Beaumont Newhall

Beaumont Newhall (born June 22, 1908, Lynn, Massachusetts, U.S.—died February 26, 1993, Santa Fe, New Mexico) was an American photography historian, writer, and curator known for founding, and serving as the first curator of, the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Newhall was first exposed to photography by his mother, who ran a commercial portraiture studio out of their house. For that enterprise she did all of her own photo processing in their home darkroom, where Newhall carefully observed. In the early 1920s, by which time his mother had given up photography, Newhall taught himself photo processing in her abandoned darkroom.

Newhall graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and went on to Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1930. At Harvard he studied art history with Paul J. Sachs, the associate director of Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum who taught museum studies courses, the first of their kind in the United States. In the summer of 1930 Newhall earned a scholarship to return to Harvard for a master’s degree (1931). That same year, with Sachs’s support, Newhall got his first job, as a lecturer at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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In the midst of the Great Depression, funding for the arts was scarce, and Newhall was soon laid off. He moved on to a position working on the development of the Cloisters, what would become the medieval art museum of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in Fort Tryon Park at the northern tip of Manhattan. During the summers of 1933 and 1934, Newhall studied at the University of Paris and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, respectively. He went home to Lynn, Massachusetts, for a short time in 1935 and served as an administrator of the Art Project of the Emergency Relief Administration of Massachusetts, part of the New Deal’s Public Works of Art Project, which put artists to work during the Depression.

In November 1935 Newhall was hired as a librarian by MoMA. Soon after, MoMA’s director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., asked Newhall to curate a photography exhibition. Newhall organized a 98-year photographic history of the medium—“Photography: 1839–1937” (March 17–April 18, 1937)—which filled all four floors of the museum’s building, a brownstone at 11 West 53rd Street, and featured more than 800 works. When the first run of the 225-page exhibition catalog sold out, Newhall reissued it as Photography: A Short Critical History (1938). In 1940, after close collaboration with photographer Ansel Adams, Newhall founded the museum’s department of photography and, in addition to his librarian duties, took on the role of director of the new department. Newhall and Adams co-curated the department’s inaugural exhibition, “Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Esthetics” (December 31, 1940–January 12, 1941). The two men remained close friends and colleagues throughout their lives.

Newhall had married in 1936. When the United States entered World War II in 1942, he was called up for service. In his absence, his wife Nancy took over his responsibilities as curator of photography until he was able to resume his position in 1945. During the summers of 1946 and ’47, he taught the history of photography at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an experimental school which included on its faculty other thinkers, architects, and artists such as Walter Gropius, Josef Albers, Anni Albers, and Jacob Lawrence.

In 1947 photographer Edward Steichen was appointed director of the photography department at MoMA. Newhall, feeling blindsided, had no choice but to resign. He received a Guggenheim grant that year to fund the writing of a thoroughly revised and enhanced edition of his first MoMA catalog, now titled The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day (1949).

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In 1948 Newhall was appointed curator at the George Eastman House (now the International Museum of Photography and Film) in Rochester, New York; he was promoted to director in 1958. Together with Adams and photographers Minor White, Dorothea Lange, and Barbara Morgan, in 1952 the Newhalls launched the photography magazine Aperture, a quarterly periodical devoted to examining and promoting photography as a fine art. While in Rochester, Newhall also taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology (1956–68). In 1971 he retired from Eastman House and moved to Albuquerque for a professorship at the University of New Mexico, where he taught until 1984, when he became professor emeritus. That year he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship.

Newhall was a prolific writer, penning hundreds of articles and essays and several books over the course of his career. He was also a photographer, and toward the end of his life he published In Plain Sight: The Photographs of Beaumont Newhall (1983), a collection of his photographs with a foreword by Adams. An autobiography, Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography, was issued the year of his death. Newhall is considered one of the foremost early scholars of photography. His The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present, in several revised and enlarged editions, long served as a seminal text for students of the medium, and it was translated into several languages.