Getty Museum

Landscape with Frame Buildings, Gaspé

Date

1929

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

Object ID

6fa2f574-8229-4643-b653-593858b16543

In this view of Gaspé there is not the grand sense of perspective or vastness of space found in The Beach—_Percé, Gaspé, Quebec_ ([84.XP.208.233](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/1043EE)), but there is the same attention to the internal arrangement of the image and the interaction of key elements through the exploitation of line, shape, and mass as they are translated into black-and-white forms. Strand is approaching his photography as Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) did his painting: the structure of the composition and the organization of elements within that composition define the subject. Indeed, this print recalls Cézanne's painting _Houses in Provence_ ( [https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.54129.html](https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.54129.html)) from about 1880 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), where the picture is composed of blocks of color that create bold diagonals and forms, which in turn depict the buildings. Strand had seen various works by Cézanne at the 1913 Armory Show in New York and acknowledged the influence of the French artist in a 1974 interview with Calvin Tomkins in the _New Yorker_, claiming: "I would say that the landscapes of Cézanne are the greatest of all, because not only is every element in the picture unified but there is also unity in depth; there is tremendous three-dimensional space that is also part of the unity of the picture space. Anyway, I became very conscious of the need to master this problem." Originally published in _Paul Strand_, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Anne M. Lyden (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 40. ©2005, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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