Frederick Sommer Italian, 1905-1999

Frederick Sommer (1905–1999) was an artistic polymath whose work across photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, and music resists any hierarchy of mediums. He photographed the seemingly boundless Arizona desert, severed chicken parts, and the interiors of dead animals; made drawings and collages from anatomical illustrations; and devised a musical notation of his own. Working through unexpected juxtapositions of found images and objects, he pursued visual affinities that could be as unsettling as they were revelatory. His practice was grounded in a conviction that beauty might be discovered where others saw only the ordinary, the overlooked, or the grotesque, and in a sustained effort to expand the boundaries of what could be seen, assembled, and understood as art.

Born in Angri, Italy, in 1905 and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Sommer developed an early interest in art and landscape architecture. He completed a Master of Arts in landscape architecture at Cornell University. In his early thirties, a journey to Switzerland for health reasons became a catalyst for explorations across several disciplines. He eventually settled in Arizona, where he and his wife, Frances Sommer, made their home in Prescott in 1936, remaining there for the rest of their lives.

Sommer turned to photography after meeting Alfred Stieglitz in 1935 and Edward Weston in 1936. He replaced his smaller cameras with an eight-by-ten-inch view camera and developed a meticulous contact-printing practice distinguished by extraordinary tonal control. His desert landscapes, stripped of the horizon and framed as flattened fields of tone and texture, exemplify his approach: rather than offering a conventional view, they transform the landscape into an abstract arrangement of surfaces, rhythms, and forms. In 1940, he visited Charles Sheeler in New York; the following year, in California, he met Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim, and, most consequentially, Max Ernst, with whom he developed a lasting friendship. When Ernst later settled in Sedona, the two artists continued an exchange that enriched their respective practices.

In dialogue with artists including Edward Weston, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Aaron Siskind, Sommer forged a singular avant-garde practice informed by Surrealism, scientific illustration, and an unorthodox approach to appropriation. He dismantled and recombined existing images, discovering new meanings in their unexpected conjunctions decades before such strategies became central to postmodern art. Across his work, the boundaries between photography, drawing, painting, and collage remain deliberately porous, each medium offering another means of investigating the relationships between image, form, and perception.

Sommer’s work encompasses five principal bodies: photographs, drawings, paintings, collages, and musical scores. Among his most distinctive experiments were his glue-color drawings, made by applying pigments suspended in hide glue with a brush or nib. He began on the black interleaving sheets separating photographic film and later worked on drawing paper. He also produced cliché-verre negatives and camera-less images, contact-printing brushstrokes of oil paint on cellophane and arrangements of smoke and grease on plate glass. These experiments extended his interest in the photographic image beyond representation, treating light-sensitive materials and the processes of image-making as independent fields of artistic possibility.

Sommer’s engagement with music emerged from a visit to a Los Angeles music library, where he encountered a display of original musical scores. This prompted him to explore the relationship between graphic form and musical composition. “One thing I became convinced of,” he observed, “and that has proven to be quite the case, [is] that only the really great composers are the ones who have good looking scores.” Beginning in 1941, he created musical scores of his own through the same intuitive, almost automatic process that informed his work in other mediums. Each was completed in a single session, guided by the proposition that a beautifully realized score might give rise to music of corresponding quality. His final body of work, produced between 1989 and 1999, consisted largely of collages assembled from anatomical illustrations, bringing his lifelong fascination with the body, found imagery, and unexpected visual correspondences to a culmination.

The Museum of Modern Art acquired Sommer’s work in 1941 for its exhibition Images of Freedom and has since included him in twenty-eight major exhibitions. Fluent in five languages, he pursued an intellectual life as expansive as his artistic practice, reading widely across literature, philosophy, critical theory, and quantum physics, from Goethe and Kant to Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin. His work reflects this breadth of inquiry while remaining grounded in a fundamental conviction about the interconnectedness of all things. “Everything is shared by everything else,” he said. “There are no discontinuities.”

Sommer received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 and died at Prescott in 1999, at ninety-three. His legacy lives on at the Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation, and since 2010 Bruce Silverstein has shown two major retrospectives of his work.