ed at the Cekinov Grad. The show covered cultural links with Italy and northern Europe, social history, and patronage.
At the Hermitage, "Hidden Treasures Revealed" showed 74 works, including ones by Picasso and Edgar Degas, that had been removed from Germany at the end of World War II and since hidden in the museum. (See Sidebar.)
The purchase in 1995 of the huge Bettmann Archive by software billionaire Bill Gates underscored a potentially revolutionary trend taking place in museums, archives, and libraries: the conversion of visual images to digitized form for electronic storage, access, and distribution. Gates’s privately owned company, Corbis Corp., also had acquired electronic rights to 500,000 images, including work from individual photographers and art from the National Gallery of London, the Philadelphia Museum, and the Barnes Foundation. The Bettmann Archive--established in the 1930s by Otto L. Bettmann, who fled to New York from Hitler’s Germany with $5 in cash and two steamer trunks of images on 35-mm film--now housed some 16 million images that, taken together, constituted an unmatched visual chronicle of the 20th century. The acquisition of this collection placed Gates at the forefront of photographic image digitization for use by new electronic imaging and communications technologies.
An exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, Calif., "Vision in Motion: The Photographs of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy," celebrated the centennial of the birth of this protean photographer, painter, filmmaker, and designer, who had powerfully influenced modern art in Europe and the United States between World Wars I and II. Some 50 vintage photograms (camera images and photographic collages made in Germany between 1923 and 1930) displayed his dynamic structures disciplined by elegant formalism.
"An American Century of Photography from Dry Point to Digital" traveled to several venues and surveyed a familiar field but gave an unusually fresh and lively historical look at American photography from the mid 1880s to the early 1990s. More than 300 works, including many rare, less well-known, or virtually forgotten images, were selected from the notable Hallmark Photographic Collection of some 2,600 prints taken by 400 photographers.
Another traveling exhibition, "The Garden of Earthly Delights: Photographs by Edward Weston and Robert Mapplethorpe," provoked controversy with its pairings for comparison of 82 prints by these two photographers. Though each artist was a rebel and a sensualist, some questioned whether they shared a common vision, as the exhibition seemed to suggest. Some critics, however, found a striking commonality of perception and style in the paired portraits, nudes, and erotic shapes of plant life. Others found the attempt superficial and unconvincing, arguing that the photographic genres for which each man was famous--landscapes for Weston and homoerotic images for Mapplethorpe--were too unalike for paired comparison.
"Dirty Windows," an exhibition by Merry Alpern, tested the limits of artistic expression, with photographs that some felt bordered on the merely sensational or pornographic. By photographing across an air shaft through the grimy window of a Manhattan sex-club bathroom, Alpern framed anonymous yet startling fragments showing sexual encounters and drug transactions taking place there. Though her project was selected to receive a grant by a peer-review panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Council on the Arts, which reviews such recommendations, rejected it. Collectors, galleries, and leading museums were quick to acquire her pictures, however, which also appeared in book form.
News of a rare daguerreotype unveiled by Sotheby’s created a stir among collectors and aficionados of such works. Made in 1846 and tentatively attributed to early American photographer John Plumbe, Jr., the half-plate daguerreotype depicts the U.S. Capitol building with the Bullfinch-designed dome that replaced the original destroyed by fire during the War of 1812. Rumoured to have been purchased in the 1960s 