by Julie D. Andrews
| It’s not the sort of gallery that calls out to passersby. No windows open to the street beckoning art lovers inside. But, on Friday January 12, the street-level door painted black and reading 160A Roth in simple white lettering was slightly cracked open from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. signaling to those in the know that an exhibit was opening at the Andrew Roth Gallery at 160A E. 70th St. | | The collection of more than 100 American true crime magazine illustrations on display in the show, Cyanide and Sin, date back to the 1950s (which, though crime magazines spanned 80 years, represents the most audacious period for photographers, art directors, and graphic designers).
The magazine covers reveal historical details about society and life in the U.S. at that time – from their 14-cent price tags to the blaring headlines and graphic crime scene photographs, as seductive as they are violent, displayed on the covers.
“What attracted me to the material was the reference to photography,” said Andrew Roth who opened the gallery in 1999 on the street level of a building owned by Elaine Lustig Cohen. |  | | “These magazine cover images were taken by people who made photographs for a career. These were reenactments of real crimes and there’s an aspect of photography and history in the images that’s never been looked at before.”
The collection of color illustrations is owned by Will Straw, associate professor of communications in the Department of Art History and Communications at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Straw, who was present at the opening, wrote a 12,000-word introductory essay outlining the stylistic and conceptual evolution of the crime magazine genre and identified key photographers and designers who contributed regularly to the magazines in the catalogue entitled “Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America” (New York: Andrew Roth Gallery/PPP Publications, October 2006, $60). | | “An exhibit like this hasn’t been done before. There was the pulp fiction culture everyone knew about, but these photographs fell through the cracks,” said Jee Song, who studied art history in college before going to work at the Andrew Roth Gallery in 2002.
The true crime magazine medium appeared in the 1920s and flourished until the 1960s when it began to slowly decline in popularity for about 40 years. Millions of photographs were produced over the 80-year lifespan of the genre – from official police photographs, to staged photos of crime scenes complete with bloodied models, and wild montages that meshed the genuine and the manipulated. Headlines from Inside Detective blurt out desperately: “Baby I’d Kill to Keep You” and “I’ll Set Him Up In Lover’s Lane – You Follow.” |  | | Professionally trained tabloid photojournalists and police photographers often supplemented their incomes selling pictures to magazines like Inside Detective and Best Detective Cases.
The graphic images can be described as enticingly racy, but somewhat disturbing for the fear, violence, and sexuality they combine and captivating for the lewdness and unapologetic sensationalism of heinous crimes they depict.
Among the locals in attendance was Scott Springer, an architect with Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates who lives at Sutton Place at E. 57th Street. He arrived with his colleague Thomas Schlesser, the architect who designed the Andrew Roth Gallery space.
“I go to gallery openings now, but not as much as I used to ten years ago,” said Springer. That’s because he now travels to China frequently with work and is even soon moving to Hong Kong for six months with his job.
Andrew Roth Gallery occupies a space in a building owned by the artist, art dealer, and archivist Elaine Lustig Cohen, who operated a gallery called Ex Libris in the same space from the 1970s until 1998 with her then husband, the publisher and author Arthur Cohen. Displaying avant-garde books, posters, collages, and paintings, it’s been said that the gallery was ahead of its time.
The Cyanide and Sin exhibit runs through February 17 during which time the magazines will be sold as a collection. |
|
