WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS.- Featuring over a dozen large-scale photographs of the places where leading nineteenth-century landscape painters John Constable and Claude Monet made some of their most iconic works of art, the Clark Art Institute’s latest exhibition presents Cuban-American photographer Abelardo Morell in Abelardo Morell: In the Company of Monet and Constable, on view November 23, 2024 through February 17, 2025 in the Eugene V. Thaw Gallery for Works on Paper in the Clark’s Manton Research Center.

Morell (b. 1948, Havana; lives and works in Boston) is known for his distinctive photographic inventions based on the principles of a camera obscura. Morell’s Tent/Camera device used to make the images in this exhibition, makes it possible for him to combine in a single image the features of a landscape view with whatever happens to be underfoot—leaves, blades of grass, dirt, pebbles, and so on. Combining picturesque vistas with ground-level natural details, Morell’s luscious color photographs capture one’s relation to both art and nature through their complex fusion of the historical and the contemporary, the transitory and the lasting, the pictorial and the photographic.

“It is exciting to see the ways in which Abelardo Morell breathes new life into scenes that have become so closely associated with the works of artists who lived more than a century before him. The unique marriage of three artists’ perspectives—working generations apart—to create something that is utterly new is brilliant,” said Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director of the Clark. “Not only will our visitors enjoy the haunting beauty of this exhibition, but I am certain that they will find the artist’s process fascinating.”

“Morell’s multilayered photographs have the power to surprise and delight,” said Anne Leonard, exhibition curator and Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Clark. “Like the best art, they allow us to see in new ways—and that goes for the natural world around us as well as beloved, familiar paintings. The dialogue that Morell’s photographs initiate with paintings by Monet and Constable is historically grounded in the nineteenth century and, at the same time, absolutely contemporary.”

THE EXHIBITION

Abelardo Morell’s singular works are achieved through the use of a Tent/Camera that he has adapted to integrate the centuries-old device called a camera obscura (similar to a pinhole camera) with state-of-the art technology to allow him to capture distant vistas and juxtapose them with the granular aspects of a place in a single moment in time. For the last ten years or so, Morell has been connecting his innovative photographic techniques with storied traditions of nineteenth-century landscape painting. He has spent time in France and England and taken photographs at locations that directly inspired Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926), and John Constable (English, 1776–1837). By following in these artists’ paths, Morell seeks not to copy their paintings but rather to make new pictures in their spirit.

An interesting dialogue about the relationship between painting and photography began in the mid-nineteenth century, just after photography was invented. When Morell takes his fascination with optics and technology into the realm of landscape, he reactivates this dialogue. For him, the Tent/Camera pictures represent an effort to “marry photographic vision with painterly patina.”

In this exhibition focusing on Monet and Constable, who are not only touchstones for Morell’s artistic vision but also mainstays of the Clark’s permanent collection, Morell’s large-scale, richly layered photographs offer a bridge between historical and contemporary experiences of place.

THE TENT/CAMERA

Morell's Tent/Camera is made of light–proof material that wraps around a large, redesigned tripod, which has a plate on top that holds two devices. The first device is a 90–degree prism with a lens attached, called a diopter, which acts like a periscope projecting an image of the nearby landscape on the ground below. The focus of the image projected can be adjusted by raising or lowering the height of the tent. This has the effect of changing the focal length of the lens attached to the prism, resulting in a discrete focused area of the image. The second device is a digital camera looking straight down and focused on the ground. A picture made with a Tent/Camera shows both the granular details of the ground—for example, stones, grass, dirt, or cement—and a projected vista of the landscape, giving the overall image an illusion of a painterly patina. The camera is connected to a laptop outside the tent which allows the artist to compose, focus, and view the image with precision.

IN THE COMPANY OF MONET

The first section of the exhibition showcases eight Tent/Camera images Morell took in regions of France in which Monet lived and worked, including the artist’s garden in Giverny, poppy fields near Vétheuil, and the Rouen Cathedral.

Morell explains that Monet’s landscape paintings “interest me a lot because of his emphasis on linking seeing and painting. In his work these two things are inseparable! Undoubtedly, my photographs also suggest the look of many other painters and photographers who worked in France during the mid-19th century. What I have come up with contains some interesting new versions of the light and the land, now so familiar, in paintings and photographs by artists from the past. The feeling of sharing a common ground with them thrills me.”

Morell’s Tent/Camera images Yew Tree in Monet’s Garden, Giverny, France (2023); Water Lilies in Monet’s Water Garden, Giverny, France (2023); View of Monet’s Garden #1, Giverny, France (2023); and View of Monet’s Garden #3, Giverny, France (2023) reflect the landscape of the small village northwest of Paris where Monet cultivated his famous garden and painted the surrounding countryside beginning in 1883. By using richly varied brushstrokes and excluding distinct points of interest, Monet draws the viewer’s attention to the color and texture of the painting’s surface, much like Morell, with his use of the natural elements surrounding his Tent/Camera adding texture to his photographs.

Tent-Camera Image: Rouen Cathedral in Cloudy Afternoon Light, Rouen, France (2016) offers a similar perspective to Claude Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, the Façade in Sunlight (c. 1892–94) that is a part of the Clark’s permanent collection. Monet painted nearly thirty views of the cathedral’s façade, moving from one canvas to the next to capture different moments throughout the day. The encrusted brushstrokes on the canvas evoke the blinding radiance of sunlight glinting off pale stone. Morell’s photograph captures the building on a cloudier day and incorporates the cobblestones on the ground in front of the cathedral.

IN THE COMPANY OF CONSTABLE

The exhibition’s second section displays five Tent/Camera images of English landscapes in the countryside in which John Constable lived and worked.

“In June 2017 I traveled to England with my Tent/Camera in search of landscapes where John Constable painted,” Morell said. “My Tent/Camera images are rendered on the ground, resulting in a photograph that suggests the painterly effect of his own canvases. I love the way his paintings have a kind of ‘ground’ quality to them, a roughness; that roughness was interesting to me. A lot of his work is so much about scraggly kind of ground, and then the clouds,” Morell explains. “I strived to look at the English landscape in his spirit. Constable stayed very attached to the countryside where he grew up. I made these images in the Flatford area of East Anglia, where he spent his boyhood, and in Hampstead Heath north of London, where he lived as an adult.”

The Clark’s permanent collection holds nearly sixty works by Constable. Beginning in 1819, Constable and his family spent several summers in Hampstead to escape London’s heat and pollution. The Hampstead landscape was admired by poets and artists alike, and the suburb also boasted a spectacular view of the city. The sky makes up most of the composition of Morell’s Tent/Camera images Pond in Hampstead Health, London, England (2017) and Clouds and Trees on Grass in Hampstead Heath, London, England (2017). Constable described the sky as the “chief organ of sentiment” in a landscape painting. He painted more than one hundred cloud studies while summering in Hampstead in 1821 and 1822.

Upon visiting Constable’s boyhood home in Flatford, England, Morell was struck by the attention the painter paid to the textures and details of the workaday landscape. For Constable, even the riverside mud was imbued with a noble quality. He once said, “I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, — light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.” Morell’s technique compresses the landscape around him and the ground beneath him into a single view. Like Constable, he delights in the richness of the humblest of surfaces.

Born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, Abelardo Morell immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962. Morell received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale University School of Art. He was professor of Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston from 1983 to 2010.

His publications include Tent-Camera (2018, Nazraeli Press), Flowers for Lisa (2018, Abrams), The Universe Next Door (2013, The Art Institute of Chicago), Abelardo Morell (2005, Phaidon Press), Camera Obscura (2004) and A Book of Books (2002), both published by Bulfinch Press, a photographic illustration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1998, Dutton), and A Camera in a Room (1995, Smithsonian Press).

He has received a number of awards and grants, including a Lucie Award for Achievement in Fine Art, the Infinity Award in Art from the International Center of Photography, New York, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

Morell’s work has been collected and shown in galleries, institutions, and museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Museum in New York, and The Art Institute of Chicago.