bravo has achieved international fame as one of Mexico's most talented photographers. In 1918 he studied painting and music at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes. After taking up the camera in 1924, Alvarez Bravo was encouraged by photographers Hugo Brehme and Edward Weston to pursue a career in the medium. Over the next several years he worked as a government employee, a photography instructor, and a photographer for the magazine Mexican Folkways. In 1931 he became a freelancer specializing in the reproduction of paintings and other works of art. A variety of jobs followed, including that of photographer and cameraman at the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Producción Cinematográfica de México (1943-59). He also served as cofounder, director, and chief photographer for El Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana, a publisher of fine art books (1959-80). Alvarez Bravo has been awarded the National Arts Prize of Mexico (1975), named an honorary member of the Mexican Academy of Arts (1980), made an Officier des Arts et Lettres in France (1981), and received the Hasselblad Prize (1984). He has had numerous individual exhibitions at venues throughout the world, including the Palacio Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (1934, 1968, 1972), the Art Institute of Chicago (1943, 1974), the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego (1990), and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu (1992). Alvarez Bravo's personal work is deeply rooted in Mexican culture, as were the paintings of his friend Diego Rivera and the other Mexican muralists. Like them, he has focused on his country and its people to create straightforward, evocative images. Alvarez Bravo lives in Mexico City. M.M. --- measurements: Image: 24.4 x 18.3 cm (9 5/8 x 7 3/16 in.); Mounted: 30 x 23 cm (11 13/16 x 9 1/16 in.) state of the work: edition of the work: support materials: inscriptions: inscription: Written in pencil on recto of mount: "Manuel Alvarez Bravo (signed)" translation: remark: inscription: Written in brown ink on verso of print: cajas para muertes grandes y chicas and MAlvarez Bravo/Mexico translation: remark: --- CURRENT EXHIBITIONS title: Focus on Minotaure: the Animal-Headed Review opening date: 1987-10-17T04:00:00 Focus on Minotaure: the Animal-Headed Review. Musée Rath (October 17, 1987-January 31, 1988); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (March 17-May 29, 1988). title: Andre Breton: La Beaute Convulsive opening date: 1991-04-25T04:00:00 Andre Breton: La Beaute Convulsive. Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou (April 25-August 26, 1991). title: La Révolution surréaliste opening date: 2002-03-06T00:00:00 La Révolution surréaliste. Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris cedex O4, France (organizer) (March 6-June 24, 2002). title: Surrealismus 1919- 1944 opening date: 2002-07-20T04:00:00 Surrealismus 1919- 1944. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (July 20-November 24, 2002). title: Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modernist Photography opening date: 2014-10-19T00:00:00 Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modernist Photography. The Cleveland Museum of Art (organizer) (October 19, 2014-January 11, 2015). title: Stories From Storage opening date: 2021-02-07T05:00:00 Stories From Storage. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 7-May 16, 2021). --- LEGACY EXHIBITIONS --- PROVENANCE The artist, Mexico City date: footnotes: citations: Collection of André Breton [1896-1966], Paris date: footnotes: citations: (Calmels Cohen Auction, Paris, 2003) date: 2003 footnotes: citations: David Raymond [b.1979], New York, NY date: 2007 footnotes: citations: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH date: footnotes: citations: --- fun fact: Manuel Alvarez Bravo encouraged viewers to discover their own meanings in his pictures. digital description: Manuel Álvarez Bravo captured unusual scenes of everyday life in his home country of Mexico. In the three photographs included here, each focuses on isolated fragments of urban iconography through storefronts and billboards. Ladder of Ladders strikes a particularly dark note. The workshop pictured here manufactured caskets for children at a time when the infant mortality rate in Mexico City was 75%. The stacked coffins just inside the shop’s doorway formally play on light and darkness in the same way the photograph’s subject matter metaphorically references the tension between life and death in the city. wall description: Though Bravo made this image years before he encountered Surrealism, the movement’s principle theorist André Breton cited it among the evidence that Mexico was "the Surrealist country" whose principal lure was "the ability to reconcile life and death." Describing Ladder of Ladders, Breton wrote, "That workshop where they make caskets for children (the infant mortality rate in Mexico is 75%); the relationship between light and shadow, between the stacks of boxes by the ladder and the one by the gate, and the poetically dazzling image created by placing the phonograph horn inside the lower coffin are exceptionally evocative of the emotional atmosphere in which the whole country is steeped." --- RELATED WORKS --- CITATIONS Spies, Werner. La révolution surréaliste: exposition présentée au Centre Pompidou, Galerie 1, 6 mars-24 juin 2002. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2002. page number: url: Spies, Werner. Surrealismus 1919-1944: die surrealistische Revolution : Dali, Max Ernst, Magritte, Miro, Picasso--. Düsseldorf: K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2002. page number: url: Breton, André, Agnès Angliviel de La Beaumelle, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, and Claude Schweisguth. André Breton, la beauté convulsive: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1991. page number: url: Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E. Hinson, Ian Walker, and Lisa Kurzner. Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modernist Photography : the David Raymond Collection in the Cleveland Museum of Art. 2014. page number: cat no. 24, p. 51 url: Andre Breton: 42, rue Fontaine, no. 5047. Paris: Calmels Cohen, 2003. page number: url: --- IMAGES