Image scanned from a transparency and color-corrected by Pat Cagney.

Bruce Christen

Artist Marjorie Content (American, 1895-1984)

CultureAmerican

Dateca. 1926

MediumGelatin silver print

DimensionsOverall, Image: 3 7/8 × 3 in. (9.8 × 7.6 cm)
Overall, Support: 14 × 11 in. (35.6 × 27.9 cm)
Overall, Mat: 18 × 14 in. (45.7 × 35.6 cm)

InscribedArtist's printing notations on reverse in pencil: "6-4" and "80?".

Credit LineThe Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA, Horace W. Goldsmith and Art Purchase Funds

Object number93.9.2

Not on view

DescriptionThis is a vintage gelatin silver print; it is a portrait of a man with glasses and pipe, one of the artist's friends, Bruce Christen. He knew the photographer when she lived in New York City with her family from 1923-1927.

Label TextMarjorie Content American (1895-1984) Bruce Christen, ca. 1926 Gelatin-silver print Museum purchase, Horace W. Goldsmith and Art Purchase Funds 93.9.2 In a career lasting a mere fifteen years, Marjorie Content achieved fame in avant-garde circles for the purity and wit of her small-scale landscape, still-life, and portrait photographs. Within a miniaturist format, only six inches square, she worked to capture the essence of family friend Bruce Christen's personality, focusing on his bespectacled face and inquisitive gaze to suggest the presence of intense intellect. Whether essaying the face of a single sitter or the vastness of the Grand Canyon, Content's quest "to see more than I see now" earned the admiration of photographer Alfred Stieglitz and painter Georgia O'Keeffe. Despite such endorsements from these revered artists, she viewed herself essentially as an amateur and never exhibited her work during her lifetime. Exhibition History"Marjorie Content," The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Va., December 10, 1994 - March 5, 1995. "Women of the Chrysler: a 400-Year Celebration of the Arts," Large Changing Gallery, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., March 24 - July 18, 2010. Published ReferencesBrooks Johnson, _Photography Speaks: 150 Photographers on Their Art_ (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2004), 116-117.