Background
Frederick Sommer was born in 1905 in Angri, Italy. Sommer grew up in Brazil.
Cornell University
University of Arizona
Frederick Sommer was born in 1905 in Angri, Italy. Sommer grew up in Brazil.
Sommer earned an Master of Arts in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 1927, and an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 1979.
Frederick Sommer was precociously talented and worked in his father's office as a landscape architect before gaining a master's degree at Cornell University. He returned to Brazil to form a partnership with his father but in 1930 became ill with tuberculosis. To recuperate he went to Europe, where his interest in art and philosophy deepened. He read voraciously on modern art and aesthetics and experimented with photography alongside painting and drawing. In 1931 Sommer settled in America to work as an artist. By the end of the decade, he was concentrating on photography, although he continued to work in a variety of media throughout his career.
Sommer is noted for his mastery of photographic technique and his engagement with the ideas and practices of Surrealism. Sommer settled in Prescott, Arizona, in 1935. In the same year he traveled to New York to show his drawings to Alfred Stieglitz, the great pioneer of modern photography. This encounter, and the introduction to other artists associated with Stieglitz's gallery, had a decisive impact on Sommer.
The following year he also met Edward Weston, whose photographs he greatly admired. Stieglitz and Weston became mentors and encouraged Sommer to pursue his interest in photography. Another significant influence was the Surrealist Max Ernst. They first met in 1941 and became closer when Ernst also moved to Arizona in 1946. In his portrait of Ernst, Sommer useв double exposure, combining a photograph of the artist with one of water stains on cement. In doing so, he evokeв the Surrealist technique of 'frottage' (rubbing) and transformв an otherwise straightforward portrait into an uncanny homage.
In 1946 Sommer began to photograph composed arrangements of found objects. He realised that things which at first might not appear to have anything in common can still "meet and work together." Sommer created unlikely connections between works of art of different periods and traditions. In "Dürer Variation" Sommer cut, pleated and reassembled three reproductions of engravings from Albrecht Dürer's "Large Passion" series. The result is an image devoid of perspective and almost Cubist in appearance. By contrast, in the "Virgin and Child", Sommer combined a lump of metal salvaged from the wreckage of a burnt-out car and a fragment from a children's book illustration to echo the famous drawing of that name by Leonardo da Vinci.
Sommer made "Victoria and Albert Museum" painting when visiting the V&A in 1960 although confusingly, he sometimes dated it to 1959. It showed a detail from an early 16th-century Flemish tapestry, "The Triumph of Death over Chastity" from the V&A's collection. By zooming in, cropping and moving the camera during the 1/5th second exposure, Sommer distorted the image to such an extent that it is difficult to identify its source.
In 1957 Sommer began to make photographs using 'synthetic' or camera-less negatives he made by applying smoke or paint to cellophane and glass. For the "Paracelsus" negative, he manipulated oil paint between two pieces of cellophane and pulled them apart to reveal a textured shape. The result bears an uncanny resemblance to a human torso and led Sommer to name the photograph after Paracelsus, the 16th-century Swiss doctor, alchemist and philosopher. Sommer identified with his holistic belief in the inseparability of the human and universal life and the need to treat both body and spirit.
Sommer started photographing landscapes around 1939, having bought a large-format camera the previous year. With their flattened compositions and meticulous detail, his desert scenes suggest the plans and maps he would have made when working as a landscape architect. Their patterning, minimal shadow, and omitted horizon also have much in common with the 'all-over' field paintings of American Abstract Expressionist artists. Perhaps, like those paintings, these atomised landscapes devoid of human presence speak of existential unease in the wake of world war. About the same time, Sommer also made a series of photographs of decaying animals he encountered on desert walks. He died on January 23, 1999 in Prescott, Arizona, United States.
Lee Nevin
All Children Are Ambassadors
Medallion
Colorado River Landscape
Valise d'Adam
Untitled
Hens
Taylor, Arizona
Fighting Centaur
Untitled
Max Ernst
Untitled (Amputated Foot)
Giant
Lee Nevin
The Eatable Thief
Configurations on Black 5
Arizona Landscape
Prince Albert
Jack Rabbit
The Thief Greater Than His Loot
Flower and Frog
Sun Valley, Idaho
Untitled
Lee Nevin
Untitled (Nude out of focus)
Frances
Arizona Landscape, 1945 (gelatin silver photograph)
Ondine
Coyotes
I Adore You
Coyotes
The Wall
Chicken Parts
Max Ernst
Venus, Jupiter and Mars
Moon Culminations
Livia
Coyote
For Sommer, the act of drawing addressed the most fundamental problems of perception and representation, and as with his photographs and paintings, he sought to transform, unfold, and expand potential meanings of objects and forms. Sommer explored the boundaries of abstraction and representation, as well as challenged himself through formal exercises in color relationship, line, and compositional space.
Quotations:
"The coherent way of investigating any field is to examine its possible relatedness to other things."
"The smallest modification of tonality affects structure. Some things have to be rather large, but elegance is the presentation of things in their minimum dimensions."
"Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities."
"Ideas and thoughts collide and sort themselves out in these fruitful collisions."
Quotes from others about the person
According to art critic Robert C. Morgan, Sommer's "most extravagant, subtle, majestic, and impressive photographs - comparable in many ways to the views of Yosemite Valley’s El Capitan and Half Dome by Ansel Adams - were Sommer’s seemingly infinite desert landscapes, some of which he referred to as 'constellations.'
At Cornell University Frederick Sommer met Frances Elisabeth Watson whom he married in 1928. They had no children.