When I entered college in the fall of 1957 I was aware that there was a mainstream American culture and various counter cultures. In those days one of the most publicized of the latter was the beatniks, The Beat Generation. On the campus, aware of some badly dressed, look alike, and obviously antiestablishment persons in the university art department I quickly learned that everyone more or less conforms to the prevailing norm of his chosen social group: we are each of us conformist in his own way. As I have always been a supporter of individuality and individuation, the on campus “beats” did not elicit my interest or inspire my adulation.
By the fall of 1959 I had moved to New York City and if I was at all aware of the publication of Robert Frank’s The Americans at that time, I likely considered it but another tome in the beatnik canon. That suspicion would have been confirmed over the next few years when I became more aware of Grove Press, the American publisher of the book, and its publication, The Evergreen Review …some of these photographs were used as the magazine’s cover illustrations.
This is not to say that as a young New Yorker I was an uptown snob: I lived my years in New York almost exclusively in the West Village and at one time my ex wife was Barney Rosset’s secretary. While I might always have been counted upon to know “what was happening”, I was rarely a “player” in the prevailing trends.
Over the last fifty years I have likely had an exposure to many of these photographs in different venues, but it was not until I began to give more concentrated attention to photography in the last several years that the name and the work began to embed itself in my memory, most recently in the exhibition Made in Chicago, (see December, 2008, this blog.). Some of them have become familiar but they have not favorably impressed me. I have always felt that they were made as illustrations for Kerouac’s On the Road. (I like the book.).
When I read that the National Gallery was to present this Fiftieth Anniversary exhibition I decided that I would go down to Washington to see it. I was primarily interested in the process that went into the making of the book. At the National Gallery there was a second exhibition on the art of making the photography book. As an independent entity the book of photographs is one to which I have given little if any thought. The world is so full of them …it seems to me that the only thing more common than published photographs are published books of photographs …that I have never considered that there was ever very much creativity in their making, or that they were an art form separate unto themselves. But alas the weather last winter was colder than I wanted to experience and so instead of going to Washington I ordered the catalogue, Looking In.
At an estate auction several years ago I bought a box of photographs, family snapshots for the most part, thinking that I might someday make use of them somehow in a series of art works. Included in that box was an album of about 200+ photographs of one family, a man and a woman, their parents, their aunts and uncles, their brothers and sisters, their children, their dogs and cats, and their houses and automobiles. In a burst of housecleaning I decided to get rid of it as I had done nothing with the photographs for years.
My copy of Looking In arrived just as I had changed my mind and had decided to make a series of collages using some of the auction snapshots. During that process, going through the album looking for suitable material for the project, I became aware that in every one of those pictures each person, dog and cat, was smiling broadly. These were the happiest people I had ever encountered. They personified the attainment of the working class American dream. The photographs were dated from 1940 to 1960, that period in American history that is often looked back on as the best years of our lives, ignoring that the 50’s lead to the protests of the 1960’s.
The dichotomy between those seen in the snapshots and those seen in the Robert Frank book was remarkable. I could hardly reconcile the evidence that all of these persons resided in the same country.
One of the first differences to be noticed is that in the snapshots all of the subjects are known to the photographer, they are looking into the lens and complicit in their understanding of the photographic genre in which they are participating. As successful members of an upwardly mobile society, each person gives the photographer his best side. By contrast, in the Robert Frank photographs many of the subjects are unaware of being photographed or, when they are aware, they look at someone they do not know who is holding a camera. When they are knowingly photographed they are allowing him to photograph only their social persona: they wear the mask of the withdrawn, the benign, the indifferent.
In the commentary Frank states that he has captured the essence of his subjects. Yousef Karsh has made a very similar statement about his work. I disagree that any photographer can do that. The human personality is so richly layered and complex I believe no one photograph can catch the essence of any one person. It might catch a moment of unguarded spontaneity or emotional honesty, but a moment is the not the whole of the experience. I will add to this Karl Jasper’s comment that a person cannot be known: each of us is an experience in the process of becoming: at our demise all that is left are the subjective memories others have of us.
Reading the catalogue text and looking at the photographs I continued to be unimpressed with these pictures. They seemed to me nothing more than one would have anticipated from a work issued from a source that claimed a specific subcultural identity. But I was made aware that rather than just an American view there was a stronger European antecedent. It seemed to me that Robert Frank had come to America, he is Swiss, and traveled it widely and made photographs that illustrated his European background. And in fact he makes the claim that his photographs represent his felt response to what he saw, his subjective world view. That this was filtered through the background of his education called to mind Williams James’s statement: “A man’s philosophy tells me nothing about the world but everything about the man.”
The exhibition and the catalogue that contains all of the same material are quite good in illustrating the work that went into the making of the book. Of the 1000 frames that were made, using a Leica and 36 exposure rolls of 35mm film, Frank winnowed them down to 83 photographs. We see the contact sheets and we see 8 by 10 prints pinned to the wall just as he had done to study the photographs and to work out the organization. We also see some of his earlier work.
The most commanding aspect of the exhibition, however, is the display of the 83 works in the sequence he finally determined for the layout of the book. Seen as a contiguous exhibition the photographs are suddenly far better and far more interesting than they are in the book. One reason for this is the size of the photographs. I am a firm believer that a photograph has a correct size. Here they range from 8 by 10’s to 11 by 14’s and even larger, 16 by 20. In the book, the Grove Press edition, they are almost all the same size, the book being about 8 by 10 inches with a horizontal format. In the catalogue they are slightly larger. As might be expected from 35mm negatives, many of them are grainy, often dark, and many with soft focus. Rather than a fault, for Frank and his mentors, this was a characteristic of their style.
But the difference also has to do with the physical layout. Here the photographs are side by side in four small galleries whereas in the book they are one per page with the next behind the first or in the same page position, i.e.: on pages one, three and five. While there is a vague sense of continuity in the book, in the exhibition the works have both continuity and a dynamic relationship. But most important, in this layout, each of the photographs stands out more successfully as an individual photograph.
The first section is a good illustration of this.
The book is in four sections, each section beginning with a photograph containing an American flag. In the first section, the first photograph in the book shows us two women standing and looking out the windows of their tenement apartments. A wind blown flag covers their faces. They face front. They are in shadow, they are isolated from the event they watch, they are passive, impotent. The next photograph, on page two, shows us five top hatted men in profile facing our left. Picture three, on page three, shows us a man on an architectural ledge with his arms outstretched in a grand gesture. In picture four, on page four, we see a group of well dressed black men leaning against cars. They face to our left. The caption reads: Funeral, St Helena, S.C. Photograph number five on page five shows us a cowboy with two young women. They face right. And in picture six, on page seven, we see a military man, likely a career man, who is overweight and paunchy, crossing a street toward the camera accompanied by a woman who is clearly working class but made up and dressed in the haute mode of her social set. It is unclear if she is his wife or a prostitute: both seem possible.
As seen in the book none of these photographs seem to have any relationship to one another. But if we have leafed through the catalogue before beginning to study it more closely, as one is wont to do, we recognize that the man with the outstretched hands is in almost the same pose as an earlier 1951 photograph in which we see a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade Superman hot air balloon. Are we to infer that the man on the ledge is also full of hot air? If so, should we read him as “The Politician”? I think that’s a leap most mainstream folks are not likely to make, but one that most counter cultural folks would make readily. So if the interpretation is correct, the photograph preaches to the converted.
Further along in The Americans we see the same group of black men in another photograph of the same funeral. It is rather perplexing why we see them in this early page. The cowboy with the two women is very like another cowboy we see later standing on a New York City street. The couple crossing the street face, in the book, a blank white page. I think one would have to be a die hard puzzle fan to extract any sense of relationship out of these six photographs.
However, hanging on the wall next to one another, these read completely differently. Now the man in the center with outstretched arms can be seen as the locus for the others, he is the politician. The men on page two, looking, we suppose, at the crowd, are the committee men, the two women at the window are the constituency, the blacks, on the other side, are a separate constituency, the cowboy, with other fish to fry, looks to his business, he is at a rodeo, and the middle aged man and woman ignore the whole thing and are going out on the town or shopping. Seen all at once, it is a sociological/political overview of society. And seen all at once with a coherent narrative, each of the photographs assumes a greater depth. And once comprehended, they continue to maintain that more informed understanding.
For the most part the rest of the book repeats these contrasts, rich and poor, black and white, and at times gives us a series of parallels…the different social castes each separately at lunch, man and his automobile, etc. Thus the statement of the first section is reiterated and elaborated, but never more deeply explored. With its variations on a single theme, the work is one long sustained chord. The choice of 83 photographs was more than enough.
Just as no one photograph can capture the essence of the individual person, neither can a collection of photographs capture the essence of a geographically large society. There is too much in America that is left out of this essay. In the end this is a very one sided view, a very narrow interpretation. But it is not without validity: that which is documented …the social divisions between rich and poor, black and white, the street corner evangelicals, the shallow hedonism of materialism… continues, after 40 years of Republican misgovernance and voodoo economics, to be the prevailing mainstream social norm: ours is a culture in stasis. No doubt many foresaw this; many have attempted to redirect the course of history. But the mainstream could not or would not see it or hear it and they allowed themselves to be sucked into the slough of despond.
As photographs the photographs are often quite good and they consistently work as a suite. But I could not single out any one of them that I think is a great photograph. I had seen Plate 58, Political Rally –Chicago, 1956, last winter in Chicago in the LaSalle Bank Collection. There it was an 8 by 10 print and while intriguing it made little sense. In the book it is but one among many. But seen in this exhibition in a larger print, 16 by 20, with the large bell of the Sousaphone exactly at eye level, the personality of the man behind it completely subsumed by the political process in which he participates, it has tremendous impact …but only because it relates to the other photographs. The same can be said for the last photograph, the artist’s wife and children half asleep in a car at the side of a deserted highway. It is a poignant visual experience but only because of its relationship to the work as a whole. While that might be a weakness in the individual entities, that they all work together as an ensemble is the strength of the whole.
By showing us the contact sheets we can see that the young photographer was a man with eyes who was not afraid to turn his camera on a stranger and make a record of his feelings about that person and his place in his society. That takes a kind of courage. We can see that he traveled many, many miles looking, seeing, and recording, that he knew what he was looking for and that he could use that subject to make a specific kind of photograph when it presented itself to him.
But there is a too strong sense that he was looking for something specific to photograph rather than photographing what he happened to find. And there is too strong evidence of the influence of Frank’s European mentors …copies of their photography books are included in the exhibition… as well as a too strong evidence of Walker Evans’ influence on the young Frank …there is often a sense of this being their collaborative effort. Taken all together these influences suggest that Frank had yet to develop a personal style, his own voice. From his earlier work we can see that he repeats himself …the dividing line down the middle of 34th Street in an earlier photograph is rendered here as the dividing line down a remote southwestern highway, which is a variation on a photograph by Berenice Abbott, a friend of Walker Evans’. Ezra Pound once commented that the young writer begins by imitating a writer he admires, and that few ever develop a personal voice beyond that. Perhaps Robert Frank sensed that and perhaps that explains why, after this was published, he turned from still photography to film.
It is stated that the book has had a strong influence on subsequent American photography. But I think it is probably not so much because it is the work of a particular photographer, Robert Frank, but rather that he married American subject matter with European style. At that same time a new generation of film makers was inspired by the post war European Cinema that was invading small movie theatres all over America. Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus reconfigured our cities and our dwellings. Hans Hoffman and William de Kooning were changing the face of American fine art painting. It was the American Century but the look was decidedly The New Europe. To me that infusion of European influence is like erecting a steel frame building in Chicago and giving it an Italian Renaissance or French Baroque façade: the overlay of a foreign style is applied ornamentation, not architecture.
The Catalogue.
“Looking In, Robert Frank’s The Americans” is excellent. The exhibition was conceived and created by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. (They have the Robert Frank archives.) Sarah Greenough, the curator of the photography collection and the exhibition, has written four essays giving us a biography of the artist, his early years, his process in creating the book, and an afterward. Her writing should be a model for all future writers on the arts: she has a good writer’s voice, she brings the artist alive as a person, and her writing is completely lacking in grad school linguistic mumbo jumbo. The quality of her work as represented here should help us understand why The National Gallery is considered one of the world’s finest museums.
American museums are teaching institutions and the marriage of the catalogue and exhibition for this presentation is everything museum work should be. My disagreement with it is the claim that this photo essay is a major twentieth century artwork. I disagree. With its strong association to a specific historic moment, its still apparent identification with the beat generation, I think it does not transcend the level of genre: there is some very good work here but it lacks individuality.
Even though I saw this at the Met in New York, The National Gallery web site has better on line information. See their link on the right, Exhibition Feature, for detailed information.
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/frankinfo.shtm
The Met web site has several reproductions of the photographs.
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={1FD57D4D-FE17-41FA-9025-E2667E36AD27}
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009
Larry Rivers at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC.
While looking at these art works from the late 1950’s I had a moment of insight in which I understood once again how completely the corporate world has come to dominant all aspects of the American experience. We know, or we should know, that corporate America dominates our political life, our government, our for-profit healthcare “industry”, our work place, and our educational system, especially our institutions of “higher” learning.
While we might think that the arts flourish or whither in a universe separate from this corporate mandate, the evidence is to the contrary. Publishing has always been a business in this country: a work under consideration for publication is rarely assayed as to its intellectual value but more likely in regard to its projected commercial success, more so now than in the past with the present subsumation of publishers into corporate conglomerates. Corporations underwrite university presses. From its inception, the movie industry has been controlled by the money men “in New York”. Theatre in America has hardly ever been more than live entertainment for those with corporate expense accounts. The skylines of our cities are defined by bland corporate towers. Our public institutions, museums and libraries, are chaired by boards of directors composed of men and women from the corporate world.
The corporate presence is no less evident in the world of the fine arts. In the museum world we have progressed in the twentieth century from look-alike beaux arts classic revival mausoleums to bland look-alike modern architecture museum extensions. New museums adhere to the prevailing norm. Inside, the museums host collections that are composed, in the contemporary galleries, of the same small number of artists who have “national” stature as determined by New York City critics, showing, almost without exception, works that are the same from one museum to the next, and with only the slightest acknowledgement of the local artists. Thus one begins to see Rothko, Stuart Davis, Jackson Pollock, et al, as one man factories turning out product for these sepulchral institutions.
For many years I knew and worked with Larry Rivers’ two sons. I knew from their conversation that Larry lived and worked in the midst of the art scene out “in the Hamptons”. Early in his career he had been a habitué of the downtown (Greenwich Village, for your out of towners), art scene and likely spent many an afternoon and evening at the Cedars Tavern talking jazz, art, and picking up “chicks”, as years later many of the then older chicks subsequently told me. Thus I have always known that Larry Rivers was an art world insider. On one occasion Joe, his son, told me that there were many really good artists at work in the world but that they were not active in the “art scene” and so they got no press and were for the most part unknown. Despite the popular myth that the artist is a social outsider and that his unique vision extends the human experience, it should rather be understood that in America the artist is but another facet of the corporate superstructure, a drone who receives support correlative to his willingness to legitimize corporate hegemony.
Larry Rivers has always exemplified for me the dilemma of the good draughtsman, the artist, in the modern era where abstraction rules the roost and who is in constant search for a manner in which to use his talents, and his preference, for the representational drawing of the recognizable object.
The works in this exhibition are early works painted in a variety of styles all of them with an abundance of drawing. In quality they are not at all different from, but no where near as good as, an exhibition of student art works I saw a year ago in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, that is to say they look very much like student work and none of the artists here or there shows any evidence of having developed a personal vision. But what is most disturbing is that in his work there is a real sense that Larry Rivers wanted to be “a player” …there are consistent references to the works of Picasso, Matisse, de Kooning, and Hans Hoffman among the many famous others. My sense is that he was presenting his credentials for inclusion into The Tradition in Western Art, that he was demonstrably eager to be a fellow player in the current art scene: whatever it took he was ready to appease the corporate purse.
Clearly the man loved to paint and draw. Now there are many really fine art works in the world in which the artist, having mastered his medium, executed works that have nothing more to say than: “I did it because I can do it well and I love doing it!” But unlike outsider art in which a master of his craft expresses something irrepressible that must be said, Larry Rivers has nothing to express beyond his love of art, he really has nothing to say, at least not here. Nor, in these early works, is he the master of his craft. This is not Picasso making marks on a surface with absolute confidence and an indifference to the observer’s response: these markings are all labored and rather tentative and appear as if executed with an awareness of an audience: they are a public performance.
Of all the works on view here only Orange Valentine Number Two has validity as an art work: it is a fully resolved visual experience, it has presence, it has integrity, it has a life of its own. I have always liked the idea of Larry Rivers’ work and I have often suspected that he is far better than the prevailing wisdom indicates. In the Steinberg collection, seen two years ago at the Metropolitan Museum, his painting of his mother in law was, I thought, one of the best works. I have admired many of his lithographs back in the 80’s. But I am also aware that often his work is merely pedestrian.
The New York Times gave this exhibition a very good review, suggesting that Rivers might yet someday enjoy a more elevated reputation. I hope someday that does happen. But I also recognize that the New York Times almost always gives gallery and museum exhibitions favorable reviews. In fact, you might say that The New York Times is one of the great enablers of the corporate stranglehold on the world of the fine arts. This is so consistently true that I would suggest that their opinions no longer have validity.
As for these early works, average student works that they are, nothing is gained for the reputation of the artist by their presentation to the public. A more confident and self disciplined artist would have hidden them or destroyed them years ago: a gallery with the artist’s best interests at heart would have advised against showing them, at least until the time when a full career retrospective was mounted. If it is believed that Rivers is best served by small exhibitions like this one, perhaps it would be a better idea if they were small career retrospectives: unless you know his best work his less than best is neither interesting nor inspiring.
http://www.tibordenagy.com/#/exhibitions/
Other Larry Rivers works can be seen at this web site:
http://www.larryriversfoundation.org/
While we might think that the arts flourish or whither in a universe separate from this corporate mandate, the evidence is to the contrary. Publishing has always been a business in this country: a work under consideration for publication is rarely assayed as to its intellectual value but more likely in regard to its projected commercial success, more so now than in the past with the present subsumation of publishers into corporate conglomerates. Corporations underwrite university presses. From its inception, the movie industry has been controlled by the money men “in New York”. Theatre in America has hardly ever been more than live entertainment for those with corporate expense accounts. The skylines of our cities are defined by bland corporate towers. Our public institutions, museums and libraries, are chaired by boards of directors composed of men and women from the corporate world.
The corporate presence is no less evident in the world of the fine arts. In the museum world we have progressed in the twentieth century from look-alike beaux arts classic revival mausoleums to bland look-alike modern architecture museum extensions. New museums adhere to the prevailing norm. Inside, the museums host collections that are composed, in the contemporary galleries, of the same small number of artists who have “national” stature as determined by New York City critics, showing, almost without exception, works that are the same from one museum to the next, and with only the slightest acknowledgement of the local artists. Thus one begins to see Rothko, Stuart Davis, Jackson Pollock, et al, as one man factories turning out product for these sepulchral institutions.
For many years I knew and worked with Larry Rivers’ two sons. I knew from their conversation that Larry lived and worked in the midst of the art scene out “in the Hamptons”. Early in his career he had been a habitué of the downtown (Greenwich Village, for your out of towners), art scene and likely spent many an afternoon and evening at the Cedars Tavern talking jazz, art, and picking up “chicks”, as years later many of the then older chicks subsequently told me. Thus I have always known that Larry Rivers was an art world insider. On one occasion Joe, his son, told me that there were many really good artists at work in the world but that they were not active in the “art scene” and so they got no press and were for the most part unknown. Despite the popular myth that the artist is a social outsider and that his unique vision extends the human experience, it should rather be understood that in America the artist is but another facet of the corporate superstructure, a drone who receives support correlative to his willingness to legitimize corporate hegemony.
Larry Rivers has always exemplified for me the dilemma of the good draughtsman, the artist, in the modern era where abstraction rules the roost and who is in constant search for a manner in which to use his talents, and his preference, for the representational drawing of the recognizable object.
The works in this exhibition are early works painted in a variety of styles all of them with an abundance of drawing. In quality they are not at all different from, but no where near as good as, an exhibition of student art works I saw a year ago in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, that is to say they look very much like student work and none of the artists here or there shows any evidence of having developed a personal vision. But what is most disturbing is that in his work there is a real sense that Larry Rivers wanted to be “a player” …there are consistent references to the works of Picasso, Matisse, de Kooning, and Hans Hoffman among the many famous others. My sense is that he was presenting his credentials for inclusion into The Tradition in Western Art, that he was demonstrably eager to be a fellow player in the current art scene: whatever it took he was ready to appease the corporate purse.
Clearly the man loved to paint and draw. Now there are many really fine art works in the world in which the artist, having mastered his medium, executed works that have nothing more to say than: “I did it because I can do it well and I love doing it!” But unlike outsider art in which a master of his craft expresses something irrepressible that must be said, Larry Rivers has nothing to express beyond his love of art, he really has nothing to say, at least not here. Nor, in these early works, is he the master of his craft. This is not Picasso making marks on a surface with absolute confidence and an indifference to the observer’s response: these markings are all labored and rather tentative and appear as if executed with an awareness of an audience: they are a public performance.
Of all the works on view here only Orange Valentine Number Two has validity as an art work: it is a fully resolved visual experience, it has presence, it has integrity, it has a life of its own. I have always liked the idea of Larry Rivers’ work and I have often suspected that he is far better than the prevailing wisdom indicates. In the Steinberg collection, seen two years ago at the Metropolitan Museum, his painting of his mother in law was, I thought, one of the best works. I have admired many of his lithographs back in the 80’s. But I am also aware that often his work is merely pedestrian.
The New York Times gave this exhibition a very good review, suggesting that Rivers might yet someday enjoy a more elevated reputation. I hope someday that does happen. But I also recognize that the New York Times almost always gives gallery and museum exhibitions favorable reviews. In fact, you might say that The New York Times is one of the great enablers of the corporate stranglehold on the world of the fine arts. This is so consistently true that I would suggest that their opinions no longer have validity.
As for these early works, average student works that they are, nothing is gained for the reputation of the artist by their presentation to the public. A more confident and self disciplined artist would have hidden them or destroyed them years ago: a gallery with the artist’s best interests at heart would have advised against showing them, at least until the time when a full career retrospective was mounted. If it is believed that Rivers is best served by small exhibitions like this one, perhaps it would be a better idea if they were small career retrospectives: unless you know his best work his less than best is neither interesting nor inspiring.
http://www.tibordenagy.com/#/exhibitions/
Other Larry Rivers works can be seen at this web site:
http://www.larryriversfoundation.org/
Monday, July 27, 2009
Frank Lloyd Wright. From Within Outward. The Guggenheim Museum, NYC.
Architecture is often considered the highest of the fine art forms. It is the only fine art we are allowed and encouraged to touch: it is the only fine art form designed and built specifically for our living, working and playing in. Of all the many museums devoted to the various art forms it is only recently that museums have been opened devoted exclusively to architecture. The only one I’ve seen is that at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia which is also the repository for the work of Louis Kahn.
The concept of an architectural museum has inherent problems. Other than touring the actual architecture, there is very limited material that can illustrate architecture: there are plans, elevations, renderings (sketches), models, and photographs of built works. The drawings are in a somewhat universal language: most plans and elevations follow a specific discipline and can be read by engineers throughout the world. Each architectural office selects a specific style for the renderings that represent that office. Thus there is the Cesar Pelli and Associates sketch, the Louis Kahn and Associates sketch, and the Frank Lloyd Wright and Associates sketch. These are almost always the same regardless of which architect in the firm designed the project or which staff artist executed the sketch.
While that material might have a very strong appeal to those in the field, for the average museumgoer, those who cannot read plans, and most people cannot, and who might be perplexed by renderings, and most clients need them explained, most laymen will find little of sustainable interest in architectural museums.
The Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition at the Guggenheim is a good illustration of those problems not addressed. It is an exhibition with a wealth of material rarely seen by either the lay public or the professionals in the industry. I would think that this is an extraordinary experience for the professions and I am certain, having walked amongst them, that it is utterly perplexing to the general public. Despite the rarity of the material presented, the museum has done little to make it more understandable or interesting. The full range of Wright’s career is at hand …from his own home in Oak Park and the houses he designed there up to and including the Guggenheim museum. It is a vast record of over sixty years work. But the presentation, due to the limited variation of the professional work, is unrelieved. There are hundreds of plans, elevations, sections, isometric drawings and sketches. There are some photographs. There are six or seven models built specifically for this exhibition. But it is repeated seemingly ad infinitum up and down the spiraling ramp and in one long side gallery and without naming the more important works.
No mention is made that UNESCO has ten of these buildings under consideration for designation as World Heritage Sites for their architectural importance. No mention is made that many of these buildings have Interior Department Landmark Status. No mention is made that the American Association of Architects has declared a number of these buildings irreplaceable national treasures for their architectural excellence.
As presented this sameness all becomes exceedingly tedious. That tedium is the fault of the curators. It is almost as if the exhibition had been designed to insure that the well meaning but unenlightened visitors would drift by the art works at a pace sufficiently rapid to insure that the maximum number of visitors could be accommodated. Little about the work is explained in detail or from Wright’s aesthetic perspective. Much comment is made regarding the fact that Wright reconceptualized architectural space, but absolutely nothing has been done to “show” how he went about that. When I considered how many examples could have been used here, I was saddened to think that this first great retrospective of the work of America’s greatest artist is so woefully inadequate.
The most obvious example at hand is the museum building itself. Wright understood architecture as the perimeter between the external world and the space defined through the use of scale, proportion and geometry. From the outside that perimeter should inform viewers what they are likely to find on the inside. On the inside there must be an integral unity as foreshadowed by the exterior appearance. Wright called this organic architecture; it was American in that it was democratic. Wright understood the desire for democracy as originating in the heart and expressing itself in an outward flow. So he reconceptualized architectural space through the process of allowing the function of the structure to dictate the design and look of the whole. This museum is a brilliant articulation of that concept: no one seeing this form from the street would expect to find standard rectangular museum galleries on the inside.
Once the building function was determined and the plan created for the flow within the structure, Wright then determined the inherent organic design. For instance the Robie House in Chicago is composed, in plan, of two offset rectangles. An interplay of those two forms became the motif for the design elements throughout the house in the stained glass windows, the covers over the radiators, and in the light soffits. A contrasting form, the sliced section of a sphere, appears on the outside as urns for flowers on the low parapets and on the inside as lighting fixtures. In the Guggenheim Museum the circle of the plan of the building was repeated in the circles made in the terrazzo floors and on the sidewalks outside. Wright’s buildings always began outside the buildings with elements that formed a transition from the outside to the inside. (This exhibition does not tell us that either.)
Nor did the museum explain, although it did mention, his concept of compression and expansion whereby an entry space leads one into the building where one encounters that initial small space repeated on a greater scale. With the circles in the sidewalk, the canopy leading to the entry door, a revolving door, and a few steps veering to the right, one then enters into the open rotunda: a perfect example of this concept. I did not see any mention of this at all in the exhibition literature.
Most architects are known now not only for designing buildings but various of the components within the buildings. Sullivan, Wright’s “meister”, is as well known now for the ornamental pieces he designed for his buildings as he is for the buildings themselves. It is a rare architect in this day and age who is not known for also having designed a chair… the Eames chair, the Breuer chair, the Meis chair, and the Gehry chair. Had the dining table and chairs Wright designed for the Robie House been included (they are in the Smart Museum in Chicago), the public would have had the opportunity to see and study a Wright design first hand and they would have better understood the claim that he reconceptualized architectural space by pointing out that the high backs of the chairs created the sense of a living space within a living space in an otherwise open floor plan. (He created an intimate, small space within an open large space.) None of his furniture is presented nor was the space concept in any way elaborated.
Lacking that table and chairs, or any others of his chairs or furniture, or cast cement blocks used in his California houses, examples of his stained glass windows, or perhaps full scale models of his various architectural pieces…doors, windows, etc, etc, etc….Wright’s architecture is presented here in full two dimensional flatness. How odd that a museum would mount an exhibition of architecture, the most three dimensional and sculptural of the fine arts, and present it only as a repetition in flatness …and unrelievedly on tracing paper.
Other than the models the only three dimensional object is the curtain Wright designed for the theatre at the Wright Fellowship Theatre. Yet no mention is made that this abstract design referencing the Jones Valley farm country is very similar to the art produced at Germany’s Bauhaus; it almost seems Mondrian inspired whereas the reverse is true. (An early book of Wright’s work published in Germany in 1911 influenced Walter Gropius and lead to the creation of the Bauhaus.) In fact, no mention is made regarding Wright’s influence on subsequent world architecture at all…and it was and continues to be tremendous.
But what intrigued me more than anything else is that very little was said about Frank Lloyd Wright the person. Here it is all work and little about the man behind the work. I was curious if this was an effort to create a new perspective for the study of his work. There is a great literature of fact and fiction about him and it is believed that most of that fiction was a fiction, a legend, a mythology that he himself created. It is so sad to see his work and to find him missing: it is as if someone had chopped him off with an axe. I felt his absence very strongly.
Just inside the entry door to the museum there is a medallion placed in the floor which states that this building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is a gift from Solomon Guggenheim. There is a motto on the circumference and at the bottom Greek letters that when pronounced reveal the author as Aristophanes. That medallion, giving top billing to Mr. Wright, symbolizes the character of this venue: it is known primarily as Wright’s great, last masterpiece. It is a fine art museum but little of the art here is very interesting on its own and certainly not as interesting as the building, one of the greatest artistic achievements of the twentieth century.
This 50th anniversary Wright exhibition is a first and has been mounted perhaps under the assumption that it might have been a very long wait but that very, very late is better than never at all. As I have said earlier, there is a wealth of material here but I walked away from it thinking that something better could have been done: we have been given recipes but not the banquet. Over and over again I was sorry they had not asked me to curate it. I have never thought of myself as a museum curator but this left me with the confidence that I could have done better. Certainly Mr. Wright deserves better.
The link below will access the Guggenheim web site. There is a brief video about the making of the models for the exhibition. The model of the Jacobs House is excellent: it is made in layers, hanging on wires, representing the order in which the building was erected. Otherwise note in the voice-over commentary that many of the Wright buzz words are uttered: reconceptualized space, landscape and the relationship of architecture to landscape, form follows functions, etc. The astute listener will notice that while these buzz words are voiced, no effort is made to explain them. I would think the layman would walk away from this exhibition having learned nothing more about this work than he knew coming in. This exhibition could have been the impetus for a revival of interest in Wright’s work and a source for greater understanding on the part of the layman as to why Wright is held in such high esteem by his professional peers. Instead, for the layman, and for our cultural enlightenment in general, it is a real missed opportunity.
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view-now/frank-lloyd-wright
The concept of an architectural museum has inherent problems. Other than touring the actual architecture, there is very limited material that can illustrate architecture: there are plans, elevations, renderings (sketches), models, and photographs of built works. The drawings are in a somewhat universal language: most plans and elevations follow a specific discipline and can be read by engineers throughout the world. Each architectural office selects a specific style for the renderings that represent that office. Thus there is the Cesar Pelli and Associates sketch, the Louis Kahn and Associates sketch, and the Frank Lloyd Wright and Associates sketch. These are almost always the same regardless of which architect in the firm designed the project or which staff artist executed the sketch.
While that material might have a very strong appeal to those in the field, for the average museumgoer, those who cannot read plans, and most people cannot, and who might be perplexed by renderings, and most clients need them explained, most laymen will find little of sustainable interest in architectural museums.
The Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition at the Guggenheim is a good illustration of those problems not addressed. It is an exhibition with a wealth of material rarely seen by either the lay public or the professionals in the industry. I would think that this is an extraordinary experience for the professions and I am certain, having walked amongst them, that it is utterly perplexing to the general public. Despite the rarity of the material presented, the museum has done little to make it more understandable or interesting. The full range of Wright’s career is at hand …from his own home in Oak Park and the houses he designed there up to and including the Guggenheim museum. It is a vast record of over sixty years work. But the presentation, due to the limited variation of the professional work, is unrelieved. There are hundreds of plans, elevations, sections, isometric drawings and sketches. There are some photographs. There are six or seven models built specifically for this exhibition. But it is repeated seemingly ad infinitum up and down the spiraling ramp and in one long side gallery and without naming the more important works.
No mention is made that UNESCO has ten of these buildings under consideration for designation as World Heritage Sites for their architectural importance. No mention is made that many of these buildings have Interior Department Landmark Status. No mention is made that the American Association of Architects has declared a number of these buildings irreplaceable national treasures for their architectural excellence.
As presented this sameness all becomes exceedingly tedious. That tedium is the fault of the curators. It is almost as if the exhibition had been designed to insure that the well meaning but unenlightened visitors would drift by the art works at a pace sufficiently rapid to insure that the maximum number of visitors could be accommodated. Little about the work is explained in detail or from Wright’s aesthetic perspective. Much comment is made regarding the fact that Wright reconceptualized architectural space, but absolutely nothing has been done to “show” how he went about that. When I considered how many examples could have been used here, I was saddened to think that this first great retrospective of the work of America’s greatest artist is so woefully inadequate.
The most obvious example at hand is the museum building itself. Wright understood architecture as the perimeter between the external world and the space defined through the use of scale, proportion and geometry. From the outside that perimeter should inform viewers what they are likely to find on the inside. On the inside there must be an integral unity as foreshadowed by the exterior appearance. Wright called this organic architecture; it was American in that it was democratic. Wright understood the desire for democracy as originating in the heart and expressing itself in an outward flow. So he reconceptualized architectural space through the process of allowing the function of the structure to dictate the design and look of the whole. This museum is a brilliant articulation of that concept: no one seeing this form from the street would expect to find standard rectangular museum galleries on the inside.
Once the building function was determined and the plan created for the flow within the structure, Wright then determined the inherent organic design. For instance the Robie House in Chicago is composed, in plan, of two offset rectangles. An interplay of those two forms became the motif for the design elements throughout the house in the stained glass windows, the covers over the radiators, and in the light soffits. A contrasting form, the sliced section of a sphere, appears on the outside as urns for flowers on the low parapets and on the inside as lighting fixtures. In the Guggenheim Museum the circle of the plan of the building was repeated in the circles made in the terrazzo floors and on the sidewalks outside. Wright’s buildings always began outside the buildings with elements that formed a transition from the outside to the inside. (This exhibition does not tell us that either.)
Nor did the museum explain, although it did mention, his concept of compression and expansion whereby an entry space leads one into the building where one encounters that initial small space repeated on a greater scale. With the circles in the sidewalk, the canopy leading to the entry door, a revolving door, and a few steps veering to the right, one then enters into the open rotunda: a perfect example of this concept. I did not see any mention of this at all in the exhibition literature.
Most architects are known now not only for designing buildings but various of the components within the buildings. Sullivan, Wright’s “meister”, is as well known now for the ornamental pieces he designed for his buildings as he is for the buildings themselves. It is a rare architect in this day and age who is not known for also having designed a chair… the Eames chair, the Breuer chair, the Meis chair, and the Gehry chair. Had the dining table and chairs Wright designed for the Robie House been included (they are in the Smart Museum in Chicago), the public would have had the opportunity to see and study a Wright design first hand and they would have better understood the claim that he reconceptualized architectural space by pointing out that the high backs of the chairs created the sense of a living space within a living space in an otherwise open floor plan. (He created an intimate, small space within an open large space.) None of his furniture is presented nor was the space concept in any way elaborated.
Lacking that table and chairs, or any others of his chairs or furniture, or cast cement blocks used in his California houses, examples of his stained glass windows, or perhaps full scale models of his various architectural pieces…doors, windows, etc, etc, etc….Wright’s architecture is presented here in full two dimensional flatness. How odd that a museum would mount an exhibition of architecture, the most three dimensional and sculptural of the fine arts, and present it only as a repetition in flatness …and unrelievedly on tracing paper.
Other than the models the only three dimensional object is the curtain Wright designed for the theatre at the Wright Fellowship Theatre. Yet no mention is made that this abstract design referencing the Jones Valley farm country is very similar to the art produced at Germany’s Bauhaus; it almost seems Mondrian inspired whereas the reverse is true. (An early book of Wright’s work published in Germany in 1911 influenced Walter Gropius and lead to the creation of the Bauhaus.) In fact, no mention is made regarding Wright’s influence on subsequent world architecture at all…and it was and continues to be tremendous.
But what intrigued me more than anything else is that very little was said about Frank Lloyd Wright the person. Here it is all work and little about the man behind the work. I was curious if this was an effort to create a new perspective for the study of his work. There is a great literature of fact and fiction about him and it is believed that most of that fiction was a fiction, a legend, a mythology that he himself created. It is so sad to see his work and to find him missing: it is as if someone had chopped him off with an axe. I felt his absence very strongly.
Just inside the entry door to the museum there is a medallion placed in the floor which states that this building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is a gift from Solomon Guggenheim. There is a motto on the circumference and at the bottom Greek letters that when pronounced reveal the author as Aristophanes. That medallion, giving top billing to Mr. Wright, symbolizes the character of this venue: it is known primarily as Wright’s great, last masterpiece. It is a fine art museum but little of the art here is very interesting on its own and certainly not as interesting as the building, one of the greatest artistic achievements of the twentieth century.
This 50th anniversary Wright exhibition is a first and has been mounted perhaps under the assumption that it might have been a very long wait but that very, very late is better than never at all. As I have said earlier, there is a wealth of material here but I walked away from it thinking that something better could have been done: we have been given recipes but not the banquet. Over and over again I was sorry they had not asked me to curate it. I have never thought of myself as a museum curator but this left me with the confidence that I could have done better. Certainly Mr. Wright deserves better.
The link below will access the Guggenheim web site. There is a brief video about the making of the models for the exhibition. The model of the Jacobs House is excellent: it is made in layers, hanging on wires, representing the order in which the building was erected. Otherwise note in the voice-over commentary that many of the Wright buzz words are uttered: reconceptualized space, landscape and the relationship of architecture to landscape, form follows functions, etc. The astute listener will notice that while these buzz words are voiced, no effort is made to explain them. I would think the layman would walk away from this exhibition having learned nothing more about this work than he knew coming in. This exhibition could have been the impetus for a revival of interest in Wright’s work and a source for greater understanding on the part of the layman as to why Wright is held in such high esteem by his professional peers. Instead, for the layman, and for our cultural enlightenment in general, it is a real missed opportunity.
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view-now/frank-lloyd-wright
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Avedon Fashion 1944-2000. International Center for Photography, NYC
Of all the photographers whose work I’ve seen in the last year or so, and I have made a concerted effort to see as many of the classic exemplars as I could, Richard Avedon is the only one I have actually met. For many years I worked in the film industry with a man who had been Richard’s assistant in the fifties and into the sixties. When Richard went to Paris to act as the advisor on the film Funny Face, with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, my friend Frank accompanied him. He also had many stories to tell about the classic Marilyn Monroe shoot featured in Life Magazine in which she portrayed the legends of early Hollywood. When two of Avedon’s books were printed in Switzerland, Frank went over to supervise the printing. Thus one day, circa 1986, as we were working he told me that Richard was shooting a commercial in the studio next to ours and he asked if I would like to go over with him to say hello. Usually I am shy but I thought: “What the hell. Why not”.
Working in the film industry as I did for some thirty years, one meets his share of prima donna directors and hot shot here today and gone tomorrow photographers. I am happy to report that Richard Avedon was neither of the above. The man I met was encountering his old and dear friend; his social/professional persona was minimized. I was able to observe a man who was brimming with delight, energetic, somewhat humble, and emotionally honest. In this retrospective exhibition I can sense the same man behind these works.
What is remarkable in these photographs is that each of them was made on assignment …photograph this dress, these shoes, that hairdo, this scarf…and each of them bristles with a life far more energetic than that of the slaves to fashion for whom they were made. In every one of them Avedon has been creative, intelligent, and playful and has produced a result that is unique.
It appears that he often worked with the same models for periods of time ...Dovima, Dorian, Suzy Parker, Sonny Hanett, Elise Daniels. Rather than use them as soulless mannequins he has allowed the personality of each of them to contribute to and color the work. As a result these photographs are not so much about a specific article of apparel but of a way of life. The women who read those fashion magazines, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, etc. no doubt wanted not so much the clothing but to live that way of life, those rapturous moments he created. However; they are so imbued with the personality of the photographer I wondered if perhaps the designers whose work was the raison d’être for the photographs might not have been just a little taken aback by his strong presence. But if the photographs sold dresses and promoted fame I suppose they remained silent and swallowed their objections.
There is a very strong sense in this work that for Avedon “the usual” would not do. He did not do what other photographers did and he rarely repeated himself, at least not as shown in the two hundred photographs in this exhibition. To realize that he was able to do that for 60 years is astonishing. It is evident that he conceptualized and directed each session. His appears to have been an endlessly flowing creativity.
Clearly he was a master of lighting. But that does not mean that the lighting is flawless. Often it is theatrical and it is glaringly obvious …but that is in keeping within the character of his work on the whole: he had a theatrical, dramatic side that he allowed to inspire spirited and humorous works. The settings were often location settings and there was no effort to hide the bizarre quality of the choices and the juxtaposition of the various elements or the artifice employed to complete the concept. I wondered many times while going through this exhibition if he had inspired Fellini or if Fellini had inspired him.
Having worked on many, many, many film locations I could see in these photograph that many hours of work went into making them: there is evidence of large arc lights, rain making machines, and fans, as well as all the props brought onto the set. I could see as well that there were many hours spent making the photographs in the darkroom …the dodging and burning and cropping; these are not Ansel Adams’ “found” photographs or Bresson’s decisive moments but created experiences. Perhaps what is most astounding is that they read as visual experiences: often I forgot that I was looking at photographs!
It is a remarkable creativity and vision…
Dovima, in Paris, dressed to kill, standing between two elephants.
A beautiful socialite, from the waist up, looking quietly into the camera, her hair, by Kenneth, in wild abandon. She is nude.
A curve of a woman’s calf, her ankle, the extension of her foot, and a magnificent shoe.
In a very decrepit old house, the paint blistered and peeling, the plaster in chunks on the floor, the model communes with “A person unknown”, a skeleton who wears the dress. (These are among the few color photographs in this exhibit and the limited palette of very greyed colors is wonderful.) Rather than macabre these are extremely whimsical.
Also in color a young couple, both nude. He kneels on the floor resting on his calves; she kneels in the same pose, facing him, resting on his thighs. They embrace. Both their heads are covered by a really beautiful Italian silk scarf that a large fan has blown into a maelstrom like an escaped sail on a sail boat.
A very thin woman stands in profile to the camera in a very tight dress. You suddenly realize that her leg nearest the camera has the foot turned toe-on to the camera. I tried to recreate that pose as I stood there. I could not do it!
Often a photograph is animated by the splayed fingers of a hand, or an extended arm or leg, or a head tipped askew.
I do not recall seeing that credit was given to whoever had made these mostly large prints. They are, of course, flawless. There are some 8 by 10 prints each stamped as being the approved print to be used for the lithographs that were to be printed in the magazines. Each of those is signed by Richard Avedon; I believe indicating his approval rather than his having made the print.
There are also copies of the various magazines showing the work as the public first saw it. Considering how they are placed on the pages, that the cropping is sometimes very different, one cannot see the art in these photographs except in these gallery prints.
The Center is a surprisingly small space for a New York City arts venue. There are two moderately sized and one small gallery on the street level and galleries in the same square footage area one floor down. The lighting is excellent: pin spots from high overhead on a very oblique angle illuminate each photograph. Shutters mask the light off the walls. There are no distracting reflections. It is possible to stand twelve inches from the works before your head casts shadows on them. That alone prompts you to step back: the ideal aesthetic distance is established by the lighting. One of the rooms on the main floor has dark walls. On first entering that space the photographs appear to be back-lit transparencies. The black and white contrasts are extremely crisp. Excellent.
I can think of some museums that would be well advised to study the lighting in this installation. I won’t mention names but you will come across them if you scroll down though some of my earlier entries.
In the New York advertising business and in the fashion world the word “Great” is greatly overused. I try to use it only when appropriate. Richard Avedon. A+. Good show! In fact, Great!
http://www.icp.org/
http://www.richardavedon.com/
Working in the film industry as I did for some thirty years, one meets his share of prima donna directors and hot shot here today and gone tomorrow photographers. I am happy to report that Richard Avedon was neither of the above. The man I met was encountering his old and dear friend; his social/professional persona was minimized. I was able to observe a man who was brimming with delight, energetic, somewhat humble, and emotionally honest. In this retrospective exhibition I can sense the same man behind these works.
What is remarkable in these photographs is that each of them was made on assignment …photograph this dress, these shoes, that hairdo, this scarf…and each of them bristles with a life far more energetic than that of the slaves to fashion for whom they were made. In every one of them Avedon has been creative, intelligent, and playful and has produced a result that is unique.
It appears that he often worked with the same models for periods of time ...Dovima, Dorian, Suzy Parker, Sonny Hanett, Elise Daniels. Rather than use them as soulless mannequins he has allowed the personality of each of them to contribute to and color the work. As a result these photographs are not so much about a specific article of apparel but of a way of life. The women who read those fashion magazines, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, etc. no doubt wanted not so much the clothing but to live that way of life, those rapturous moments he created. However; they are so imbued with the personality of the photographer I wondered if perhaps the designers whose work was the raison d’être for the photographs might not have been just a little taken aback by his strong presence. But if the photographs sold dresses and promoted fame I suppose they remained silent and swallowed their objections.
There is a very strong sense in this work that for Avedon “the usual” would not do. He did not do what other photographers did and he rarely repeated himself, at least not as shown in the two hundred photographs in this exhibition. To realize that he was able to do that for 60 years is astonishing. It is evident that he conceptualized and directed each session. His appears to have been an endlessly flowing creativity.
Clearly he was a master of lighting. But that does not mean that the lighting is flawless. Often it is theatrical and it is glaringly obvious …but that is in keeping within the character of his work on the whole: he had a theatrical, dramatic side that he allowed to inspire spirited and humorous works. The settings were often location settings and there was no effort to hide the bizarre quality of the choices and the juxtaposition of the various elements or the artifice employed to complete the concept. I wondered many times while going through this exhibition if he had inspired Fellini or if Fellini had inspired him.
Having worked on many, many, many film locations I could see in these photograph that many hours of work went into making them: there is evidence of large arc lights, rain making machines, and fans, as well as all the props brought onto the set. I could see as well that there were many hours spent making the photographs in the darkroom …the dodging and burning and cropping; these are not Ansel Adams’ “found” photographs or Bresson’s decisive moments but created experiences. Perhaps what is most astounding is that they read as visual experiences: often I forgot that I was looking at photographs!
It is a remarkable creativity and vision…
Dovima, in Paris, dressed to kill, standing between two elephants.
A beautiful socialite, from the waist up, looking quietly into the camera, her hair, by Kenneth, in wild abandon. She is nude.
A curve of a woman’s calf, her ankle, the extension of her foot, and a magnificent shoe.
In a very decrepit old house, the paint blistered and peeling, the plaster in chunks on the floor, the model communes with “A person unknown”, a skeleton who wears the dress. (These are among the few color photographs in this exhibit and the limited palette of very greyed colors is wonderful.) Rather than macabre these are extremely whimsical.
Also in color a young couple, both nude. He kneels on the floor resting on his calves; she kneels in the same pose, facing him, resting on his thighs. They embrace. Both their heads are covered by a really beautiful Italian silk scarf that a large fan has blown into a maelstrom like an escaped sail on a sail boat.
A very thin woman stands in profile to the camera in a very tight dress. You suddenly realize that her leg nearest the camera has the foot turned toe-on to the camera. I tried to recreate that pose as I stood there. I could not do it!
Often a photograph is animated by the splayed fingers of a hand, or an extended arm or leg, or a head tipped askew.
I do not recall seeing that credit was given to whoever had made these mostly large prints. They are, of course, flawless. There are some 8 by 10 prints each stamped as being the approved print to be used for the lithographs that were to be printed in the magazines. Each of those is signed by Richard Avedon; I believe indicating his approval rather than his having made the print.
There are also copies of the various magazines showing the work as the public first saw it. Considering how they are placed on the pages, that the cropping is sometimes very different, one cannot see the art in these photographs except in these gallery prints.
The Center is a surprisingly small space for a New York City arts venue. There are two moderately sized and one small gallery on the street level and galleries in the same square footage area one floor down. The lighting is excellent: pin spots from high overhead on a very oblique angle illuminate each photograph. Shutters mask the light off the walls. There are no distracting reflections. It is possible to stand twelve inches from the works before your head casts shadows on them. That alone prompts you to step back: the ideal aesthetic distance is established by the lighting. One of the rooms on the main floor has dark walls. On first entering that space the photographs appear to be back-lit transparencies. The black and white contrasts are extremely crisp. Excellent.
I can think of some museums that would be well advised to study the lighting in this installation. I won’t mention names but you will come across them if you scroll down though some of my earlier entries.
In the New York advertising business and in the fashion world the word “Great” is greatly overused. I try to use it only when appropriate. Richard Avedon. A+. Good show! In fact, Great!
http://www.icp.org/
http://www.richardavedon.com/
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Picasso: Mosqueteros. At the Gagosian Gallery, New York City
Reading the first three volumes of John Richardson’s The Life of Picasso, an invaluable resource for understanding the chronology of this artist’s life and his influences, I became much more aware than I had been previously that throughout his lifetime Picasso was much in the company of poets …in his early days the Barcelona poets and later in Paris Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Andre Breton, and Jean Cocteau. In his mid to late career he wrote poetry. I have often wondered if anyone has considered Gertrude Stein’s influence on him: to what degree did her play of words and her restructuring of the language influence his restructuring of his subjects and the reorganization of picture space?
Made aware of that constant company of poets I have wondered to what degree he might have considered that his works were visual poetry, that he and his friends shared a common endeavor. I am unaware that anyone who has written about him has discussed his work from this perspective, although there was an exhibition recently at Yale University that did consider his work in this light because he incorporated letters and words into the paintings. Rather than those letters and words I am more focused on considering the images, the freedom with form, the reorganization of picture space, the dynamic of line, and the use of color as visual poetry.
From this perspective it could be more easily understood why he never forsook the representational in art: poetry is a human utterance and has as its subject the human experience. While a painting can be stripped of subject and anecdote and still express the sentiments, poetry without human sentiment is merely word play that often devolves into nonsense. Abstraction, non representational painting, is an area that Picasso would not enter. He insisted that he wanted there to be a reference in each of his works. And of all his subjects the most constant is the human form. That insistence on subject and that particular subject have inspired my curiosity as to his purpose.
Picasso’s paintings from the early forties through the sixties have often seemed inexplicable to me but looked at from the perspective of visual poetry they can be seen to follow a linear development that began with the loose and free composition of the turn of the century works, and continued with those from the blue period, and especially those of the rose period …which are his most lyrical works, through the deconstruction of form in the cubist works, the presence of expressive form he saw in African works, and in the reconstruction of the natural forms, with the emphasis on expressive form, in the works of the twenties. It is in seeing all of the elements from these periods as the syntax of visual poetry that I can better understand the later works.
In this exhibition of very late works at the Gagosian Gallery the poetic syntax is intact. The subjects are exclusively the human figure and Picasso works with his standard iconography …the hands, the feet, the fingers and toes, the eyes, the noses, the tangled limbs and the genitalia, the vaginas, the penises and the black void of the anus are all strongly indicated., but in many of these paintings the subjects, the human figures …the Mosqueteros, seem merely the motive for making the painting, there is not always a felt sentiment expressed, the expression of a sentiment being the essence of poetry. Here it seems as if Picasso was insistent that the act of painting is everything. With their great energy and with the obvious presence of the painter, these works often read as a record of the making of the paintings.
The Gallery owners and the curator, John Richardson, suggest that these works are worth our reconsideration and imply that there is something in them that we might have overlooked in previous exposures to Picasso’s late work. I am uncertain that I agree. What we see here is very much what Picasso showed us over and over again from 1930 onward. In many passages Picasso appears to be referencing Picasso …the parallel series of lines, hatching, that he borrowed from African art, the face that is full front and profile at the same time, the eyes one above the other …several of these figures very strongly reminded me of the portraits of his infant daughter Maya done many years before.
What I do sense strongly and what I have only sensed slightly in his other work is the desperation that drove him, his manic insistence to “get the work done”. But with an unending stream of creativity flowing through him and from him, the work would never have been completed even if he had lived to be 200.
In that desperation can be sensed as well a sense of frustration and rage: “I can’t get beyond this!” These painting, seen in a former industrial space with its hard white walls and its cement floor, have the hardness of the wall against which he hurled himself …repeatedly …and always with the same frustrating result: stasis. There is no breakthrough comparable to cubism and little that inspires as did his referencing African art or the early Iberian figures. These are wonderful paintings and some of them might well be great paintings …two awesome self portraits and a painting of a young boy on the beach in particular … but the frustration of that stasis is reiterated from one to the others of them overall.
Picasso is a master draftsman and the exhibition reconfirms this. Because of the dominance of line in the paintings, these are essentially drawings in oil on canvass, the approximately 60 paintings and 80 drawings can be understood as an exhibition of 140 drawings.
The making of lines seems to me to have been Picasso’s great love. Considering the vast number of his works, I think it is not far off the mark to suggest that his was a compulsion. In these paintings, drawings, and etchings, the line is dominant, every plane and form has been minimized or eliminated. There is no deep picture space; the activity in every one of these works is restricted to the surface, to the picture plane. Color seems very secondary as well as if a palette had been chosen arbitrarily or at random and where the sometimes resulting muddle of color has obscured the line Picasso often restated the line and most often very emphatically.
It is also readily apparent that he could look at a blank surface and begin a painting at once, almost simultaneously as the concept presented itself to him. There is no sense that there were ideas jotted down in a notebook or that there were preliminary or color sketches. Each of these paintings has the sense of their having been conceptualized and executed within a matter of minutes or hours. Spontaneity is the strongest impression here just as it is in the late work of other masters …Goya …Rembrandt …where the shorthand of a slash of color could sum up the lifetime experience of painting. For a man his age it is remarkable that there are no mistakes or wrong turns although there is evidence that many areas were painted over or rubbed out. Each of these paintings is a complete and finished work: each is the work of a master: each is as good as the work he had done during the previous seventy years.
Seeing these paintings I was reminded of the exhibition at the Frick Museum a few years ago, The Last Works of Goya, especially the drawings that he made using a conte crayon. Rarely have I felt so strongly an artist’s pleasure in and love of his life long involvement with drawing, although I have experienced that same love of drawing in the Vollard Suite. By contrast these last works of Picasso read as all work. Hard work. There is little sense that he took pleasure in making them. It is as if he had addressed not us, the viewers, but his God. I sense in these a violent protest of his mortality: whatever life gave him in his 90 years, it was not enough.
Despite what I feel is their lack of an expression of his sentiments within some of these works, as individual paintings each contains those elements that make me continue to see them as visual poetry. But seen as a group these works are an expression of his rage against the dying of the light. Certainly that is some kind of poetry!
In the twentieth century art world there was much hype but only a few masters. Let’s face it: Picasso was the preeminent master. To see any of his work in large numbers is always an inspiring occasion. This is an excellent exhibition of remarkable paintings in a wonderful gallery space and there is no need to invent for them virtues beyond their observable achievements. To the end the man was the master: period.
http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2009-03-26_pablo-picasso/
Made aware of that constant company of poets I have wondered to what degree he might have considered that his works were visual poetry, that he and his friends shared a common endeavor. I am unaware that anyone who has written about him has discussed his work from this perspective, although there was an exhibition recently at Yale University that did consider his work in this light because he incorporated letters and words into the paintings. Rather than those letters and words I am more focused on considering the images, the freedom with form, the reorganization of picture space, the dynamic of line, and the use of color as visual poetry.
From this perspective it could be more easily understood why he never forsook the representational in art: poetry is a human utterance and has as its subject the human experience. While a painting can be stripped of subject and anecdote and still express the sentiments, poetry without human sentiment is merely word play that often devolves into nonsense. Abstraction, non representational painting, is an area that Picasso would not enter. He insisted that he wanted there to be a reference in each of his works. And of all his subjects the most constant is the human form. That insistence on subject and that particular subject have inspired my curiosity as to his purpose.
Picasso’s paintings from the early forties through the sixties have often seemed inexplicable to me but looked at from the perspective of visual poetry they can be seen to follow a linear development that began with the loose and free composition of the turn of the century works, and continued with those from the blue period, and especially those of the rose period …which are his most lyrical works, through the deconstruction of form in the cubist works, the presence of expressive form he saw in African works, and in the reconstruction of the natural forms, with the emphasis on expressive form, in the works of the twenties. It is in seeing all of the elements from these periods as the syntax of visual poetry that I can better understand the later works.
In this exhibition of very late works at the Gagosian Gallery the poetic syntax is intact. The subjects are exclusively the human figure and Picasso works with his standard iconography …the hands, the feet, the fingers and toes, the eyes, the noses, the tangled limbs and the genitalia, the vaginas, the penises and the black void of the anus are all strongly indicated., but in many of these paintings the subjects, the human figures …the Mosqueteros, seem merely the motive for making the painting, there is not always a felt sentiment expressed, the expression of a sentiment being the essence of poetry. Here it seems as if Picasso was insistent that the act of painting is everything. With their great energy and with the obvious presence of the painter, these works often read as a record of the making of the paintings.
The Gallery owners and the curator, John Richardson, suggest that these works are worth our reconsideration and imply that there is something in them that we might have overlooked in previous exposures to Picasso’s late work. I am uncertain that I agree. What we see here is very much what Picasso showed us over and over again from 1930 onward. In many passages Picasso appears to be referencing Picasso …the parallel series of lines, hatching, that he borrowed from African art, the face that is full front and profile at the same time, the eyes one above the other …several of these figures very strongly reminded me of the portraits of his infant daughter Maya done many years before.
What I do sense strongly and what I have only sensed slightly in his other work is the desperation that drove him, his manic insistence to “get the work done”. But with an unending stream of creativity flowing through him and from him, the work would never have been completed even if he had lived to be 200.
In that desperation can be sensed as well a sense of frustration and rage: “I can’t get beyond this!” These painting, seen in a former industrial space with its hard white walls and its cement floor, have the hardness of the wall against which he hurled himself …repeatedly …and always with the same frustrating result: stasis. There is no breakthrough comparable to cubism and little that inspires as did his referencing African art or the early Iberian figures. These are wonderful paintings and some of them might well be great paintings …two awesome self portraits and a painting of a young boy on the beach in particular … but the frustration of that stasis is reiterated from one to the others of them overall.
Picasso is a master draftsman and the exhibition reconfirms this. Because of the dominance of line in the paintings, these are essentially drawings in oil on canvass, the approximately 60 paintings and 80 drawings can be understood as an exhibition of 140 drawings.
The making of lines seems to me to have been Picasso’s great love. Considering the vast number of his works, I think it is not far off the mark to suggest that his was a compulsion. In these paintings, drawings, and etchings, the line is dominant, every plane and form has been minimized or eliminated. There is no deep picture space; the activity in every one of these works is restricted to the surface, to the picture plane. Color seems very secondary as well as if a palette had been chosen arbitrarily or at random and where the sometimes resulting muddle of color has obscured the line Picasso often restated the line and most often very emphatically.
It is also readily apparent that he could look at a blank surface and begin a painting at once, almost simultaneously as the concept presented itself to him. There is no sense that there were ideas jotted down in a notebook or that there were preliminary or color sketches. Each of these paintings has the sense of their having been conceptualized and executed within a matter of minutes or hours. Spontaneity is the strongest impression here just as it is in the late work of other masters …Goya …Rembrandt …where the shorthand of a slash of color could sum up the lifetime experience of painting. For a man his age it is remarkable that there are no mistakes or wrong turns although there is evidence that many areas were painted over or rubbed out. Each of these paintings is a complete and finished work: each is the work of a master: each is as good as the work he had done during the previous seventy years.
Seeing these paintings I was reminded of the exhibition at the Frick Museum a few years ago, The Last Works of Goya, especially the drawings that he made using a conte crayon. Rarely have I felt so strongly an artist’s pleasure in and love of his life long involvement with drawing, although I have experienced that same love of drawing in the Vollard Suite. By contrast these last works of Picasso read as all work. Hard work. There is little sense that he took pleasure in making them. It is as if he had addressed not us, the viewers, but his God. I sense in these a violent protest of his mortality: whatever life gave him in his 90 years, it was not enough.
Despite what I feel is their lack of an expression of his sentiments within some of these works, as individual paintings each contains those elements that make me continue to see them as visual poetry. But seen as a group these works are an expression of his rage against the dying of the light. Certainly that is some kind of poetry!
In the twentieth century art world there was much hype but only a few masters. Let’s face it: Picasso was the preeminent master. To see any of his work in large numbers is always an inspiring occasion. This is an excellent exhibition of remarkable paintings in a wonderful gallery space and there is no need to invent for them virtues beyond their observable achievements. To the end the man was the master: period.
http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2009-03-26_pablo-picasso/
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Federico Fellini: Revisiting His Films 50 Years Later
Netflix makes it possible for the film lover to program a film festival or career retrospective in the comfort and privacy of his own home. In deciding to do this with the work of filmmakers whose works I had seen in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s, it was a no-brainer for me to begin this project with the work of Federico Fellini. Netflix makes available 18 of the 22 films he directed. I can think of no filmmaker, other than Ingmar Bergman, who created so many iconic images that continue to linger in my mind through so many years as if they were my own memories. But of course they are my memories now. By recording his memories in such detail, Proust, mentioned in two Fellini films, recaptured the past not only for himself but made those memories mine as well, he recaptured the past for me. Fellini works from this same awareness but from a different perspective.
No artist appears in full bloom out of nowhere and by referring to The Internet Movie Data Base it can be seen that Fellini is no exception. In his early days in Rome, in the late thirties and early 40’s, he worked as an actor, a cartoonist and as a writer. He made his first contribution to a film script in 1942. By the time he co directed his first film, Variety Lights, in 1950, he had twenty seven writing credits. During those early years he had a chance meeting in a sidewalk café with Tullio Pinelli and the two of them, in collaboration with others, would continue to co write all the Fellini scripts. Pinelli, who died earlier this year, was a noted Italian authority on literature; he was an esteemed poet and a playwright.
Fellini and Pinelli wrote the screenplay for The White Sheik as a project to be directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, but when he passed on it, it was decided that Fellini would direct it. Although he seems to have been established at Cinecitta, this is a point in his career that should be explored: movie making is an expensive undertaking and no one directs a film without the backing of the money men. Because the White Sheik was somewhat successful, Fellini and Pinelli set to work on their next film, Il Vitteloni, Fellini’s memories of his early twenties in his home town, Rimini, and that was followed by Il Bidone, The Swindle, an effort that was an undisguised reference to American film noir.
I don’t know how successful that film was commercially, but I have a sense that it did not please Fellini: from that point on all of Fellini’s films were self referencing. He has said: an artist can only speak about himself. And indeed this is true. I have read elsewhere about another artist that the words are Hamlet’s but the thoughts are Shakespeare’s. It would be very interesting to know why the money men decided to underwrite this excursion into personal vision as opposed to the usual studio product. Perhaps they had the cultural education and wisdom to realize that among the Cinecitta stable of filmmakers Fellini, Vittorio de Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Lucino Visconti were men who deserved their full support. But once Fellini’s early efforts, La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, and La Dolce Vita, proved to be artistically and commercially successful, it is easier to understand why it continued to be bankrolled: with those films Fellini had become a major filmmaker on an international scale.
In his essay, Create Dangerously, Camus wrote that those who go in for being famous in our time destroy not only their creativity but themselves as well. La Dolce Vita seems to be an illustration of that observation. It explores the influence of his social experience on the creative force of the individual. Marcello has a recognized writing talent but he has married and has a need to support himself and his wife. He works as a newspaper man covering the good life in mid century Rome. But as he becomes more and more involved in that life and as he becomes more and more comfortable with the recognition he receives from those within that circle, the less he is able to write the things he wants or feels he must write. Thus he becomes dry…nor can he any longer live in the isolation required for creative work. His innocence is lost as well and he cannot hear innocence, the young waitress at the seaside café, when it calls to him.
After making that film Fellini became interested in Jungian psychology…I would think from his book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, just as I did at about the same time …a work that discourses on the collective unconscious and the archetypes. 8 ½ is the story of a creative film maker, like Fellini, of course, who cannot make the next move forward…he is blocked. The film lacks a linear narrative…it is a sequence of episodes around the mental/creative block. The Jungian syntax first begins to appear in Fellini’s work in this film.
Juliet of The Spirits is a more wholehearted embrace of that intellectual framework…in addition there is much discussion of and imagery from modern psychoanalysis.
From the first films Fellini directed he questioned the need and the value of narrative, the structure of the well made play with a beginning, a middle and an end, a clearly delineated antagonist and protagonist, a plot, a situation, and a denouncement. Considering that he worked with some of Italy’s best writers, it is easy to assume that they had many discussions regarding the technique and the structure of screenplays. Satisfied that plot is not needed, they created in all his films a sequence of visual experiences that arrest our attention.
Fellini’s films are about illusion, about telling the truth, being honest: about being dishonest, lying. (That dishonesty is defined by Fellini in I’m a Born Liar: He says that the memories he reconstructed for his films are more real to him than the actual persons and places he remembers.) This theme is elaborated through movies, memories, and dreams. Generously laid over these illusions is his great compassion for the human experience and his tremendous love of life.
Movies.
Fellini grew up in a small Italian town in the twenties and 30’s and the dominant cultural influences for him was the cinema, just as it was for me growing up in a small town in Kansas in the 1940’s and 50’s. Each one of his films is loaded with film references. In Il Viteloni the movie house is one of the settings, movie posters are splayed on the walls in the backgrounds, and the influence of the Hollywood stars can be seen in the dress and manners of the characters.
In La Strada the Guieletta Masina character is based on Harpo Marx, complete with blond hair, white make up, heavily drawn eyebrows, the overlarge coat, the silent miming, and in the melancholy music played on a variety of instruments.
In La Dolce Vita Anita Ekberg plays a visiting Hollywood sexpot, Lex Barker a former Hollywood Tarzan (himself), and in Intervista Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni play themselves as the aging stars of an old Italian movie, La Dolce Vita, complete with a screening of the scene in the Trevi fountain.
In all of the films there are the elaborate sets that reference the sumptuous 30’s Hollywood sets without architectural logic such as those seen in the Fred Astaire Ginger Rogers movies. There are scenes in which the lighting, both indoors and out, is nothing other than studio lighting. In many films there are film crews set up with all the possible film equipment in the world. There are cardboard ships that sail on oceans of fabric.
The movie reference comes completely to the forefront in the late film, The Ship Sails On. It is a ship of fools, a comedy, but you dare not laugh. In this film the ship travels from A to B. The ship sinks. There are characters and they are busy doing things but nothing they do refers to a plot or to a meaning. It is a movie just as an opera is an opera, just as a modern painting is an object in and of itself. It is not a documentary, it is not a history, it is not a drama or a comedy or a musical or a thriller …it is just a movie but presented in such a way as to never lose our attention. And The Maestro is having his fun with it. It is creative illusion, art, and only that makes life significant. In I am a Born Liar, an excellent meditation on art and the creative personality, Fellini states that art is the essence of life, that without art life is only a heart that beats or an eye that records. For Fellini, art is vital energy. His premise is very clearly stated and understood in this film.
Memories.
As I wrote earlier, all of Fellini’s films are based on his memories, whether they are his memories of actual events or memories that he has made up, according to his collaborators, is not for us to know.
Dreams
While recuperating from an illness after making La Dolce Vita, Fellini read Petronius’ Satyricon. It is an incomplete fragment of a classic work …rather like the ruined and fragmentary wall murals from old Roman structures. Understanding the various archetypes within the work, Fellini turned these elements into a motion picture. But rather than a narrative that presents a world view for consideration, it is instead an exploration springing from the question: Do these images resonate with modern man? When the viewer gives himself up to the events, to the jumps and skips and the lack of narrative and continuity, when he gives himself up simply to this visual experience, the film can be understood as a dream. It is without cohesive narrative logic. It covers a wide range of cultural artifacts from ancient Rome, through the Italian Renaissance and on to modern times, through monuments, references to Italian Renaissance paintings and in the focus on the two young men who are very much like the footloose young hippies in modern day Rome, as if agreeing with T.S. Eliot that all time is contained in time present.
In the film the dream quality is enhanced by the words being out of sync with the mouths of the characters. This was a Fellini device used in all his films. He wanted that disconnect from reality because it enhanced the dreamlike quality of the visual experience. When he directed he sat beside the camera and told the actors what to do. Some ambient sound might or might not have been recorded. Once the film was edited, then he would record the dialogue and lay it over the picture. For those of us who sit and read the subtitles that is not as noticeable as it was to those who speak Italian. But if you turn off the subtitles and just listen to the Italian dialogue, you can see that it is indeed, out of sync.
This film is one in which the filmmaker has used archetypes in such a way as to show us the value of this as a dramatic device. In the sequence wherein the couple sends their children off before committing suicide, the entire scene is presented in white costumes and in a muted light…this is a scene of purity. After their death the two young men enter and explore the house and discover the maid. It is implied that the two of them together become sexually involved with her and immediately after that they indicate that they are sexually attracted to each other as well. (They are satyrs: the basic energy of the characters in the film is libido energy.) In both inferences the information is conveyed as fact and without moral judgment.
In the Christian religion disobedience is considered the original sin, a sin of which all subsequent men are guilty: Man is by his nature disobedient. Civilization is but a thin veneer over man’s inherent nature. And indeed the social conservatives tell us that unless we have strong law and order we will live in a state of social anarchy.
Thus it can be said that those of us who think ourselves moral and on our guard against temptation can find that when we see the two young men in bed with the young woman we will have an emotional/moral response to that and we will also have an emotional/moral response to the inference that they are sexually intimate with each other. But in the absence of a moral standard, the official Church dogma, on the part of the filmmaker, our response, whatever it is, can be said to be our own response…and we must own up to that response, or, in Jungian terms, when we accept the dark, the hidden, side, by acknowledging our emotional response as our own, we gain personal knowledge. Triggered by the mechanism of the archetypes, that knowledge then expands our understanding of what it means to be human.
And just as the role of the church is minimized in this film, as indeed it is in all these works, it is generally presented as a social institution divorced from the lives of the people, so the role of the state is minimized: there are very few politics in Fellini’s films, when they are there, as in Amarcord, it is seen as being so much less emotionally vital than the quotidian reality of the characters or the archetypes and the strong images of the memory and the imagination of the film itself. In Fellini’s world nothing is political, life is visual experience …the passing ocean liner on the late night sea… and much of it raises the question: why is this visual experience so meaningful?
Film is a director’s medium…hence these works are The Films of Federico Fellini. But film is a most collaborative process and they are only as good as the work of each of the contributors. This director was extremely fortunate to have worked with some of the most creative and talented men and women in the industry. In the early black and white films he had the good fortune to work with cinematographer Otello Martelli and his work, as seen in the restored La Strada print is among the very best of film photography. He died in 1966 and from then on Fellini worked with Giuseppe Rotunno in color films that are as rich as Italian Renaissance paintings.
Danilo Donati, Piero Gheradi, and Dante Ferretti were his costume and set designers. In addition to Pinelli he worked on scripts with Ennio Flaiano, Brunello Rondi, and Tonino Guerra. The films were all edited by Ruggero Mastroianni, brother of the actor. And in the music department there is Nino Rota who created a music for these films that is so perfect for them, but so iconic that it cannot be used in other films, it cannot be heard, without evoking the memory of Fellini and Rota. In all areas of this filmmaking each collaborator has given the director a perfectly conceptualized and flawlessly executed component and no expense seems to have been spared in the execution thanks to some very generous producers.
It must have been wonderful to have been so creative and to have had all these very, very talented people help realize the creator’s vision. The felt sense of personal reward must be wonderful for each of them as well. These films can be viewed over and over again and each time more and more of the details become apparent …such as the young man with a white streak in his black hair that grows wider and wider throughout the film until near the end, standing at the church door at a funeral, he looks as if he has a skunk on his head ala Davy Crockett. Fellini is so sly!
From this body of work it is no exaggeration to say that Fellini is to film as Picasso is to modern art: with all due respects paid to his predecessors, he is the outstanding creative energy of twentieth century cinema. His movies are not theatre or painting or photography, Fellini’s movies are movies. Real movies! Bravo Fellini! Encore! Encore!
No artist appears in full bloom out of nowhere and by referring to The Internet Movie Data Base it can be seen that Fellini is no exception. In his early days in Rome, in the late thirties and early 40’s, he worked as an actor, a cartoonist and as a writer. He made his first contribution to a film script in 1942. By the time he co directed his first film, Variety Lights, in 1950, he had twenty seven writing credits. During those early years he had a chance meeting in a sidewalk café with Tullio Pinelli and the two of them, in collaboration with others, would continue to co write all the Fellini scripts. Pinelli, who died earlier this year, was a noted Italian authority on literature; he was an esteemed poet and a playwright.
Fellini and Pinelli wrote the screenplay for The White Sheik as a project to be directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, but when he passed on it, it was decided that Fellini would direct it. Although he seems to have been established at Cinecitta, this is a point in his career that should be explored: movie making is an expensive undertaking and no one directs a film without the backing of the money men. Because the White Sheik was somewhat successful, Fellini and Pinelli set to work on their next film, Il Vitteloni, Fellini’s memories of his early twenties in his home town, Rimini, and that was followed by Il Bidone, The Swindle, an effort that was an undisguised reference to American film noir.
I don’t know how successful that film was commercially, but I have a sense that it did not please Fellini: from that point on all of Fellini’s films were self referencing. He has said: an artist can only speak about himself. And indeed this is true. I have read elsewhere about another artist that the words are Hamlet’s but the thoughts are Shakespeare’s. It would be very interesting to know why the money men decided to underwrite this excursion into personal vision as opposed to the usual studio product. Perhaps they had the cultural education and wisdom to realize that among the Cinecitta stable of filmmakers Fellini, Vittorio de Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Lucino Visconti were men who deserved their full support. But once Fellini’s early efforts, La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, and La Dolce Vita, proved to be artistically and commercially successful, it is easier to understand why it continued to be bankrolled: with those films Fellini had become a major filmmaker on an international scale.
In his essay, Create Dangerously, Camus wrote that those who go in for being famous in our time destroy not only their creativity but themselves as well. La Dolce Vita seems to be an illustration of that observation. It explores the influence of his social experience on the creative force of the individual. Marcello has a recognized writing talent but he has married and has a need to support himself and his wife. He works as a newspaper man covering the good life in mid century Rome. But as he becomes more and more involved in that life and as he becomes more and more comfortable with the recognition he receives from those within that circle, the less he is able to write the things he wants or feels he must write. Thus he becomes dry…nor can he any longer live in the isolation required for creative work. His innocence is lost as well and he cannot hear innocence, the young waitress at the seaside café, when it calls to him.
After making that film Fellini became interested in Jungian psychology…I would think from his book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, just as I did at about the same time …a work that discourses on the collective unconscious and the archetypes. 8 ½ is the story of a creative film maker, like Fellini, of course, who cannot make the next move forward…he is blocked. The film lacks a linear narrative…it is a sequence of episodes around the mental/creative block. The Jungian syntax first begins to appear in Fellini’s work in this film.
Juliet of The Spirits is a more wholehearted embrace of that intellectual framework…in addition there is much discussion of and imagery from modern psychoanalysis.
From the first films Fellini directed he questioned the need and the value of narrative, the structure of the well made play with a beginning, a middle and an end, a clearly delineated antagonist and protagonist, a plot, a situation, and a denouncement. Considering that he worked with some of Italy’s best writers, it is easy to assume that they had many discussions regarding the technique and the structure of screenplays. Satisfied that plot is not needed, they created in all his films a sequence of visual experiences that arrest our attention.
Fellini’s films are about illusion, about telling the truth, being honest: about being dishonest, lying. (That dishonesty is defined by Fellini in I’m a Born Liar: He says that the memories he reconstructed for his films are more real to him than the actual persons and places he remembers.) This theme is elaborated through movies, memories, and dreams. Generously laid over these illusions is his great compassion for the human experience and his tremendous love of life.
Movies.
Fellini grew up in a small Italian town in the twenties and 30’s and the dominant cultural influences for him was the cinema, just as it was for me growing up in a small town in Kansas in the 1940’s and 50’s. Each one of his films is loaded with film references. In Il Viteloni the movie house is one of the settings, movie posters are splayed on the walls in the backgrounds, and the influence of the Hollywood stars can be seen in the dress and manners of the characters.
In La Strada the Guieletta Masina character is based on Harpo Marx, complete with blond hair, white make up, heavily drawn eyebrows, the overlarge coat, the silent miming, and in the melancholy music played on a variety of instruments.
In La Dolce Vita Anita Ekberg plays a visiting Hollywood sexpot, Lex Barker a former Hollywood Tarzan (himself), and in Intervista Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni play themselves as the aging stars of an old Italian movie, La Dolce Vita, complete with a screening of the scene in the Trevi fountain.
In all of the films there are the elaborate sets that reference the sumptuous 30’s Hollywood sets without architectural logic such as those seen in the Fred Astaire Ginger Rogers movies. There are scenes in which the lighting, both indoors and out, is nothing other than studio lighting. In many films there are film crews set up with all the possible film equipment in the world. There are cardboard ships that sail on oceans of fabric.
The movie reference comes completely to the forefront in the late film, The Ship Sails On. It is a ship of fools, a comedy, but you dare not laugh. In this film the ship travels from A to B. The ship sinks. There are characters and they are busy doing things but nothing they do refers to a plot or to a meaning. It is a movie just as an opera is an opera, just as a modern painting is an object in and of itself. It is not a documentary, it is not a history, it is not a drama or a comedy or a musical or a thriller …it is just a movie but presented in such a way as to never lose our attention. And The Maestro is having his fun with it. It is creative illusion, art, and only that makes life significant. In I am a Born Liar, an excellent meditation on art and the creative personality, Fellini states that art is the essence of life, that without art life is only a heart that beats or an eye that records. For Fellini, art is vital energy. His premise is very clearly stated and understood in this film.
Memories.
As I wrote earlier, all of Fellini’s films are based on his memories, whether they are his memories of actual events or memories that he has made up, according to his collaborators, is not for us to know.
Dreams
While recuperating from an illness after making La Dolce Vita, Fellini read Petronius’ Satyricon. It is an incomplete fragment of a classic work …rather like the ruined and fragmentary wall murals from old Roman structures. Understanding the various archetypes within the work, Fellini turned these elements into a motion picture. But rather than a narrative that presents a world view for consideration, it is instead an exploration springing from the question: Do these images resonate with modern man? When the viewer gives himself up to the events, to the jumps and skips and the lack of narrative and continuity, when he gives himself up simply to this visual experience, the film can be understood as a dream. It is without cohesive narrative logic. It covers a wide range of cultural artifacts from ancient Rome, through the Italian Renaissance and on to modern times, through monuments, references to Italian Renaissance paintings and in the focus on the two young men who are very much like the footloose young hippies in modern day Rome, as if agreeing with T.S. Eliot that all time is contained in time present.
In the film the dream quality is enhanced by the words being out of sync with the mouths of the characters. This was a Fellini device used in all his films. He wanted that disconnect from reality because it enhanced the dreamlike quality of the visual experience. When he directed he sat beside the camera and told the actors what to do. Some ambient sound might or might not have been recorded. Once the film was edited, then he would record the dialogue and lay it over the picture. For those of us who sit and read the subtitles that is not as noticeable as it was to those who speak Italian. But if you turn off the subtitles and just listen to the Italian dialogue, you can see that it is indeed, out of sync.
This film is one in which the filmmaker has used archetypes in such a way as to show us the value of this as a dramatic device. In the sequence wherein the couple sends their children off before committing suicide, the entire scene is presented in white costumes and in a muted light…this is a scene of purity. After their death the two young men enter and explore the house and discover the maid. It is implied that the two of them together become sexually involved with her and immediately after that they indicate that they are sexually attracted to each other as well. (They are satyrs: the basic energy of the characters in the film is libido energy.) In both inferences the information is conveyed as fact and without moral judgment.
In the Christian religion disobedience is considered the original sin, a sin of which all subsequent men are guilty: Man is by his nature disobedient. Civilization is but a thin veneer over man’s inherent nature. And indeed the social conservatives tell us that unless we have strong law and order we will live in a state of social anarchy.
Thus it can be said that those of us who think ourselves moral and on our guard against temptation can find that when we see the two young men in bed with the young woman we will have an emotional/moral response to that and we will also have an emotional/moral response to the inference that they are sexually intimate with each other. But in the absence of a moral standard, the official Church dogma, on the part of the filmmaker, our response, whatever it is, can be said to be our own response…and we must own up to that response, or, in Jungian terms, when we accept the dark, the hidden, side, by acknowledging our emotional response as our own, we gain personal knowledge. Triggered by the mechanism of the archetypes, that knowledge then expands our understanding of what it means to be human.
And just as the role of the church is minimized in this film, as indeed it is in all these works, it is generally presented as a social institution divorced from the lives of the people, so the role of the state is minimized: there are very few politics in Fellini’s films, when they are there, as in Amarcord, it is seen as being so much less emotionally vital than the quotidian reality of the characters or the archetypes and the strong images of the memory and the imagination of the film itself. In Fellini’s world nothing is political, life is visual experience …the passing ocean liner on the late night sea… and much of it raises the question: why is this visual experience so meaningful?
Film is a director’s medium…hence these works are The Films of Federico Fellini. But film is a most collaborative process and they are only as good as the work of each of the contributors. This director was extremely fortunate to have worked with some of the most creative and talented men and women in the industry. In the early black and white films he had the good fortune to work with cinematographer Otello Martelli and his work, as seen in the restored La Strada print is among the very best of film photography. He died in 1966 and from then on Fellini worked with Giuseppe Rotunno in color films that are as rich as Italian Renaissance paintings.
Danilo Donati, Piero Gheradi, and Dante Ferretti were his costume and set designers. In addition to Pinelli he worked on scripts with Ennio Flaiano, Brunello Rondi, and Tonino Guerra. The films were all edited by Ruggero Mastroianni, brother of the actor. And in the music department there is Nino Rota who created a music for these films that is so perfect for them, but so iconic that it cannot be used in other films, it cannot be heard, without evoking the memory of Fellini and Rota. In all areas of this filmmaking each collaborator has given the director a perfectly conceptualized and flawlessly executed component and no expense seems to have been spared in the execution thanks to some very generous producers.
It must have been wonderful to have been so creative and to have had all these very, very talented people help realize the creator’s vision. The felt sense of personal reward must be wonderful for each of them as well. These films can be viewed over and over again and each time more and more of the details become apparent …such as the young man with a white streak in his black hair that grows wider and wider throughout the film until near the end, standing at the church door at a funeral, he looks as if he has a skunk on his head ala Davy Crockett. Fellini is so sly!
From this body of work it is no exaggeration to say that Fellini is to film as Picasso is to modern art: with all due respects paid to his predecessors, he is the outstanding creative energy of twentieth century cinema. His movies are not theatre or painting or photography, Fellini’s movies are movies. Real movies! Bravo Fellini! Encore! Encore!
Thursday, January 22, 2009
The Book. Harry Callahan:The Photographer at Work. The Center for Creative Photography
After my discovery of the work of Harry Callahan in Chicago last month I decided to do some further research of his life and work…the weather being too cold, at minus 15, to go out to see any museums or exhibitions this month. For the sake of title compression I have indicated the book listed above, but as well I have read The Archive Series Number 28, Harry Callahan, Early Street Photography, and Number 35, Harry Callahan, Variations on a Theme. All three of these books have been published by The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. It is interesting, and I think it excuses my prior ignorance of the man’s work, that in his preface to Archive 35, Peter Schjeldahl remarks: “I can’t think of another photographer on Callahan’s level who is less well known.”
While reading the books I became aware that in his life and work there is a convergence of two of my life long interests: Cezanne and Camus. This is not to suggest that Callahan shared my interest in those two artists, but that my understanding of his work proceeds from my understanding of their work.
Cezanne had a passion to paint and in his early years his energy far exceeded his mastery of craft. It was not until Pissarro slowed him down and taught him the rudiments of Impressionism that the man began to look at a canvas in a different way. But having completed a few paintings in that style, he was dissatisfied with it and moved on to a new area. Late in his life when fellow painters would go down to Provence to visit him and to paint with him, they would find crumpled in the underbrush paintings that had not met with his approval and which he had thrown away.
For many years I wondered why those paintings did not please him and why others did. Considering that his paintings were so different from what was being done I began to ask: what was his reference? What was he attempting to do? Slowly I have come to understand that he did not consider the format a window, one did not look “into” the paintings to see “something”, nor were they about the subject, the subject was simply a motif, a reason for making a painting. Finally, about a year ago, and this was after twenty years of hard looking, I came face to face with one of his Jas du Bouffan landscapes at MOMA and immediately I was struck by its tremendous “presence”. Suddenly I understood that it was the “presence” of the painting that made of it an object in and of itself and that in his paintings he was reconciling that surface presence with the tendency of a painting to drop into deep picture space: he was balancing that tension.
This means that I disagree with Meyer Shapiro who attempted to persuade us, in his essay The Apples of Cezanne, that the apple paintings are about apples and spring from their mythic symbolism for Cezanne. They are not about apples. They are paintings about painting. Every painter is trained, either in a school, as an apprentice, or self taught. When he paints he paints to please his mentors. If he has a client, he paints to please the client. But before he can please any of the above, he must paint to please himself: hence, first and foremost all painting is about painting. Great paintings are a dialogue with and about painting. In modern art …see Cezanne …see Picasso.
In his book, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus describes for us the absurd moment, a moment when each of us steps outside the time in which we live and comes face to face with the comprehension that the universe is without meaning or purpose, it is absurd, and we then realize, if only fleetingly, that we too are without meaning and purpose: ours is an absurd existence. Once having admitted the possibility of absurdity we can no longer deny it. But rather than using that insight to justify suicide, Camus encourages us to make the work of our lives meaningful to ourselves, and, by inference, as members of a social organism, meaningful to the race. In his view, the right path is outside our common tendency to take the easier way …conformity, which he views as a denial of our true state.
In reading about the life and work of Harry Callahan I was reminded over and over again of those two artists. Early in his life, in the mid 1930’s, in Detroit, Callahan took up photography and joined a local camera club…a cultural artifact of the era. But he was uninspired by the work of the other members and by the then dictates of the art. His contact with guest workshop host, Ansel Adams, altered his understanding of photography…and of what made a life significant. He said: “It gave me the freedom to make pictures my way.” There followed a period in which he strictly adhered to the Adams principles but eventually he threw that over in order to really make pictures his way.
From the time that he bought his first camera, Harry Callahan said that he only wanted make photographs. Throughout his life he went out every morning and shot three or four rolls of film. He spent the afternoons developing and making contact sheets. (By his estimate he made five or six good photographs a year …that should certainly encourage the rest of us!) For thirty one years he also taught photography in Chicago, at Black Mountain, and then at The Rhode Island School of Design. His graduate students would gather weekly in his living room for discussions about photography. Indeed, as his wife has attested, his life was about photography. When it is stated in the books that he had a loss of religious faith as a young man, it seemed to me that this consuming occupation could be understood as an indication of his glimpse of the absurd moment, and that he was not hiding or cowering from that insight but embracing it. I am reminded in this of Susanne Langer’s comment regarding our need for symbolic experience and that it is satisfied in magic and ritual, religion and art. Clearly, for Harry Callahan, fine art photography was the entryway to symbolic experience.
In discussing his work, and he was apparently a man of few words, the words he used being sufficient in his opinion, he often used the term “intuition”. The Photographer at Work has a good long section in which the author, Britt Salvesen, defines what Callahan might have meant by intuition. But whatever he did mean when he went out to photograph he went out to see what was there not to find something preconceived that he was looking for although he did work in specific areas and he maintained an interest in those areas all his life, for instance his people on the street photographs from Detroit in the 40’s, in Chicago in the 50’s and in Providence in the 60’s. He also worked with landscape, cityscapes and buildings, female nudes, (his wife), and many, many photographs of his wife and daughter. In his continual return to the same subject matter, I am reminded of Cezanne’s similar return, in the apple paintings, Mont Sainte Victoire, Mme Cezanne, and I think I see in the photographs the same thing I see in the painter’s canvasses: the subject is simply the motif for making a photograph; first and foremost his photographs are about photography and in the work of both artists there can be seen a life long development to clearer understanding and comprehension of what they are doing over the long number of years.
But Callahan’s works are not about photography in the way that Ansel Adams photographs were about photography. Adams kept his eye open for the “found” photograph and once having found it he set up his equipment and exposed the plates all the while making copious notes which he then followed rigorously in the darkroom. When his works were reproduced in books he was very specific about the reproduction methods he would allow.
By contrast, for Callahan a photograph was an art work that had the quality of being reproducible. He felt that anyone should be able to make prints from his negatives. He felt it was his obligation to make a negative through which that would be possible. This is not to say that he never manipulated the process during the printing. In the book there are several photographs that show both the contact sheet print and the photograph Callahan made from that negative: there is a difference. But the basic difference between the two photographers is that for Adams the technique of making photographs was paramount and for Callahan making a photograph was his primary interest.
As a result of his interest Callahan’s photographs can be understood as explorations of the possibilities for making art through the use of the plastic elements of photography; line, form and light. That they are or might be or need to be “about” something seems beside the point.
At the exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center I saw the photograph, Chicago, 1950: there is a band of white snow across the bottom, the ground is two very near shades of gray…the sky and the lake, and silhouetted over it are six trees in crisp black silhouette. Very likely I have seen thousands of photographs very similar to this one but seeing that print face to face I was awe struck by the simplicity, by the perfection of the composition, and by the magnificence of this photograph. That work is beautifully reproduced in the book and on the facing page there is a photographic negative of the same work. As a purely visual experience this does not need to be “about” something, it is and that it exists is sufficient.
That Harry Callahan worked every day and that he made photography his life does not at all imply that he shared the obsessive compulsive energy of the outsider artist. For him this was an expression of his Midwestern work ethic. But, again, I think it also relates him to the thinking of Albert Camus: the work filled the void of a man conscious of being alone (in the company of his family and friends) in the universe. From the comments in all three of these books and especially from his colleagues I have the sense of a man who was very much alone, on his own, his own man, and somewhat apart from the world around him. I have no problem with that…he made magnificent photographs. That aloofness could also have been a very Midwestern trait as well. But our pleasure in seeing his work and sharing his vision brings us out of our isolation and into communion with him: through his strong presence in his work we find the warmth of fellowship and the joy of seeing with new eyes.
Harry Callahan, The Photography at Work was the accompanying catalogue for the exhibit at The Center in early 2006. (I had visited the Center in late 2005: sorry I just missed this one.) The book seems to me to be an essential source for becoming familiar with the artist and his works. In addition to a really fine essay by Salvesen there are 20 photographs in color and 227 in black and white. The quality of the reproductions is superb. Rounding it off there is a bibliography, and a section on the Harry Callahan archives: The Center is the home for those archives. Yale University Press is the publisher.
The Archives 28, Harry Callahan Early Street Photography 1943-1945, (1990), is a 44 page monograph written by John Pultz and includes a 24 page portfolio of prints in the size and as originally oriented on the pages by Harry Callahan. While this book is available from the Center at $19.95, in doing my research on the internet I found a copy of it available at Amazon.com at $250.00. Buyer beware!
The Archives 35 Harry Callahan Variations on a Theme, 2007, is a published version of the symposium that was held during the 2006 exhibition at the Center. Those participating were friends, colleagues, former students, and his wife Eleanor and his daughter Barbara. All of the information is first hand oral history. In addition to many beautiful prints there is a wealth of information in this book.
Once home from Chicago I went through my collection of books on photography and found that I had indeed seen the work of Mr. Callahan in several of them. One book I can especially recommend is Master Photographers, a series of interviews with many mid twentieth century artists discussing their techniques and with a small portfolio of prints representing each photographer. The editor is Pat Booth. Clarkson N. Potter, Publishers, 1983. The Callahan chapter is excellent. I’m sorry I had forgotten that I had read it. But I think that illustrates the value of seeing art works face to face: while the recipe might be appetizing, the proof is in the pudding.
While reading the books I became aware that in his life and work there is a convergence of two of my life long interests: Cezanne and Camus. This is not to suggest that Callahan shared my interest in those two artists, but that my understanding of his work proceeds from my understanding of their work.
Cezanne had a passion to paint and in his early years his energy far exceeded his mastery of craft. It was not until Pissarro slowed him down and taught him the rudiments of Impressionism that the man began to look at a canvas in a different way. But having completed a few paintings in that style, he was dissatisfied with it and moved on to a new area. Late in his life when fellow painters would go down to Provence to visit him and to paint with him, they would find crumpled in the underbrush paintings that had not met with his approval and which he had thrown away.
For many years I wondered why those paintings did not please him and why others did. Considering that his paintings were so different from what was being done I began to ask: what was his reference? What was he attempting to do? Slowly I have come to understand that he did not consider the format a window, one did not look “into” the paintings to see “something”, nor were they about the subject, the subject was simply a motif, a reason for making a painting. Finally, about a year ago, and this was after twenty years of hard looking, I came face to face with one of his Jas du Bouffan landscapes at MOMA and immediately I was struck by its tremendous “presence”. Suddenly I understood that it was the “presence” of the painting that made of it an object in and of itself and that in his paintings he was reconciling that surface presence with the tendency of a painting to drop into deep picture space: he was balancing that tension.
This means that I disagree with Meyer Shapiro who attempted to persuade us, in his essay The Apples of Cezanne, that the apple paintings are about apples and spring from their mythic symbolism for Cezanne. They are not about apples. They are paintings about painting. Every painter is trained, either in a school, as an apprentice, or self taught. When he paints he paints to please his mentors. If he has a client, he paints to please the client. But before he can please any of the above, he must paint to please himself: hence, first and foremost all painting is about painting. Great paintings are a dialogue with and about painting. In modern art …see Cezanne …see Picasso.
In his book, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus describes for us the absurd moment, a moment when each of us steps outside the time in which we live and comes face to face with the comprehension that the universe is without meaning or purpose, it is absurd, and we then realize, if only fleetingly, that we too are without meaning and purpose: ours is an absurd existence. Once having admitted the possibility of absurdity we can no longer deny it. But rather than using that insight to justify suicide, Camus encourages us to make the work of our lives meaningful to ourselves, and, by inference, as members of a social organism, meaningful to the race. In his view, the right path is outside our common tendency to take the easier way …conformity, which he views as a denial of our true state.
In reading about the life and work of Harry Callahan I was reminded over and over again of those two artists. Early in his life, in the mid 1930’s, in Detroit, Callahan took up photography and joined a local camera club…a cultural artifact of the era. But he was uninspired by the work of the other members and by the then dictates of the art. His contact with guest workshop host, Ansel Adams, altered his understanding of photography…and of what made a life significant. He said: “It gave me the freedom to make pictures my way.” There followed a period in which he strictly adhered to the Adams principles but eventually he threw that over in order to really make pictures his way.
From the time that he bought his first camera, Harry Callahan said that he only wanted make photographs. Throughout his life he went out every morning and shot three or four rolls of film. He spent the afternoons developing and making contact sheets. (By his estimate he made five or six good photographs a year …that should certainly encourage the rest of us!) For thirty one years he also taught photography in Chicago, at Black Mountain, and then at The Rhode Island School of Design. His graduate students would gather weekly in his living room for discussions about photography. Indeed, as his wife has attested, his life was about photography. When it is stated in the books that he had a loss of religious faith as a young man, it seemed to me that this consuming occupation could be understood as an indication of his glimpse of the absurd moment, and that he was not hiding or cowering from that insight but embracing it. I am reminded in this of Susanne Langer’s comment regarding our need for symbolic experience and that it is satisfied in magic and ritual, religion and art. Clearly, for Harry Callahan, fine art photography was the entryway to symbolic experience.
In discussing his work, and he was apparently a man of few words, the words he used being sufficient in his opinion, he often used the term “intuition”. The Photographer at Work has a good long section in which the author, Britt Salvesen, defines what Callahan might have meant by intuition. But whatever he did mean when he went out to photograph he went out to see what was there not to find something preconceived that he was looking for although he did work in specific areas and he maintained an interest in those areas all his life, for instance his people on the street photographs from Detroit in the 40’s, in Chicago in the 50’s and in Providence in the 60’s. He also worked with landscape, cityscapes and buildings, female nudes, (his wife), and many, many photographs of his wife and daughter. In his continual return to the same subject matter, I am reminded of Cezanne’s similar return, in the apple paintings, Mont Sainte Victoire, Mme Cezanne, and I think I see in the photographs the same thing I see in the painter’s canvasses: the subject is simply the motif for making a photograph; first and foremost his photographs are about photography and in the work of both artists there can be seen a life long development to clearer understanding and comprehension of what they are doing over the long number of years.
But Callahan’s works are not about photography in the way that Ansel Adams photographs were about photography. Adams kept his eye open for the “found” photograph and once having found it he set up his equipment and exposed the plates all the while making copious notes which he then followed rigorously in the darkroom. When his works were reproduced in books he was very specific about the reproduction methods he would allow.
By contrast, for Callahan a photograph was an art work that had the quality of being reproducible. He felt that anyone should be able to make prints from his negatives. He felt it was his obligation to make a negative through which that would be possible. This is not to say that he never manipulated the process during the printing. In the book there are several photographs that show both the contact sheet print and the photograph Callahan made from that negative: there is a difference. But the basic difference between the two photographers is that for Adams the technique of making photographs was paramount and for Callahan making a photograph was his primary interest.
As a result of his interest Callahan’s photographs can be understood as explorations of the possibilities for making art through the use of the plastic elements of photography; line, form and light. That they are or might be or need to be “about” something seems beside the point.
At the exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center I saw the photograph, Chicago, 1950: there is a band of white snow across the bottom, the ground is two very near shades of gray…the sky and the lake, and silhouetted over it are six trees in crisp black silhouette. Very likely I have seen thousands of photographs very similar to this one but seeing that print face to face I was awe struck by the simplicity, by the perfection of the composition, and by the magnificence of this photograph. That work is beautifully reproduced in the book and on the facing page there is a photographic negative of the same work. As a purely visual experience this does not need to be “about” something, it is and that it exists is sufficient.
That Harry Callahan worked every day and that he made photography his life does not at all imply that he shared the obsessive compulsive energy of the outsider artist. For him this was an expression of his Midwestern work ethic. But, again, I think it also relates him to the thinking of Albert Camus: the work filled the void of a man conscious of being alone (in the company of his family and friends) in the universe. From the comments in all three of these books and especially from his colleagues I have the sense of a man who was very much alone, on his own, his own man, and somewhat apart from the world around him. I have no problem with that…he made magnificent photographs. That aloofness could also have been a very Midwestern trait as well. But our pleasure in seeing his work and sharing his vision brings us out of our isolation and into communion with him: through his strong presence in his work we find the warmth of fellowship and the joy of seeing with new eyes.
Harry Callahan, The Photography at Work was the accompanying catalogue for the exhibit at The Center in early 2006. (I had visited the Center in late 2005: sorry I just missed this one.) The book seems to me to be an essential source for becoming familiar with the artist and his works. In addition to a really fine essay by Salvesen there are 20 photographs in color and 227 in black and white. The quality of the reproductions is superb. Rounding it off there is a bibliography, and a section on the Harry Callahan archives: The Center is the home for those archives. Yale University Press is the publisher.
The Archives 28, Harry Callahan Early Street Photography 1943-1945, (1990), is a 44 page monograph written by John Pultz and includes a 24 page portfolio of prints in the size and as originally oriented on the pages by Harry Callahan. While this book is available from the Center at $19.95, in doing my research on the internet I found a copy of it available at Amazon.com at $250.00. Buyer beware!
The Archives 35 Harry Callahan Variations on a Theme, 2007, is a published version of the symposium that was held during the 2006 exhibition at the Center. Those participating were friends, colleagues, former students, and his wife Eleanor and his daughter Barbara. All of the information is first hand oral history. In addition to many beautiful prints there is a wealth of information in this book.
Once home from Chicago I went through my collection of books on photography and found that I had indeed seen the work of Mr. Callahan in several of them. One book I can especially recommend is Master Photographers, a series of interviews with many mid twentieth century artists discussing their techniques and with a small portfolio of prints representing each photographer. The editor is Pat Booth. Clarkson N. Potter, Publishers, 1983. The Callahan chapter is excellent. I’m sorry I had forgotten that I had read it. But I think that illustrates the value of seeing art works face to face: while the recipe might be appetizing, the proof is in the pudding.
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