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John Vanderpant
Design, c. 1937
silver bromide print
Image dimensions 38 X 29.5 cm
ESTIMATE $3,000 - $4,000
Born Jan van der Pant in Alkmaar, Netherlands, John was a photojournalist and writer who settled in Vancouver in 1919. He opened a photo studio in New Westminster in 1924 and in 1926 established the Vanderpant Galleries with Harold Mortimer-Lamb at 1216 Robson Street, which he operated until his death in 1939. The gallery was a meeting place for local artists such as Frederick Varley and Emily Carr, and a hotbed of intellectual activity and music. As Jack Shadbolt said, “He was a very exceptional modern experimenter…and one of the fortifying spirits in Vancouver at that time.” Vanderpant was an internationally renowned pictorialist photographer who was included in the 1930 book The Principles of Photographic Pictorialism, along with notable photographers Alfred Steiglitz and Edward Steichen, and was featured in the seminal American Photography series The World’s Greatest Photographers. He has been widely published, with solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada and the Vancouver Art Gallery, the latter of which holds an extensive collection of his photographs.
Influenced by theosophy and organicism, Vanderpant’s tenet saw abstraction as an invisible life force of living organic matter. As Grant Arnold has described Vanderpant’s utopic vision, “he focused on abstract patterns to delineate the underlying order in nature that intimated the possibility of social harmony and unity of purpose.” “Design” is a fine example of Vanderpant’s photography, and how it shares formal concerns with Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Karl Blossfeldt. Driven by a modernist impulse, this image marries aesthetic emotion and significant form.
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