Friends of The Photography Society Newsletter

by Friends of the Photography Society at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art on Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 5:16pm

Sadly, I must note the death of David L. Strout (1922-2011). A dear friend, he played an enormously important role in my professional life—for which I remain profoundly grateful. From our perspective, Dave’s significance lies primarily in the fact that he began the Hallmark Photographic Collection in 1964. He built it for the first 15 years of its history and enthusiastically supported its growth and activities after that. Appropriately, he is also represented in the collection, with several vintage prints from the 1940s-50s. He became interested in the photography as a teenager, and followed it all his life, as a practitioner, patron, and collector.

Dave spent much of his life in business, but he was first and foremost an artist. His life story reflects the variety of his interests, his energy, and his restless curiosity.

Born in Pittsfield, MA, Dave received his undergrad degree in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. He then became chairman of the Art Department at Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, 1947-50. In this period he often went to Chicago on weekends, where he met and became close friends with Harry Callahan, a teacher at the Institute of Design. In 1950, he decided to continue his studies in Mexico City, with the help of the GI Bill, at the National School of Fine Arts. There, he became interested in Mexican art, archaeology, traditional crafts, and other contemporary art forms. His friends at that time included the dancer and choreographer Jose Lemon, the artist and ethnologist Miguel Covarrubias, the painter Diego Rivera, and others. After about 18 months, he returned to Ohio to work as a photojournalist, contributing to Life, Ladies Home Journal, and other magazines. In 1954, he became Dean and Director of the Kansas City Art Institute. After four years in Kansas City, he went to Providence, in 1958, to take a similar position at the Rhode Island School of Design. As Vice President and Dean there, he created an important new program by enticing Harry Callahan to come to Providence to head RISD’s new photography department.

Dave joined Hallmark in 1963, at the urging of the company’s founder J. C. Hall. He began as director of the Hallmark Gallery, a new flagship store at 720 Fifth Avenue, in New York City. Designed with a state-of-the-art gallery space on the store’s lower level, Dave organized a program of high-level exhibitions that combined popular culture (shows on the history and art of weddings, New England gravestone rubbings, recent Italian design, and Carl Sandburg) with fine photography. The first photography exhibition, in the fall of 1964, was a 141-print retrospective of Harry Callahan’s work. Callahan personally selected every print and laid the show out himself. As his first one-person show in New York, it garnered considerable attention from both the public and the press. Over the years, other major photography exhibitions were presented at the 720 Fifth Avenue space, including “Henri Cartier-Bresson’s France,” “André Kertész,” “Toni Frissell,” and a survey of RISD work titled “The Students of Harry Callahan.”

Beginning with the purchase of that first group of Callahan prints, Dave judiciously added to what would become the Hallmark Photographic Collection. In addition to keeping up with Callahan’s work by acquiring a handful of new prints every few years, he looked at a range of artists. In 1969, he visited the legendary Edward Steichen, who hand-picked a group of 18 prints for purchase. In the 1970s, Dave acquired various bodies of work: a superb group of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy prints from a private dealer; works by Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and others from the Sales and Rental Gallery of the Nelson; groups of Lewis Hine and Edward Muybridge prints sold as duplicates by the George Eastman House; and works by younger artists such as Jerry N. Uelsmann and Linda Connor. It should go without saying that all this activity was very much ahead of its time—long before any clear “validation” of the medium by the market we know today. By the end of the 1970s, he had assembled a collection of about 650 works by 34 photographers—a superb and surprising artistic treasure.

In 1971, Dave was given additional duties back in Kansas City, as Vice President for cultural affairs at Crown Center. In this position, he coordinated artistic, entertainment, and cultural activities at the Crown Center complex then under construction. He commuted back and forth between Kansas City and New York for a few years, but his duties in Kansas City were clearly his top priority. As a result, by 1973 the exhibition program at the Fifth Avenue store had wound down and the photography collection was moved permanently to Kansas City.

I met Dave in the early summer of 1979. I was finishing a year as an intern at the George Eastman House, in Rochester, New York, and he was on the museum’s board of trustees. The museum’s director, Robert Doherty, was an old friend of his, and Dave asked him for a recommendation. He was looking for a young person with some knowledge of photography who might be interested in coming to Kansas City on a six-month temporary assignment to catalogue and organize the Hallmark Photographic Collection. Bob Doherty introduced us, and my “interview” was a 15-minute chat with Dave on the front steps of the museum. It didn’t seem to me that we talked much about photography, but, before long, Dave asked if I’d be willing to come to Kansas City. In hindsight, my “yes, sure,” was the smartest thing I’ve ever said. I packed up my Volkswagen, drove to Kansas City, and began work on August 13, 1979. After two or three months, that temporary assignment became full-time, and the position of curator was created.

Dave‘s personal life in the 1970s had been somewhat rocky. He had been drinking more than he should have, and his marriage had ended. His willpower was amazing, however; when he realized the need for change, he did it, decisively, without looking back. One day, he swore off alcohol forever; on another, he stopped smoking, cold turkey. This process of self-transformation gave him a deeply philosophical outlook on life and a profound sense of both optimism and freedom.

On his retirement from Hallmark in 1983, he took up art with a new passion, making precise and delicate pencil drawings and larger scale paintings. The drawings typically depicted intricate geometric patterns. The paintings dealt very cleverly with the idea of synthesis and appropriation. He would find magazine reproductions of images that interested him—a Picasso painting, perhaps, and a contemporary fashion photograph—and then cut them into vertical strips which he arranged in alternating sequence to create a new, composite image. In this way, each original image was stretched in width, and the two were woven together into a new pictorial whole. He then translated this study or maquette into larger size, as acrylic on canvas. These paintings were fresh, witty, and purely Dave. In a short profile on him and this body of work (Kansas City Magazine, July 1988), Peter von Ziegesar noted: “Strout refuses to show in galleries, for the simple reason that it would create more work for himself. ‘I started working when I was 15,’ he says. ‘Now I only want to do what I enjoy.’”

These were great years for him, particularly when he fell in love again. In about the early 1990s, he and his wife Harriet moved to Maine, where they built a cozy earth house on a quiet, wooded piece of land. He loved it there—watching the cycle of seasons and the wildlife out their front window, creating images on the computer, reading, listening to music, writing letters, and visiting with family and friends. It was there that he died, on March 9.

Dave was a gifted, warm, fascinating, and generous person, admired and loved by those who knew him. Modest to a fault, he seemed to actively discourage praise or public renown for anything he had done. However, for the sake of history, I offer this small testament to a life well lived—a life that has enriched us all.

Keith Davis