Art Pick of the Week: Plant Form Leaves with Circular Protrusion

Photography is a highly celebrated medium today, but it wasn’t always regarded as fine art. With some of the first photographs created as a form of documentation or as a result of experimentation, it took until the early 1940s for photography to officially became classified as an art form in the United States, and soon after in England and beyond. For this week’s Art Pick, we’re highlighting one of the first fine art photographers to exhibit at the AGO, Eugene Haanel Cassidy, and his work Plant Form Leaves with Circular Protrusion which is on view now in the exhibition Plant Forms.

Eugene Haanel Cassidy was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1903. He began experimenting with photography in the 1930s and in December 1938, the Art Gallery of Toronto (now known as the AGO) hosted the exhibition Plant Patterns in Hawaii and Japan: Photographs by E. Haanel Cassidy. It was one of the first solo photography exhibitions at the museum during a time when photography struggled to gain recognition as fine art in Canada. The groundbreaking exhibition included many of the photographic prints currently on view on Level 1 in the Robert & Cheryl McEwen Gallery (Gallery 129).

In support of the movement toward photography as fine art, the 1938 exhibition revealed Cassidy’s concept of nature as a source of beauty in relation to the universal principles of harmony and unity. His series of extreme close-ups of plants aspired to evoke an intense feeling through his abstraction of the natural world. In Plant Form Leaves with Circular Protrusion, principles of rhythm through repetitive shapes and patterns give a harmonious feeling to the print and the use of balance through symmetry is also pleasing to the viewer. This work, on display alongside prints of plants with differing shapes, lines and forms offer a compelling collection of fine art photography that showcases Cassidy’s aesthetic control.

Cassidy believed art should produce an emotional experience that transcended the physical world and photography allowed him to explore that. Much like paint to a painter, photography offered Cassidy a medium for creating compositions with tonal variations and detailed textures, which when displayed alongside one another, generate the graphic tension and spiritual energy for which Cassidy sought to achieve.

See Plant Form Leaves with Circular Protrusion and other magnificent photographs by Cassidy in Plant Forms until April 19, 2020.

Stay tuned for next week’s Art Pick.

Admission to the AGO Collection and all special exhibitions is always free for AGO Members, AGO Annual Pass holders and visitors 25 and under. For more information, please visit the website.