Iconoclast Bill Jay, photographer, editor, writer, and historian, knew Van Deren Coke for many years. Bill received an MA from the University of New Mexico. Van and Beaumont Newhall were his professors. Bill wrote that Van made snap judgements that were rarely wrong. He went on to say that Van was an insensitive bully, and he was ruthless. Then he added “…his contribution to photography is quite immense and I admire him.”
Frank Van Deren Coke was born in Lexington, Kentucky on the 4th of July, 1921. He ran the family’s hardware business from 1946-1955, and he was in Naval intelligence and also commanded a landing ship, tank (LST) in the Okinawa campaign, from 1942-45. He began his photographic studies at the Clarence White School of Photography, in New York. Van studied history and art history at the University of Kentucky, and from there at Indiana University, for an MFA in sculpture. He studied painting under Nicholas Ház, who was a pictorialist photographer and a modernist painter. Van worked toward a Ph.D. in art history at Harvard and briefly taught there. From these studies it is easy to see that Van understood photography to be integral to painting, and sculpture.
Arizona State University hired Van as associate professor in 1961. The next year he became the founding director of the New Mexico Art Museum and a full professor at the University and Chair of the Art Department between 1962-1970. In 1970 Beaumont Newhall left his post as director of the George Eastman House and Van took that position for two years, before returning to UNM, where he stayed till 1979.
In 1977 my then wife and I began the Photo History Video Project, to make video interviews with a handful of older Western photographers who, until then had enjoyed very little attention. One interview was with Laura Gilpin in Santa Fe. Laura suggested that we first meet with Van Deren Coke, the great eminence of Southwestern photography. We met him at his office. As we entered, his swivel chair facing away from us, he stared out his window. For a couple of long minutes he said nothing. He might have been napping.
Then he turned to greet us and propped his feet on the desk, equal distance between his face and ours. Not a very gracious first impression. When he heard that we were to interview a few older western photographers, he stated that we were interviewing the wrong photographers. He suggested a smarter course would be to instead do documentaries on California studio photographers Will Connell, and Paul Outerbridge. Both of these gentlemen were, in 1977, quite dead.
I am happy to report that I subsequently became friends with Van Deren Coke, occasionally reminding him of our first meeting.
Van arrived in San Francisco and was named director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s photography department in 1979 and remained there till 1987, when Sandra Phillips took over. Van lived a couple of years in SF with the wonderful photographer/artist Judith Golden.
Van was extraordinarily prolific as a curator. One source identifies that in 1980-81 he installed 37 exhibitions and the next year another 19. Van was particularly interested in the intersection of photography with painting. He published The Painter and the Photograph: From Delacroix to Warhol in 1972, (University of New Mexico Press). The Avant Garde in Germany, 1919-1939, in 1982, (Pantheon Books), and many catalog, and magazine essays. He collected a great many images by Bauhaus artists Moholy-Nagy, Andreas Feininger, and Herbert Bayer and others such as Hans Bellmer, Herbert List, Georgy Kepes, Hans Finsler, John Gutmann, and Helmar Lerski. He showed a fondness for manipulated work, solarization, montage, superimposition, and other dada and surrealist methods.
Van always felt a strong rivalry with MoMA curator John Szarkowski. He was a finalist for the MoMA job in 1962. Their aesthetics were strikingly different. He once told me that the powers that be there discounted his academic background and his insistence on grouping photography with other mediums. They instead found his southern accent objectionable. That sounds spurious to me. I think Szarkowski’s position that photography was a discrete medium with different aesthetic concerns most likely appealed to the trustees and to the outgoing curator Edward Steichen. One can only imagine how different the trajectory of photography would be, had Van been appointed curator of MoMA in 1962.
Van Deren Coke built a strong program at SFMoMA. He ignored much that was going on in contemporary work, just as Szarkowski did. Each institution can only do so much. Both were strong characters who readily argued their respective positions. Both wrote and lectured extensively, and photographed prolificly before and after their curatorial work. At a time when their were very few curatorial voices, those representing large collecting institutions were amplified. In the end neither curator should be defined by the other’s interests.
Van died in 2004 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Copied from a tribute by photographer Arthur Ollman.
