Setting the Stage: Photography from The Stéphane Janssen Collection

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

This exhibition celebrates a selection of significant new gifts to the Museum’s permanent collection drawn from the private collection of the late Arizona-based philanthropist and collector Stéphane Janssen (1936-2020). Known for his eye for recognizing emerging talent, Janssen collected art in all media for over sixty years, with a special focus on international contemporary photography. Over his lifetime, he amassed a collection of an estimated over 7,000 works and was recognized numerous times since 1994 on the Artnews list of top 200 collectors around the world. For the last 25 years of his life, Janssen resided in Carefree, Arizona, where he was a generous patron of cultural institutions across the state, including the Phoenix Art Museum and the ASU Art Museum. His recent gift of over 100 works to the Phoenix Art Museum also includes painting, sculpture, and fashion objects.

The presentation in the Norton photography galleries will draw upon Janssen’s gift to consider the “directorial mode” in contemporary photography from the mid-1980s-early 2000s, a term coined by the critic A.D. Coleman to describe a way of making photographs premised upon strategies of staging and performance rather than stumbling upon subject matter in the world. Coinciding with the period when Janssen was most actively collecting, this pivotal moment marked photography’s enmeshment with contemporary art. Leading artists in these decades—from American photographers Gregory Crewdson, Anthony Goicolea, Cindy Sherman, and Spencer Tunick to internationally-based figures like Zhang Huan and Yasumasa Morimura—staged tableaus in a theatrical or cinematic fashion, expanding the narrative potential of photography as a medium. Showcasing iconic works by this wide range of artists, the exhibition will furthermore spotlight Janssen’s unique and discerning taste as a collector: he gravitated to bold, even visceral and challenging artwork of his time, building a collection that reflected themes of the body and mortality, queerness, visual maximalism, and irreverent humor. In celebrating his transformative gift to Phoenix Art Museum, Setting the Stage will invite visitors to consider not only art historical ideas, but also what distinguished Janssen’s eye as a collector.

Header: Yasumasa Morimura, An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Will to Live), 2001 (detail). Color photograph. Gift of The Stéphane Janssen Art Foundation. Photo: Katie Jones-Weinert © 2001 Yasumasa Morimura. All rights reserved.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled (Angel Series), Rome, 1977. Gelatin silver print. Gift of The Stéphane Janssen Art Foundation. © Francesca Woodman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Katie Jones-Weinert