Clara Sipprell (October 31, 1885 – December 27, 1975) was a Canadian-born, early 20th-century photographer who lived most of her life in the United States. She was well known for her pictorial landscapes and for portraits of many famous actors, artists, writers and scientists. Her photograph ''New York City, Old and New'' was the first artwork by a female artist acquired for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Life
Early years
Clara Estelle Sipprell was born in
Tillsonburg
Tillsonburg is a town in Oxford County, Ontario, Canada with a population of 18,615 located about 50 kilometres southeast of London, on Highway 3 at the junction of Highway 19.
History
Prior to European settlement, the present site of Tillso ...
,
Ontario
Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...
, Canada on 31 October 1885. She was the sixth child and only daughter of Francis and Fanny Crabbe Sipprell. Her father died before she was born, and her mother had to find various housekeeping jobs in order to care for the family on her own.
Since her mother had trouble finding dependable work, Sipprell's older brothers lived for a while with their grandparents about fifty miles away from their home.
When they were old enough to work, three of her brothers moved to Buffalo, New York, and her brother Frank got a job as a photographer's assistant. The brothers sent money back to their mother and encouraged her to join them when she could. At some point before she was ten years old, Sipprell and her mother moved to Buffalo, and, except for travels, she stayed in the United States the rest of her life.
In 1902, Frank borrowed money from an older brother and opened the Sipprell Photography Studio in Buffalo. From the start his sister was fascinated with what went on at the studio, and soon she was acting as Frank's apprentice. At the age of sixteen she left school and became a full-time assistant, and over the next ten years she learned all of the technical aspects of photography in his studio. Later, Sipprell would credit her brother for both her technical and her aesthetic training, saying "He taught me all I seem to know. He taught me by letting me alone with my mistakes, and for that reason I never became conscious of the limitation of photography."
In her early years Sipprell took photos of landscapes around Buffalo. While learning the technical aspects of the art, she experimented with a wide range of photographic media, including bromoil, gum, carbon and
platinum prints
Platinum prints, also called ''platinotypes'', are photographic prints made by a monochrome printing process involving platinum.
Platinum tones range from warm black, to reddish brown, to expanded mid-tone grays that are unobtainable in silver ...
. She also made a series of
Autochome color prints and continued to prefer that process even after higher quality color film was created.
Because of the work of
George Eastman
George Eastman (July 12, 1854March 14, 1932) was an American entrepreneur who founded the Kodak, Eastman Kodak Company and helped to bring the photographic use of roll film into the mainstream. He was a major philanthropist, establishing the ...
and the establishment of the
Eastman Kodak
The Eastman Kodak Company (referred to simply as Kodak ) is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorpor ...
Company in Rochester, the city became an important center for American photography in the early part of the 20th century. Sipprell became involved in the activities of the Buffalo Camera Club, which, although its membership was closed to women at the time, allowed her to participate because her brother Frank was a member. In 1910 she exhibited her first photos at the Camera Club, one of which won second prize in the portrait competition.
Despite the fact that she could not be a member of the Club, Sipprell continued to show prints in their annual exhibitions. In 1913 she won six prizes at the show, more than any of the Club's actual members.
The photographs she exhibited there attracted the attention of influential art and photography critic
Sadakichi Hartmann
Carl Sadakichi Hartmann (November 8, 1867 – November 22, 1944) was an American art and photography critic, notable anarchist and poet of German and Japanese descent.
Biography
Hartmann, born on the artificial island of Dejima, Nagasaki, to ...
(who at the time wrote about photography under the pseudonym "Sidney Allen"), and he wrote two very favorable reviews of her work. His interest, coupled with her own success, brought her invitations to speak at various photo clubs in New York City, and soon she was spending more time there than in Buffalo.
Rising fame
In 1915 Sipprell and long-time family friend and teacher Jessica Beers moved to New York, where they shared an apartment on Morningside Drive. The big city better suited Sipprell's growing bohemian tastes, which quickly came to include smoking cigars, and pipes; drinking bourbon, driving fast convertibles, and wearing capes, exotic jewelry and embroidered Slavic clothing. One friend recalled that she "did not make her work her life, but instead crafted a life that was a work of art."
Within a few months Sipprell established a portrait studio and soon established a long list of clients due to her already well-known artistry. Over the next forty years she would photograph some of the most famous artists, writers, dancers and other cultural icons of the time, including
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz (January 1, 1864 – July 13, 1946) was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was kno ...
,
Pearl S. Buck
Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973) was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for ''The Good Earth'' a bestselling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, Pulitze ...
,
Charles E. Burchfield,
Fyodor Chaliapin
Feodor Ivanovich Chaliapin ( rus, Фёдор Ива́нович Шаля́пин, Fyodor Ivanovich Shalyapin, ˈfʲɵdər ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ ʂɐˈlʲapʲɪn}; April 12, 1938) was a Russian opera singer. Possessing a deep and expressive bass v ...
,
Ralph Adams Cram
Ralph Adams Cram (December 16, 1863 – September 22, 1942) was a prolific and influential American architect of collegiate and ecclesiastical buildings, often in the Gothic Revival style. Cram & Ferguson and Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson are partner ...
,
W. E. B. Du Bois,
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...
,
Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost (March26, 1874January29, 1963) was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in the United States. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloq ...
,
Granville Hicks
Granville Hicks (September 9, 1901 – June 18, 1982) was an American Marxist and, later, anti-Marxist novelist, literary critic, educator, and editor.
Early life
Granville Hicks was born September 9, 1901, in Exeter, New Hampshire, to Frank Stev ...
,
Malvina Hoffman
Malvina Cornell Hoffman (June 15, 1885July 10, 1966) was an American sculptor and author, well known for her life-size bronze sculptures of people. She also worked in plaster and marble. Hoffman created portrait busts of working-class people and ...
,
Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hug ...
,
Robinson Jeffers
John Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887 – January 20, 1962) was an American poet, known for his work about the central California coast. Much of Jeffers's poetry was written in narrative and epic form. However, he is also known for his short ...
,
Isamu Noguchi
was an American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public artworks, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several ...
,
Maxfield Parrish
Maxfield Parrish (July 25, 1870 – March 30, 1966) was an American painter and illustration, illustrator active in the first half of the 20th century. He is known for his distinctive saturated hues and idealized neo-classical imagery. His ...
and
Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt () (October 11, 1884November 7, 1962) was an American political figure, diplomat, and activist. She was the first lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt's four ...
.
As a portrait photographer, Sipprell sought to convey a sense of the whole person and what made each unique.
She was a traditional
pictorialist
Pictorialism is an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer ha ...
, interested in simple beauty and soft-focus imagery, and she kept this same aesthetic vision whether she was taking portraits, landscapes or still lifes.
In the late 1910s Sipprell met a young Russian woman named Irina Khrabroff, who became her lifelong friend, traveling companion and, later, her dealer and business manager. When they first met Sipprell still shared her apartment with Beers, but when she moved out in 1923 Khrabroff moved in. Later that year Khrabroff married a man named Feodor Cekich, and the three of them lived together in the same apartment for many years.
In 1924 the threesome traveled to Europe, where Sipprell photographed the Adriatic Coast and, through connections with the Khrabroffs, members of the Moscow arts community. Later these same connections gave her access to many Russian expatriates whom she also photographed, including Countess Alexandra Tolstoy,
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff; in Russian pre-revolutionary script. (28 March 1943) was a Russian composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one o ...
and
Sergei Koussevitzky
Sergei Alexandrovich KoussevitzkyKoussevitzky's original Russian forename is usually transliterated into English as either "Sergei" or "Sergey"; however, he himself adopted the French spelling "Serge", using it in his signature. (SeThe Koussevit ...
.
Two years later Sipprell and Khrabroff, without her husband, traveled again to Yugoslavia, and Sipprell made another series of photographs of the countryside and the people.
Throughout the 1920s Sipprell continued to exhibit and have her work published, and in 1928 and 1929 she was given her first one-person shows, at San Jose State Teachers College. She also continued her friendship and living arrangement with the Khrabroffs, even after they had a daughter in 1927. However, around 1932 tension developed between Sipprell and her close friends over the rise of the
Stalinist
Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist-Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory o ...
government in Russia. The Khrabroffs remained loyal to the ousted czarists, and they felt Sipprell's continued association with some who were sympathetic to the Stalinists was intolerable.
By 1935 the friendship was over, and Sipprell started living on her own for the first time.
In 1932 her photograph ''New York City, Old and New'' became the first artwork by a female artist acquired for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Later life
In 1937 Sipprell moved to
Manchester, Vermont
Manchester is a town in, and one of two shire towns (county seats) of, Bennington County, Vermont. The population was 4,484 at the 2020 census.
Manchester Village, an incorporated village, and Manchester Center are settlement centers within ...
, at the suggestion of Vermont poets Walter Hard and
Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost (March26, 1874January29, 1963) was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in the United States. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloq ...
. Soon after she met
Phyllis Reid Fenner
Phyllis R. Fenner (October 24, 1899 – February 26, 1982) was an American librarian, writer, anthologist, and storyteller. She was also a long-term companion of Clara Sipprell.
Early life and education
Phyllis Fenner, born in Almond, New York o ...
(1899–1982), a writer, librarian, and anthologist of children's books. Fourteen years younger than Sipprell, Fenner soon became Sipprell's housemate and traveling companion. This relationship continued through the final thirty-eight years of Sipprell's life. In the mid-1960s, they had architect Harold Olmsted build them a house in Manchester, which included the first darkroom that Sipprell ever had in the same place she lived.
It is not clear if Sipprell's relationships with any of the women she lived with were sexual or even romantic, yet their length and stability indicate an extraordinary level of commitment.
Clara Sipprell died in April 1975 at the age of eighty-nine. Her ashes are buried in a plot near an outcropping of rock in Manchester. Attached to the rock is a small bronze tablet on which, in accordance with her wishes, are engraved her own name along with the names of Jessica Beers and Phyllis Fenner.
Over the course of her lifetime her work was shown in more than 100 photography exhibitions around the world. Major collections of her work are housed at the
Amon Carter Museum
Amon may refer to:
Mythology
* Amun, an Ancient Egyptian deity, also known as Amon and Amon-Ra
* Aamon, a Goetic demon
People Momonym
* Amon of Judah ( 664– 640 BC), king of Judah
Given name
* Amon G. Carter (1879–1955), American pu ...
and at
Syracuse University
Syracuse University (informally 'Cuse or SU) is a Private university, private research university in Syracuse, New York. Established in 1870 with roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the university has been nonsectarian since 1920. Locate ...
.
Gallery
File:Decorative Study, by Clara Sipprell.jpg, Decorative Study (1913)
File:Ivy and Old Glass.jpg, Ivy and Old Glass (1922)
File:NPG-NPG 81 12.jpg, Sculptor Malvina Hoffman
Malvina Cornell Hoffman (June 15, 1885July 10, 1966) was an American sculptor and author, well known for her life-size bronze sculptures of people. She also worked in plaster and marble. Hoffman created portrait busts of working-class people and ...
(1928)
File:NPG 82 201.jpg, Journalist Ida Minerva Tarbell
Ida Minerva Tarbell (November 5, 1857January 6, 1944) was an American writer, investigative journalist, biographer and lecturer. She was one of the leading muckrakers of the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and pionee ...
(1940)
File:S-NPG 82 76.tif, Children's writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Dorothy Canfield Fisher (February 17, 1879 – November 9, 1958) was an educational reformer, social activist, and best-selling American author in the early 20th century. She strongly supported women's rights, racial equality, and lifelong educat ...
(1940)
File:NPG 82 158 Roosevelt.tif, Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt () (October 11, 1884November 7, 1962) was an American political figure, diplomat, and activist. She was the first lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt's four ...
(1949)
File:Walter Francis White by Clara Sipprell.jpg, NAACP
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E.&nb ...
leader Walter Francis White
Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 – March 21, 1955) was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for a quarter of a century, 1929–1955, after joining the organi ...
(c. 1950)
References
Further reading
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*
*
External links
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sipprell, Clara
Canadian photographers
1885 births
1975 deaths
Canadian women photographers
Lesbian artists
Canadian LGBT artists
Canadian women artists
Artists from Ontario
Canadian expatriates in the United States
People from Tillsonburg
20th-century American photographers
People from Manchester, Vermont
20th-century American women photographers
LGBT photographers