Object number2020.18.28
Volcano 69
Date1980
Artist
Aaron Siskind
(American, 1903-1991)
CultureAmerican
MediumGelatin silver print, printed later
DimensionsImage: 9 7/8 x 9 7/8 in. (25.1 x 25.1 cm)
Sheet: 13 15/16 x 10 15/16 in. (35.4 x 27.8 cm)
Sheet: 13 15/16 x 10 15/16 in. (35.4 x 27.8 cm)
Credit LineGift of Howard Greenberg
On View
Not on viewPeriod20th c
Classification(s)
SignedOn verso, signed upper center in pencil: Aaron Siskind.
InscribedOn verso, by artist, upper center handwritten in pencil: Volcano 69 1980. On verso, in unknown hand, along bottom portion in pencil: FLLAC2020.18.28 / V69 / 80 / PF130756 / 365 / ASF15940.
Vassar Exhibitions
Label TextPhotographed during Aaron Siskind’s Hawaiian expeditions of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Volcano 69 abstracts hardened lava to near illegibility. The surface reads as pure tactility— fissured, granular, fixed between eruption and dormancy. Working with a Rollei SL 66, he pursued what critic Peter Bunnell called “depth turned inside out,” rendering geological upheaval as textural patterning. From the peeling walls of New York tenements to the weathered stones of Martha’s Vineyard, Siskind found compositional possibilities in material decay and evolution. Like Abstract Expressionist contemporaries Franz Kline and Mark Rothko, he extracted expressive charge from gestural marks. Through such radical abstraction, Volcano 69 achieves what Siskind sought in his mature work: “an altogether new object, complete and self-contained.”
Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge.
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