THE SECRET OF THE TYNG COLLECTION by Andrew Leeming LRPS

October 2020 No. 7

THE SECRET OF THE TYNG COLLECTION by Andrew Leeming LRPS

That the Victoria and Albert Museum holds the RPS Collection of over a quarter of a million photographic objects – equipment, books, periodicals, documents – will be familiar to most of us. However, the fact that the Visual Art Group has its ‘own’ Collection in the V&A may be a little like a best-kept secret.

In 1927 a wealthy New Yorker, Stephen H. Tyng, donated a fund to the Royal Photographic Society to finance the acquisition of outstanding pictorial photographs.

Each year such a photograph is chosen by a small group of selectors for the Tyng Collection. Presently there are 221 photographs in the Tyng, including portraits of Helen Keller and composer Jean Sibelius by Yousuf Karsh and scenes by Tim Rudman, Joan Wakelin, Ian Berry and Tony Worobiec.

The RPS Pictorial Group was the forerunner of the present-day Visual Art Group, so the VAG Committee continues the historical involvement of the RPS in the Tyng Collection by inviting Selectors to choose photographic prints.

What is pictorialism? For many years, the Tyng was run by Alastair McGhee ARPS. To guide the Selectors in their choice of prints, he indicated ‘beauty of subject’, ‘tonality’ and ‘composition’ as ideals. Consequently, the Tyng Collection is comprised of a wide range of subjects: still life, portraits, landscapes, nature, everyday scenes of people and events, even a 1938 portrait of Stephen H. Tyng himself.

The Chairman of the Tyng Foundation Trustees, Professor Ray Clarke OBE, remarked that the V&A especially value the 1927 masterpiece Bewegungsstudie (Motion Study) of dancers from the Vienna State Opera by Rudolf Koppitz. Please internet search on ‘Rudolf Koppitz Wikipedia’ for a more complete discussion of the Jugendstil (art nouveau, avant-garde) photography of Koppitz, which echoes the style of the painter Gustav Klimt.

Reference is made in this Wikipedia entry to the early 20th Century American Photo-Secessionist movement of Alfred Stieglitz, who believed that Pictorialist art photographers should be creative during the printing process – as painters are when they produce unique works of art - by applying sepia or platinum toning, by using soft focus or by different printing techniques, such as bromoil, the carbon/Fresson process, photogravure, gum bichromate or by using Gevaluxe warm-toned paper, all of which feature in the earlier photographs in the Tyng Collection.

Andrew Leeming is a Trustee of the Tyng Foundation and Tyng Co-ordinator on the VAG Committee.

He will follow this article with a discussion of Pictorialism.