untitled (Looking at Jewelry), Arthur S. Siegel

Exhibition Label: "Art for Kansas: Building the Collection, 1988-1998 (Recent Acquisitions)," Nov-1998, John Pultz and Susan Earle In 1995 and 1996, Chicago residents Susan and Kenneth Pearl donated to the Spencer fifty-four prints by three Chicago photographers: Arther Siegel, Gordon Coster, and James Hamilton Brown. These men were part of the large and vital photographic community that Chicago has attracted and maintained to meet its needs as a major retail and commercial center, since the 1940s. Many of these photographers, including Siegel and Coster, were affiliated with the Institute of Design, a school founded in 1937 by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a former teacher of photography at the German Bauhaus who was brought to Chicago by businessmen wanting to improve industrial design in the Midwest. Moholy-Nagy's embrace of experimentation with the camera's mechanical eye can be seen in the work of these and other Chicago photographers. Siegel, a member of Moholy-Nagy's first Chicago class, is best known for his gelatin-silver prints, but he also experimented with the expressive potential for color photography. In the 1950s, Siegel's phychoanalyst encouraged him to use photography as a means of self-understanding. The Museum's print, part of a series taken by Siegel during his therapy, shows Moholy-Nagy's influence as the accidents of reflection are put forth to symbolize human psychology.